What I Wish I Knew Before Going Viral

It was a little more than a year ago when my frustration one morning from a rude neighbor led to a blog post which went further than I ever could have imagined. My cathartic online journal (blog) that never received views (other than my own Mom) suddenly was being shared faster than I could have ever imagined via social media and forums. It was in that instant that I was both terrified and excited. Terrified because it’s true that once you send something into the virtual world, it is forever out there; but exciting that our account of racial discrimination was being viewed by so many eyes (around the world). My social media accounts are minimal; I am not a professional “blogger”, and I would have never imagined my small domain name would hit hundreds of thousands of views in a matter of weeks. The entire experience was overwhelming and left me struggling to continue to write. It was difficult to return to my blog because that single post held such significance, I had a difficult time finding topics that would matter. I mean, how do I go from writing such an emotional post to narrate my stay at home mom days which led to serious writers block.

There are a few things I wish I had known prior to my post going viral. Internet comments can completely ruin your day. I am guilty of it as well on social media, reading something and then scrolling through the comments; but after my post went viral I stopped. It was amazing how hateful people can be while behind a keyboard, which is saying a lot considering the post was written about hate we were experiencing. A good friend of mine who had her share of social media interactions while running a business and a successful YouTube channel for years, told me the minute my post went viral “don’t read the comments”. It would have saved me many tears had I listened. For my own well being, I stopped viewing and replying to all comments (even kind ones) because it became too much. While everyone is entitled to their own opinions it is challenging to read things about your own story, family, and self coming from complete strangers.

You’ll relive your story more than you’d like once it is out in the virtual world. We gave permission for a local newspaper interview and a national news interview; but I have seen our story published in many blog websites, online journals, and across so many various platforms even more than a year later. Once I published my blog article it was forever on the web and it will be something that will follow a google search of our names forever.

My little blog received over 100 thousand views and I have no idea how many shares. But those numbers are unimaginable to me considering the city of Burbank, CA has a little over 100,000 people residing there. An entire city population could have read my post! With all those views, comes a lot of opinions which people are not shy about sharing via the internet. The internet is an astounding resource of information and the ability to spread our story to more than 100 thousand people is incredible. Another aspect I never anticipated was being recognized in public. For a good year, we had people stopping us in public places asking if we were the couple that they saw in the paper, on the news, online. It was a 50/50 shot if they were going to have negative commentary or positive after admitting it was us. Most was positive comments in public, it was online where the hateful comments flowed freely.

You might regret your post. In the days following my post, I regretted publishing it often because the comments, phone calls, emails, and constant requests for interviews was making me question if it was worth it to share our story. I was nervous that I could have potentially affected my husband’s job by the media attention, and feared for my families safety when we became thrown quickly into the public eye and the hate from individuals became so brutal online. In person, things changed; we were receiving a lot of friendly hello’s and conversations with other families who experienced similar situations to ours. I was tired of repeating the story and felt that some publications I was reading was changing the narrative. I wrote my blog to express the exhaustion I had battling racism against my family on a daily basis, not reflecting the accomplishments of my husband and or his career. In the long run, the post and its outcome outweighed my regret of publishing. It was a conversation starter for so many people, it was shared thousands of times and read hundreds of thousands, it brought awareness to a situation we faced in hopes that the next family moving into a neighborhood won’t experience the same.

In the end, going viral was an experience I wouldn’t change. I think it was a positive experience for our family as well as our children to know that we stood up for ourselves and our family. That the power of your words can be heard across countries and words have the ability to spark change.