The piece itself was relatively mild, on the Gawker spectrum. There were no intimate texts involved, there was no damning sex tape. I had simply been pronounced irksome because “She’s against domestic violence. She’s against harassing children. She’s against elder abuse” — and I apparently expressed this in ways insufficiently nuanced for the writer. I was, in summation, declared “a first class hack.”

I’ve been at this a very long time and been called worse by better, so it wasn’t the piece itself that really got to me. It was the picture. It was an image of me, pale and freckled, that had run in Salon seven months before, when I shared that I had just been diagnosed with malignant melanoma. A photo that had been taken just a few days prior, one of my last remaining images of myself before I learned I was sick. It never appeared anywhere else. And now it was being used to make fun of me.

Still, it was relatively easy to put the hit piece behind me. My father-in-law was busy dying of cancer himself, and his brother had died a few days before, so I had my own stuff going on. Then a few months later, I was rediagnosed, this time at Stage 4. My cancer had metastasized into my lung and soft tissue, and I entered a Phase 1 clinical trial in the hopes of staving off a disease one of my doctors would later describe as “rapidly fatal.” That fall, I wrote about the experience several times in Salon, along with my usual pop culture pieces. In December, I wrote multiple stories around the subject, including one about how my kids were facing the holidays after two deaths in the family and my own “full-blown late-stage melanoma.” When the same Gawker writer tweeted out that day, “I have a joke for you: ‘Why I Still Believe in Santa,’ by Mary Elizabeth Williams,” I braced myself. (I am not using the person’s name, because you know what? This is about the Gawker culture, and because I have it on very good authority that publicly shaming individuals is an ass move.)

On the penultimate day of the year, I appeared on a Gawker list of people who should quit the media in the coming new year. In it, the writer described my style by noting, “Be sure to throw in some irrelevant tidbits about your personal life designed to short-circuit any criticism of your work in advance…. We’re not being mean. We’re being honest.” The words appeared, again, next to the photo from my cancer story. This time, I cried. And you can laugh at me if you want, Gawker, but when you’re actively in the midst of a grueling medical experience and uncertain how much time on earth you have, a cruel reference to your imagined fate for the coming year pretty much sucks.

Fortunately, I got better. Just a few weeks later, I was declared cancer free and I have been ever since. Gawker, meanwhile, continued to sputter at me, damningly referring to me as “polite mom” and “America’s least necessary cultural critic,” and taking umbrage that, as they put it, I’d written that “It’s sad that MCA died.” Of cancer. At least they stopped using my picture. And it’s hard to take seriously an outlet that rages that your writing is “like sticking a needle full of SUPER SWEET SUGAR WATER in your veins.”

But I entered a period of constant low-level dread nonetheless. I knew what happens to figures who become their popular targets, how they are perpetual low hanging fruit for a slow news day. Each time I filed a story, I wondered if it would be the subject of another scathing takedown, and what the fallout might be. “This is just how they are,” my friends said, and some of them said it from experience. “It’s what they do.” In my world, it has long been understood that Gawker might today rip you to shreds. Just because. And this has been considered totally normal. So I avoided writing pieces critical of Gawker, for fear of retaliation. This went on for longer than I care to admit. For a company that claims to pride itself on freedom of expression, I wonder if they’ve ever considered the profoundly chilling effect their tactics have had on others. It’s been a while now, but I have never stopped looking over my shoulder, wondering how I might again incite the outrage of Gawker, and what form that might take. It’s a sickening feeling.