Danielle Belton Transcript — Nov. 3, 2025
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:00):
Session two of the November widening the pipeline. Training. Journalists who cover mental health must always be mindful of how vulnerable their interview subjects can be when they’re reporting on challenges. But when the journalist is actually living with a mental illness, the challenges are personal and can become even more difficult to navigate. During this session, we’ll hear from Danielle Belton an editor and author who’s been transparent about her career as a journalist living with bipolar disorder. She, the former editor in chief of HuffPost, the Pulitzer Prize winning news organization that publishes original digital first reporting on politics, lifestyle, entertainment, and more. It’s notable that when her hiring was announced, she was praised by her past staffers as having empathy and a strong voice. You can learn more about Danielle’s tenure at HuffPost on our website@nationalpress.org, but in January of 2025, she stepped away from her role at HuffPost to help save newsroom jobs after the company’s face severe layoffs. She’s currently writing a humorous memoir based on her experience as a journalist living with bipolar disorder. Danielle, thank you so much for joining us today.
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (01:30):
Oh, thank you for having me.
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:33):
We’re huge on lived experience here at Widening the Pipeline. And so why don’t we start by you just giving us some background on who you are, where you were born, your family, the whole nine yards.
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (01:46):
Sure. So I’m originally from St. Louis, Missouri. That’s where I was born and raised. I grew up in North County in a town called Florissant, which has more churches than people it feels like sometimes. My parents are both from the deep south. My dad’s from Texas. My mom was from Arkansas, and I graduated with a degree in mass communications from Southern Illinois University back in 1999. My first job out of J School was with a Midland Reporter Telegram in Midland, Texas where I was an education reporter, and within a few months they promoted me to assistant city editor, which I still think was absolutely insane. But I did it.
(02:30):
And then I went from assistant city editor to an assistant lifestyle editor, and well, all within a year, I was only at that paper for about a year and some change. And then I moved from Midland to Bakersfield, California where I worked for the Bakersfield, California newspaper again as an education reporter. But within the year, I moved over the general assignment, and by the following year I was the entertainment reporter at the paper. From there, I would suffer severe mental health incidents. I was in and out of hospitals for most of my twenties while still trying to juggle my career in journalism. During a hospitalization in 2005, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was staying at UCLA’s Medical Center on their campus, and I was there for over two and a half weeks during Christmas time.
Rachel Jones/NPF (03:24):
I’m going to stop you right there because one of the things that I find interesting, and when I think of my own journey and issues, there was never any conversation about mental illness in my family growing up, although there were reams and reams of examples in illness, and we were raised in a religious setting. My parents were Jo’s witnesses, and so the message was, God will take care of it or the truth, we’ll set you free, all of that sort of thing. So I wanted to ask you to share some insights into your experience or knowledge of mental illness from your youth.
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (04:09):
Sure. So I didn’t know much about mental illness growing up, but I always had mental health issues. They’re very prevalent on my mother’s side of the family, although my mother and her relatives tended to downplay things, and it was always a silly joke or a comment or people would say things like, oh, well, our family’s crazy. And as a kid I remember thinking, well, what does that mean? Are we just a little off? What are you talking about? And then as I got older and started to struggle with my own mental health issues, I reached out to my aunt, my mother’s sister, and told her that I had been diagnosed with bipolar, and she proceeded to tell me that this cousin had schizophrenia and this uncle had this problem and my grandmother had this issue, and my cousin was on medication and she was on medication. And then it was like, oh, so it’s a much more prevalent than I could have imagined and much more severe than just a little offhanded joke that my mother used to make on occasion.
Rachel Jones/NPF (05:10):
Again, for me, sorry to interrupt you here, but for me, looking back in hindsight, obviously both of my parents dealt with fairly severe depression, and as a little kid, you can’t figure out what that is about. Maybe they’re just mad at you or maybe they just don’t want to do whatever. And so amongst my siblings and myself, there were things. So I wonder if you can share any indications that you might’ve had as a young person that there was something going on before you got the official diagnosis?
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (05:44):
Yes, yes. So when I was around four, five, and six, I had really bad childhood phobias. I was scared of everything, animals, loud noises, bright lights, the dark, all kinds of bugs. And I would have a really over outsized reaction. I would have a panic attack and just flip out, and my parents just thought I was being a brat or just an annoying little kid and didn’t understand it. But what it was, I just had severe anxiety and the anxiety was triggered by any type of stress or being overstimulated. I’ve never been officially diagnosed with being on the spectrum, but I’m pretty sure I’m on the spectrum. And my parents at the time just didn’t recognize it for what it was, and so they pretty much just told me that it was all in my head and to knock it off. And so what I ended up doing was learning how to suppress it. It never really went away. I never really knocked it off. I just got a lot better at masking it and hiding that I was having a panic attack or a stress response to the same stressors that I’ve had since I was a kid
Rachel Jones/NPF (06:55):
In the last session about how it’s often perceived that for journalists having that sort of neurotic edge or that anxiety or whatever that drives us, compels us, is almost like fuel for being a journalist. Is that something that you sort of used in your toolkit early on? Again, pre-diagnosis before you knew what was going on, did you see yourself as being motivated by your anxiety?
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (07:25):
I was prompted by pressure. So if there was no pressure, no deadline, who knows when that story would get turned in. But if I had a deadline and there was pressure put on me, I could get anything done. I could move mountains. And so a lot of times I was waiting for the spirit to move me to do things, and usually the spirit was relatively predictable. I’m a pretty reliable reporter. I’d show up, I meet my deadlines, I get my work done. But when I started having mental health challenges that were more severe, it became much more complex and more difficult for me to manage. There was a point in my career when I was working in Bakersfield around my first year there, one of my bosses had outed me as being divorced. She didn’t mean to, it was an accident, and I was in denial that I’d ever been married. I was married briefly in my early twenties, and the marriage was very tumultuous and awful. And so I was in such a deep denial that when my editor accidentally outed me, I just started drinking and I just had severe anxiety for months. I would get all my work done before 1:00 PM I knew the anxiety attack was coming around noon, so I knew I only had the morning to really do my reporting and write my stories because after noon, I was just going to be a mess.
Rachel Jones/NPF (08:44):
So you were outed about the divorce, but there came a point where you were also outed about having bipolar disorder. Is that correct?
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (08:53):
Yes, that’s correct. After my hospitalization at UCLA in 2005, a local blogger who was upset with me, I didn’t review his book even though I’m not a book reviewer, but he was very upset about it and he had heard from other people in the community as well as a post that I wrote on MySpace that I hadn’t been well and that I had to take off from work. And so he outed me as being out of a mental hospital and having a severe mental illness, and it was horrifying. I was embarrassed. I felt ashamed and humiliated. I didn’t understand why this person was targeting me in such a vicious way considering that I’m not a book reviewer. It was just an insane response from an insane person. So that followed me for several years after I left the Californian. And when I would apply for jobs, it would show up in Google searches because eventually that person’s blog was acquired by bakersfield.com, the.com website that the Californian owned. And once that happened, I actually just called the Californian and told them about the page, and thankfully they took everything down, but I did have a few jobs ask me about it, and I answered as truthfully and honestly as I could, but I’m pretty sure I lost out on at least one or two opportunities because of it.
Rachel Jones/NPF (10:16):
I meant to ask you before that question, when you’ve got the diagnosis, what emotions did you go? How did you handle it in that moment?
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (10:25):
In the moment, I was initially relieved because I’ve been going in and out of hospitals for about three years at that point. And so I was happy to finally have a diagnosis with the hopes that maybe there would be some type of solution to my problem, like, okay, now I know what it is. Is there going to be some medication or some treatment or some therapy that will just make this all stop? And the truth of the matter was there. It was just like, let’s try different medication. You’re kind of a Guinea pig now. We’re just going to throw different things at you and see what happens. So the emotions were very mixed. It went from relief to then sadness when I realized that I was going to have this disease for the rest of my life and that I’d have to learn how to manage it and live with it, and I didn’t know how. And so I was really in a fog for about a year after my diagnosis where I just was sleepwalking my way through work, just severely depressed and really unable to function. So I ended up moving back home to St. Louis the following year.
Rachel Jones/NPF (11:28):
How did colleagues interact with you during that period?
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (11:33):
Well, what’s fascinating is the Bakersfield, California was a very unique newspaper in that despite the fact that at that time the industry really didn’t talk about mental health amongst its staffers, everyone was very understanding. My first hospitalization, the newspaper sent flowers. People from my team came to visit me in the hospital. My friends, many of my coworkers were my friends, and they would come visit me and spend time with me. One of my friends who worked with me actually saved my life a few times driving me to the hospital on an incident where I almost overdosed. And so I’d say that I had a unique experience in that my newspaper cared deeply about my mental health and wellbeing and made every effort they could to be supportive towards me.
Rachel Jones/NPF (12:23):
So fortunate, I’ve only had one severe anxiety attack. I remember leaving a federal building somewhere in south Florida and heading out to the parking lot and literally having sort of this out-of-body experience of the walls are closing in, somebody’s going to catch me or somebody’s going to find out I did something wrong and just literally just dismantled by anxiety. And so I wonder, what do you think about the way anxiety is perceived generally in the public? I think that as I was talking with our previous speakers, there’s almost a general generational shift between, for example, when I was coming up, suck it up, deal with it. Nobody wants to hear about your cry, baby anxiety versus now, and I’m assuming you’re like a millennial or customer?
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (13:20):
I’m a gen Xer.
Rachel Jones/NPF (13:21):
You’re a Gen Xer. Okay, so then clearly I’m assuming that maybe there’s a different perspective, but how do you feel the general public thinks about anxiety?
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (13:32):
Well, it really depends on who you talk to. I mean, most people, whether they want to admit it or not, have had some form of anxiety attack at some point in their life where they’ve got really nervous or really stressed out. What’s different is whether you have them chronically, and I had them chronically. I probably have at least two anxiety attacks now a month. There was a time it was daily, and so the impression that I got from people outside of my life who didn’t know me as well was that they were tired of it. They saw it as a nuisance. They saw it the same way my parents initially saw my phobias and my temper tantrums, which weren’t really temper tantrums. They were panic attacks.
(14:14):
It was just like a never ending saga that people wanted. They wanted to get off the ride. They just didn’t want to talk about it anymore. They didn’t want to hear about how sad I was anymore. They didn’t want to hear about what I was going through. And so I learned early on that because of the nature of my illness, which sometimes can make you really self-centered, you’re in so much pain, all you can focus on is your own pain, is that you need to have a support system. You need to have a very strong network of people that you can rely on because what I would do was I try not to burn out any of my friends. I would rotate who I would tell whatever my problem was that day or that week, so no one friend felt all the burden of having to take on my depression.
Rachel Jones/NPF (15:01):
What’s interesting to me is that your trajectory continued to rise apparently through all of this. So talk about the strategies other than obviously your network of friends and supporters, but what else did you do to maintain your ability to produce and function
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (15:20):
Well? There’s a part of me that no matter what is happening just wants to produce, I want to write, I want to communicate with people, I want to work on stories I want to edit, and so I just always end up going back to it. I write every day to this day still, and I find it to be helpful because a lot of times the writing that I do daily is journaling, but I also write columns and blog posts and other things as well, or I work on my book and I find it all very therapeutic. It allows me to take a break from whatever is going on internally and focus on a task at hand. I’ve always been really good at compartmentalization, which I think is a side effect of my parents’ response to my anxiety and panic attacks. They told me I had to get over it, and so I knew I couldn’t get over it.
(16:13):
So I got really good at just putting my problems in a box and just storing it on a shelf in my brain and then trying to operate as if that box isn’t there. Now, the good side about that is that I was still able to climb the ladder in my career and really achieve a lot because I was so productive. But the downside is that eventually you have to deal with what is in that box. Eventually you just start to break down and you start to have other issues. I had lots of psychosomatic health issues that would pop up over time because if you don’t deal with your anxiety, your depression, whatever your issues may be, your body will find a way to stop you. It’ll just make up problems for you to solve. Trying to make it is your body’s warning, central warning system, trying to let you know something’s wrong. You need to stop, you need to take a break, and I’ve had everything from eye twitches to convulsions to burning mouth syndrome, just the a grain of sand feeling like was in my eye when there was nothing there for weeks. So I’ve had a lot of them because I’m so good at just masking how I’m actually feeling and forging ahead that my body has had to get pretty creative to let me know that this is not just normal anxiety. You need to deal with it.
Rachel Jones/NPF (17:38):
I want to ask you about therapy.
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (17:41):
Yes.
Rachel Jones/NPF (17:43):
I shared during the last session one of the epiphanies that I achieved in therapy, which was someone telling me that this overwhelming desire on my part to save the world and that my journalism had to right wrongs and do whatever. She described that as being egotistical. Why do you think that your work has the power to even do that? If I shared all of the epiphanies I’ve gotten in therapy, it would take up all of our time here, but I wanted to ask you, throughout your life, have there been successes with therapy that really helped prop you up during some of these challenges?
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (18:32):
Oh, yes. I’ve been fortunate to have a few very good therapists. Now, a lot of the therapy that I’ve had from various psychologists and psychiatrists was terrible. I’m going to be honest with you. It’s very hard to find a good doctor. But of the doctors that I had who were quite good, I did learn some great tools and got a better insight and understanding on what was going on with me. The first was my doctor in Bakersfield. Her name was Janet Pucci. She was excellent, and she’s the one who essentially saved my life. She was the one that convinced me that I needed to move back home to St. Louis because being alone in Bakersfield was not the move. I was only getting worse. I wasn’t getting better. And then after that, I had a psychiatrist when I was in St. Louis who pulled me aside after I told my felt I was on too much medication because at one point I was on 11 different medications and I had started my blog, the Black Snob, which had taken off in popularity around 2008.
(19:33):
And in 2009, Harvard invited me to come speak at their black policy conference because of the blog, and so I was terrified about whether I should go or not. I went and saw my psychiatrist and he basically said to me, I think you should go, and I’ll tell you why. I said, I know you thought that your job was causing your illness to be worse. He says, but I don’t think you can do nothing. I think doing nothing is just as detrimental to you as overworking yourself. And so he gave me the best advice, which I don’t know why I never, because I couldn’t come up with it on my own tragically, but he basically told me I needed to create a work-life balance for myself so that I could pursue my dreams but not become so sick that my health was in peril, and that had a profound impact on me.
(20:24):
Once I realized that my problem was that I was expecting too much of myself, that I was working myself too ragged, that was putting too much pressure on myself and that I just needed to find balance. It couldn’t just be working 12 hours a day, writing three and four stories a day and then thinking, I’m going to be normal just because I can do that, that’s still not normal. Most people don’t write four stories a day, and I was writing five or six for my blog sometimes. So I had to learn how to be kinder to myself, and that was of his advice. I did become that.
Rachel Jones/NPF (21:03):
Let’s talk about people of color, journalists of color and mental illness. Again, for me, it was a situation of these issues were never discussed in childhood. If you brought it up, you’d be perceived as weak or whatever. And so we enter newsroom often in many cases, maybe the only one or one of few. There’s a expectation or a focus, a lens on us that might be a little different from other people. Those issues exacerbate what you were going through, or is this something that all journalists of color need to sort of be aware of? It could possibly affect ’em.
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (21:56):
I was often the only black person in the local newspapers that I worked for, and in many cases, those newspapers would talk about how they wanted to have more diversity, but it’s a tall order to ask an African-American person to move to a town where there’s no other black people because in Bakersfield, the black population was less than something like 4%. It was very small, and Midland, Texas also had a very small black population, so there wasn’t a lot of community there for me, and I didn’t have much of a support system initially outside of the newsroom because of it. And so I was both the only black woman in the newsroom, the only black person in the entire organization in both cases, and one of the few black people in the town. So that was tough, and I understood why they had such a hard time improving the diversity of those newsrooms because who wanted to come go there?
(22:55):
Besides me, I just was so aggressive about wanting to kickstart my career. I was willing to take on these roles and live in these very disparate places, but I have the type of personality where I can get along with almost anyone. As long as you’re not a literal Nazi, I can figure out a way to make it work. So I was able to make friends. Thankfully, I was able to create a support system for myself. That’s the reason why I’m still here today, but it is very taxing to take on all the burdens of your entire community in a newsroom where there is no community for you. Often I was the only person writing about anything that had to do with the African-American community as small as it was in Bakersfield, and I felt a lot of pressure to cover those stories because else was going to do them.
(23:46):
Who else had the sensitivity and the background and the understanding to be able to pull it off? And it was like no one, it had to be me, and that was tough. I can remember when Hurricane Katrina happened and I tried to avoid the images for as long as I could, which wasn’t very long. I worked in media, and then when I saw them, I was horrified and saddened because the people on the roofs of the building just looked like my family members, and I identified so strongly with them that it sent me into a depression, and my coworkers were very well-meaning, but they didn’t get it because they also didn’t know geography, which was sad. But a lot of them would walk up to me, is your family okay? I’m like, I’m from Missouri. Katrina happened in New Orleans, which is in Louisiana. That’s several states down the Mississippi River.
(24:38):
And so once they would realize that I didn’t actually have any family there, then it was just kind of like, well, why are you so upset? And around, I want to say a few years after that incident happened, a study was done that showed that African Americans tend to overly identify when they see another African American in peril, whereas most white Americans see themselves as individuals. And so when they would see a white person who lost their home to a tornado, it was just like, oh, that’s a bad thing that happened to an individual. They don’t see it as it was a thing that happened to us. And so that was something that my newsroom didn’t understand and I didn’t know how to articulate at the time, and so I just had to navigate that on my own.
Rachel Jones/NPF (25:19):
Let’s talk a little bit more about that in this moment. Again, that’s one of the other things we talked about in the previous session, which is I shared the fact that when I woke up this morning and saw the story about Head Start programs closing due to the shutdown, I was a Head Start kid in the first year that it opened, and there’s so many of the issues surrounding the snap and whether people will have access to food this Thanksgiving. That really triggered me, if you want to use that term. I really sort of feel that. And so what advice would you give to journalists in this moment right now who may be dealing with some of this vicarious trauma?
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (26:05):
The best thing you can do in my opinion, is to allow yourself to feel however you choose to feel because your feelings are valid. If you are sad, find a time and space to yourself to be quiet and sad and get it all out. If you are angry, find a physical activity that you can do to get out some of that rage and try to channel some of your emotions to things that are healthy for you, like things like exercise or art or writing or reading. Try to find something that you can put yourself in to take you out of what’s going on in the moment and get you focused on a task that allows you to feel a little better and gain some perspective and take a break.
(26:50):
Another thing that I often recommend people who have to cover these types of things is that it’s important to take your PTO if there’s no way for you to avoid some of the more traumatic things that come out in the news. It’s best sometimes to take a break, do your job to the best of your ability, and then take your sick leave, take a few days off. When I was editor-in-chief of the Root before I was editor in chief of Huff Post it, it was the year 2020 after George Floyd was murdered and CNN played that video on a loop for hours every day. And my staff was working diligently on all the protests and the stories that came out around it, and they were all traumatized by it. And so I went to the then CEO that owned the route and basically asked him for money for me to hire a freelance team so my team could take the week off.
(27:47):
They were so burnt out and I was so worried about their mental wellbeing covering this story, and so they approved it. I hired a team of freelancers and then asked some sister editors that were part of the larger organization. There were several websites that the route was part of. And so I asked some of the editors at Jezebel, which we were all sister sites then, and they were kind enough to come on board and agree to edit the freelancer stories for the week so we could all take some time off. So yeah, I’m a big advocate of take your time off. Don’t just continue to suffer in silence. Speak up and take the PTO that’s owed to you.
(28:29):
And finally, on top of taking time off and allowing yourself to feel however you feel and channeling that into something healthy, I often recommend talking to people. Talk to your friends, talk to your fellow colleagues who share your same background, who are part of your community and get it all out. Talk to a therapist if you don’t feel comfortable talking to friends and family about it. This is just important to be able to vocalize these things and exercise it out of you so you can have that perspective and have that moment of healing to process and work through the emotions that are going on.
Rachel Jones/NPF (29:06):
I want to pivot here and talk about the issue of achieving in spite of achieving and dealing with whatever’s going on, and you’re still winning as they say, and that appears to me to be certainly your story in that you started the blog was very successful. I mean, if you’re getting invitations to come and talk at Harvard, it’s a big deal. You worked for the root, you went from there to HuffPost, you keep winning, girl. So talk to me about how you juggle the challenges, be it medication therapy, maybe some days just not being able to get out of bed and you still are able to accomplish things.
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (30:00):
Well, the reality is there’s two parts of me. There’s one part of me that deals with the illness, deals with depression, deals with imposter syndrome and self-doubt, and sometimes doesn’t want to get out of bed or leave the house. But then there’s another part of me that’s supremely ambitious and desires to be the best at my career and to achieve things and get to where I want to go in life. And those sides get into fights. And at the end of the day, the side that is the most ambitious always wins. So that side just drags the depressed, angry, miserable side right along to wherever we’re trying to go because the reality is the part of me that loves myself today because I do love myself now, is much stronger than the part of me that doesn’t. And that is what has kept me going during some of the darkest times in my life.
(31:00):
Around 2014, my mother was diagnosed with dementia and my best friend was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. My friend would be dead within six months and my mother would forget who I was within about a year. I was in a deep, deep, deep depression for about four years after that that I didn’t come out of until my mother passed away in 2018. But that whole time that I was struggling mentally and basically waiting to die, I knew I wasn’t going to harm myself, but I also didn’t want to be here anymore. I was like, what’s the point of life if it can be taken away from you so cruelly and quickly or you could lose your mind? What’s the point?
(31:44):
And at the same time that I was going through that, I got the job at the root. I got the promotion at the root. I moved to New York City, I got the roots traffic up by 300% within my first year. I won a bunch of awards. My staff won a bunch of awards. We broke stories, and it was fascinating because if you had asked me was I doing well, my answer would’ve been no. But it didn’t look that way on paper because that part of me that was ambitious was still just dragging the other part along. And it was like, we’re going to do this whether you want to or not. Eventually, you’ll be grateful that I made you do all these things and I made you get up and go to work, and I made you edit these stories and I made you meet with your staff because the reality is you could stay in bed, but you don’t get better just staying in bed days for weeks and months on end, that actually makes things worse.
(32:37):
After a while, you need to reach out and have community with other people. You need to still pursue your dreams and goals because that’s what’s going to get you out of it. That’s what’s going to fuel you, that’s going to be the battery in your back that gets you over the hump, that makes you keep seeking treatment and trying to find what works best for you. In my case, I’m want to a mood stabilizer and antidepressant, and I have some anti-anxiety medication that I take rarely because the other two medications seem to do a good enough job dealing with my mood swings and I see a therapist weekly.
(33:12):
I also exercise, I do Pilates, I walk, I do strength training, I lift weights and I draw and I write my journal daily. And all of it helps keep me centered and allows me to monitor my mood swings, especially in my journal. I usually write whatever condition I’m in that day so I can look for patterns and then understand when I might not be on the right path. A big one for me is sleep. If I’m not sleeping, it’s a five alarm fire. We need to deal with this right now because every time that I’ve gone through a bout of insomnia, it’s led to me being in the hospital. So I tend to take things that for other people, they just kind of take for granted. I have to take very seriously. I got to realize that I got to eat at some point during the day. If I don’t eat, I’m going to have a panic attack and my brain’s going to shut down. So it’s like I just don’t have the same responses that other people might have to certain stimuli or stressors. And so I have to be aware of what my triggers are, and one of them is not sleeping and the other one’s not eating and stay on top of those things through my therapist, through my journaling and through my network of friends.
Rachel Jones/NPF (34:28):
You have shared such a word in this moment for me. I have to thank you for what you’ve just shared because to be fully transparent in the period between 2007 and 2000 and wait 2004 and 2007, my eldest brother committed suicide. My father died three months later. My mother died a year later, and then my eldest sister, who was a second mother than me, died. And shortly thereafter, or during the time that she was dying, my eldest sister, I moved to Northern Uganda for Inner news and led a training program. And that began my African journey. And if you ask me now how I got through it, I have no idea other than what you were just describing, this sort of ambition, this ability to somehow or other move through the grief or fight the desire maybe to stay in bed for the rest of your life. But I love something so powerful that you said, I love myself now more than I hated myself. You are breaking off such truth and such powerful information that I can’t begin to thank you enough for being so open and vulnerable with us in that mode, continuing in that mode. I’d love to hear about why you started the Black Snob and what you had hoped to accomplish when you started it.
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (36:17):
Yes. So the Black Snap, I started for a few reasons. The first I was bored. I was working for a PR firm at the time, and I was so depressed I could barely function. I ate up burning out at the job after about three months and asked to be just made a contractor. I could no longer deal with the full-time work. And so that’s what I did, and that work was boring. I was doing opposition research on schools and charter schools for them, and that didn’t move me, but that’s what I was doing. And so at the same time, I was missing having a column because when I was at the Bakersfield, California, sometimes I would write columns about entertainment or culture or pop culture or things on television, things like that. And so I said, oh, I’ll just start a blog. I had a blog at the Bakersfield, California, and I can just get on blog spot and start my own thing.
(37:09):
And originally I wanted to be anonymous, and so it was just called The Black Snob. It didn’t have, my name wasn’t affiliated with it at all, and I just kind of just wrote about whatever. There was no real strategy in the beginning. And then Obama won Iowa in 2008 because I started to blog in 2007 in the fall. And when he won Iowa, I was so inspired that I was like, man, I wish I was working at a newspaper. I really want to write something about this. And I was like, oh, I have a blog. Let me just write it on the blog. And so I wrote a piece about Obama’s historic win and it went viral, and I was so shocked that so many people wanted to hear what I had to say. And it was really affirming for me. I always believed in my talent as a writer.
(37:56):
And so what ended up happening was I got jealous of myself. I kept seeing online people saying, oh, the black snob is so brilliant. The Black snob said this great thing. I was like, the black snob, Danielle Belton wrote those things. Danielle Belton wants her credit. And so I changed it to Danielle Belton’s, the Black Snob, and realized that this actually was really helpful because I was taking back my SEO because for the longest time, if you typed in Danielle Belton into Google, the first thing that came up was that hateful blog post that the guy in Bakersfield wrote. But after I created The Black Snob, the first thing that came up was the Black snob. And so I cleaned up my SEO and eventually got that guy’s blog taken down. And then the third thing that happened because of the blog and why I wanted to do it, I wanted to demonstrate to other journalists that I had the talent and the chops to be in the big leagues, to be honest, like there used to be a path in journalism if you started out in small newspapers to get to the major publications.
(39:05):
But that path collapsed after Craigslist came about and wiped out so many small town newspapers. And so I didn’t see a clear path if I wanted to get published in the Times of the Washington Post. And so I realized that I needed to do something unconventional. And so I started the blog, and one of the things that I did on the blog was write about journalism. I wrote about black journalists, like any black journalist who was prominent. I wrote about them on the blog about what they were doing, what they were writing, because I knew that most journalists had Google alerts for themselves, and they would find out that I wrote about them, and they would read my blog and see that I was actually quite good and funny and smart, and they would give me work, and it worked for years. I would go on to be hired at various places and get various opportunities because of that blog.
Rachel Jones/NPF (39:58):
I could seriously talk with you all afternoon. We’re going to have to pivot to an off the record q and a session soon, but before we do that, tell us about the book.
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (40:10):
Oh, sure. So the book is a memoir that is specifically about my journey as a journalist living with bipolar disorder. It talks about my family, it talks about my friends, it talks about my career at length and the things that I’ve gone through and the things that I’ve struggled with as a result of my bipolar disorder. So it covers everything from the end of my terrible starter marriage in my twenties all the way to my time in Bakersfield. And I had over four hospitalizations. My last one was in 2009 before I went to Harvard and spoke, and I talk about cashing in my 401k and moving to Washington DC after I finally got stable. And just choosing to live openly with the illness rather than hide it, because to me, I was just setting myself up for failure if I wasn’t honest about it, because the reality was it was already kind of out there, and if I didn’t own it, someone else was just going to be able to tell my story.
(41:13):
And I didn’t want someone else to tell my story about who I am and what I’m capable of. I wanted to tell it myself. And so I took my power back by being open about living with this illness. So no one since that blogger, no one’s been able to really hold that over my head because it’s upfront, it’s Googleable. You can read all my articles about me living with this illness. So it goes from there, from my time in DC to being a late night talk show TV writer for BET. And it goes from there to my mom getting sick and my friend dying, and then me going through that four year bout of depression, while at the same time having this incredible run of success. And I’m hoping what people get from it is that they see people who live with these types of illnesses as human beings, as that they’re just a woman living with bipolar disorder.
(42:14):
I am not bipolar disorder, that my disease does not define who I am. I’m a person with a full and rich life. I have great friends. I’m in a great relationship. I love my family, and that is what I want to be defined by. I want to be defined by the good that I leave in the world and the impact that I have on the people that I love the most and the community that I’m part of. And so the only way to reduce stigma is just to be transparent and open about living with mental illness. Because when I was at my sickest, particularly when I was in UCLA medical center, one of my doctors found out I was a journalist, and he told me, you should write about it. That would be so powerful to help people with your illness. And I told my doctor at the time like, look, I’m just trying not to die maybe later.
(43:01):
And then I made a promise to myself that if I ever got stable, I would live openly with this illness because I’m convinced that if I’d just seen other people living with bipolar and being successful, having relationships, having adventures, living their best life, I would’ve had that glimmer of hope that I needed to get over the hump sooner. Because some people never get that glimmer of hope. A lot of times when you’re sick, you’re only around other sick people and you think that’s going to be your life forever. And who’s going to be excited about living and finding love for themselves if they think their whole life is just going to be in and out of hospitals? So that’s why I do what I do. That’s why I talk about it, and that’s why I’m writing this book. I want people to see us as full humans to respect that humanity and not be afraid of it.
(43:50):
And I want people to be able to talk about it openly and get the help that they need, because the only reason I got better was because of the people in my life that I was able to talk to about these things that I reached out, that I asked for help. Now, asking for help is not easy. It definitely wasn’t easy for someone like me who was raised to be very resilient. And you do everything on your own and you suck it up and you tough it out, but you don’t. It doesn’t have to be that way, and it shouldn’t be that way. You have friends and family for a reason, and that love often from others will get you over the hump until you have that love for yourself.
Rachel Jones/NPF (44:29):
Thank you for the most extraordinarily powerful and impactful interview that I think I’ve had in three years of doing widening the Pipeline. Danielle Belton, your story is inspirational. I can’t thank you enough.
Danielle Belton/Formerly of HuffPost (44:49):
I’m happy to do it.
