Kanoa Lloyd (Ngāti Porou) is one of Aotearoa’s top broadcasters, who recently was co-host of The Project.

I’m not a politician. But I know something about the intensity of being a brown woman in the public eye. 

A well-known white supremacist once wrote a rambling letter from prison, where he called me ugly and a ‘race traitor’.

It was years ago, but it still makes my head go all fuzzy when I think about it again. I was scared and stressed out about it. And he was just one of dozens of people who hated me and wanted me to know that. Not all of my haters made the news. 

It’s impossible to imagine the kind of shit that people like Golriz Ghahraman, or Kiritapu Allan or Tory Whanau, are served on a regular basis, unless you’ve lived it. 

So I invite you to wade through the muck of this one ugly letter with me, and consider the weight of that when it’s a regular occurrence.

A journalist you work with calls you and says there’s a letter. It’s nothing to worry about, the writer is clearly disturbed, he’s in a South Island prison, just because he’s writing your name doesn’t mean you’re in any danger. 

You Google the letter writer and read the laundry list of violent, terrifying signs and symbols he’s into, the concerning things he’s done. But you tell yourself there’s nothing to worry about because that’s what the journalist told you. 

When you’re still thinking about the letter a day later, you ask to meet the journalist at a cafe so you can see the letter for yourself. Even though you’ve heard what it says, when you see your name scrawled down like that your eyes swim and your chest feels tight. But there’s nothing to worry about, of course, so you finish your lunch, crack some jokes with the journalist and go back to work. 

A few days later, when you’re maybe just a tiny bit concerned after all and perhaps you haven’t exactly forgotten about the letter yet, your boss suggests you share that tiny concern with the HR department.

You bolster your “complaint” about the letter with a handful of DMs and social media comments sent by people who seem to be on the same team as the letter writer, just so that HR knows you’re not trying to be a nuisance; you’re just wondering if there is, in fact, anything to be a bit worried about?

After several emails, phone calls and reschedules to fit around work, HR tells you at a meeting over a big boardroom table that they recognise this letter “goes against your core values” but that there is no real threat, and not to worry about it.

By the time you make it to dinner at your friend’s on the weekend, you are rinsed. But you tell them the story and try to add a flourish of finality and exasperation that it’s taken up any of your time, when you’ve really got much more important things to be worried about. They make sympathetic sounds and they assure you there’s nothing to worry about really, you poor thing.

Two weeks later you’re at a party, hiccuping away to some poor random in the corner, thinking “nothing good happens after 2am” but making no real moves to leave, because you deserve to relax and have a good time. 

A month later, you’re getting into a stupid fight about a carpark with a stranger outside Number One Shoe Warehouse because he’s not listening to you and he’s being really unreasonable, actually! 

A year later, you recognise the envelope with the photocopy of the letter in it in a pile of crap on your desk and you jump like it’s a spider. Without opening it, you cautiously remove it with your thumb and forefinger and toss it even deeper out of sight. Not to worry. 

Stress makes you do dumb stuff. There’s good science that shows an increase in risky behaviour from people under prolonged stress. These people are more likely to engage in the classics – excess alcohol, drug use, impulsive sexual activity – but one list also includes “skydiving, mountain climbing, reckless driving, and playing the stock market”. Shoplifting isn’t on there, but I think it fits the bill. 

Just this December, I found that envelope again. This time I opened it and read some passages aloud with a laugh to my colleagues, who were also packing up their belongings for the final time. None of them had letters like that in their pile of things to keep, shred or give away. 

Last night, I went to see a movie with a darling friend who has helped me through a thousand moments of stress and worry and risk-taking. As we stood in the evening sun, people watching and waiting for the film to start she said, “do you know a nice thing about you since you stopped working on TV? You like talking to people again. Now that you don’t have to be nice to people all the time, even when they’re being dicks, you’re more yourself.” 

Stepping out of the judgemental eye of the public might look like a failure from the outside. But inside, it actually feels pretty good.