9:38pm June 22, 2014

Writing in public is difficult.

And it’s difficult regardless of exactly how public it gets. I discovered how public it got when my videos went viral and I got on the news and all this other stuff. Friends have discovered how public it gets, when it’s even just a blog that starts getting high traffic.

The first thing that everyone forgets is that you are one human being.

You are one human being and that means that you cannot be everyone for everyone.

You are one human being and that means that you cannot – no matter who you are – be representative of whatever group people want you to represent. Because no one person can be.

You are one human being and that means that you’re going to make as many mistakes as any other human being.

Except when you make mistakes, people are gonna treat you like shit for it. People will hatefollow you and stalk you and say horrible things about you that they would not say if their best friend made a corresponding mistake, publicly or privately. Because people put public people on a pedestal and then treat us like shit when we don’t measure up, which is never.

Often we never intended to be as public as we are. We just started out saying shit that we thought was important, and suddenly lots of people were listening, before we even knew it.

We aren’t given classes in how to handle being in the public eye.

We have all the same feelings as anyone else and we feel just as lousy when people step all over them.

And people feel more entitled to step all over our feelings than they feel entitled to step all over most people’s, because they think we need to be held to a higher standard.

And while we do need to hold ourselves to a higher standard to some degree – because more people are listening, which means we have more power, which means we need to watch ourselves? We’re still going to fuck up.

And when we do fuck up, the answer is not to dogpile and ostracize and otherwise treat us like total and utter shit. And tear everything we’ve said apart looking for the tiniest possible thing that can go wrong.

Because most of the time? We’re trying to do something. We’re trying and we know we’re going to screw up. But we’re trying.

Meanwhile there’s people who seem to think it’s their mission in life to pick us apart to the greatest degree possible, as if that’s helping… anything or anyone, anywhere. (It’s not.)

It’s one thing to confront someone who’s doing something wrong. It’s another thing to spit in their face. We get spat in the face, a lot.

This can make it very hard to want to continue doing what we’re doing. Even if what we’re doing is mostly having a positive outcome for the world.

Because we’re people.

We’re not word-generation machines with no feelings or souls or lives.

We have feelings. We have lives. We have hearts. We’re real people. We’re not built differently than you and we don’t have magical armor that makes us immune to vicious personal attacks.

I’m writing this because some friends of mine are new to this and are getting really discouraged by the sheer level of hostility they’re encountering.

Try to fucking remember that public bloggers are people, not blogging machines.

Try to remember that your words have the capacity to hurt and discourage and wound people in ways you might not be able to imagine.

Try to remember we have lives, and we have bad things happening in those lives, things we may not be talking about, things that affect all this.

And before you decide to flame or snark or show how wittily you can put someone down, ask yourself why you’re doing it. Why does it help you in any way to make someone else feel like they’re utterly beneath you? Who does it help? Why do you think you’re contributing anything to the conversation by being an asshole?

And no, I’m not talking about righteous anger and I’m not talking about disagreement, I’m talking about flat-out being an asshole. I do know the difference. Hate-stalking and insulting people isn’t disagreement and no amount of word-wrassling will make it so.

So even if you disagree with someone, holy crap try to not be a total jerk to them. They’re a human being just like you and they almost definitely don’t deserve what you’re trying to do to them. Certainly in the instances I’ve seen, the person didn’t deserve it at all.

And try to remember that writing in public like this is a difficult, often thankless task that the person is doing because they really want to make changes in the world. Not because they just decided they wanted to paint a target on their ass.

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