Like so many sudden deaths, it came under perfectly normal circumstances: I submitted a humor column to a website I’ve been publishing with for years. It went live in short order. And within forty eight hours, my prior understanding of how we interact online was dead, dead, dead.
Just as psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler Ross suggested it might, the violent death marched me through five stages of grief. Some lasted longer than others. Some required more drinking than others. But at some point, most freelancers who publish online for the general public troop through them. May you have loved ones and plenty of ice cream around you.
From my work with NASA and plenty of pilots, I’ve learned that disasters are never brought about by a single cause; it’s always a chain of events. This was the disaster chain for me and my article: 1) It was a satire about the danger of ruining cherished American Christmas cartoons by viewing them through an adult lens 2) for a very general audience 3) which was not accustomed to reading satire on this particular site 4) and was invited to a discussion board beneath the following headline: “BAH HUMBUG! Social messages seem to rear their ugly heads for adults in kids’ classics.� 5) Said headline blared forth for the entire no-work, no-school weekend before Christmas, when the article was “staged� on the front page of the site.
It was the Hindenburg of freelance writing.
Denial
I never visited the site’s message boards, because I figured that if readers wanted to register an opinion, they’d do so through my website, which was linked in my bio line. All the feedback I’d had, initially, was positive; the piece sailed through the approval of at least two editors, possibly three, and several new readers stopped by my site or dropped an email to let me know they’d enjoyed it.
And then one comment caught my attention:
“I was reading the comments posted by readers after it and was stunned by all the negative feedback. Are these people for real? They really thought you were serious? Just wow.�
“…all the negative feedback�?
I’m not a stranger to negative feedback; I wouldn’t have lasted .0000001 seconds in my MFA program if I weren’t conditioned to people brandishing an essay in my face and saying, “No. Start again. Make the last line the first, and then the concept might be tolerable.� I sure as Twain wouldn’t have a career as a writer if I didn’t think I needed it in order to improve, and faced it on a constant basis from editors and trusted readers. I’ve had it right here on FreelanceSwitch, for heaven’s sake. So I clicked over to the site’s message boards to investigate.
I’ve written about politics, motherhood, and religion, and had never in my life seen anything even remotely approaching what unfurled on the monitor before me. I was, it seemed, in desperate need of therapy and antidepressants. A person who should never have children. A person who was unqualified as a professional writer. A person who must have had an awful childhood, and who hated Christmas, and very likely roasted kittens for lunch. It was difficult not to take it all personally, because when a person takes time out of his or her life to type, “I hope Mary Beth Ellis never comes to my house for the holidays,� it’s kind of hard not to distill such reactions into an occasional bad mood of the general human race.
By now I was well aware that I had committed the cardinal sin of writing the wrong article for the wrong audience. And yet I was shocked by the backlash, not because I’d never considered it impossible that another human being might not like my writing, but because, wellâ€"these people were just so mean . There had been times, certainly, when I’d read an article which made me angry, and my response was to… stop reading, and move on with my life. I abhor nasty conflict, experiencing a stomach-tightening sensation when I see it even on television. I’m the person at the airport ticket counter who says, “Oh… all flights cancelled due to snow for forty-eight hours? That’s fine, I’ll just buy eleven bags of candy for $14.95 apiece.â€? Then I’ll sit in the corner and fume to myself.
But not everybody is a fumer.
Bargaining
In my experience as an educator, I had found that if people were aware that they were heard directly, their anger and tendency to lash out drops considerably. I mulled it over, and decided that this was all a simple misunderstanding compounded by holiday stress. Discuss it openly, that’s what we needed to do! I posted to the message board myself, offering apologies to those who hadn’t liked the article, explaining in non-condescending terms that it was, indeed, a satire, and inviting those who had questions or comments to email me.
Which, of course, made it all worse. I had brought a strongly worded greeting card to a gun fight. Because now there was author blood on the webpage, and the insults continued unabated… on the anonymous message board. Exactly three people took me up on the offer of a personal email conversation, and all three parted e-ways with a mutual, heartfelt “Merry Christmas.� I continued to field only positive feedback on my personal site and in my inbox. A pattern was emerging. And the pattern made me furious.
Anger
Only people with nice comments or genuine questions were willing to tie themselves to a traceable email address. But as though I owned packs and packs of Doberman pincers to unleash upon those who displeased me, commenters who addressed me as “honey� and who openly hoped I wasn’t paid for the article continued to hide behind anonymous usernames or fake Blogger accounts. I never expect everyone on Earth to fall into raptures over or agree with my every word, but at least my name was up there in big red letters over the article. I was angry with the hiders and angry with myself for being angry.
At this point, I piloted the flaming Hindenburg directly into an old wooden barn stuffed with gasoline-drenched rags: I went back to the publishing site’s bulletin board, and did exactly what the trolls wanted me to do. I unleashed about a hundred words of defensive furor. Sorry you didn’t like the FREE ARTICLE, which you were also free to stop reading at any time. I most certainly had further qualifications as a writer than a self-run blog, which a five-second Google search would have revealed. And, no, my 67-year-old parents were neither hippies nor child abusers.
I also included, much to my current chagrin, a literary version of that obnoxious daytime television cry, “You don’t know me!� Because that was the crux of it: People who had absolutely no idea about my background, my qualifications, or my politics were suddenly criticizing all three. Why did I care, and what did that say about my priorities?
Then the backlash to the backlash started, and I began to see commenters catapulting the very same mud in the opposite direction. “You should grow a brain.� “You wouldn’t know good writing if it bit you in the butt.� The sentiment was appreciated, but by now, the method certainly was not.
Depression
Who was to blame? Well, me, for starters. Our snap-heavy culture has given us permission to act this way, even celebrates it, and I, for one, have typed some not-very-nice things about Britney Spears. What else is the Internet but a worldwide slam book, one in which I myself had written as a humor columnist, gleefully mocking public figures–because that’s part of the job description, isn’t it? If a person makes an extraordinarily nice living as a politician or entertainer, it stands to reason that he or she should expect a few jabs from Jay Leno every week or so. Simon Cowel on “American Idolâ€? has made an entire career of in-your-face snideness, and America pays him handsomely for it.
What was different about this situationâ€"in addition to the small technicality that I am not, in fact, an actual celebrity– was that now it was happening to me , and I didn’t like it one little bit. Something about typing into a little box on a little screen unplugs people from the fact that there is another human being out there on the receiving end. Were any of these people to register their opinion of my writing to my face, I doubt they’d say the same thing, or at least not in the same way. I certainly wouldn’t saunter up to Shania Twain and denounce her for contributing to the objectification of women. But I have said so in the glowing, transitory online world, because that seemedâ€"okay, somehow.
When did we become this way? Is it the language, the culture, the curt abbreviations of the Internet, or all of the above? I stopped writing about politics last year because I was weary of the shrillness it seems to breed, no matter one’s stance. There’s a political scientist here in the States by the name of Jay Cost. He’s a non-partisan poll reader who crunches numbers and reports on voting trends. That’s all he does. He doesn’t endorse anyone for President; he doesn’t identify himself as a liberal or conservative in any way. And yet, on his blog, he’s posted the following genteel warning: “I have no tolerance for emailers who choose to be unconstrained by the parameters of basic etiquette. I get too many emails from people who use the anonymity of email to be rude. Please be courteous.�
Is this, then, who we truly are? Are we only our most honest selves when we aren’t held accountable for our actions? For centuries, have human beings really been these nasty little ferrets, kept in check merely by a superior sense of manners?
Those questions spooked me more than any other aspect of the entire incident. On the second night, afraid for me, my husband physically took my computer out of my hands. I was shaken to the core and considering a professional hiatus. Had I not been able to write all along, and people were just too kind to tell me to my face? If those detractors were correct, if I really couldn’t writeâ€"then there was no career, and there was no me.
Acceptance
I contacted one of the editors of the piece in question to gather a second opinion. He couldn’t understand the reaction, either, and told me about an article he’d written which was given a headline suggesting non-PC overtones. Within seconds, he was deluged with anonymous hate mail. The computer was set so that an alarm went off each time he had new mail, so every few seconds, every time he sat down to write, it was ding, ding, ding. Racist, racist, racist.
“How did you deal with it?� I asked.
“That,� he said, is what I talk to my therapist about.�
Well, all these people were suggesting professional help anyway, so I called one. “Why all this anger out there?� I asked her. “It’s an eight hundred word article about cartoons. If people disagree with me, why can’t we just have a civil discussion about it?�
Her short answer: It’s all about shoving. “Somehow your words pushed an emotional button for them,� she said. “See how you yourself reacted when your own writing was, it seemed, unjustly under attack? You have your identity all tied up in your career, and you felt you were being annihilated.�
Within the article are the words, “All negative behavior stems from pain.� I pulled out my single semester of Psych 101 and asked the therapist if it applied in this case. “Is it that these people are just hurting, and they’re merely spreading the pain around?�
She asked me to repeat the line. “You wrote that?� she exclaimed. “Oh, no wonder these people are angry! See the mirror you’ve held up! They’re saying, ‘I’ll show you who’s negative!’�
I thanked her and hung up. Maybe I was a good writer who had produced a bad article. Maybe I was a bad writer who had risen to the level of mediocre just often enough to make a living of it. I could quit, or I could do what I have always done: Turn what doesn’t kill me into writing material.
Mary Beth Ellis runs www.BlondeChampagne.com. Her first book is available from www.drinktothelasses.com
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