Starting blog entries with disclaimers is sexy, and everyone knows it. Telling you that this is unreasonably long and annoyingly meta is the blogging equivalent to putting on a merry widow and getting out a riding crop. Happy early Valentine’s Day.
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If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 109384029 times: Blogging is weird. But you know what’s weirder? The blogosphere. And while you might think blogging and the blogosphere are one and the same, they are so very not.
Blogging is pretty much all about writing your own thoughts in your own corner of the Internet. It’s about finding a line of self-censorship comfort, about reaching out in a somewhat anonymous fashion to the online world in a place that feels somewhat safe. The blogosphere, on its best days, is a community of support for writing and discussing views in thoughtful forums with sporadic and frequent breaks to compliment pictures of one another’s children and pets, and/or raise money for someone’s tragedy. On its worst day, it is a hive of defensiveness, misunderstandings, and bullying.
I’ve succumbed to the nasty side of the blogosphere on several occasions. I’ve left horrible anonymous comments on peoples’ blogs informing them that actions they have taken are stupid, insensitive, bad for themselves and the world, etc. After growing up a tad, I left NON-anonymous comments on other people’s blogs telling them their views were dead wrong and offensive and implying that they are awful people.
I’m awesome, right?
I didn’t do this often; the mean girl isn’t a side of me I love to indulge. But it happened.
Two occasions stand out to me in particular: One was over-the-top absurdly silly on my part. Some woman I don’t know (even in the sense of Internet knowing) wrote a reasonably innocuous post about how people without children could never, ever imagine or understand the love that parents feel for their kids. This happens to be a bugaboo of mine, and funnily enough it has little or nothing to do with a child-free person’s typical rant about a world that caters to parents and how everyone should control their miniature reflections of themselves.
My hang-up in this area has to do, as it so often does for me, with the phrasing. Telling me I can’t imagine something is like telling me I can’t organize something. Because I CAN and I WILL. Do not offend my ability to be creative, as I will then (and did, in this case) creatively rip you a new one. (I believe I compared her to those assholes who spend a month in Thailand and then return in order to spend a year and a half explaining to everyone they know about how travel is so enlightening, and how one can’t even fathom the poverty, but also the generosity! The two-dollar massages! It’s enough to make a listener long for the days of slideshows. At least then there’s an opportunity for napping.) That poor child-loving blogging mother had no idea what semantics and a need for Zoloft will induce in me. And why should she? She DIDN’T KNOW ME and had no idea what vitriol her in-exact wording would inspire in a stranger.
If I could remember which blog it was, I would go back and leave four extra-special nice comments as penance.
The second incident was nastier. I got all heated when a semi-famous blogger posted about how she would never, ever befriend someone to increase her blog traffic. And she thought terribly of anyone who did so. Now, due to a blogging friendship with another woman who knew someone who knew someone, I had INSIDE KNOWLEDGE that this semi-famous blogger had done JUST THAT with a very famous blogger. She had even used a tenuous connection to meet the famous blogger and befriend her so that she could get a link! And she even admitted it when her tenuous friend called her out on her abominable behavior! This all boils down to the UNDENIABLE, PROOF-POSITIVE FACT that she was a hypocrite, and needed to be stopped, obviously by me. And so I left a series of comments calling her out on her bad behavior, but then was unable to back up my assertions without betraying my friend and her friend and ended up looking like a crazy person. Which would have been fitting because clearly I was.
It was then that I realized that I was too emotionally immature for the Internet.
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I recently ran across the blog of a woman to whom I very much relate. I like reading her stuff, and she thinks of things in a way that is new to me. Refreshing. But her comments? Reading them is like wading through bile. The things that others feel compelled and entitled to tell her are astounding. I felt ashamed for my early blogging behavior when I treated the Internet like a screen I could stand behind.
On reading her comments, I couldn’t understand why she would even let them get posted. And I wondered how she must have felt when she read them. It was for just this reason that when I started blogging again, I turned off the comments. I didn’t want input, ANY input. What if ANY small smidgen of it was negative? What if?
Clearly I am too fragile to sustain insults from someone I don’t know.
It all sounds so weak because it is. And it comes back to words and how they hold power. A well-written essay can clear minds and open hearts; a compelling speech can change the course of history.
But something I always fail to remember is that the act of speaking or writing does not make something true. I find I have to repeat this to myself a lot: Saying it doesn’t make it true. Writing it doesn’t make it true. Someone telling me I am a horrible person could potentially be helpful feedback in a scenario I can’t summon right now, but mostly it’s a mis-perception. As I’m not horrible. I’m quite lovely, really, occasional ranting comments aside.
The blogosphere can bring out the best and the worst in people. I resolve to let it bring out my best. My best is not hurtful. It is thoughtful, loving, kind and truthful.
My best is me.
