IN BERLIN . . . (A POST ABOUT HATERS)

I didn't get to spend much time in Berlin. Considering I went to Europe in the first place because of Berlin, it seems especially silly, but I landed on Friday and flew out on Saturday, and in between cabs to the airport I only had time for dinner with a favorite expat of mine from New York City, to speak at a conference on surviving vulnerability with your heart intact in this crazy age of the Internet, and to meet an impressively good group of strong, artistic, enthusiastic women and men who managed to pull the impossible and give me a second (or third? fifth?) wind for this blogging shedoodle. I had a box of my books with me and we sold out in under 10 minutes. It was the kind of bleary-eyed experience that feels almost surreal. Probably because I was kiiiiiind of exhausted? But so, so so so happy. I felt happy because of the Internet in Berlin. Like a dream, that's for sure. ;)

It's different world over there on the Euro-net. (I just invented that word.) I joked that it was like time travel over there, but it's true! It's still 2005 over there in their neck of the bloggy woods, and I am so excited to see how everything unfolds for them. I have a sneaking suspicion they might correct for a few of the left turns we took over here as we found our way through. I sure hope so.

My topic was haters. Big fat quotation marks there. "Haaaaaaa-terrrrrs."

I spoke on haters, and now, I'm going to write about them. If you'll pardon some blunt honesty here for a minute. It's long, and it's after the jump. And just a quick note-this is not about artistic critique or less-than-glowing book reviews. Those of course are valid and valuable and I consider myself lucky to have that opportunity. This is about bullying, cruelty, personal insults, and shame mongering. it's about H-A-T-E. Okay. Onward.  

So, my laptop is still broken. This is pertinent information, I promise. So it's broken and I ordered a replacement, and now I am waiting for it. It should be my turn to get a laptop in the mail somewhere around June. Apparently MacBooks are the new cronut. Until then my old laptop is just sad and broken, and I can only ever see the bottom left quadrant of anything at any given time, so whenever I edit photos and with every line that I type, right at the middle point there's this big slice of glitchy pixelated weirdness that I have to work around. It is, like, the biggest metaphor of my life right now, this giant slice down the center of my laptop, because for the last little while it's been making it real hard for me to see the Internet clearly. I'm poking my head around things over here, trying to get a handle on stuff, figuring out how to make things work. Figuring out if things are worth making work in the first place, and if not, what's next? That kind of thing. And I'm waiting on my answer still. It'll come to me one of these days.

So yes. Sometimes it's hard to see around the haters. 

But see, I don't believe in that word though, "haters." I don't. I don't buy it. I have not yet in my lifetime met a single individual who was only capable of hate, and I have a hard time believing that anybody should be disregarded completely just because their words happen to hurt (though, they probably should be), and I also don't believe that anybody, no matter how mean or cruel they may be, is doing anything purely out of "hate." 

But I do believe in weakness. And I do believe in anger. 

I do believe in irritation. I also believe in spite.  

I believe in frustration, too. And sadness. Misguided disappointment. 

I believe in bad decisions. 

And I understand catharsis.

But I don't believe in this "us vs them" bullshit. It's not "Bloggers" vs "Readers," we are all, all of us, "humans." Same team. Duh. If you've been looking at the other people online like they're something to be beaten, well. I think you might be the problem here.

Don't get me wrong, it's super easy to draw the distinction, to make that separation, to classify ourselves as one thing or the other, but we are all exactly the same. Not one of us is innocent of what the other is guilty. We all put out, and we all take in. I've done it. I've read blogs that make me roll my eyes, and I've gone there again with no other reason than to see what they're up to so I can roll my eyes again. It's human nature. I was just talking to my father-in-law about this last night, about how frustrated he is with Facebook because it turns out he is completely against the politics of a lot of his friends but he just can't seem to turn away, even when what he reads makes him red-in-the-face kind of angry and can ruin his whole day. I don't know if he's ever engaged with these "thems" in his life; I do know my sister once engaged with a "them" over a religious disagreement--our aunt--and that both of them walked away feeling completely crappy, swearing they'd never do it again. Anyway, it's there. It happens. We're all in the thick of it. 

But it's this "us vs them" idea, I think, that's feeding this beast, giving an urgency to these opinions that otherwise we'd all know for sure we were not supposed to share. 

"Surely I can't be the only one that thinks this!?" 

That's where it starts. 

"I can't be the only one who thinks this. Who out there agrees with me?!" 

We all do this--not just with the negative things, more often with the good things. I mean, I do it err damn day on this blog! This is how we find our connections, this is how we find our people. It's the "Me, Too" phenomenon. And it's amazing! And you know what, ain't nothing wrong with it if it happens sarcastically. I mean, sometimes *I* attempt this sarcastically, and I always regret when I attempt it sarcastically, and one of these days I will stop attempting things sarcastically, but probably immediately thereafter I will die, because then I will have finally become a perfect person and it will be like unto those characters on Lost who have wrapped up their issues and then suddenly get exploded. (The teacher--remember that one?)

The "Me Too" phenomenon. The problem starts when the "Me Too's" are over things that manners would suggest we should keep to ourselves. The dark side of our thoughts. The "if you can't say something nice" thoughts. That's still a thing, right? Manners? Kindness? Oh good.

"Oh my gosh, I can't believe she did that! I can't wait to see what everyone's saying about it." 

That's what's next. 

Sometimes, we let it get to this stage:

"Here's what *I* think, and I don't care if it's hurtful. I don't care if it's hurtful, and I don't care if it's truthful, it's just what I think, and it's not my fault I think it, it's hers. It's her fault for sharing it. That's on her for even being it in the first place." 

Hatersville, party of us. We wipe our hands clean, right? That's how we get here. We hold no responsibility over our opinions of others' behaviors; that's on them. They don't like what I say? Well then they don't have to do what irritates me. I just can't with her anymore. She is such a c-u-n-t. Her husband must be so sick of her. Someone needs to take her off her damn pedestal. Me. Maybe it should be me that takes her off her damn pedestal.

Last year at Halloween I went to a bookstore and picked up a few Gothic Victorian Halloween-y type classics. Frankenstein, Dracula, a collection of Edgar Allen Poe, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, you get the drift. Jekyll & Hyde was slimmest of the bunch, so obviously I read that one first. You know, a warm up. Sometimes literary pursuits can be jarring to my system. ;) While reading one day, while Huck played at the playground and the world smelled of fireplaces, I had myself an intense emotional discovery.

So now we are going to talk about Jekyll & Hyde. 

Not the restaurant in Times Square, though that place is pretty rad, too.

The way it goes is this. Dr Jekyll is this really great dude. Beloved in his community, he's tall, strong, handsome, broad shouldered, kind. He loves doing good, he loves being good. He is a good, good man. But he also loves sinning. As do we all. He loves reveling in lasciviousness (I love that word). But as much as he loves to go out and sin and carouse all night long, he hates the guilt of it even more. So he devises a way where he can split these two parts of his self into two separate selves, two distinct men, so that he never needs to feel the ramifications of what the other has engaged in. When Jekyll is Jekyll he is good, and when Jekyll is Hyde he is bad. Period. And never the twain shall meet. Once this potion he's created wears off, Hyde resumes his life as his stronger self Dr Jekyll, and Dr Jekyll feels not a single speck of guilt over any of Hyde's decisions. Mission accomplished! 

The story is told from the perspective of a third character, a good friend of Jekyll's, and he describes the first time he sees this Mr Hyde person. Hyde is stooped over; hunched. Gnarled and crooked and deformed, with the face of evil itself. Uncoordinated and weak. 

Over time, as Jekyll spends more evenings out in the skin of Mr Hyde, something starts to change in Dr Jekyll's demeanor. His hair starts to gray, to thin, his muscles start shrink. Age catches up with him quicker, he hobbles a little bit more, his footing becomes unsteady, he needs to rest more frequently. Meanwhile, Hyde is filling out. His posture is straighter, his muscles stronger, his coordination smoother, until one day when the potion wears off and he doesn't revert to Jekyll. Jekyll is no longer his default state, because Hyde has become too strong. His Hyde has eclipsed his Jekyll, and he now needs the potion not to become sinful, but to resume his business and social engagements as the kinder Dr Jekyll.  

I think about this all. the. time. I have assailed myself and this story upon all of my friends. We talk about it at length at our house. I made it the foundation of my presentation at The Hive. 

The thing of it is, we are all filled with the complications of duality. We all feel love, and we all feel hate. We all pass judgement, we all grant forgiveness. We all have engaged, in one form or another, in taunting, teasing, bullying, or criticizing. Many of us have done it online. Once, maybe twice. Maybe accidentally. Some of us do it for sport. 

But what happens when those muscles of cruelty grow too strong? What happens when we shut down our laptops and that cruelty comes with us, no longer trapped between the keys and glowing screen? 

I understand the nature of blogging. Of publishing, of acting, of doing anything in a public arena, really. I understand it. That doesn't mean I am okay with  it. I am not okay with it. And that doesn't mean I've always been able to cope with it. Full stop, I am very new at knowing how to cope with it. In the past, I've done a bad job of it. Like last Christmas. Last Christmas it broke me. In the middle of a lot of online scrutiny, and in the beginning stages of writing this book that I just knew was going to be torn to pieces by those who truly wanted me to suffer, I broke. I broke down. Guys, I was 89 pounds fully clothed that Christmas. I made my aunt cry at my sister's wedding. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't go a full hour without having some kind of panic attack over something ridiculous, the PMDD that was only sort of a pain before all this had suddenly become completely untenable. I literally could not function once the hormonal element hit at the end of my cycle. I was a hollow version of myself. It was bad. I saw doctors, I saw therapists, I saw psychiatrists, I saw specialists. It took a lot of work. I am glad for it though, and I am now a hilariously strong person because of it. I stared into the eye of the most frightened parts of myself and the  most awful people on the Internet, and I decided to become brave. I decided to believe that what they were doing in those forums was not "entertainment," not "critique," and not "justified." I decided to face reality and stop trying to find the good in those that perpetrated it. I had to believe that I was worth more than that, and that none of their garbage about me was true.

And you guys, I am. I now know I am worth way more than that. (And you are, too.) 

What goes on online in certain parts of the Internet is truly, heartbreakingly disgusting. It is wrong. 

There are a lot of people who want me to hurt. They want me to know, they need me to know, that they are unhappy with me, that I let them down, that I am not what the kinder people among us might say that I am. That I am nothing. 

I finally realize that has nothing to do with me whatsoever.

Now, I don't like to let people down, just like I don't like to be around people who can't deal with their own emotions and be kind to others anyway. But I want to let all those out there for whom I've proved a disappointment to know this: My failure does not make your cruelty okay.

To those out there who've tried in the past to ruin my career. To those out there who've emailed past sponsors to get my partnerships cancelled (sponsors who all emailed me in return going, like, who ARE these nutballs?), to those who've lobbed hateful words my way, who've left harsh, degrading reviews of me on Amazon--of ME--to you I say this: 

Don't Hyde yourselves, girls! Stand up a little taller! Exercise your muscles of kindness! Become women of substance! Don't let the stooped-over monster of resentment and envy grow so strong that it overpowers the rest of you! Don't let that future sneak up on you, take control of your final selves! Of the Internet's final self! Take control! Make cognitive choices that will lead you where you really want to be. You are the only one who can do that for yourself. Taking me down is highly counter-intuitive!!!

Also. Fuck you.

Sometimes I catch wind of the feeding frenzy that goes on in certain places online any time I do something asinine (often). It doesn't make me angry. It doesn't make me frightened. It doesn't hurt my feelings. It sometimes makes me defensive, and I do wish that it didn't (maybe someday it won't).  It does make me sad. Deeply sad. For all of us. Sadness for those that wrote it, sadness for those that read it. Sadness because it has to feel awful to be in that place where you need to have that kind of sustenance, the kind of sustenance that tears others down in order to make strong. I would so much rather be on this end of that hatred than the other. Carrying that around all day? Guys, this side of things is a much sunnier place to be. 

Story time. 

Once upon a time, I went on GOMI. I did, it was part of my cognitive therapy "homework" if you will. I made myself an account (and I gave myself a horribly inappropriate, darkly-not funny screen name) and I went on and I answered some questions. I defended myself. I apologized for the things that I needed to apologize for (duh, there's plenty--I ain't perfect). And do you know what happened? It changed in there. Suddenly people were kind. They were writing nice things about me. They were rooting for me! I got a ton of nice emails from GOMI users, all of them basically saying, "I read your forum, they be crazy in there." This change lasted a few days, until some of the longer-term users got in there and started harassing everyone who was being nice until eventually all the kindness went away. They said, "Start a SOMI for this! This doesn't belong here!" and then when someone did start up a SOMI for me, those same users went in and bombarded it with gifs until everyone in there gave up, too. 

It was hysterical. 

That did it. It was a tipping point, and I stopped feeling any curiosity at all about what anybody might have to say about me over there. I had proven my point.

I had won. 

Guys, kindness can win. Even if hatred is louder. 

At The Hive I shared a few things that I want other bloggers to know about online cruelty. They're things I want readers to know, too. Things I think everyone on the Internet should know. They are:

1. It's not normal. We weren't created to withstand this. We shouldn't expect it, we shouldn't stand for it. Nobody should. What you would do if you overheard your child being talked about in this way? Would you think he deserved it? It is not normal you guys. Those who would argue that you're "putting yourself out there," we ALL put ourselves out there. Come on. Imagine someone coming up to you on the street and slugging you in the face. "Your fault, dude. You came outside." Guys, cut that out. Your mom is on Facebook.

2. It's not true. Whatever mistakes you make, whatever nuggets of truth are at the heart of the insult, it's not true. It's not real. You are not the sum total of your parts, the world is not black and white, nobody is all this or all that, it's not real. One person will find your nose highly unattractive and insult you on the Internet for it, another will come up to you after a conference presentation has ended to tell you he thinks you're the most beautiful woman he's ever seen, and then single out your nose as the reason (not kidding). One reader will email to tell you that you've helped her stop cutting herself, that you've given her a glimpse of a future where she can imagine herself being happy, and that you've changed the whole world for her. Another will write that you are hateful and stupid and worth being boycotted. Come on. So take it from me. All those hateful words? They're not true. I promise.

3. It won't ruin you. Noise is not power. Sponsors don't rescind offers. Friends don't turn against you. Family doesn't stop being proud of you. Nobody reads that stuff and thinks "geez I was wrong, she IS terrible!" What they do think, is "what a bunch of nutjobs." I got an email the week my book was published from a blogger who'd also had a book published, and who had similarly been torn to pieces online because of it. "It'll be okay," she said. "It won't ruin you." She told me she'd gotten a similar email from another blogger who'd published a book and had also been torn to bits with a similar message. "It'll be okay. It won't ruin you," she'd said. It was like being the caboose of a long train of encouragement. So let me be the one pass that on right now.

Guys. It'll be okay. It won't ruin you. You still have every reason to feel proud of your accomplishments. It feels like the end of the world, but it isn't. You feel completely alone, but you aren't. You still hold promise. They may try to take good things from you, but your life is not something they can hold. Stay strong. Keep your chin high. Keep on keepin' on.  

Fist bumps, kids.