“Genius!” “Piece of shit!” “Bully!” “Bravo!” “Mediocre!” “Legend!”
The range of judgments online is vast and varied, we know that. There are those who love you, those who flatter you first and then hate you, those who hate you on principle. Then, thankfully, there's an overwhelming majority of wonderfully normal people.
I found this out firsthand a few weeks ago, when I suddenly became famous. Usually I'm about as well known as a comic-book writer can be, which is to say not at all (except for the odd person who recognizes you in the restroom line at Lucca Comics). Now, though, I have a lot more followers than before.
It's happened to me before, for reasons just as fleeting, and I know it doesn't last, that it's ridiculous to believe it will – or to want it to.
Because it's a hallucination, this online reputation.
Then again, the event that changed it is hallucinatory too: the end of my collaboration with the newspaper I loved my whole life. Twenty-three years of work gone with a GULP, just to stay on theme.
The reasons were all discussed at length online: by those who read and understood, by those who read carelessly, even by those who chose to give their own personal, fanciful interpretation. But in the sea of social media, a Poe-style maelstrom, this hallucination becomes a fog that hides the beautiful things. In which warriors turn to shadows, as in the frozen land of the Cimmerians in the Odyssey. In which the monsters appear, from the smallest trolls to the great Krakens. A fog that won't lift anytime soon, since we all live online. So, what do you do? Do I stop in the mist and become a monster myself? Or do I drop everything, shut down my social accounts and off I go, into the woods like Emerson? Tempting: but I also have to work.
The trouble with these extreme solutions is that they're, well, extreme.
The world, instead, is one big dazzling, wishy-washy “Yes, but”.
Maybe, I think, it's just a matter of cleaning up. Tightening the rigging, mending the sails, swabbing the deck boards. Reminding myself that the ship has to keep moving. But out of the fog other Me's appear, they too part of the hallucination. There's an Asshole Me. A Victim Me. A Rational Me (but nobody ever listens to that one). A Narcissist Me, who gets plenty of attention. Who should I listen to?
In the silence, I go instead to find the Estranged Me, who sits in a corner and resolves the impasse with a question. “Shall we get back to writing?”
Because this is what I do, for a living. Not only because they pay me to do it, but above all because it's part of me. I'm someone who looks inside himself to tell what's outside. Who puts his pound of blood and emotion on a page, to make readers laugh and cry. Who remembers all his scars, as Stephen King says, and reopens them to tell other people's.
So my Estranged Me and I start hammering away at the keyboard again. Will it be an absolute mess or something halfway decent? Who knows. But it's the only solution we have: and it's saved us in far worse storms.
As I set one word after another, the mist begins to thin.
And beyond the hallucination, I glimpse a beautiful day.