I’m giving up. Cooking for the rest of the year!
I’m giving up Cooking for the rest of the year!
I’m at my desk now, staring into my computer. An unidentified foreign object clings in an effortless cluster to the screen; top right-hand quadrant, about two inches below the battery power indicator. I wonder if scratching at it with my fingernail will get it off, leaving no trace, or if I’ll just make matters worse by messing with it. Dark black and utterly unassuming, this speck is a dead-ringer body double for the humble period, and in my careless attempt to compose a newsletter to my blog subscribers for the first time, I actually take it for one. In my need to adhere to an arbitrary deadline I have set for myself for no other reason than that, I have, I fail to recognize the speck as a speck and carry on with my writing as if it’s the real thing; as if it’s a period.
No big deal. This is boring, right? But that tiny black fleck of whatever-the-hell-it-is will cause me to share a newsletter that could very well have tanked this whole venture of mine – it could all have self-destructed. This single point – this dot – had the ability to alter the course of my infantine blog, evolving and expanding into something much bigger than itself. A big bang.
You see, I am trying to get you excited about what is to come here in Blogland. I’m trying to be a little louder about things these days, maybe compete with my fellow blogging peers a bit more; really throw my hat into the ring. I want to share news and tidbits and tricks – all of the requisite things one does when penning a small business newsletter. I sat in on a social media influencer’s webinar about this just yesterday, in fact; an experience that made it clear I will not succeed as a blogger unless I’m doing this, unless I’m working to actively grow my email list. My capital “E” Email list.
But mostly, it feels a little like I’m putting up imaginary fly paper. I am trying to attract you, to get you to stick with me, to stick to me, to stick around. Will you?
The jazzing up of one’s readership is an important thing, they say. And so, I fumble through.
When fused together, this mash-up of sentences inside my newsletter-to-be establishes a sentiment so grossly antagonizing to my intended one that my entire point will be doomed to go awry; what with the period that isn’t really a period splitting it in two. Or not splitting, rather. It’s there for me, on my computer screen. But to your eyes, it will be a very different thing.
Intended to read much like a cheeky bumper sticker, here is what it looks like on my screen:
I’m giving up. Cooking for the rest of the year!
Here’s what it will say on your screen, when I hit send:
I’m giving up Cooking for the rest of the year!
See what I mean? No period. No speck. I’ll be damned.
Because of the speck’s dopple-ganging resemblance to the period, I’ll simply carry on typing away at my newsletter’s copy, fingers flying over keys, brain none the wiser. I’m sitting here mistaking some mysterious particulates of probable food waste for a sort of punctuation; punctuation that, were I to publish the thing, could very well give the impression that I’m going to abandon ship – that I’m going to stop cooking and sharing recipes for the foreseeable future. It sounds like I’m quitting, going on some sort of sabbatical. This, as you might infer, would be a form of unintended blogger suicide. become a more sophisticated coffee drinker.
A text from my mother wrests my gaze back to the screen. I don’t think this reads the way you want it to read, sweetie.
When I hit publish, in T-minus four minutes, I will do so with more confidence than one should, failing to edit any of the words that have just dripped from my fingertips. My lack of patience has come a calling, yet again. The resulting newsletter will carry a dramatically different tone than I’d intended, all because of a punctuation gaffe. A speck.
Fingerprint-smeared and bespeckled with a gritty patina of what now amounts to about two and a half months of kitchen-centered recipe testing and tethered camera-to-computer food photography, it is safe to say that the screen of my Macbook Air is in need of a good spit shine.
I take a sip from my now-cold coffee, whose mug has left a semi-circular ring of tawny leakage in the center of my hot pink Mead Five Star spiral-bound notebook. It’s too blonde, I note. I need to stop using so much creamer. I vow, in that moment, to at least try to work my toward drinking it black.
***
She reads my copy sometimes, before I hit “publish.” I’m always grateful to have her eyes on my words, my “first reader” as they say. In On Writing, Steven King shares that he’s long assigned this all-important role to his wife, trusting her reader’s intuition more than that of any other. I’m not sure if it’s that I trust my mother’s intuition more than any other, so much as I just value it so immensely. I soak up the love in it, I do. The supportive undertones it carries nourish my jitter-bugging confidence like a cracked desert landscape after a hard rain. This has proven true, always.
Readers come with varied lenses though, all different kinds. Some are shiny with bias, like a mother’s, while others come framed with dollar signs, as with those of a publisher whose job it is to sell words to the masses. Some are crystal clear and unassuming, some more critical, some not critical enough. Some are end-of-day tired and work-weary, fighting to stay open while others come at their reads fresh and sharp, landing on the page with the renewed energy afforded only by a night’s rest. It really just depends.
As a writer, the way your words make a person feel so often depend on when, how, where, and why their eyes catch them in the first place. Your text’s context, it matters. The words on the page might technically be the same but we will all feel them differently as they bounce around in the spaces between us. It’s scary truths like these that can make you wonder why anyone ever writes anything at all. It makes me feel like maybe I’m a brave person, which is nice.
But mostly, I tend to skew a little shier when it comes to sharing my words, which might explain why I first send them to my mother. The safety net of her heavily biased, fiercely loyal support has often been the lifeblood of any creative thing that I have ever thrown out into the world. I suppose I am the type that needs it. The validation, like a vitamin for the ego, is so often the fuel I need to forge ahead, to keep putting one letter after another. This post, therefore, should probably be dedicated to her.
The helpful, disaster-preventing usage of a first reader combats the ever looming embarrassment that lurks just on the other side of our mistakes, typos, and confusions that do, inevitably, find their way into our work. It’s so very human, right? To make these mistakes; to forget a period or to forget to tell people say, in your latest blog recipe’s instructions, to add the lemon zest into the pie filling (Again, I’m really sorry about that).
It’s that first reader who can really help keep us afloat, as we create and then cling to our creations – or recipes, images, and words – the vulnerability turning us into stone. Like noise-reducing headphones, this simple yet invaluable measure of a first set of trusted, safe eyes helps to quiet the riot inside our own heads. It calms the screaming chaos born of the felt insufficiency that accompanies any attempt at creating into an abyss, into THE abyss.
Into the red.
There is an infinite, expectant sea of readers out there – the fifth, sixth, six hundredth – all ready to pounce on your words, some taking greater interest than others, and some no interest at all. But we write for the former. We write as if everyone cares. Because doing anything other than that would be a sort of dying.
But still, we write. We create. We do so like our lives depend on it, because they do.
***
“Elle! Can you grab the Windex for me, sweetie?” I’d yelled this, hoping my voice would push through our galley kitchen, past the dining room, and into the small central hallway where my two young children were immersed in a game of Candyland. “It’s the blue one!”
She located the bottle of glass cleaner and placed it, with a look of helpful, six-year-old pride, on the corner of the desk where I sat, still staring at the mess of a sentence that could’ve, at least temporarily, derailed the course of my blogger’s journey.
My reaction to this speck, this mote, may or may not be a little overly dramatic, but when one is the sole proprietor of a small, fledgling business, they can never be too careful. Thus, histrionics abound and we begin to overreact to things like free climbing flecks of dust that cling to the face of our computer screen.
One week prior, upon noticing that I was officially six months into my food blogging endeavor, I’d made the mistake of Googling myself; a thing we’re likely to do sometimes in moments of curiosity, temptation, and also procrastination. Slinking in with feline nonchalance, my curiosity had gotten the best of me, despite pointed warnings from other blogger friends.
“Oh don’t do that, don’t fall down the rabbit hole of the interwebs, into the dreaded forums. It’s dark down there. People are unkind; they’ll tear you up, for sport. Just … just don’t do it, okay? Keep your head down and do your thing.”So of course I went and did it anyway.
“Harvest and Honey blog,”I’d typed, holding my breath like I was awaiting important test results from a health exam. Hello drama, we meet again.
I’d mostly just wanted to know if I’d a r r i v e d yet, if I’d gotten there. It was an innocent search for clues as to whether or not my new baby blog was present and accounted for, if it had kicked its way up to the surface of the vast Net into which I’d dropped it. Had I successfully transplanted it from the labyrinthine corridors of my brain into the Net without getting things too terribly tangled? I wanted to know if anyone, anywhere had anything to say about it.
Ego is a formidable, stupefying force.
***
It never ceases to amaze me just how fast people who have never met you will seize the chance to rip you to shreds, letting you know of your errors with a rapid-fire response time that makes it seem as if they’re there just waiting for you to fail, to mess up. Haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate.
Who names a website Harvest and Honey anyway?! WTF does that even mean? Why would anyone ever share black and white images of food? What the fuck is wrong with her? I would literally never make her food. Ugggh what an idiot. I think I hate her.
In cases like these, of which there are countless every single day, each vitriolic contender brings his or her own brand of sad-sacked loneliness and longing to the fray. They feel, I believe, that if only they find a community to belong to, they’ll be okay. Their sense of self worth will be strengthened, their unhappiness buoyed in some way.
This is where the cowards live; just on the other side of the screen, as if through a sort of looking glass, waiting to tell you all the worst things about yourself, to dredge up the bad and leave you bleeding and scarred, defeated. With weapons drawn, these cowards hunker down in their festering bunkers of resentment, in their own loud, not-so-small, rotting territory of the vast web. The hard and harsh truth of it is that if you, too, are sending your work out into that same web, they’ll come crawling in sooner or later. Closing in on your work like a clutter of arachnids, they’ll find you where they will. It’s only a matter of time, and it’s just part of the deal.
When nobody is around to defend themselves from the evisceration, like trolls under a bridge, they hide, waiting. With the protective glass of their screens and devices, they spit their animosity, as the Net masks their faces from the light. It is almost as if by attacking you and attempting to drain you of your lifeblood, they will somehow transfer your skills, your passions, your beauty, your self-respect into themselves, soaking it all up. It’s vampiric.
But don’t drink that poison, don’t bite that apple. You still have a choice. You can choose to listen to them, or not; to sink down to their level, or just keep swimming.
Easier said than done, right? But you have to try. Don’t allow yourself to be stymied by the careless whispers of hate that trickle in and out of your journey. That, to me, is the hardest part of all of it. Filled with daring, when we as the brave creatives make the choice to turn away from and tune out the noise, we’re choosing passion over fear, love over shame, vulnerability over cowardice.
Words are heavy, they can carry weight and impact and influence that goes far beyond what is intended by their original source. What you say, write, sing, shout out loud – it matters. The power of our words is impossible to understate; their gravity, earth shattering. The old adage that they can never hurt you, and that only objects like sticks and stone can, is a logical fallacy to be sure. It is simply not the case. Words can both break us in two and forge us all the way back together again.
I know this to be true. We all do.
***
Cowardice is a private aspect of us, it’s quiet; shut away because it’s shame-laced. We don’t want it known. It shows itself though, cowardice does, with a presence felt in spite of its insular, tucked away nature. It seeps and skulks out from behind closed doors, from the shadowed corners and dirty crevasses of our darker nature, when we think no one is watching. We don’t want anyone to see us cower.
Together we could travel to time’s end and back, and I don’t think we’d ever be able to synthesize the myriad reasons underlying the abundance of online cruelty we see today. It’s at a fever pitch, though, this buzzing vibration of hatred. And while I’m no expert on the matter, I think it grows out of a type of cowardice born of self-loathing, envy, unhappiness, and an intense desire to belong to something.
How does the patient present? My husband, a physician who works at a training hospital, would ask this of his medical students and residents, seeking insight into each symptom of every malady. So, too, could we observe our cohort of online trolls, but unlike the clinical, evidence-based methods found in a patient’s hospital room, the path to understanding the roots of online hatred is much tricker to traverse, it’s foggier, more meandering.
But lucky for us, it’s not our job to diagnose. We don’t have to walk down that road into the divisive, gnarled and darkened corners of the web – there is nothing we need to figure out here. Sure, it’s easy to wonder why anyone would take the time out of his or her life to spew vitriol and hate-filled words at you and your work. But they don’t even know me?
We can offer our hypotheses, our best guesses as to why people are so cruel sometimes. But that is time wasted; it’s time they’re taking from you, from us. From hateful online forums and chat rooms to harsh, unfeeling book reviews, again, I’ve been there. If this hits home, I see you.
I see you.
I see you.
But let’s not let our time be stolen out from under us, okay? We owe it to ourselves, dear reader, to everything we’ve created, and everything we’ve yet to create.
That trip I took down the Google rabbit hole, against my own better judgement, was the first of many times in which I’ve faced them – the tyranny of online trolls, the foot soldiers of self-doubt. I learned from it though, what to do and what not to do.
DON’T: tune my mental vibration to their setting, don’t stoop and allow myself to get swept away in the negativity.
DO: the work, keep putting it out there – the photos, recipes, and writing – all of it. Forgive. Forget. Stay where the light is; keep following that, and don’t look down.
At the very beginning, when you sidle up to the wilderness that is the Internet to share yourself with the great big world, it’s a tentative walk, your steps coming slowly. But eventually, you’ll find your footing, your pace will quicken, and away you’ll go. Free.
***
“Thanks, Mom.” I text back, waiting for the WiFi bars to multiply so my words will make their way to her. I shake my phone like that will help anything at all. With my pinky finger, I catch a small droplet of the “Liquitint sky blue” cleaner that was sinking down the now clean computer screen and I watch it settle on top of my skin, magnifying the ridges of my fingerprint.
Its astringent, ammonia scent covers that of the morning’s coffee like a shroud.
