Preemptive Retaliation

Someone I don’t know said something nice about my work.

At least, I assume I don’t know them. As soon as I typed that last sentence out, the self-sabotaging part of my mind instantly threw doubts on it. Maybe I do know them. Maybe they’re close to me. Maybe it’s Brad Pitt, pretending to be me.

My brother and I talked about getting older today. He was speaking to a colleague and referenced something that happened a number of years ago (the whole World of Warcraft exp thing which I don’t want to explore in its own tangent) and uttered the phrase, “This was probably before your time” in a completely unironic fashion. And I’ve been finding that more frequent these days. Not my brother saying tings to me, but more that the things that I love and influenced me are becoming less relevant. Months ago I attended a pop-punk cover night, where the lead singer firmly declared that we were listening to Dad-rock before launching into a feverous All the Small Things. I mean, Fight Club was release twenty four years ago and here I am making an off-hand reference to it. It was once the hot thing of my friend group, a talking point across both film buffs and filthy casuals. But still. It’s an old film, and it was an old reference, and I’m showing my age by not only referring to the film but referring to my age in relation to the film.

And, of course, this is all a distraction on the fact that someone said something really nice about something I’ve written. Someone I don’t (likely) know, who read my work and liked it, and told me so, and had no incentive to tell me apart from to tell me.

I accidentally subscribed to Skillshare earlier this year. I joined in order to learn something about Power BI, which is somewhat needed in my actual proper Real Life job, and forgot to cancel after the free trial. So I’ve got it for a year, and since getting it I’ve completed a course in Power BI (good job, corporate Joe), one third of a Ukulele course, and one whole writing course. I had write as journal of sorts for nine days using the prompt “Today I noticed” and on the tenth day I was to rewrite and edit some of those daily thoughts into a story.

So I wrote for ten days, because I didn’t read the question properly – and then I edited some of them down to a story. The dailies were my usual fare; over thought under developed streams of consciousness covering mostly anxieties on whether I was doing anything right and concluding that No Joe, You Are Not. But I honed them into a nice story. A story about a parent coming in from work and flying a kite with their child.

I liked it. It reminded me of the story that I had published in a book – the one about the little girl sledding down a snowy hill. It was sweet and saccharine and was true and read well. But, even then, it felt flat. I chalked it up to not writing fiction for a while, achy fingers not used to writing etc etc, and I moved on with my life – happy that I had written fairly consistently for almost two weeks. Which was great, because the ol’ videogame addiction was calling to me again and I wanted to dive into some new experiences.

But then someone left a comment on it. I’m not going to put it here or even quote any of it, but suffice to say that it was wonderful. It was thorough, and complimentary, and sweet, and insightful and-

I made a joke on another entry that I had to repeat to myself over and over that people do enjoy my writing, and it’s clear that all the best jokes are stuffed with depressing truth. The fact that other people might not enjoy my work isn’t something I worry about, it’s something I’ve come to accept and internally I thank my friends every time they say something to keep up the charade. Logically this isn’t true. People wouldn’t say they enjoyed my work if they didn’t actually enjoy it. But still – the little voice in my head that sits in the little wrong part of my brain keeps telling me so.

It’s nice, to have that voice be told to shut up.