18 / Well Well Well Well Well Well Well
Submitting myself for public criticism, calmly and sagely.
Well well well well well well well well..... Here we are again.....
I've recently made an executive decision to start once again sending out my newsletter. I arrived at this decision after basically a quorum of colleagues and peers expressed to me that they'd read my newsletter, liked it, and missed it in its absence. Given a market flooded with first person expository writing, I was skeptical, but have chosen to ignore that feeling (a skill honed with thousands of dollars in therapy thank you Andrew!!!!!!!) and charge ahead. And also: I'm moving to Substack! I did TinyLetter at first because I thought I'd be able to change the font, but then I never figured out how to, and if I'm going to work hard on making smart and funny writing I at least want to give people the option of paying me for it ("lol"). I may figure out a paying subscribers-only offering at some point, but for now, I’m just giving you the option of sending me five dollars monthly for nothing in return. You’re welcome :)
I stopped sending these monthly emails not only because they're a lot of work but also because I found the act of sending them to be really scary. I'm used to sharing my work in public settings: I've done stand-up for over a decade (lol) and have tweeted to tens of thousands of people daily for years. Those contexts seem even scarier than a newsletter, or any long-form prose writing, because you get immediate feedback, but for me the opposite is true. The absence of any live feedback leaves me with no ability to recalibrate my performance as I go, or to account for poor performance as it happens. Instead, I’m haunted by the specter of an imagined humiliation – cutting things my readers might be saying, with the added indignity of my ignorance to them. So embarrassing: to write something, and have no idea it sucks and that people hate it.
I recently wrote a piece for Gawker about my long history of being sad online. I was excited to write it, but as soon as its publication date grew close I had second thoughts. I started to feel that the piece was bad: unimportant, uninteresting, and, most devastatingly, imprecise — a trend piece whose trend was overstated, the kind of essay I would have read a few paragraphs of and scoffed at, thinking how much better I could do if I’d written it except now I was writing it and I couldn’t. Lifehack: if you never try you can never fail.
I almost pulled the piece, but ended up keeping it after receiving some really smart edits from my editor George Civeris (king!) and realizing I needed the money to make rent (epic). I'm glad I did: the public reaction was really positive. A lot of people shared the piece, and many DMed me their appreciation. I'm sure there was also a great deal of private criticism — cutting, brutal insights of the article, my writing skill, and my intellect that I'd have been completely devastated to hear — but it turns out the nice thing about private criticism is that it's private. I never heard it.
I've been lucky to not have had many mean things written about me online. I did recently read this comment on a video I did for Comedy Central last year, whose premise was that I wanted to have sex with a dolphin:
Go off Dale!!!!!!! Genuinely very funny, and to me a rhythmically interesting little clause as well.
Like many, I sometimes do something masochistic and seek out negative feedback (Pat Regan has a great joke about reading mean comments), because, again, nothing is scarier than being naive to your own humiliation. If I know what mean things people are saying, I can address them and control the narrative, and total control is famously amazing to have. I am working on being less sensitive to negative criticism, especially from strangers or those who aren’t invested in my work — the nature of my career literally necessitates submitting myself to public commentary, so it’s either inure myself to criticism or fully lose my mind. I get secondhand embarrassment when wealthy celebrities publicly spiral after receiving artistic or personal criticism, threatening their critics’ livelihoods or levying armies of rabid stans to their defense. God forbid I ever make millions of dollars and spend my free time searching my own name on Twitter.
I've used Twitter daily for almost a decade, and have the whole time avoided any significant pushback or criticism, for the most part. I think this is partially because I'm a white guy (represent!!!! jk), and partially because I'm not that successful at anything outside of Twitter (which I say with genuine love and respect for myself), but also because I deliberately try not to post anything that will upset anyone too much. Many of my followers know that I delete tweets compulsively — probably about half of what I tweet, and usually within an hour of posting it — sometimes out of fear that they're controversial, but more often because I become nervous that the tweets are corny and not funny, and I don't want to be judged for them. Wee oo wee oo: needing control alert.
I sometimes see other people use Twitter and can only assume they're trying deliberately to incite anger — tweeting inflammatory things they may not really believe, engaging with angry replies. I'm amazed by these people and don't think I'll ever be like that. I've always been afraid of conflict — "non-confrontational." In the past I've liked this quality in myself (I don't like it when people are upset! Good person alert!) but I view it more ambiguously now. It's not just that I don't like when people are upset; it's also that I particularly don't like when people are upset at me. From a different angle, being non-confrontational starts to look like needing to be universally liked which, not to be the literal DSM-V, is pathological. I’ve only recently learned that sometimes you need to be confrontational, like with your health insurance company or your landlord or with someone at a bar who’s harassing your friend. If everyone likes you, you’re probably not standing up for much.
In writing this essay, I remembered another criticism I'd received long ago, on an opinion essay I wrote for my college newspaper my first semester of college. I can tell I still feel ashamed of it because I didn't want to look up what the essay was about, but I've been brave and pushed through and reread it (though not brave enough to link it; you can find it on your own if you try hard enough). The premise of the essay was that students at my college complained too much about how much work they had, that it wasn't as bad as they were making it seem. It was an audacious thing to publish a mere two weeks into my time at college. What authentic insight could I have had into an institutional culture by that point? Very little: it was an essay I'd repurposed from an essay I wrote in high school. The essay made little splash, and garnered no comments, except for one: "is this satire". Devastating. I didn't publish anything else for years.
But I've come around, and here I am, easing back into the experience of public prose writing. Maybe some of it will be bad. That's okay!! People create mediocre, derivative uninspired work all the time, and they're fine. They can even be celebrated and become rich for it! Just look at Dua Lipa or Adam Levine. I'll be proud enough to follow in their footsteps.