Walls

In my hometown in Pennsylvania, on a ridge overlooking the main boulevard, sits a copse of ancient pines that block the glare of the city lights from the old mansions sitting above. Positioned between the auxiliary parking used by the local college campus to its north and just off of a well-used sidewalk to the south, it is surrounded by various shrubberies and flower beds the local garden club has staggered down the side of the steep ridge, an oasis of green and color in the middle of a busy intersection. From there, you could see all of downtown, most of the residential neighborhoods tucked around the hills, and all the way off to the lone tree marking the edge of a farmer’s field miles away. For someone the right size, the copse made a perfectly comfortable place to work, offered an interesting viewpoint, and had that rare property of affording complete privacy while being smack in the middle of everything. It was a secret in the middle of a town that held few, a place to observe while remaining unobserved.

It was my favorite place to write.

And then I made the mistake of sharing it with someone else.

It wasn’t a matter of the person stealing the place for his own; that would have been far less traumatizing. It wasn’t even that the place didn’t have the same impact – I’m a fairly rational person and understand that people react to things in different ways. I didn’t expect the place to hold an immediate and mystic reverence for the person I’d allowed in. But I also didn’t expect the complete and nonchalant dismissal of something so deeply meaningful to me, especially from someone I’d taken the rare chance of letting get close. And I certainly didn’t expect the response to my protest being a rather callous “well, the world is never going to see things the way that you see them.”

I could understand if he didn’t get what made the place special. But I felt betrayed that my feelings and the work that meant something to me would be held in such blatant disregard by someone I’d finally opened up to. And what was worse is he didn’t even seem to get that there was something wrong.

It was a moment that would have lasting repercussions.

*****

Creators are a sensitive folk. Anyone who’s ever poured their heart and soul into a project, whether it’s writing, acting, photography, sculpting, carpentry, or any of a thousand other things that allow expression and make a person feel complete, knows how personal the process becomes. Game developers, musicians, and even the Let’s Play streamers do the same thing. Our creations and performances are extensions of ourselves; praise and criticism of our work are felt more keenly as a result. For those of us who work nearly entirely in an online environment, this feedback, good or bad, is taken to an entirely new level. When I share an anecdote on our podcast. I’m not opening myself up to a couple of trusted friends; anything I share is done with the full knowledge that it can be viewed by anyone, for better or for worse, under whatever mindset they want, and thus is open to whatever criticism they feel the need to dish out.

One of the tradeoffs of opening ourselves up to the world at all is that the world is not always a friendly and welcoming place. Words can easily be taken out of context or interpreted in ways we didn’t originally intend. A good recent example that reminded me of all this was Stephen Fry’s joke about his friend Jenny Beavan’s outfit at the BAFTA ceremony this past weekend, made after she accepted her award for costume design. While Beavan flat out said she wasn’t bothered by the comment, the immediate backlash on Twitter became enough that Fry deactivated his account. Allow me to emphasize a point here: Stephen Fry is a comedian. As in, he tells jokes for a living. It’s his craft. It’s what he does. And he just got ripped apart for doing what he does, not by the person about whom the joke was made, but by an internet society overly willing to strip things from their context. And when that happens, a trust is broken, just like there was in the little copse of trees. In my case, it was the trust that someone would be gentle with a part of my soul I had never shared before. In Fry’s, it was the trust that a comedian, in a comedic role, telling a joke, isn’t going to be vilified as a human being to the point where it’s just easier to give up and shut himself away somewhere. Turns out, we were both wrong.

This also goes for every written piece I publish, and this is where my little anecdote from the beginning comes into play. Those fateful words – “the world is never going to see things the way that you see them,” and from someone I’d trusted enough to share such a deep part of myself only to be crushed in the very place I came for sanctuary – were enough that I stopped sharing my writing with anyone else for years. That doesn’t mean I stopped writing. Far from it. Writing is and has always been an essential part of who I am. But hidden deep in the recesses of Compzilla’s files, locked in password protected documents, are stories that no other person has ever seen and I’m not sure ever will. What was the point of letting anyone that close to the inner workings of my mind, only to risk being hurt again?

It wasn’t until I got involved with RCM that I started sharing and talking about my writing projects again. And to be fair, even that was with more than a bit of hesitation. Part of what keeps me going is that I have a larger goal in mind that requires my being braver than I actually am in order to coax people with even thicker emotional walls than me into allowing their own stories to see the light of day – not exactly a small feat, considering some of the voices echoing in their heads are even meaner than the ones echoing through mine. One of the more surprising things to come out of this project over the past year was that the more I showed others how to find their voice, the easier it became to find my own.

*****

Even now, I still have a preference for hiding in plain sight. I also still have an incredibly hard time letting people get close to me. There are a small handful that I’ve entrusted with some of my secrets, and I’m not entirely certain that any of them understand how huge it is that I picked them for those roles. As difficult as it is (and believe me, there are nights where I’m up until 4:00 AM praying to whatever gods will listen that I don’t come to regret opening up to someone), our enterprise can’t move forward without trust, and I can’t expect them to trust me if I don’t show trust in them. It’s also a big part of why I work on this blog every week – for better or for worse, I promised to be open and honest here about what I learned and what I’ve thought about as we grow our little empire. That, too, hasn’t been without concern, but so far we seem to be doing okay.

As for the rest of my writing, there’s a certain amount of trust that goes in there, too: trust in myself, in that I actually do know what I’m doing and can turn out work that is meaningful and entertaining, and trust in my team to remind me of that and keep me thinking straight when negativity comes knocking and I want to rage-quit in disgust.

Because everybody knows you can’t make the world see things the way you see them.

But then again, that’s a lie, isn’t it?

Sure, not everyone will understand what you, the creator, mean in your work. Some people are going to latch onto whatever negativity they can to try to knock you down, for no other reason than their lives are so sad that they have nothing better to do with their time.

But the entire point of writing is to depict the world the way you see it, to tear down the walls and bring your readers into your world, to see things, even for a minute, the way you do. Not everyone will get it. But every once in a while, if only for a moment, somebody will.

And every once in a while, if you do things right, it is in that moment that those words change everything.