It took me three full days before I could bring myself to do a close reading of this excellent profile that Steve Barnes wrote about the 20th anniversary of my blog in the Times Union in its entirety. It was available on newsstands last Saturday, and early that morning I went out scouring the area to pick up a few copies. Not having purchased an actual newspaper in years, I was surprised by how few stores even carried them anymore – I made it in and out of several gas stations, a Stewarts, and a Starbucks before finding a few at Coulsen’s News, and then they didn’t take American Express so I couldn’t even purchase a copy there. I had, however, glimpsed a tantalizing preview of the front page of the ‘Unwind’ section, and its accompanying artwork, the main photo of which I’d sent to Steve just about a week or so prior. It looked impressive at first glance, and while part of me shrank at the exposure – the same part that always shied away whenever anyone proverbially sang my praises or drew attention to me in any way – I still thought it would be wonderful to read, and I’d trusted Steve’s words not to do me dirty.
Finally finding a hefty stash of the local paper at Price Chopper, I picked up several copies out of vanity and excitement, hastening home to feast upon what was surely to be a great, if self-indulgent, read. Unaccustomed to seeing or reading about what anyone other than myself wrote about me, it was a new experience, and an unexpectedly uncomfortable one. As much as I trusted Steve, it dawned on me then, in the panicked realization that it was too late to do anything, that I’d given up complete control over the telling of my story to another person for the first time in my life. All of the perfectionist control-freak tendencies I’d held for over forty years came bubbling to the surface. All of the social anxiety I relatively-recently named and tamed, and was only starting to understand, came rushing back. Perhaps worse, and more damaging than anything else, all of the insecurities and wonder at my own worth came out of hiding in grotesque and frightening fashion, prompting me to begin reading the piece in the mindset of the most critical and trollish reader and jumping to the worst and wildest versions of how I might be viewed.
Such was my suddenly-terror-stricken state of mind when I began (and I would only just begin and do a quick skimming of the article at that time) that after reading a few paragraphs, I put the paper down. A poisonous seed of self-doubt, scattered to a dry wind decades ago and left to languish in inhospitable darkness, had been brought to light and nourishment, fed by the manure of my own neuroses and issues. All the ultimately-false accusations of narcissism and vanity, all the photos from the past twenty years conspired to rope me into a place of despondent paranoia.
My own words, which sometimes felt very grand and powerful as I wrote them out in the quiet environs and privacy of my home, where the only response or reaction was the silent relief at having put them down and out of my head, looked questionable and simplistic. The superficial silliness that dominated the early years and provided salacious click-bait to trick people into visiting the site felt frivolous and indulgent. And still there was more – all those photos submitted by me, and many other pictures culled directly from my site – selfie after selfie after selfie, from a time before anyone even knew what a selfie was – paraded in a way that made me almost sick of myself. (Not a foreign land by any means, and never a fun visit.)
Imagining any of the many strangers who had taken shots at me over the years for vanity and ego, my first thought was that if anyone read this I would be the most hated man in Albany, and it already felt like I’d cracked the top ten a long time ago. Reading the profile in that mindset proved impossible, and so I had to stop. For all the reports of excessive vanity, and for all the accusations of acute narcissism, I genuinely didn’t want to read another word about myself.
When the article reached the homes of all the newspaper subscribers the next day, I began to hear from people – and still I didn’t open my copy or scroll through the online story. Out of respect for the writer, and to outwardly assume a stance of pride, I shared it half-heartedly on my social media feeds. The comments were overwhelmingly kind, but that has never fed into any authentic shift in my own estimation of myself. Years of not feeling like I belonged anywhere would not be forgotten so easily, despite an equal amount of years spent working to correct it.
It had been out for two days, and I still I hadn’t read it in full. Andy encouraged me to give it another go, adamantly expressing that it wasn’t coming across like I thought it was, but for various reasons I couldn’t do it. A testament to its title, I was genuinely too shy to look too closely at it. I went to bed and spent another restless night trying to focus on anything else.
Then, on the third day, the writer himself contacted me and proposed a blog post on it, one in which he welcomed questions on how he went about writing it, turning the interviewer into the interviewee for this subject. I would have to read the story now, and figure out a way to politely decline… the way the truly shy among us have been declining life for years.
{To be continued…}
