Originally published in October of 2021.
A social phenomenon has been plaguing me. While I’ve started putting a name to it in my adulthood, it’s really been a boulder in my backpack since grade school. Some people, for some reason, are instantly adored, immediately accepted, and effortlessly loved. I have never been a member of their ranks. While this involved feelings of pain and rejection in my youth and a certain level of jealousy as I grew up, I’ve got book coming out in three weeks and I’m going to need people to just fucking like me already.
It might be my face, I don’t know. That’s what I’ve always assumed, that there’s something about my face that people just don’t instantly enjoy. It isn’t a matter of pretty/unpretty, like those are even real things, I think it’s something much more primal and human than any modern beauty standard we’ve invented and started charging women money to achieve. I don’t think I have a face that people warm to instantly, I think I’m more of an acquired taste. Rough gig for someone living in the Instant Age, I can assure you.
Perhaps it’s my personality, one which would never be described as “bubbly” by any stretch of the English language. I’ve never been anyone’s instant best friend, a person the whole room is inexplicably drawn to at a party. I’m more likely to be checking out the host’s record collection with one or two close companions while sipping a bottle of something we’ve snagged from the kitchen. Attention? En masse? Me? Never.
These aren’t complains, mind you—I’m just stating fact so that my current level of perplexed makes sense to you a few paragraphs from now. I have plenty of self worth and certainly wouldn’t look to a place like the internet to bolster it if I didn’t. But I do need you to know that this understanding of how unsavory I am didn’t come from nowhere. I didn’t pull this out of my ass and decide to be vulnerable about it online, people have simply been slow to enjoy me since I’m six years old.
Back then it was just with friends. I could tell that some girls were cool and popular and for some reason I was never socially reinforced as one of those people. I was an outskirts person, left to befriend the theater kids and math people and any other stragglers I could scoop up and sit with at lunch. I never had a crowd that I fit into or that even wanted me as part of it. Then later, as a grown up, I became keenly aware that I wasn’t a person of preference with the opposite or even same sex, for friendship or otherwise. It seemed it was really easy to look past me, if not through me, to someone else more magnetic in another part of the room.
I’ve seen women with bright smiles and conventionally pretty faces charm entire dinner tables full of people just by giving mediocre Netflix recommendations. I’ve seen strangers come up to people I was standing next to and pretend I’m not standing inches away. And I’ve seen content creators with no discernible value-add command audiences in their hundreds of thousands. I’ve published 125 podcast episodes and penned hundreds of thousands of words in my area of expertise and my audience size might fill a minor league ballpark in good weather.
Need examples? Boy howdy, I have them. I once met a guy on a weekend out of town who seemed quite taken with me. This wasn’t imagined, it was confirmed and encouraged by my travel companions. A day after we’d met at the restaurant where he worked, my friends and I were out at a local bar he’d recommended to us, and he was there too. A female friend of his walked in, and I saw him point me out to her, to get her opinion. I saw her face visibly twist in disgust and her head shake from side to side in rejection. He stopped paying attention to me immediately.
When it clicks, it clicks, I’ll say that.Once someone has spent a little time with me, perhaps had a bit of repeated exposure, they get it.They get that I’m worth being friends with, worth asking out on a date, worth reading, worth listening to. On the social front, they eventually understand my value. On the professional side, they understand the value of my work. They get that I’m trying to do good and that if they just give it a minute, they’ll see I actuallyamdoing good.
I have no doubts or shame about myself socially or my professional capability, but more and more I find myself perplexed and admittedly angered by the fact that some people are just so easily flocked to, while people have to seemingly be convinced to like me. Standing on the edge of a book release will bring up some shit.
I can’t be the only person out there who feels this way. Who trusts in themselves and their work but looks around thinking what the fuck ten times a day. Maybe it’s temporary, and maybe something like a book that is without doubt my best work so far will be the moment of mine that’s accepted and loved on sight. There’s just a bit of nervousness there given all the history I’ve lived laying groundwork.
Whenever someone “new” breaks onto the acting or music scenes, the press talks about them like they sprang up out of nowhere. But nowhere isn’t a place, and these people weren’t nobody before people knew their name. Success is just the front-facing part, and behind it are years of work and effort and rejection and slow progress that most people never see. I’ve followed Lizzo since she had the bandwidth to respond to me on Twitter. There’s a lot of value in the quiet parts before the volume starts to blast, is what I’m saying. It just so happens that my quiet part has lasted 39 years.
If you’ve ever looked around wondering why some people are instantly accepted and loved and you’re not, know that you’re not alone. There are plenty of us who have been extremely online for a long time without enjoying a following that grows like crabgrass. Just because we’ve been doing it for years doesn’t mean we have huge followings, or huge successes — yet. And just because we haven’t enjoyed the ease of acceptance and celebration that flow to others, that doesn’t mean we never will.