It’s not about you

No, really, it’s not.

That’s a hard thing for some people to grasp. I know I struggle with it. I think it’s left over from grade school, where you were so insecure that you were sure that any slight was a purposeful cut, that any time a group of girls twittered, their head held close together, the twitter was about you.

Random aside: Years later, one of the nicer (i.e., not cruel, just well-liked) “popular” girls from my middle school told me that the reason I never got invited to anyone’s party or over to their house after school when I was 13 was that I “lived too far away.” I wonder if it’s because I “lived too far away” that they put gum in my hair, stole my purse and threw it in the dumpster, and dropped my gym clothes in the toilet. Middle school sucks. I think I write about somewhat older kids because middle school and even a large portion of high school sucks so completely that I’m afraid to access it again.

But really, outside of middle school, it’s not about you. Those rejection slips you get in the mail? Not about you. They don’t hate you. They don’t even know you. They aren’t whatever clique you were trying to access in school that wouldn’t let you in because they were mean girls. On an email loop, the people who are talking aren’t being cliquey. They won’t shoot you down if you say something. If you post a question an no one answers it, it may be because they don’t know the answer. They aren’t ignoring you because they don’t like you. It’s not about you.

It’s not about you. If you happen to email a blogger a question, and around about the same time, this blogger, who NEVER, EVER includes the names of the questioners in her online responses, posts a completely unrelated email and responds to it, and in her response, happens to use a vocative to which you note a vague and unsupportable similarity to your screenname, even though the blogger was in fact referencing a series of commercials that related to the email she did post and her response, do not start a flamewar on her blog, insisting that she made up an email and signed your (fake) name to it. She didn’t. She didn’t assign any name to it. It’s not about you.

It’s not about you. It’s not about you when someone makes an offhand and utterly neutral observational comment about the various levels of success at different epublishing houses. It’s not about you, and it’s not about whatever genre you write in. It’s not about you when people comment about what they are tired of seeing in insert-genre-here style romance, It’s not about you when they say they are tired of that genre. It’s not about you when the internet screws up, and it’s not about you when Yahoo decides to make all of your groups disappear (and you’re wasting time emailing the moderator over that one, btw. It’s disappeared for her, too).

Why do we want to think it’s about us? Does it make us feel more important? If it isn’t a random accident, or a completely unintentional overlooking, if it’s a slight, does that make us feel more important? Being ignored or unanswered, being unobserved as they might say in Joan of Arcadia, is a far, far worse fate than being reviled. Getting no Amazon reviews is worse than getting a hundred that hate you. Having enemies is better than having no friends. Is that the idea? If it’s about us, does that make us relieved, even if it’s wretched?

And that’s why we Google ourselves. We want to see who is talking about us, and where they’re doing it. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that the people who hate us are doing it in private forums (or, natch, as anonymous blog posters). It’s a shame, really, because nothing provides more fascination/revulsion than secretly listening in on a healthy round of hatred. After all, it’s better to be disliked than not to be known at all.

But it’s not about you. It’s not about you because the people involved aren’t thinking about you at all, They’re only thinking about themselves. The other day, I was very offended. I’d gone to a writing industry event, my brand new cover clutched tightly in my hands, I was so excited to show it to the other writers. I sat down and the woman sitting next to me asked me what I wrote. I told her, and showed her my cover. She turned away from me and starting telling the people on her other side that she couldn’t sell what she was writing because editors were only buying the stuff I wrote, and maybe she wasn’t twenty-six, like some people, but she should be able to sell her books too.

I sat there with my mouth open. I wanted to scream, “I’m not keeping you from selling your books!” But I didn’t. I was a little shocked that the person took the very existence of my book and me as a personal affront to her and her career. Jeez, it’s not about her. I wasn’t even thinking of her when I wrote and sold my book.

But then I thought about it some more and realized that actually, no. It wasn’t about me. She wasn’t even thinking of me when she was reflecting on the various market value of certain literary proerties, when she was thinking about all the years she’d spent on her craft, and when she was worried about whether or not she’d sell her latest project. I was not involved in any of those thoughts. She wasn’t saying it to hurt my feelings. She was talking about herself.

We think about ourselves. That’s all we have energy for on a day to day basis. When we feel angry, or jealous, or frustrated, or worried, we’re not really thinking about other people, we’re thinking about ourselves. We spend so much time thinking about ourselves that we’re shocked that other people aren’t doing it, too.

But they aren’t. It’s hardly ever about us.

By the way, all the things I mentioned in this blog post? They aren’t about you. Really.