I hate reality checks!!
So the bug bit me. It bit me hard…really sunk its teeth in there and didn’t let go. Write! It demanded. By Jove man, write! It didn’t promise to let go, but at the very least it assured me it would let up! But my vanity and ego were the voices of reason-albeit cowardly reason, but reason all the same. They were the rational, calculating brain to my irrational, wanton writing heart…desperate to bleed their longings on paper. Uncharacteristically, the bug and its affected heart won. “I’ll put myself out there”, I decided, set myself up for cold, hard, ground-open-up-and-swallow-me rejection, holding on to the whimsical hope that it would not be so.
See, like most short men, nay like all human beings everyone lusts after acceptance, everyone’s a little girl inside crying out for a hug, a pat on the back, an annoying ruffle of the hair. Of course, social convention spits on these ‘girly’ longings and glorifies the un-feeling, macho, top dog caricature that generations of programming has mainstreamed. Woe unto you as a man if you are in touch with your ‘feminine’ side, if you cry at the end of Titanic, if words like ‘cute’ and phrases like ‘I feel’ creep their way into your vocab-sic! So many people-read men, will walk around un-affected-or at least trying to be, against every fibre of their little-girl-inside being, while all the while hoping someone will see past this façade and accept them.
But, I digress. So my heart won-the battle at least, but who’s counting…and I put finger to keyboard. It should be pithy, I thought. Forceful, in a you-better-like-what-I’m-writing kind of way. Witty, you know…like I am. But most of all, I hoped and prayed that it would be accepted…that I would be accepted. I hoped that there was at least one person-or perhaps a thousand, who thought what I had to say was worth listening to. That they would laugh at some witty gem that nobody had written before. And while you know at the back of your mind that that is likely not to be the case you hope, you pray that it is. You clutch onto the little glimmer of optimism that is part of your default human system and indulge it like you would an enthusiastic half wit.
You do the predictable thing, you ask as many friends as you can to read it. To give you the ‘honest, brutal’ truth, you insist. And like the friends they are, they oblige…if only a bit too enthusiastically. ‘I didn’t know you could write so well…’, ‘It’s so fresh’…,’I always told you you should write’…and their loyal encouragement allows-against your better judgement, a glimmer of hope, a strengthening of your resolve. “I was being too hard on myself” you decide. In any case, I do not really care what people think, I am after all, a man.
And so, I posted. Like my life depended on it, I posted. Like I would never post again, I posted. But, there weren’t any accolades, no tags of ‘literary genius’ were assigned to my name, no one sent congratulatory messages-nor the customary bottle of champagne, heck! No one even commented!
And quite suddenly you are jerked back to reality. You are reminded that hope by its very nature means that it is fickle, it slips easily through the fingers…like beach sand. But most of all, you are reminded that at the core of every human being-man or woman, is a little girl yearning to be accepted. That is the reality.
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