What Doesn’t Kill You …

I can still remember the first column I ever wrote. Some women’s studies major glued together a couple of half-cocked theories she’d picked up in class with a paste of rage at the whole male gender and published it on the editorial page of the UNC-Chapel Hill’s Daily Tar Heel.

There wasn’t an original thought in her entire column, but I didn’t know that because I was 20 and not well-read enough to recognize it. It was the kind of piece that I wouldn’t waste my time reading, much less responding to today. But at the time it angered me that someone could think like that, just paint half the human race with one big ugly brush. So I fired off 1,000 words — a lot for a biology major — and sent it in to the paper. I’d never write a column like that one today. I was much freer with my words and absolute in my terms than I am now because I assumed they wouldn’t print it. I’d almost forgotten about it when, a few weeks later, I opened the paper and there it was.

I was walking back from class and it stopped me dead in my tracks. I had trouble breathing and my heart raced as I had what today would probably be called a panic attack. I was still terribly shy back then and in that moment I’d have maxed out my credit card to take that column back. But it was too late. Many people agreed with what I wrote, but many did not.

The hateful letters to the editor lasted for weeks. I had nightmares. I felt naked. Some people called me stupid in their letters. People I knew read those letters in the paper. People I didn’t know did too, and it made enough of an impression on them that they recognized my name when we met later.

I can still recite verbatim the exact wording of some of the insults in those letters to the editor 13 years later. Most people go their whole lives without being subjected to that level of negative public scrutiny, self-generated or not. It was a few semesters before I wrote again. But it would be years before the words people wrote about me in response stopped burning. Stupid, ignorant, hateful, naive and drivel are among those that stick out.

In the beginning I’d carry their insults around for weeks, replaying them in my head and fluctuating between anger and self-doubt. Over the years, it became days. Then eventually it was only the well-written ones that would get to me. For me, the true breakthrough came when a guy who used a couple of choice insults in an e-mail to me about a piece I wrote promised never to read me again — then e-mailed me six months later to remind me I was stupid after another piece I wrote. That was when it dawned on me that people who thought I was stupid were helping me pay my mortgage — and were among my most loyal readers.

Over the years, those who have been meanest to me have given me the most. I was the kid who took the insults on the playground and never had a comeback. I was the one who hung back and mastered the blend-in so as not to be noticed. Not anymore. There is nothing that anyone could say to my face that is worse than what has been written about me in the pages of newspapers I’ve worked for or said about me over the radio. And that is damned liberating, a sort of strength through a thousand cuts.

Cut in front of me in the line at the grocery store and years ago I would have been one of those fuming silently. Now I’d be the first to call you out while an awkward silence descends upon the rest of the line.

Lawyers who make their living arguing before juries know exactly what I’m talking about, because their arguments are mocked by the opposition every time they go to court. So do some people in sales.

With every cut you learn that even if you will walk away temporarily shaken, life goes on if people don’t like you. And over time you start to care less and less what they think and to grab more forcefully — but respectfully — for what you really want out of life despite them.

There are many paths to happiness, and to contentment, but I don’t think you get to truly arrive until you can let go on at least some level of the tendency to care what most people think beyond your immediate family circle and sometimes within it.

If you pay attention to that little voice that frets over what other people think, you’ll realize it speaks to you more often than you thought and affects the decisions you make more often than you might have realized.

Life is just too short to spend any more time listening.

This article appears in Nov 28 – Dec 4, 2007.