Yes, Criticism is Sometimes Personal
Pretend you have a child. If you do have a child, pretend that child is in front of you instead of this computer screen. Now pretend that child tells you last
minute you need to bring some sort of baked goods to whatever meeting you’re
about to go to. If you have a child, this probably isn’t difficult to
imagine. It probably happened yesterday.
So you run to the store, you grab the first batch of
cookies you see, throw them on a plate, and go on your merry way.
The cookies are terrible. I mean, people are polite about
it, but you can hear the murmurs. You look in the trash and the top is layered
with them, one bite taken out of each. The rest of the cookies go uneaten.
Now, it’s possible that you don’t feel bad, that this
isn’t worth your time in the least, but we can all admit that there’s a chance
we do feel just a little embarrassed.
The right time, place, and mood, anyone could feel rejected, downhearted,
foolish, despite the fact that we did not make the cookies, we didn’t even
choose the cookies, not really.
Or, if that doesn’t work for you, think of a time in
which everyone in the car was hungry but no one wanted to decide where to eat.
So you throw out the first restaurant you think of—not that you particularly
want to go there—and everyone immediately goes, “Ew! No!”
Or when a man starts laughing and mocking everything you
do and logically you know he has a crush on you, but that doesn’t stop you from
slamming the cash register drawer into his knee.
Even the most level headed of us have felt rejection when
we really shouldn’t. In many cases, the embarrassment has more to do with
the reaction than the actual events. People can shame you just by behaving as
though you should feel shame.
Rejection hurts, and the worst part is it’s not always
logical. You rarely can talk yourself out of the grief of rejection. Once you
feel it, no matter how stupid it is, you just have to bear through it.
Yet, that doesn’t mean we don’t try to argue ourselves
out of it. It also doesn’t stop our significant others from trying to reason
with us either. They hate seeing you in pain, they hate feeling helpless, so
they try and give you advice that, unfortunately, sometimes makes it worse.
“When people criticize your book, they’re not criticizing
you.” I hear it more from authors telling it to themselves than anything else,
and if it works for them, fantastic. I don’t mean to poke holes in something
that can soothe irrational emotions. But the statement, while seemingly true on
paper, actually promotes a problematic mentality, and can leave people feeling
more helpless.
The idea is first that rejection has to be personal to
hurt, that it has to be a criticism of who you are as a human being for it to
be painful. It falls under the same category of “sticks and stones may break my
bones but words can never hurt me.” Not only can words hurt, but so can
thoughts. Being judged as being inadequate, even if it has nothing to with who
you are, even if it has nothing to do with what you want to be doing, can still
leave you feeling inferior. The desire to be a keystone in society is what
makes society work. We all want to be important and when we prove a failure in
even stupid things, it touches on our fear that maybe we truly are that insignificant.
On a more logical level, being considered a failure in
anything can be detrimental to our reputations. We tend to dehumanize the
greats, see their qualities and flaws different as ours. “Everyone shits,” is
an image we use to remember that King Arthur and Gandhi and Donald Trump are
just people, and it expresses the issue nicely. You can take someone down a peg
just by remembering that they have normal everyday functions.
We are the sum of our parts. Our actions are not defined
on an individual basis; they are the accumulation of each other. If, when we
first meet, I prove ignorant on the subject of geography, when you then find
out that I’m your therapist, for many it doesn’t matter that I don’t need to
know if Australia is a continent or a country to be able to analyze your personal
problems with your husband, I’ve still caused you to start questioning my
judgement.
So, yeah, just because something isn’t a personal attack
doesn’t mean that it’s not going to affect me. It still means that I was
inadequate in someone else’s eyes. And what if they’re right?
The second problem is when people say criticism isn’t
personal, what they really mean is in the context
they are thinking, but that’s
only theoretical. In practice, it very much can be.
When I was in high school, we discussed the issue of
illegal search and seizure. One boy argued that if you didn’t have something to
hide, then why did it matter? If you refused them, obviously they knew that you
had done something wrong.
At the time, I argued that you may not want someone going
through your personal belongings, you might have something on you that, while
not illegal, you didn’t particularly want other people to see. Maybe you were
carrying around a pack of condoms or a diary or animal scat. Who knows?
After that argument, I spent a long time considering it,
and it wasn’t until several years later that the most obvious argument occurred
to me: you are assuming the cop is a good person. I, too, didn’t believe that
there could be selfish and corrupt authority figures. I trusted my teachers,
for instance, and it wasn’t until college that I realized you could have a
professor who actually wanted you to fail.
I do still have the tendency to trust officers and
teachers, but I am far more aware of why we can’t bank of self-policing when
trying to solve problems. You can’t just make laws assuming that the criminal
is always wrong and the cop is always good. You can’t just be obedient when a
teacher spends all his energy telling you you’re going to fail and you should
quit. Questioning motivations is a big part of understanding truth, and the
truth is that sometimes criticism is personal.
There’s the obvious ones: “You’re fat.” If you look on
Goodreads or Amazon, you’ll come across these sorts of reviews, where the
reviewer goes off on the author’s appearance, race, and/or gender. It doesn’t
have anything to do with the book in many cases, it’s just an insulting rant.
Then there’s the not so obvious ones, where you start to
get the feeling that they have some sort of issue with the writer, but the
criticism isn’t exactly insults. Their hatred is hidden by actual literary
complaints, it’s just that those complaints seem a little petty, irrelevant,
and maybe even contradictory to the person’s other reviews or comparisons.
Last you have the worst kind, where the criticism is
intricately tied into their hatred of the writer. The reviewer genuinely
believes that the author is a horrible, disgusting person because of the things the writer chose to discuss, the opinions the writer had, the things the writer cares about.
We try and separate our work from our personal selves to
help us compartmentalize criticism and rejection, but to say that they are
independent is inaccurate. Our books are a part of ourselves, they discuss our
perspectives, examine our reality, express our desires and fears, and
communicate with each other in a highly intense and difficult way.
A person criticizing you may not hate you. They may not
even judge you. It’s possible that they have put you up on a pedestal so high
that they have no ability to relate to the pain they’re causing you. They might
just feel they’re speaking their opinion, not expecting you to take it too
seriously. They may just be retelling the experience they had. They also may be
assholes, trolls, bullies, or frustrated writers trying to strip your freedom
down to their unrealistic standards.
In whichever case, the last thing you should do is feel
guilty for the way they made you feel. You might be irrational, but that
doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to talk yourself out of it. Let
yourself feel bad about the criticism, and if you feel like they’re being an
asshat, they probably are.
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