My Own Personal YouTube Comments

I’ve been told I’m an asshole. Talentless, a bitch–impatient, shrill, unforgiving, and bossy. I am cruel and arbitrary in my demands and expectations.

If you know me, this might surprise you. That’s because you haven’t heard me in conversation with me. Even writing that sentence about how it might surprise you to find out that I’m an asshole had my inner critic shouting, “It would not surprise people to know that you are an asshole. Everyone secretly thinks you’re an asshole.”

Famous writer about writing Anne Lamott calls this “the rap songs of self-loathing” that play in your head all day long. The Buddhists call it the Monkey Mind, which in my case seems unfair to monkeys. I call these voices My Own Personal YouTube Comments. Anyone who says or creates anything online is supposed to know better than to read the comments. So, why am I still listening to my own?

In my darker moments, when I find myself searching through real YouTube comments, reading and obsessing over the keyboard vomit of commenters lashing out at me online, I wonder why I care at all what strangers think. And what I’ve come to understand is that searching out the messages from trolls might make me both a narcissist and a masochist, but I do it because these words are familiar to me. They’re the same kind of mean and unhelpful feedback that the voices in my head have…