But I just got my first unpleasant message. An anonymous email, sent through my website, arrived today. It said:
You're so vein.
I was torn between feeling stung by the insult and amused by the misspelling. And I wasn't going to dignify it with any sort of response, but dude, this was begging for a blog post.
Look, I'm aware that not everybody is going to like me. Does that bother me? Of course. I want to be universally liked. But nobody is universally liked, except maybe Mother Teresa, and I suspect even some of her contemporaries secretly thought she was a goody-goody.
In the week since my website went live, I've quickly grown tired of myself. I am over-saturated with my own content. I'm a sensitive person, and it's easy for me to fear that if I'm tired of me, than surely others are tired of me as well. To have my singing and my writing and my thoughts on display, inviting judgment, makes me want to cringe sometimes. I do worry about what people think of me, and I do fear the bad review.
But that's the nature of the business. It's the nature of life, really. And it's a good lesson for me to accept the fact that not everybody likes me. I'll learn to live with it.
I guess keeping a blog is sort of a vain endeavor. It makes the rather large assumption that somebody's interested in reading what I have to say - and it's pretty much all about me. But what I want to do for a living requires quite a bit of self-promotion. I'm not always comfortable with it, but that's the way it is. I have chosen to write this blog so that I can speak from my own perspective, so I can share stories on the path to my career from my own point of view. I recognize that it may not be interesting to everybody, but nobody has to read it.
Am I vain? I do read and re-read everything I write about a dozen times. Sometimes I make vampy faces at myself in the mirror. I do like the sound of my own voice. Perhaps I am a little vain.
But at least I can spell.
(Oh, snap! Didn't see that one coming, did you? Oh, I had to. I just had to.)
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