does the mortifying ordeal of being known guy know that his paragraph from a six year old NYT opinion piece about emailing pictures of goats to coworkers has become God Tier Tumblr Gospel ? like does he KNOW though
WOW thank you @inkstrangleâ for bringing it to my attention that as of last August, which is to say the chronological peak of the âmortifying ordealâ meme on tumblr, tim kreider absolutely DOES know and in fact wrote an entire brilliant essay reflecting on the phenomenon:
But what I wish I could tell all those children of the internet, holed up in their rooms, isolated online, is that they can only imagine the worst of relationships: they think that what another person will learn about them is what they see in themselves â the squirming, icky, insecure mess inside. They donât know yet that the ways in which theyâre secretly screwed up and repulsive are boringly ordinary. The issue isnât that youâll be despised for who you really are â that, as a friend and I used to say about girls we were dating, âsheâll realize.â Itâs scarier than that: itâs that you lose control over who you are. Other people get to decide. And it may turn out that youâre not who you thought you were.
As an artist, you donât get to decide why people love your work. [âŠ] I would describe my reaction to seeing my writing reanimated as meme as ânonplussed,â maybe âbemused.â It always does some slight violence to a writerâs intentions to yank a sentence out of its context and present it as if it were a complete, isolated thought, like a maxim or commandment. I am not in the business of pretending to be in possession of any wisdom, or of telling other people what to do: this is the realm of self-help and advice writers â in other words, of charlatans. Part of me worries itâs an indictment of my prose that it should lend itself so well to Tumblr memes, the digital equivalent of needlepoint samplers. [âŠ]
But the things people love about you arenât necessarily the things you want to be loved for. They decide they like you for reasons completely outside your control, of which youâre often not even conscious: itâs certainly not because of the big act you put on, all the charm and anecdotes youâve calculated for effect. (And if your act does fool someone, it only makes you feel like a successful fraud, and harbor some secret contempt for them â the contempt of a con artist for his mark â plus now youâre condemned to keep up that act forever, lest she Realize.) My last girlfriend found my flaws, the things that annoy even me about me, amusing. When you break up with someone, you donât just lose them, but a version of yourself. You donât even get to know what your children will remember you for; it probably wonât be what you thought were the important moments. [âŠ]
As The Velveteen Rabbit teaches, we donât become fully real except in other peopleâs eyes, and in their affections. At some point you have to accept that other peopleâs perceptions of you are as valid as (and probably a lot more objective than) your own.


















