Dear Author,
the internet is not your friend, but a kind of alien intelligence - vast, cool, and unsympathetic, in HG Wells' formulation. Publicly melting down (even anonymously) is not going to help you; if anything, you'll just end up feeling more isolated.
You need to work out your self-image issues with a person instead of projecting them onto your environment. That person might be a friend of therapist, or several people helping you with different things, and finding the right person(s) is likely to involve several false starts and blind alleys. You should pursue this work in person. Parasocial relationships are a necessity in this day and age, but over-reliance on them is ver bad for your mental health.
This makes me sad. Please don't speak to people like this. The small pieces of humanity that people sincerely share are about the only thing that it is worth living for. What a dark world we would live in when our public sphere is filled with insincerity. I can't infer anything about you from a single comment but it must be incredibly isolating and lonely to talk to you when you are in this mindset. I can see your good intentions but you have communicated a sadness and defensiveness that presents cynicism as truth.
I feel you've misread me as objecting to the author's sincerity - I don't think there's anything wrong with that! What I meant was that the internet, where all communication is necessarily quasi-personal and heavily mediated, is really not the best place to reach toward for mental health help, and that it's tremendously important to maintain or pursue genuine interpersonal contact, unmediated by screens or abstractions.
I agree. We all have thoughts and feelings and emotions; denying that, making that invisible, hiding the mere fact of your humanity is surely a difficult and sad way to exist. It is OK to feel things; it is OK to write about your feelings; it is OK to publish those writings wherever you like.
They spoke with respect and pointed out that, from the point of career growth, they may need to talk to someone. They pointed out that there might be more effective ways of dealing with what the blog post author is going through. This comment didn't make me sad at all, if anything I appreciated it.
I see the opposite: OP's post sounds like a cry for help, and paints a picture of someone that is not in a good place mentally.
anigbrowl might have been too direct and harsh (I would say the first paragraph of his comment could be worded differently), but he was very clear in the second paragraph about where to go from here.
If this is truly how OP thinks and this post is how they feel about everything that happened, I strongly recommend for OP to look for professional help (with emphasis on "professional").
Thanks!
I normally don't publish sappy essays like this, but I wanted to try sharing a common experience of rejection with a loud call for optimism and self-growth. I'm still learning how to be an authentic/vulnerable person, and I may have missed the mark
I like myself now. I really do. But sometimes that old self-doubt comes roaring back and I have to beat it down with a stick. You're totally right -- internet strangers cannot beat those feelings down for me.
By the time I published this, I was already back in a great headspace and moving on to the next thing :)
My hope is that somebody reads the essay and grows 1% more motivated to grab a stick and beat down their own self-doubts. I'll be sure to put that front-and-center in future essays
In my opinion this type of blogging - writing about genuine personal experience, ideals, feelings - is a positive.
At the end of the day the grandfather comment is more or less correct, the internet is a cold unfeeling whatever. But the act of writing from the heart is deeply, genuinely human and in this day and age I feel that the more human things I do, the better. And perhaps by being more obviously human will inspiring others to be more obviously human, and eventually making the internet (and perhaps the world) less of a cold and unfeeling whatever.
This is the best advice. There was a moment in time where being vulnerable on the net was okayish. I don’t think it is anymore. Its best to work on personal issues with your professional therapist and/or with your trusted group of friends.
This is the advice that I hope the author takes heed of the most.
I'll add that what qualifies as “weird” or “quirky” on the web is probably a world’s different than what did in the past. And the weird and quirky things that people are willing to indulge or entertain in certain online communities does not represent what the rest of the world is aware of or even finds appreciable.