Member-only story
Be the Mentor You Wished You Had
The power of a positive comment
When I started publishing online 22 years ago, I thought I was one of the best humor writers on the internet. But I never got the attention that the real writers that I looked up to did. My friends said my stuff was as good as theirs, but I didn’t have their following.
The humor writer I idolized was more extreme than his peers. I was determined to have my existence acknowledged by him.
I was all over the message board on his website. I devoted a page on my website to him, where I wrote him a glowing bio and linked to his site.
After a dozen unanswered emails he posted a blog where he told his fans to stop sending him their typo-riddled, unstructured psychobabble and reminded us that he’s not a publisher. He didn’t use my name, but who else could it be? That was as close to acknowledgement as I ever got.
Not sure what I expected. His whole gimmick was he was an asshole. He wasn’t a publisher or interested in helping anyone. In his stories, he got blackout drunk at strip clubs and shit his pants. Everyone loved him for it.
He didn’t worry about looking cool because he was the authority. It was cool to be a terrible person because he said it was.
