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It can get…wearing.
I am not allowed bad days. I am not allowed “off time.” If I am outside my house, I have to acknowledge that I could be asked to be “on” at any moment. (That sounds a little arrogant and weird, and it makes me feel funny to say, and yet. I have been recognized in coffee shops, bookstores, amusement parks, and corn mazes, none of which were near official events that I was in the area to promote. I’m not OMG THE MOST FAMOUS EVER, but I have experienced “Excuse me, are you…?” in some of the weirdest places.) I don’t get to trust that I can sit in the back of the Starbucks until my painkillers kick in.
And that’s part of why the “you are a precious cinnamon roll until you are a trash person” dichotomy bothers me, because yeah, there are things people do that are really awful, and I am not saying people are never problematic, but I have literally had someone come up to me while I was sitting in a coffee shop with my head in my hands, crying actual tears of pain as I waited for my painkillers to kick in, and ask me to sign a book. When I stammered that I couldn’t and pointed to the bottle of pills, they sniffed, said, “God, what a bitch,” and stomped off.
I had a reader cross several boundary lines, to the point of making me intensely uncomfortable and a little worried about my physical safety, who responded to “Please stop, you’re making me uncomfortable” with “Oh, I didn’t know you were TRANSPHOBIC, I can’t wait to tell everyone.” I backed off in asking them to leave me alone, because we’re so inclined toward “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” as a community, and I didn’t want to spend the next year explaining that no, I was not being transphobic, I was being scared because this person tracked down a lot of my personal information without being invited to do so. Them being trans didn’t make them creepy: their behavior did.
I don’t like having to second-guess everything I say and do. I appreciate the people who have encouraged me to do better, to be better, but there’s a degree of behavior and attitude policing in modern social media that sometimes makes me want to go back to bed and never get out.
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