So, Brennan Kenneth Brown wrote about the experience of my response to one of his posts topping the Bubbles list for most of a day. To that, I have to apologize, and hopefully provide a little context. Brennan wrote at the beginning of his post:

The writing was critical, but it was also fair and written in good faith. That said, seeing a 3,500-word article about me on the top of Bubbles.town yesterday certainly did give me anxiety—but that's par for the course. My chickens have come home to roost. I mean, if you're going to share your work with the world, then you need to expect the world to respond.

So, to set the record straight: I didn't start with the intention of writing a 3,600-word critique in response to Brennan's article. Especially not one as critical as it is. Personally, I like to pick up on someone else's thoughts that have some similarity to mine, or are tangential and seek a common ground. That's how my responses to Gordon Mclean and Michael Lynch have largely gone.

In this case, it felt necessary to start out of with a few corrections before moving on to my own thoughts. But, by the time I had written those corrections, I was no longer sharing my thoughts. Instead, I was back in the role of the critic, attempting my best to use academic scrutiny (despite being out of academia for over forty years):

Believe it or not, we haven't even gotten to the meat of Brennan's article yet. This article is so dense with information that it's going to take a lot of work to go through and pull it apart for a clear examination.

And this is where I failed. I wasn't able to maintain the level of even-handedness in my criticism that I should have maintained. My only excuse: I was frustrated with myself for being so critical that I turned my frustrations towards the author at times, instead of maintaining focus on the work itself. For that I apologize.

Brennan then goes on to talk about his reaction to my article:

But my body doesn't know the difference. I'm somebody who has struggled with scrupulosity, or moral obsessive-compulsive thoughts, for my entire life. I hold a high (maybe impossible) bar for myself to do good, and feel as though I'm failing no matter what I do or don't do. Irrationally—because of mental illness—I see a bad article I've written as an awful moral failure. The same order of magnitude as the things that actually get people milkshake ducked

And I want to address this point because I think, while we experience it differently, there is some common ground here.

For those who don't know, I have another website that has been dormant now for about ten years. But, during it's prime, I wrote over 500 articles on it, over half (360-420) music reviews. And I have a netlabel that has been dormant for about the same period of time. The reason I bring this up is to talk about two situations I found myself in that bear some similarity to Brennan's struggle.

The first, one of the artists I was working with on my label started demanding that I supply materials for him to use in support of his performances. None of those materials had ever been discussed when we started working together, and nowhere had I documented making any such materials available. The truth: the whole operation was running on a shoestring. I was putting in whatever money I could. There were no profits from the label to work with for supplying the artists with anything more than I had provided. The artist was enraged when he heard this, and started posting all over the place about me, trying to assassinate my credibility.

Nobody who knew me bought his allegations. I made a couple of posts correcting misinformation he was spreading, and providing receipts. Receipts I had pulled together in a panic because his attacks felt personal enough that I thought we were going to end up in a legal action. That's when things got worse: his attacks turned into threats against me. Yes, those kinds of threats. However, after his attacks had been called to the attention of the platforms he'd posted them on (by others who knew me) he cooled down a bit. At least publicly. And that allowed both of us to walk away, working relationship shattered.

In the other case, an artist I had written numerous reviews about decided, at some point, that I was his enemy. He wrote a long diatribe to me demanding that I pull down all the reviews of his works over several years. Apparently, this started because I had made a couple of mistakes in some reviews, combined with him having some bad personal experiences unrelated to my reviews. It took a week (or more) of going back and forth with him, but in the end, he agreed that it would be best to just add corrections to the reviews in question. That was something I was always more than willing to do.

But, the reason I relate these two experiences is they are similar in some respect to Brennan's experience. I was invested in the work that I was doing. I thought I was doing a greater good for everyone involved. Never would I have considered my work to be harmful in any way. (Even in my reviews I had a policy: I had to have a minimum of three good things to say about a release, if I didn't, the review would likely not be published.) But both of these experiences made me feel like I was in a war in a way, under attack and on edge for days, even weeks after the experiences. Both experiences severely undermined the person I thought I was, made me question everything.

That is an experience I don't wish on anyone. It is an experience I don't wish to inflict on anyone. And, it is something I will endeavor to improve on in the future.

Categories: #Response Tags: #criticism, #scrutiny, #scrupulosity, #writing, #experiences License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.