The other day I started to receive an unusual amount of email. And not only was it the amount that was unusual, but what they said. They were all saying, “Congratulations!” The problem is, I had no idea what they were talking about.
Apparently, I had won some contest and my URL was passed out in a mass mailing. In two days, this site that receives around 1000 hits a day received over 30,000. I was absolutely floored by that.
All the email I received was positive. Really positive. I received a lot of beautiful personal stories, a lot of good lucks and a lot of people saying they were inspired. I felt really good.
But then, I also began to feel really really crappy because most of those emails were critical. Critical in a good way, I realise now, but still critical. I was used to people just complimenting about the general tone and message of the website. I hadn’t had people pick it apart before.
The number one criticism was my grammar and spelling. My first reaction was to say, “Well, you try living in 4 countries that all spell English differently and see how confused you are.” A lot of people had thought I spelled realise wrong and added u’s where there shouldn’t be u’s. That made me defensive. I also wanted to point out that my grammar was supposed to be bad! “It’s not an article!” I wanted to scream, “it’s a bloody free flowing writing page!”
But I didn’t say any of this. Instead I just replied and said thank you, and was quietly defiant by not listening to any of them.
“I’ll leave my page as it is. I don’t care what they say – I like it.”
I suppose that’s what we’d call too smug for your own good.
I realised after that I was being stupid, and that what they had to say was not only valid, but right. I claim to be a writer yet I had stupid mistakes like mmore and double word usage.
That night, instead of remaining defensive, I decided to become humbled. I stayed up until 5:30 am re-working almost every sentence on this site. I spell checked, I grammar checked. I rechecked and over checked. Check one two and three.
I felt better after it all, and even slightly embarrassed by my previous attitude.
It taught me to pay more attention and take this all more seriously. Even though I consider this to be only a journal of sorts, it is still a reflection in some ways of my work. And that the message can’t get out there if people can’t understand it.
Criticism – especially deserved criticism – it’s something I have to get used to, I know. I have been lucky with that the current things I am having published were accepted almost as is. However, I know in the future, some editor will tare my work to pieces. And I don’t want it to be over spelling and grammar – that’s for sure.
