Why Everything Feels Personal Even When It Isn't

More than 200,000 people have watched me talk about how I brush my teeth.

I need you to understand how ridiculous that sentence feels from inside my body.

Two hundred thousand people.

That's not "a bunch of views" anymore. That's a city.

I didn't perform for a city. I sat on my couch and made a video.

My phone, however, doesn't particularly care about that distinction.

It just keeps showing me numbers.

Views.

Likes.

Comments.

Follows.

Little digital evidence that somewhere, someone I have never met has formed at least one thought about me.

Most of those thoughts I'll never know.

And maybe that's where things get weird.

Because 223,000 is just a number.

A comment has a face.

Someone can leave a perfectly ordinary sentence underneath something I've made and suddenly my brain has something tangible to examine.

What did they mean by that?

Were they being sarcastic?

Did I explain something badly?

Hang on, let me read it again.

Nope. Still don't know.

Maybe I'll check their profile.

Excellent. We've made several poor decisions now.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of other people watched the same thing and apparently continued peacefully with their lives.

My brain isn't interrogating them.

It can't.

They're invisible.

The one person who actually speaks becomes the representative for an audience they were never elected to represent.

That's a bizarre amount of power to hand some guy named Steve who was probably scrolling while waiting for his Hot Pocket to cool.

And yet we do it all the time.

Not just creators.

A text gets shorter than usual.

Someone doesn't answer.

Your boss says, "Can we talk tomorrow?"

A friend reacts differently than you expected.

Someone walks past without saying hello.

Suddenly your brain has been promoted to Director of Investigations and absolutely nobody checked its qualifications.

What happened?

What did I do?

Are they mad?

Was that weird?

Did I say too much?

Should I have said something differently?

The information is incomplete, so the brain starts filling in blanks.

Mine is apparently very committed to the project.

Success hasn't magically cured that, either.

That's something I didn't expect.

You'd think having something you've made suddenly reach an enormous audience would make you feel more confident.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it also makes you check more.

Because now there are more people.

More comments.

More interpretations.

More opportunities to be misunderstood.

And, perhaps most dangerously, proof that this thing you're doing could actually work.

Well, shit.

Now there's something to lose.

Was that video a fluke?

Can I do it again?

Should I do another one like it?

If I change something, will I ruin whatever worked?

If I don't change anything, am I wasting an opportunity?

Congratulations. The thing you wanted happened.

Please enjoy your complimentary existential crisis.

I've started realizing that there's an enormous difference between feedback and ambient evaluation.

Feedback contains information I can actually use.

"You lost me in this paragraph."

Okay. I can look at the paragraph.

"The audio is difficult to hear."

Useful.

"That statistic isn't correct."

Very useful. Also mildly terrifying, but useful.

Then there's everything else.

Someone doesn't like my voice.

Someone thinks my hair is stupid.

Someone completely misunderstood what I meant.

Someone watches twelve seconds and leaves.

Or, most commonly, someone says absolutely nothing.

None of that necessarily gives me anything to do.

Silence especially is dangerous because I can make it mean anything.

They hated it.

They were bored.

They think I'm an idiot.

Or perhaps their DoorDash arrived.

I don't know.

That's the whole problem.

I don't know.

And "I don't know" can be an uncomfortable place to leave something when your brain would really prefer a completed story.

So we invent one.

I've been trying not to do that as much.

Not by convincing myself that nobody's opinion matters, because that's bullshit.

Of course people's opinions matter to me.

I'm a writer trying to build an actual writing career by putting pieces of myself onto the internet and hoping they reach other human beings.

Pretending I don't care would be another performance.

Instead, I'm trying to get pickier about which information gets promoted to Meaningful.

Did somebody point out something I can examine?

Great.

Did several people independently misunderstand the same point?

Okay, that's worth noticing.

Did one stranger decide, based on forty seconds of video, that they understand my entire personality, childhood, marriage, credit score, and probable cause of death?

Perhaps we don't need to convene a committee.

And when the numbers themselves start feeling too big, I have to shrink the room again.

I come back to the thing I actually made.

Did I mean it?

Was I honest?

Did I check what needed checking?

Does it still sound like me?

Would I stand behind it if twelve people had seen it instead of 223,000?

If the answer is yes, there's not much else for me to do.

Because here's the strange thing about visibility:

Going viral doesn't necessarily make you feel like a celebrity.

Sometimes it feels more like accidentally walking onto a stadium stage and only then realizing you weren't wearing pants.

You're still exactly the same person you were five minutes ago.

There are just suddenly a lot more eyeballs.

And human brains care about eyeballs.

We're social creatures. We notice approval, rejection, belonging, exclusion. Some of us notice those things so intensely that a tiny shift in someone's face can become an entire evening's research project.

The internet took that ancient machinery and gave it analytics.

Of course things feel personal sometimes.

They are literally being delivered to us personally, one notification at a time.

The trick, at least for me, isn't learning not to care.

I don't particularly want that.

It's learning to separate what actually happened from the story my brain wrote about what happened.

Someone didn't respond.

That's what happened.

"They're angry with me" is a story.

Someone disliked my video.

That's what happened.

"Everyone thinks I'm ridiculous" is a spectacular mathematical failure.

Two hundred thousand people watched me talk toothbrush technique and neurodivergence.

That's what happened.

What every single one of them thought about me?

No idea.

And I'm getting increasingly comfortable leaving that question unanswered.

I've got other shit to do.