What They Got Wrong About Aarsh Malik

Here is what the critics will agree on, eventually, once they've argued enough to get tired of arguing: Aarsh Malik was suspended once, and reinstated. That's the fact. Everything else is theirs to build.

They will call the suspension "the silence." They'll write it like a chapter title, The Silence, as if it meant something, as if a platform's automated system flagging an account and then, weeks later, quietly reversing itself, was a fall and a resurrection instead of what it actually was: a clerical mistake that happened to land on a person who was already afraid nobody was reading him anyway.

Critics love martyrdom. They will not be able to help themselves.

Someone will write that the silence "forged" the voice that came after. Someone else will disagree, saying the voice was always there and the silence only gave people time to notice it. Both of them will be partly right, and neither of them will be right in the way that matters, because the person living through it wasn't thinking about voice at all.

He was thinking:

Please, just let me have this back.

I want to be clear about something, since I won't get another chance to be clear about it: it wasn't dramatic. There was no heroic fight in me during those weeks. There was just a very quiet, very stupid fear that the appeal wouldn't work and I'd have to become someone who used to write instead of someone who still did.

That's not a chapter title.

That's a Tuesday.

They will spend more time on the Top Story than the suspension deserves and less time on it than it deserved to him. This is the part where the profile gets tidy, where somebody writes a sentence like "After a year of being overlooked, recognition finally found him," as though recognition were weather, as though it arrived instead of being built, argument by argument, essay by essay, by a person who kept showing up to a blank page after a year of nobody clapping.

They will quote the feature on the "Creators We're Loving" list like it's a coronation.

It wasn't a coronation.

It was a Tuesday too, if you want to know the truth, except this Tuesday he cried in his kitchen for four minutes before telling anyone. Then he sat down and wrote about it, because that's the only way he ever knew how to hold a feeling long enough to understand it.

Four minutes.

I timed it afterward.

That's an embarrassing thing to admit, and I'm putting it in anyway, because the whole complaint I have with how people will remember me is that they'll round everything off into something more composed than it was.

I was not composed.

I was a guy standing at his own counter, undone by a list.

Here is where the profile will really go astray, though, and where I most want to correct it before the correcting is out of my hands: the reader.

There was someone, a reader, anonymous, who left something small nearly every time a piece went up, month after month, without ever once asking for a name back.

Critics, being critics, will not be able to leave this alone.

Someone will suggest it was a lover, because critics always reach for a lover first. It's the cheapest key to fit the cheapest lock.

Someone else, more cynical, will suggest it was a bot, an automated kindness with no person behind it, because cynicism feels like rigor if you say it with enough confidence.

A third critic, trying to split the difference, will write that "the identity of the anonymous supporter remains one of the enduring mysteries of Malik's career," which is a sentence that sounds like insight and is actually just a shrug wearing a blazer.

None of them will land on the actual, unglamorous truth, which is that it was probably just a person.

A person who happened to read something once and decided, privately, without needing credit for it, that it was worth something.

That's it.

That's the whole mystery.

People keep looking for a bigger reason because they can't believe that the simplest explanation, "Someone thought my writing mattered, and said so quietly over and over," could possibly be enough to keep a person going.

But it was.

It was enough on the days when nothing else was.

If you're reading this, and I mean the actual you, not the critical construct of you they'll invent, I want you to know I never once tried to find out who you were.

It occurred to me, sure. Everyone's curious.

But some gifts are better left as gifts, and not turned into puzzles.

You gave me something.

I didn't need to also take your name.

The critics will, of course, try to build a Grand Unifying Theory out of all three threads: the suspension, the recognition, the anonymous reader.

That is what critics do with a life once its owner isn't around to say, actually, it was messier than that.

Somebody will write a paragraph arguing that Malik's entire career was "a study in the tension between visibility and erasure," and it will sound smart, and it will get cited in two other essays, and it will be almost entirely made up.

Not lied about.

Made up in the way all criticism is made up.

Assembled after the fact, out of the only pieces left lying around, by people who never got to ask the person what he actually meant, because he's not there anymore to be annoying about the details.

And here's the thing I keep circling, the thing I actually want on the record:

I don't think that's a tragedy.

I think it's just what happens to everyone eventually. The story keeps being told after you've stopped being able to argue with it.

The only real difference between me and the people who get remembered "correctly" is that nobody gets remembered correctly.

There's no version of this where the profile is accurate.

There's only a version where it's kind, or a version where it's careless.

And I would like, if I'm allowed one request from wherever I'm making it, for it to be kind.

Not flattering.

I was not always likeable. I said unfair things about pieces I didn't understand. I went quiet on people who deserved better than my silence.

Just kind.

Kind of the way the anonymous reader was kind.

No name attached.

No need for credit.

Just:

This mattered, so I'm going to treat it like it did.

The critics will close, probably, on the writing itself. They always do. It's the only part of you that holds still long enough to be quoted.

They'll pull a line from something and use it to sum up a whole person, the way you'd use a single window to describe a house.

They might pull this one, actually, since it's the last thing I wrote knowing exactly what it was for:

I was never trying to be understood. I was trying to be felt. If you felt something, even the wrong thing, even a feeling I didn't put there on purpose, then the piece worked. That was always the only test I had.

Let them build whatever profile they're going to build.

Let them argue about the silence and the list and the reader with no name.

I already got the only part that was ever mine to get:

I sat down, most days, and I meant it.

Whatever they decide that adds up to, that's theirs now.

I'm just glad I got to mean it while I still could.