These Strange Parasocial Relationships
I'm still awed by how our relationships with strangers have devolved.
Years ago, I wrote a fairly popular online blog. I shared tales of croissant-baking and friendship making. A woman was a comma like that, breathlessly typing about her day. A lot of the stories would find their way into my first book, The Sky Isn’t Visible From Here. I used my blog as a space to work out ideas, experiment with storytelling and genuinely share recipes and books I loved.
But I never expected what would happen as a result of that sharing.
For the first twenty-one years of my life, the internet did not exist. When you wanted to see your friends, you yelled at their window, buzzed their bell, or called them on the phone. When you wrote a story, you shared it with the people you knew, and in the rare occasion when it was published, there wasn’t an easy way for people to contact you about what you had written. There existed this exquisite divide between self and stranger, one that ceases to exist.
Ours became a world where people believed they knew you because of the parts of yourself you chose to share online. They became voyeurs and consumers, feeling increasingly entitled to more of you. All the while you kept shouting into a void, PARTS OF ME! PARTS OF ME! NOT THE WHOLE! And when you failed to deliver on this more, or you became more human, fallible, and oh-so-flawed, they stormed your space with their pitchforks and expletives. You weren’t the person they thought you were, when, in reality, they actually never knew you at all.
On this blog I used to write I had a comments section where people were genuinely respectful before the era of never read the comments. However, I noticed this encroachment, this strange invasiveness. Questions that were inappropriate. Advise on how they would live my life. A detailed sharing of their own life without the realization that I never consented to that sharing or how I would feel as a result of it. I bear childhood trauma, wounds I’ve spent my whole life dressing, and some people felt they needed to add to that weight. I had to help them with their lives because it appeared I was navigating my own with relative sanity.
I was expected to be a friend, therapist, and hand-holder for a complete stranger—a relationship I never asked for or wanted. And when I kindly recommended they seek therapy (as I had done), it was perceived as a slap in the face. How dare I not engage in a personal relationship? Didn’t I owe them my friendship because they’d read my work? Shouldn’t I give them all of me when they demanded it?
All of this happened because people couldn’t distinguish their relationship with the writing from the writer.
I’ve worked with editors and authors who’ve given incisive feedback on my work. They’ve read deeply-personal essays and responded with a cool detachment required to make a piece of art better. The editor of my first book never used the word “you,” rather it was always, “the narrator,” “Felicia,” “the character of Felicia,” because she knew that in order to edit a piece of work she had to focus on the work, not the writer in front of her. I wasn’t a friend regaling a story from my childhood—I was contracted to deliver a book that she was paid to edit. Even close friends who are also authors (I never share work with folks who don’t know how to critique professionally), we’ll meet over the phone and they’ll treat my story as if they’re editing fiction.
Because there’s something worthy about maintaining a boundary and upholding it. There’s nobility in others who abide by and respect it. And there’s a difference between a friend telling you a story and a writer attempting to create art from her life.
Ask any writer of memoir and narrative non-fiction and they’ll say one of the reasons they write is to make others feel less alone. They want people to have a relationship with the work, the experiences, the beautiful spectrum of ugly emotions. What they don’t want is a critique of their life choices. They don’t want strangers feigning the sort of intimacy they enjoy with people they actually know. They don’t want unsolicited advise and armchair therapy.
There was a point in my early 30s where I could’ve dialed up my social media. I could’ve been one of those people who boast tens of thousands of followers. And what a difference it could’ve made for my second book, which a sum total of five people read. What a difference it could make for anything I publish in the future. But I consider the trade-off—what I’d have to sacrifice—and it never felt worth it.
While there are quite a few people with whom I’ve developed friendships as a result of meeting online, friendships I value and adore, those friendships took work like real relationships do. They’re not the sort of passive relationship where we read one another’s work online and pretend that connection is the same as one where you bear more of your less-curated and edited self in front of others.
I met my friend Krista via a friend I met through writing on Medium. Over the course of two years, we’ve developed a friendship beyond our online spaces. And, during the summer, when I was spiraling, she was one of the few who checked in on me. She was that rare breed of human who sat for an hour and change while I rambled incoherently. She listened without judgment. She was content with some measure of mess. And that’s the mark of a relationship—one that requires two people to work at it for it to work. It’s a balance where some months I’ll be the ear for her challenges while other times she’ll step up for mine.
What is harvested off-line can’t compare with a passive reading online.
So, as writers, look at your work and others as a means to help them elevate their art instead of whittling into their personal lives. As readers and consumers of others (sounds oddly cannibalistic, but I’ll go with it), we have to distinguish the art from the artist and realize a relationship with one doesn’t predicate a relationship with the other. And know that an artist wants you to have a relationship with their work in ways that inform and add beauty to your life, not as a means for you to judge or pass commentary on their personal lives. This isn’t therapy or tea-dropping, this is art.
Imagine rolling up to Sylvia Plath in 1960 in the middle of a London thoroughfare and saying, OMG, girl. I just read “Daddy.” You need to dump that Ted and move on with your life. Because what many people are doing online is the equivalent of that and we only find it strange when that invasiveness occurs off-line. Yet, it’s game-on online.
Postscript:
Speaking of the awesome Krista, she has launched plantpals.com. If you’ve killed a plant (I’m in the process of killing a houseplant as I type this) or are an expert in our leafy friends, Krista has got your back. I absolutely love this venture and she’s one of the most talented people I know. Check out her space and give her all the love. She deserves it.
A brief update on Felix. I saw my vet yesterday and it was a tsunami of emotion. Felix is up to 16 pounds from 10 (WOOT), however, my vet was concerned by the egregious incompetence of the vet I saw in Bakersfield. “Not only is this insulin for the wrong SPECIES, he has you using the wrong syringes.” So, while Felix is alive and has gained weight, his diabetes is not under control. So, my chubby boy is getting new insulin, new syringes, and a game-plan to get his body back on track. We’re going to fight this! And my vet recommends I make a formal board complaint against the other vet. Yeah, let’s add that to my formal complaint I’ve made with the Bakersfield ER that’s cycling up the chain at Kaiser. Formal complaints for everyone!
A brief update on my knee. It hurts. I hate that I can’t walk like I used to. I want to murder everyone, and my ortho rescheduled our follow-up to November. So, we’ll see.
Over at The Athletic, I always write, "Read the article, skip the comments," an homage to the classic "leave the gun, take the cannoli" from "The Godfather."
"Felix is up to 16 pounds from 10 (WOOT), however, my vet was concerned by the egregious incompetence of the vet I saw in Bakersfield. “Not only is this insulin for the wrong SPECIES, he has you using the wrong syringes.” So, while Felix is alive and has gained weight, his diabetes is not under control. So, my chubby boy is getting new insulin, new syringes, and a game-plan to get his body back on track.."
I can't believe that vet in Bakersfield! The wrong insulin and the wrong syringes?! And what would have happened to Felix had this vet not caught it?! What is wrong with people these days?! I am glad to read he's gained some weight--that handsome boy, and I hope he continues to get better, too.