Newcomers Don’t Just Dislike Authors — They Delete Them

I have had the good fortune to be able to write and even better fortune to be read and appreciated. Writing is my art now and my profession was built on writing; several books, one more coming out soon, and nearly two hundred blog posts each of which has garnered responses that are gratifying although may not always be in agreement in what I had to say. I have enjoyed being an author and hope to continue to be one as long as I can because the author occupies a permanently inconvenient position inside human systems because authors notice sequences, authors remember life such as who used to call every night and who slowly stopped, authors remember when conversations were long and unstructured and when they became scheduled and polite, authors notice when affection turns into formality, when curiosity turns into updates, when someone who once asked questions now merely broadcasts decisions, and authors do not experience these shifts as mysterious accidents but as patterns, which immediately makes authors dangerous, because once a pattern is named it stops being invisible, and once it stops being invisible someone has to explain it, and explanation is expensive, so the cheaper solution is to attack the person pointing rather than confront the behavior being pointed at, which is why authors are almost always described as negative, bitter, obsessive, dramatic, unable to move on, people whose primary crime is possessing memory in an environment that increasingly rewards amnesia. The author is rarely inventing anything, no imaginary scenes are being manufactured, what is being described are observable changes that multiple people can feel but prefer not to articulate, like when someone who once called daily now sends a short text once a week, when someone who once shared fears now shares logistics, when someone who once said “we” now speaks entirely in “I,” when someone who once defended another now says “let’s not talk about that,” these are not hallucinations, they are measurable behavioral shifts, but describing them creates discomfort, because description produces implication, implication produces accountability, and accountability is profoundly unpopular. And that is what authors do – point to the inconvenient and uncomfortable truth and this discomfort with the truth becomes curiously more pronounced when a new actor is introduced into an ecosystem that the author is documenting. The person appears, not as background noise but as a gravitational force, and the remarkable feature of the newcomer is not their existence but the speed with which their emotional comfort becomes the organizing principle of the entire ecosystem, suddenly everything must be filtered through what will upset the fresh protagonist, what will disturb the new entrant, what will complicate the preferred version of reality, and from that moment forward truth is no longer evaluated by accuracy but by its potential to irritate those who have newly arrived on the stage. The author becomes the central problem at this point, not because anything written is false, but because it is recognizable, because it describes things the revised ecosystem wishes were not there, because it forces the fresh ecosystem to acknowledge a world where history exists, and history is inconvenient when one wants to believe they arrived into something pristine rather than stepping into something already constructed by someone else’s labor. So the reaction of the system is to attack the messenger, the author is labeled toxic, negative, stuck, someone who cannot move forward, someone who is “creating problems,” even though nothing in the writing created the pattern, the writing merely named it, and then comes the escalation, not just that the author should stop writing, but that the author should be removed from the ecosystem entirely, unfollowed, blocked, avoided, erased, because as long as the author exists nearby, denial requires effort, and effort is exhausting, and the entire psychological project is to avoid effort while maintaining innocence. Meanwhile everyone involved knows the author is correct, and this is the most corrosive part of the arrangement, they know who used to call, they know who stopped, they know when emotional intimacy was rerouted, they know when someone became a backup instead of a primary, but acknowledging this would require admitting that replacement happened, that downgrading happened, that someone benefited from another person’s investment and then decided that investment no longer needed to be honored, so instead collective amnesia is chosen, preferably with soft lighting and morally flattering language. The author is blamed in a spectacular piece of psychological gymnastics, equivalent to rearranging an entire house and then screaming at the person who photographed the process for “focusing on negativity,” and this is precisely how many relationships, from interpersonal to institutional, now operate; the rearrangement is acceptable, documentation is the crime. The author does not write to destroy reality, the author writes because reality quietly dismantle themselves, the author writes because pretending nothing changed does not heal anything, it simply makes manipulation smoother, the author writes because someone in every system has to be immune to the collective decision to pretend. People are free to let the new players control access, proximity, priorities, memory, language, and eventually identity. It is socially rewarded, but they do not get to demand that the author participate, they do not demand help repainting reality, they do not get to demand silence so someone else can feel less troubled. The author remains inconvenient by design and intends to stay that way. Just as Tears For Fears said in their song, the author also says, "it is my own design."