Moving Forward; or, Is There Life After Mean People?

If you're reading this blog, it's likely you fall into one of three categories:

1. You're a member of the AW in-crowd. You aren't likely to be an average AW member, because average AW members aren't considered good enough to know about the Sekrits (TM).
2. You're an active, engaged, and curious member of the broader online writing community. By now, this blog has been mentioned on several other sites dedicated to fighting "mean people" behavior.
3. You've been recently mistreated on AW and found your way here through referral or a search engine.

I want to address this post to all three groups, because they all have one thing in common: they've been victims of mean people at some point in their lives.

Group 1: The AW In Crowd
I'll characterize you for a moment, if I may. You had a dream to be a writer or work in a writing-related career. Someone, at some point, threatened that. They hurt your feelings, fractured your trust, and treated you badly.

You aren't popular, or best-selling, or especially talented; at least, this is how you feel. You have a low self esteem and need constant reassurance from others that you're valuable. You're prone to bouts of depression or anxiety, which make you feel even more vulnerable.

So you retreated and threw up walls. You found like-minded people on a forum and you hid. You lash out at anyone or anything that might threaten your worldview, because in your experience, such people might be hiding deeper, more insidious motives. You crush people mercilessly because that way they can't get you first. You don't really even trust your "friends" on AW, and you suspect they'll turn on you with the right provocation.

Group 2: The Active Watcher/Crusader
I'm fairly certain this characterization will be accurate, because you're like me. You or a close friend were the victim of a particularly personal and nasty attack from one or more of the various "mean people" groups in the online writing community: Absolute Write, the Amazon fora regulars, the Goodreads/Booklikes bullies, the Badly Behaving Authors (BBAs), or any number of other groups or individuals.

You're afraid. You don't want to become a victim again. You lurk and watch. You take notes. You warn others anonymously, publicly or privately, because you want to make a difference.

You're angry and hurt and want to make the people who hurt you stop. You may be looking for ways to hurt them back. You haven't been beaten because you're still online, still trying, but you lay awake nights thinking about what they said to you. You show symptoms of developing depression or anxiety.

Group 3: The Recent Victims
You're furious, upset, hurt, and above all confused. You can't understand why someone would treat you the way they did. You're hunting for validation (that what they did isn't right and you didn't deserve it) and support (perhaps somebody else knows how you feel).

You fall into one of two categories:

1. You have conflicting emotions about this and other fight-back-against-the-mean-people blogs. Part of you is glad to see you aren't alone. Part of you (that you likely don't want to acknowledge) is gloating a little that the mean people who hurt you are being publicly shamed. But another part of you feels like it's low mud-slinging and it makes you feel uncomfortable. You're pretty sure there must be a better way to deal with the mean people, one that doesn't devolve into juvenile finger pointing.
2. You're thrilled someone is calling the mean people on their meanness. You follow every link and read every post. You check back regularly, sometimes multiple times per day, waiting and hoping for more dirt on the mean people to be posted. You Google other posts on other sites and read them too. You gloat to your friends about how you were right all along, and all this documented bad behavior proves what kind of people attacked you.

The Way Forward
If you're an astute reader, you will already have noticed the underlying pattern in these descriptions. This pattern can be described as a

You can't win. Victims who allow themselves to become too obsessed with the people who treated them badly end up lurking, plotting, and posting anonymous blogs. If you, as a crusader, do manage to rally people to your cause when fighting the in crowd, you create a pack like theirs: reactionary, insular, and afraid. Before you know it, people will be complaining about your victims, only you won't want to see it.

So what can you do? What can I do? How does the writing community move past this negative cycle?

I stumbled over an article by author Martha Beck that gave me insight into the situation. I can't say it will help you, but it helped me. In a nutshell, she said we have three choices when mean people target us:

1. Be aggressive - fight back and give them a taste of their own medicine.
2. Be submissive - lay down and let them walk on us, knuckle under, hide, deny it happened.
3. Be assertive - become authors of our own circumstances.

What appealed to me in this article was Ms. Beck's use of the word "authorship." All of us are members of the writing community. We understand creating through words.

The fact is that we’ve all been hurt, and we’re all wounded, but not all of us are mean. Why not? Because some people realize that their history of suffering can be a hero’s saga rather than a victim’s whine, depending on how they “write” it. - Martha Beck

This blog will remain, because I think it provides good documentation of a group of mean people. It also illustrates how one mean person--me--is choosing to break the vicious cycle.

Further breaking the cycle and striking a blow at the culture of humiliation on the Internet, this blog is now defunct.