Earlier in the week I joked that I’d make a bad youtube essayist because I’d just be reading out my own words in a monotone but it turns out you can do pretty good by reading other people’s words in a monotone instead. I figured that’d be all I’d have to say on the plagiarism matter.
But a little piece just clicked into place, and it’s this: I’m actually very proud of my writing. Or prideful about it, perhaps. I think I’m pretty good at it, and if I look objectively at what I spend a lot of my time doing, what really sucks my attention for much more of the day than it should is essentially short-form essays. At their lowest, full of snark and calculated to annoy. At their best, words that help people reframe their transness or their disability more positively. Occasionally, I get a “thank you for saying this”, and that’s better than a hundred upvotes. I’m speaking, of course, of Reddit.
And actually, I’m kind of sad about it now. I’ve spent 15 years there refining how I argue. I’ve learned that you can’t talk a bigot out of bigotry, that having every citation ready to go is just a tremendous waste of my time when I could attempt to cut to the heart of the matter. And that time spent was a learning experience, sure, but boy howdy was it a great deal of words spilled out into the void read by ten or twenty or a hundred people, an investment of my time almost certainly not repaid by any kind of positive change to the world.
Perhaps the only person who would read and appreciate my words would be a plagiarist. Perhaps it’s time I started valuing my own time a little better, and spent more time posting my words here where my audience is people who want to hear from me, not a selection of random folks wanting to discuss some newspaper article.
I actually love writing, I actually spend a lot of time doing it but do not value my own time as I do so. It’s a goddamn shame that the Reddit comment section still takes up so much of my energy. I think I’ll be changing that.