I've stood by and watched over the last six years as my personal followers have grown exponentially and the voice that I have chosen to use spread into areas that I would have never dreamed. Given hope to those that I have deemed as unsavable and helped people that were regarded as unhelpable. I firmly believe that charity begins and ends with me in the notion that I have control over who I choose to help and who I do not with the limited resources I have at my disposal.

My bitter enemy

Through these last few years I have faced an enemy that lurks in the shadows and has struck when I am at my most vulnerable. A critical hit to the sweet spot when I've tried to open myself up so that I can give a voice, or put a face on an often-faceless enemy that basks under the dark corners of our tormented souls. It's weapon of choice, criticism, has attacked me when I've had my back turned; proud of the words that I've so eloquently transformed into conscious thought over the pages that I've chosen to be heard over the four corners of the web.

One thing has become fundamentally clear to me now though, is that criticism is mostly the criticizers own issues mixed in with a small portion of mine. I've seen it with my own eyes over Facebook. I once ran a very popular post about men and pregnancy. Since I've written that post the visits to my site caused my hosting provider to literally break, and I was met by a good bit of criticism.

The funny thing here was that it was written for a clearly heterosexual viewership, and yet I began to see a stark uprising in people reading it from all walks of life; something I hugely encourage because knowledge about other groups is the world’s answer to intolerance. The strange thing about the whole episode was that people were telling me that the whole idea of pregnancy made them sick and that my post couldn't have been more badly written. I'll admit that it had me going at first, being new to popular writing on that epic scale had me reeling as I had always hated criticism and prayed for the day never to come, yet it came, with a vengeance. It's not that it was badly written that got to me, it was the fact that it wasn't written for that sort of audience.

I saw the same when I began writing for The Good Men Project but on a much larger scale. I've always tried to fight the good fight for both sexes but I was constantly being met with both angry men and upset women forcing their rather obscure [to me] views onto my audience. It was becoming a scratchy head moment; it had me wondering why work that I deemed valuable was being met with such hardcore resistance.

Lightbulb and author friend

I had my lightbulb moment when I was speaking to my friend author over Facebook. She told me that she never reads comments because people can either choose to agree with me or not. That was the beauty of free choice. When people disagree with me, occasionally with their pitchforks out, I've obviously struck a chord in their own personal domain. I can choose to own their guilt / unhappiness / anger / shame, or I could choose to ignore it and move on to my next post.

It began to be an extremely freeing process from there. I had a series of major life reflections and concluded that most criticism, whether justified or not, is mainly to do with the criticizers. Take the people commenting on my pregnancy post for example. Their criticism came from their own personal angle on pregnancy. Was it my fault that they didn't like what I had written? No. Could I have chosen to write the article in any other way to include their stances? No. From there I decided to let go of any sort of guilt I had towards it.

Take Facebook for example (or on some places in STEEM), you'll see people criticize the left and the right side of Politics, yet every time their criticisms will be deemed from their own personal stance on events. If I said President Trump is a dick I would be met with a vast swathe of angry people coming to his defence but their stance wouldn't be any more valid than my own, after all, the only valid discussion in my life is the one that I choose to have, right?

Knowledge is understanding

That discussion with my author friend has also helped me deal with my own judgements of other people much better. Whenever someone posts something I disagree with I try to at least first understand where their view is originating from, rather than shoot it down in flames which is fast becoming a common practise. A Trump supporter may vote for him because their area has seen decades of degradation and a vote for Hillary is business as usual. It's common sense at the end of the day.

I am a great believer in Karma, but not in the spooky supernatural ooky pooky belief that some people have, but more so that you reap what you sow, and in so I try to shine as much of a bright light on the world that I can, even if sometimes it's barely a dim 1 watt bulb. We can't all be happy all the time, but we can at least put our best faces forward with whatever we have in the moment.