I often feel excluded from circles of literary people who seem to think less of what I have written. Be it self-conscious or counterintuitive perception, but my senses feel acutely from the stolid reaction or derisive comments on writing platforms. When my writing is derided or ignored, I take arms against the invisible keyboard scoundrels to guard the bastion of my creative world. Otherwise, I will remain a victim of ruthless bullying combined with barbarous ridicule, which I do not deserve, ever. I am only a human, so there’s no magnanimous pretext of “constructive criticism” because there’s no such.
There are new comments for my review of a particular book posted on Amazon. The acrid and derisive comments that my writing was incomprehensible pierced my heart with a great spear and put my entire body fixed to the wall. While I have been trying to write better, the comments only affirm a doubt about the purpose of writing. The common denominators of the words were as follows:
- They were both men.
- They seemed to form an appreciation of English Undefiled.
- They were British and American.
Though I always try not to associate people with their national characteristics, men who speak English as their mother tongue have a certain air of arrogance, young or old, and seem to delight in schadenfreude. What makes these men put their hands on keyboards to pillory my writing skills in public is astonishingly callous and vile. I am with the disappointment dipped in the anger of Timon of Athens uttering, “The unkindest beast is kinder than a man.” How rightly so.
People associate a fluency of language with a level of intellect, believing that thinking shapes language. Therefore, solecism in writing equals a lack of education, learning disability, or low intelligence. It is their ignorance of such a mode of thought because language is instinct, not a thinking product. It is said that the windows of learning other languages are typically closed at the age of 13. Given that fact, shall we regard someone who tries to exercise an adopted language by writing, however poorly, as a buffoonish dilettant pitifully trying to simulate the impossible?
I am more in sorrow than in anger as I am trying to compose my emotions’ agitated waves. That does not mean I beg for customary sympathy, empty consolation, or instant charity. I want to defy being put in a public pillory to endure underserving mockery, harassment, and ridicule like a poor maid masquerading as a refined lady of high society. Truth is truth to the end of reckoning, and it will reveal itself someday. You may not like my writing, but that doesn’t give you an ipso facto reason to belittle it.