I have written a couple posts recently that have received many positive comments and a handful of negative ones. Positive comments generally come from a thoughtful place born from a desire to explore and discuss. They are not necessarily expressing viewpoints that agree with mine but share a viewpoint in a way that encourages further thought and discussion. Negative comments generally take the shape of personal judgments. “You have written X which means that you are Y type of person.” In these cases “Y type of person” is generally not someone you’d want to be. I can only imagine that the people writing this type of comment feel threatened in some way by what I have written or what they feel I represent and in that threat feel personally attacked. Part of why I started writing and putting my thoughts out onto the internet in such a public fashion was to build up my armour against this latter type of commenter.

It’s easy to read comments and gloss over the positive conversations and see only the negative ones. I find too that the more that I express big ideas and especially heartfelt or vulnerable ideas, the greater the potential for threat and judgment.

The human brain seems tuned to focus on the negative. We come from an ancestral path where spotting potential threats was imperative to survival. Yet these judgments are not actually life-threatening and I’d much rather be guided by my desire to express authentically than my fear of judgment.

This is why I am here. To express big ideas. To weather threat and judgement and see that I am still standing at the end of it.

Sometimes to learn how to deal with something requires simply that you expose yourself to it again and again.