There is a type of loneliness that comes not from being unknown, but from being known wrongly. From watching people who have never spoken to you arrive at total certainty about who you are, build an entire person out of a sentence or two, and then respond, sometimes with real venom, to a character they invented and assigned your name to. I have been thinking about this a great deal lately, because I have been on the receiving end of it, and because the more I sit with it, the more I suspect it is one of the central problems of being a person right now, far larger than any single argument it happens to attach itself to.
It started, as these things do, with something small. I wrote some posts. One was about women belonging in gaming, a thing I would have thought uncontroversial given that I have been playing games for over thirty years. Another was about men’s mental health, which I have written about, sincerely and at length, for as long as I have written about anything. And a wave of hostility arrived from people who had never once spoken to me, who knew nothing of my life, who had read at most a handful of my words. Some constructed a whole identity for me, a politics, a personality, a set of motives, from those one or two posts, and then sent the insults and the slurs and the contempt to the person they had built, who was not me, who has never been me, but who was apparently much more satisfying to be angry at than the actual human being who had written the actual words.
The interesting part is what the whole experience revealed about how people decide who you are, and how often that deciding happens long before they know anything at all, and what it costs all of us that we do this to each other constantly.
The people most certain they understood me were, without exception, the people who knew the least about me. This was not a coincidence or an irony. I have come to think it is a law. Certainty about a stranger is almost always inversely proportional to actual knowledge of them, because certainty is what rushes in to fill the space where knowledge has not yet been earned. The people who actually knew my work, who had read me for years, held their understanding loosely, the way you hold any real understanding of a complex thing, with room for revision. It was the people who knew a sentence who were sure they knew everything.
Consider the gaming accusation, because it is almost funny in its absurdity, and the absurdity makes the mechanism visible. People called me a tourist. A fake. Someone who did not really belong in the space, who was passing through to score points. About a person who has been playing games for over three decades, longer than some of the accusers have been alive. And the basis for this confident dismissal of thirty years of my actual life was a single disagreement. I had said a thing they did not like, and from that one data point they reverse-engineered an entire fictional history in which I was a newcomer, a pretender, a tourist, because that fiction was more convenient than the inconvenient reality that a person can love games deeply for a lifetime and still hold a view you disagree with. They did not weigh my history against my opinion. They erased my history to protect themselves from having to take my opinion seriously. That is what the caricature is for. It is a tool for not having to think.
This is the part that the internet does to everyone. Online spaces have a strange relationship with real-world accomplishment, which is that they mostly ignore it. I earned a STEM degree. I have worked in environments where competence was not optional, where you do not keep a difficult job because strangers on the internet think you belong there, where results and responsibility and actual skill are the only things that keep you in the room. Reality, it turns out, does not care about internet stereotypes. The boss fight does not get easier because someone decided you were not a real gamer. The job does not stay yours because a forum approved of you. There is a whole category of human accomplishment that is invisible online precisely because it happened in the realm of consequences, where the only thing that mattered was whether you could actually do the thing, and the internet, which runs on impressions rather than consequences, has no way to see it and no interest in looking. So people will confidently assign you incompetence in a domain where you have demonstrated competence to people whose standards were infinitely higher than theirs, and they will never know, and it will never occur to them that they might not know.
And this connects to something I understand from a different and more private angle, which is chronic illness, though I raise it not as the subject but as an illustration, because it taught me something about judgment that I would not have learned any other way. When you live with an invisible illness, you spend your life being assessed by people who can see only the surface. Strangers will decide you are lazy, or weak, or dramatic, or seeking attention, based on what they can observe, which is almost nothing, while the enormous reality of what you actually manage, the pain you are masking, the effort that ordinary things cost you, the sheer labor of appearing functional, stays completely hidden from them. They judge the visible sliver and feel certain they have judged the whole. And living inside that experience, on the receiving end of confident judgments built on a fraction of the facts, gives you a kind of permanent humility about judging anyone else, because you know, from the inside, how vast the unseen portion of a person is, and how foolish it is to mistake the visible sliver for the truth. Everyone you meet is managing things you cannot see. The person who seems lazy may be heroic. The person who seems cold may be holding themselves together by a thread. You do not know, because you cannot see, and the awareness of your own hidden depths should make you slow to assume that anyone else lacks them.
I think this is also why I have never publicly enlisted in a political tribe, and the recent experience clarified why the instinct was right. The moment people believe they know your side, something closes. They stop listening to you and start listening to the category they have filed you under. They import a whole set of assumptions, decide in advance what you must think about everything, and respond to the platform they imagine you hold rather than the words you actually said. I have watched it happen in real time. Say one thing that pings a tribal sensor, and instantly you are sorted, and once sorted, you are no longer a person being read but a position being argued against. The purity tests are part of this. The demand that you be wholly one thing, that your every view align with the package, that a single deviation marks you as the enemy, is the machinery by which complex people get crushed into simple ones. And the cost of it is enormous, because the moment you let people sort you, you lose the ability to be heard by anyone who dislikes the bin they put you in, which is to say you lose the ability to actually reach across anything, which is to say you lose the only thing that ever mattered.
Underneath all of these examples is a single human habit, and I have come to believe it is one of the most consequential things about us. People prefer simple stories. We are built for them. Hero, villain, ally, enemy, the clean cast of a tale you can hold in your head without effort. And real people are nothing like that. Real people are walking contradictions, bundles of views that do not align into a tidy package, capable of believing two things the internet insists are incompatible. I can support men’s mental health and also believe women belong in gaming, and to a sorting mind those two facts do not compute, because the sorting mind needs me to be a type, and no type holds both. But I am not a type. Nobody is. The whole problem is that we keep trying to read people as if they were characters, with a defined alignment and a predictable set of traits, when every actual person is a contradiction the simple story cannot contain.
And so what happens, constantly, everywhere, is that people stop responding to the human in front of them and start responding to the character they built. This is the quiet catastrophe underneath the louder ones. The hostile messages I received were not really aimed at me. They were aimed at a figure my critics constructed, a villain assembled from fragments, who held the views they found most contemptible and embodied everything they were already prepared to hate. I was just the name attached to it. They were having an argument with someone who did not exist, and winning, and feeling righteous, while the actual person, with her thirty years and her degree and her decade of writing about the very things they assumed she opposed, stood entirely unseen behind the caricature they were busy defeating. You cannot reach a person who is fighting a character that wears your face. There is no version of the conversation where you get through, because they are not talking to you.
But here is the part that gives me hope, and it is the most important thing I learned in all of this. The reverse is also true, and it is just as reliable. When people approach with respect instead of contempt, they discover things. Several men, including some from backgrounds that the people sneering at me would have stereotyped as hostile, reached out, not to attack, but to say they did not agree with the hateful responses, that they appreciated the nuance, that the writing had actually meant something to them. Men have told me, privately, over the years, that my work helped them through hard things. These were people who, had they arrived swinging, certain they already knew who I was, would have found only the enemy they expected. But they arrived curious instead, and curiosity found a person, a real and complicated one, with whom they had more common ground than the simple story would ever have allowed.
This is the whole thing, really, the lesson under all the lessons. Respect creates discovery. Contempt creates blindness. When you approach someone with contempt, certain you already know them, you guarantee that you will find only the character you brought with you, because contempt is not a mode of perception, it is a mode of projection. It shows you nothing about the other person and everything about your own assumptions. But respect is a mode of perception. It actually lets you see. When you approach someone with the genuine possibility that they might be more than your category for them, you create the conditions under which they can show you who they actually are, and again and again, what they show you is more interesting, more contradictory, and more human than anything you could have assumed.
I do not want to end this with a tidy moral, because the whole point is a resistance to tidiness, to the simple stories that flatten people into types. But there is something I believe more firmly now than I did before the hostility came, and it is this. The richest version of life is the one in which you allow people to be more complicated than your assumptions about them. Every time you let a person surprise you, every time you hold your certainty loosely enough that the actual human can come through, you get a glimpse of how vast and strange and contradictory people really are, and the world becomes larger and more interesting for it. And every time you enter a conversation already swinging, certain you know who is standing in front of you, you guarantee the opposite. You guarantee that you will never find out. You will fight your own projection, win, and walk away having learned nothing, having met no one, having spent your contempt on a character of your own making while the real person, who you might have actually wanted to know, slips past you unseen.
I have been the caricature in other people’s stories now, watched a fictional version of myself receive their anger, and the strangest part was how little it had to do with me. But I have also been found, by people who chose curiosity over certainty, who approached the actual person rather than the assumed one, and discovered, to their own surprise, that we were not the enemies the simple story would have made us. Those second encounters are the ones that stay with me. They are the proof that it does not have to be this way, that the caricatures are a choice, that underneath all the sorting and the certainty there are real people who could find each other, if only they were willing to look. The willingness to look is the whole of it. It is the difference between a world of characters fighting characters and a world of human beings, finally, actually meeting.
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