The Angry Email and the Importance of Empathy

I do not get many emails these days but every once in a while someone decides to contact me through this website. I get a perplexing number of offers to write articles for this site that couldn’t be more off-brand or inappropriate.

This is a one-man shop yet that does not keep misguided souls from offering me a piece on which cars for seniors have the best gas mileage or how college students can improve their credit scores. 

Every once in a while I receive an email through the Happy Place that does make an impression. Just yesterday, for example, I received a book-length email sputtering with rage from a gentleman who identified himself as an actor in a movie I had panned. 

Bear in mind this man did not reveal his identity at any point, nor did he identify the film in question or even what website ran the scathing review in question. He did, however, leave behind a trail of breadcrumbs that could perhaps reveal his identity if I looked hard enough. 

I sure hope it wasn’t this guy!

His email began with him talking about watching one of his old movies and being underwhelmed. This inspired him to look up reviews for the movie and to discover my review. 

The emailer agreed that the film I had given a negative review was no masterpiece but what really enraged him was that I had criticized his hair and voice in my review as well as the film itself. 

He felt that this was unfair and hitting below the belt so he Googled me and was delighted to discover that I was bald. He was apoplectic that someone who didn’t even have hair had the audacity to write about the hair of a character in a movie? 

Ah, but it was not just my hairlessness that he found offensive. He also thought I had a wretched and unlistenable voice and that I was, by any objective standard, hideously ugly, a total monster, out and out repulsive. 

To be perfectly honest I skimmed the email both because it was long-winded and verbose and because it was overflowing with deeply personal insults about my hair, or lack thereof, my looks, my intelligence and my talent. 

But I got the gist. Oh sweet lord did I ever get the gist. This man was VERY, VERY angry that someone had criticized him on the internet. He was not about to take a slight like that lying down so he lashed out in explicitly personal ways. 

I had hurt him and now he wanted to hurt me the same way. The email went on and on and on, getting uglier and more vitriolic with each successive insult. 

This gentleman did not leave contact information, but if he had I would have replied that I had grown tremendously as a writer and a man through the decades and am an infinitely more sensitive critic and human being than I was twenty years ago, or ten years ago, or even five years ago, before I started this site. 

Some of that growth is attributable to age and experience but I’ve also grown with culture as well. We’re more sensitive when it comes to criticizing people’s appearances. That is a positive development on the whole but there are still times when it’s kosher to discuss someone’s looks, particularly if they continually cast themselves as men who are sexually irresistible to beautiful women, as I suspect the emailer in question may have done. 

I’ve also been on the receiving end of criticism that has genuinely wounded me and made me realize the power I wielded when I wrote for The A.V. Club when I was a snot nosed kid straight out of a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents. 

This gentleman didn’t care about my emotional and spiritual growth. If he had he would have left a way for me to get in contact with him. And if he genuinely wanted me to stop writing reviews like the one that angered him he could have told me which one it was so I could learn from my mistakes. 

There’s a big difference, however, between constructive criticism and trying to hurt somebody with your words. This man was uninterested in constructive criticism. Instead, he just wanted to hurt me with his words. 

He did not succeed. I happen to like the way I look and sound and I strive to be a good, ethical person every goddamned day of my life. 

Yet his email was nevertheless a reminder to be kind in your words and your actions and to grow and evolve because if you don’t, you might end up in a place of bitterness and resentment the way this gentleman did. 

Buy The Weird Accordion to Al AND THE BRAND SPANKING NEW THE WEIRD A-COLORING TO AL here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or from Amazon here

Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are NINE so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

Missed out on the Kickstarter campaign for The Weird A-Coloring to Al/The Weird A-Coloring to Al-Colored In Edition? You’re in luck, because you can still pre-order the books, and get all manner of nifty exclusives, by pledging over at https://the-weird-a-coloring-to-al-coloring-colored-in-books.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

AND of course you can also pledge to this site and help keep the lights on at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace