I kind of feel bleh for talking about AI so much, but everyone in every nook and corner of my life, personal and professional, is talking about it, so it’s hard to avoid wanting to chime in.

When you’ve got multiple thumbs in varying (and very different) pies, you’re exposed to a diversity of opinions, and wow is it diverse. If you’re only mingling in liberal arts circles, then you’re not hearing, truly hearing, the discussions about AI happening in the scientific circles, and if you’re only mingling in scientific circles, then you’re not hearing, truly hearing, the discussions about AI happening in the liberal arts circles. And so it’s been interesting hopping from one camp over to the other and back to witness the contrast.

Continue reading “Who’s Afraid of Big Bad Generative AI?” →

A video I watched inspired me to hit the record button and share these thoughts. But this is no longer a direct VR to that video (and in fact this video might have taken on a more melancholic tone than intended).

Instead of being a direct VR to the video inspiring this sharing, I will be commenting on what my own experiences have been like.

Here are some of my thoughts 7 years in.

This video is unlisted, which means it won’t appear on my YouTube channel or on the public YouTube platform. I will be experimenting with moving away from that platform and posting more unlisted videos here on the personal website.

Video Transcript

For those who prefer reading over watching a video, here’s a cleaned up, polished transcription of the video:

This began as a possible video response to something I watched recently—a video where someone shared their thoughts on being a pagan author. But then, my ramblings diverged into something else entirely. Still, for context, this started as a reflection on the social and professional pressures of being a pagan author.

Specifically, I was thinking about how, once you’re published, people start to treat you differently. Your voice becomes memorialized in a public, two-dimensional space with a lot of visibility—and when that happens, something reductive tends to occur to your personal identity. The audience no longer sees the full human behind the words. They reduce you—the author, a red-blooded, complex person with a past, biases, emotions, and opinions, some of them flawed—into a flat, two-dimensional caricature.

Once you become a pagan author, you’re no longer allowed to be multifaceted. You’re no longer seen as someone with complex or evolving thoughts. Heaven forbid you once published something a decade ago that no longer reflects who you are today—it will still haunt you.

When you brand yourself as an author, you’re branding yourself as a single archetype. And yet, a fully developed human being is made up of many archetypes at once. If your branding is successful, then people will only see that one archetype you’ve presented. And they will judge you as that limited version of yourself.

How people perceive that reduced archetype—this caricature—is often polarized. You’re either pure brilliance or pure awful. You’ll either be the hero on a pedestal or the villain someone is determined to take down. And when they do take a swing at you, they get to be the underdog hero that the audience roots for.

The irony is that most of us who become authors—most writers—are shy, introverted, insecure people. We’ve experienced marginalization. We were often the outcasts, the underdogs, the kids who got picked on. And now, suddenly, because we’re published, we’re perceived as the Goliath. But not a single bone or nerve in your body actually feels like Goliath.

There’s a kind of dissonance there—I don’t even know if I’m using the word “cognitive dissonance” correctly—but something happens when you’re faced with that mismatch between how you’re perceived and who you know yourself to be.

People say, “Never meet your heroes,” and now, bizarrely, they’re referring to you.

And with the rare exception of the narcissistic bad apples in any field, I can assure you—no author wants to be a hero. No one wants to be seen that way. And it’s not about false modesty. It’s just the truth. When you call someone a hero—when they’re just an ordinary person trying to live their life—you’re setting them up to fail.

An author is just someone who took the time and effort to sit down and write out their thoughts in a (hopefully) cohesive, organized way—and had the grit to see the manuscript through to publication. That’s it. That’s all it is.

I don’t think Noam Chomsky or Eckhart Tolle necessarily has more brilliant ideas than, say, my husband James hasn’t already come up with himself—while sitting in the bathtub with a beer in hand. You know what I mean? The difference is that a published author has a particular skill set and stamina for completing manuscripts that maybe Joe Plumber hasn’t developed, or hasn’t had the time or opportunity to develop yet.

To the new pagan author: I warn you—people will forget that you have feelings. Or worse, they won’t forget. They’ll realize you have feelings and just not care.

And to be fair, it’s not entirely the public’s fault. It’s partly our fault, or maybe the industry’s. There’s intense pressure to brand yourself as an author. If people can’t sum up who you are and what your work is about in three words, you won’t gain popularity. But if they can sum you up in three words—congratulations, you’ve branded well—and you’ll be rewarded with visibility.

But then, to maintain that visibility, you have to stay on brand all the time. There will be constant external pressure for you to stay in your lane. A private person who hasn’t branded themselves can have different opinions on all kinds of topics. No one asks them for sources or a CV. But as a public figure, you don’t get that grace anymore—not after publication, and certainly not if your branding is successful.

Once you become known for something, you’ll only be “allowed” to speak on that narrow range of subjects. You’ll be told to stay in your lane. People will say that author branding is a double-edged sword—and they’re right. The more successful your branding, the more your voice seems to matter. But at the same time, the more your true self gets lost in the process.

Live by the sword, die by the sword, I guess.

To the new pagan author: I warn you that, at some point, you will be called a gatekeeper.

Let’s say in your book, you write something simple, like, “Personally, I think strawberry jam is better than blueberry jam. I’m not particularly fond of blueberry jam.” That’s all you said. But people will misinterpret it. They’ll claim you said blueberry jam is inferior to strawberry jam. That you’re disparaging people who like blueberry jam. That you’re dismissing the entire population who prefers it.

And before you can even clarify, you’ve become that author—the one who gatekeeps jam.

To the new pagan author: seasoned authors will often tell you not to care what others think. Don’t worry about what people say. Shrug it off. Don’t pay attention to the negativity.

I’m still conflicted about whether that’s healthy advice. I really don’t know.

We should care what our loved ones think of us—because how they perceive us is a reflection of how we’ve treated them. And in my personal spiritual worldview, we should treat everyone as our loved ones. We should love all people. And if we do love people—truly—then we should care about what they think of us. Their thoughts and feelings about us reflect, whether we like it or not, how we’ve been treating them.

So in that sense, shouldn’t we care? Shouldn’t we be open to hearing when someone thinks something negative about us—and ask, “Is that a fair reflection of how I’ve treated them?”

But then again—what do you do when it’s the entire internet calling you a terrible human being?

How do you process that in an emotionally healthy way?

Here’s the conundrum: when you publish a book, you need to consent—at least intellectually—to being critiqued. To being criticized. That’s part of the deal. And if your voice becomes influential, then for the sake of intellectual checks and balances in a democratic society, your ideas should be vigorously challenged.

If you’re smart, then on some level, you understand that.

But… do we ever really grow out of being that little kid who got picked on for being different?

Why does public condemnation of your publicly celebrated work feel so much like the bullying you endured as a kid, when you were nobody?

So to the new pagan author, I’ll just say this: For some reason, the grass is always going to feel greener on the other side.