I work alone. I love working alone.
After almost 15 years of working alone, I still marvel at how much I can get done in a day, with no commute, with no meetings, with no stiffs hanging on my cubicle wall telling me what was on the Jon Stewart show last night that we both fucking saw, and without having to spend hours proving to bosses why their ideas are dumb, because you're not allowed to just tell bosses their ideas are dumb.
I love working alone so much that I've contemplated making a t-shirt that says, "At Writing Boots, we work more than you, we read more than you, we exercise more than you, we spend more time with our kid than you, we sleep more than you, and we drink more than you." (I've never had the shirt made, because I worry it could make people jealous.)
However: On some days it gets pretty quiet around here. Sometimes, having 500 consecutive thoughts, all your own … well that gets a little monotonous, a little tidy, a little airless. You begin to feel like a professional spinster.
And sometimes, usually in the late afternoons, you start trouble on people's Facebook posts just to find out if you really exist. (Or have you become a transparent eyeball?)
And when your friends politely tell you to fuck off, it hurts a little.
And the pain is real, so your nerves must be real, so you must be real.
And you go back to work, relieved.
And you try not to realize that Internet trolls do what they do based on the same need to prove they exist, by stabbing and being stabbed back. (And you protect by parentheses the further likelihood that the only difference between you and an Internet troll is, you have more work to do.)
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