When you write about your life, you’re going to hear about it

Standing outside a bar with a group of people, I start to introduce myself to someone. He interrupts me and says “I know who you are; you’re famous.” He doesn’t mean that I’m famous-famous; what he means is that he recognizes me from my column, and that in the same situation, so would his friends. It is, though, my kind of micro-local famousness that often works out to be more compelling than the big, regular kind.

It’s hard to be invested in real celebrities, who are decidedly Others, but it’s easy to react and relate to someone who is tangibly similar and close by. On a 10-point scale of local, literary celebrity, I’m about a one-and-a-half. Maybe a two during the weeks that I get a haircut and go to all the parties. Regularly excavating my life for its universal qualities and re-purposing my retarded, exciting, tragic and altogether normal experiences for a readership renders myself into a meta-person, a persona, a sort-of-kind-of famous non-famous person.

As a columnist, I trade in empathy, entertainment and exhibitionism, mostly because I’m interested in making other people feel the way I feel when I read something new and true, and also because I sense things in this overwhelming-to-me way that wants examination and exorcism, and also because I’m kind of serious and icy-shy in real life (well, until I like someone, and start swarming them with affection and presence and text messages and my best jokes).

My position in the attention economy means that I often feel existentially sated, comforted that my perspectives are heard and responded to. It’s not real or important — micro-fame isn’t where I go for after-dinner snugs on the couch — but having to schedule time to read and respond to emails from strangers about my feelings is as fulfilling as it is bizarre. No one’s ever had to explain the appeal of social networking to me: being known, however it happens, can feel close to love.

OK, but it also sucks. It’s weird when people who used to like me don’t like me anymore, and it’s weird when people who didn’t used to like me start to. It’s weird being recognized, which happens sometimes, in certain places. Anyone with a few pages of Google results is going to be shit-talked at some juncture, and made aware of it: it’s not like I can always blithely ignore the nastier emails, and it’s not like my friends don’t tell me when someone trashes me on their streetcar, and it’s not like I know how or if to justify my real estate for self-expression to people whose sticky-black envy is bred from their own empathy, from our recognizable and acute similarities. Fuck you too, I guess?

Last week I had coffee with a young fashion writer whose talent, much-documented hot style and ambition will forever albatross her; days later I assured a sensitive full-time blogger who I’d criticized that I did it because she’s worth it and not because I’m another jealous hater. (She has a lot of those.) Alpha-exhibitionists like us are made, obviously: we all asked for it, and continue to. The raging public insatiability for the inside on other people’s lives (especially the lives of women; extra-especially the lives of young women) is met only by the raging private insatiability for people (especially women; extra-especially young women) to provide it.

Still, writing a personal column that covers some grit like sex and family and work and fear in a newspaper occupies a wiggly spot in the social and professional hierarchies: another writer told me I had the coolest job in Toronto, which made me feel puffed-up and successful and grateful; a sweet friend from high school looked at her shoes when I told her what I do for a living, clearly embarrassed for me, which made me feel like a gross, striving failure.

This also happens when my arrogance about my-life-as-fodder comes up against the panic of being wrong, or stupid. Did my dad need to know I was raped? Do my future babies, or future bosses, need to know that I like drugs? Should I lie about my job to suitors? Like bad, big tattoos and heated Twitter overshares, the consequences of exhibitionism are left to play out, unchecked. I have some rules, like selective self-exposure (I write about fucking, but not about who I date), and cooling out when my own gnarly, empathy-based jealousy materializes (having your own ranks of haters makes being one hugely unattractive) and remembering that micro-celebrity is something I made, and can abandon any time. Not that I’m about to. 

» Email kcarraway@eyeweekly.com or Tweet @katecarraway, about anything at all.