CANNED APPLAUSE
You Cannot Applaud Your Own Story
Even if you did a really good job
I was thinking about not being able to applaud myself on this platform. Don’t get me wrong. I love Medium. They give me money for my writing which doesn’t happen in most places I go.
I don’t get money for writing at my local coffee shop, when I time at swim meets, or when I visit my more difficult relatives. I get money for writing here which makes me attracted to this platform, as a capitalist.
But I can’t clap for myself here, which confuses my brain. Why is my brain confused? You ask. Because most of us writers do our own applauding. Writing is very masturbatory.
We sit alone in a room and pick the creative lint out of our navels. Say we write a good sentence. An audience is not then sent into our bedrooms to applaud us.
We applaud ourselves. Good job, you. we tell ourselves. You really whittled down that crap stream-of-consciousness until it became a delightful piece of prose. Go write another sentence. You’re on a roll.
There were times I wished for a studio audience, even a canned applause would have sufficed. I did buy a can of applause once, but it was excruciating to open.
The original design was probably great, but the can I bought from the Dollar Store was made on the cheap. I would either cut my hand open or end up having to drop it from a tall building to break it apart.
It wasn’t safe for me or anyone who walked beneath. By the time the laughter erupted from the ill-made can, the thrill was gone. So, my husband bought me a studio audience for my fortieth birthday but we were on a budget.
The audience was comprised of friends and the people who stood outside of Trader Joe's selling Girls Scout cookies. They were either Girl Scouts or very small adults wearing terrible outfits. Either way, it took me to a very dark place.
Though I do my best writing when I’m depressed, my friends think I’m unmedicated. Anyone who sees me work will immediately be demystified by my effusive natural personality and start to make bets on what drugs I take before entering the public arena.
After I got some calls from some very helicoptery parents of Girl Scouts and the local police chapter, I quit hiring external acceptance and returned to applauding my own work. It was less complicated and clapping for myself helped with my aging circulation and Raynaud's.
Everything was going swimmingly, but then I joined Medium. I was told it was a cult. I’ve been in cults. They’re usually pretty happy to release me. I resist authority, am never attracted to charismatic male leaders no matter what they drug me with, and I’m not committed or focused enough to be programmed.
There was no cult risk for me. There was some clit risk — a risk I would end up reading and writing a lot about clits, but only as fodder to repitch my failed tv pilot I’d recently given up on called Clit Life.
Where was I? Applauding. When I joined Medium, I wrote some terrible stories and then immediately tried to applaud myself. You can imagine my alarm when this message came up.
Was it an existential crisis, you ask? A little. But if something is only a little existential crisis, can you really call it an existential crisis? Is there such a thing as existential-lite?
I can hear my college philosophy professor groaning from six states away, the same way he did when I compared Dante’s La Vita Nuova to Barbara Eden’s I Dream of Jeannie— that’s a story for another day.
If you came here looking for answers though, you’re in the right place. Great philosophers will tell you there are only more questions, but as a Diva of Unsolicited Advice, I can offer you this.
Just like the bear who shits in the woods and the tree that falls without recognition, you can still applaud yourself even if no one sees you clapping icon.
I’m clapping it right now or I will as soon as I get these digits off the keyboard. Because let’s be honest, writing is masturbation and with Roe v. Wade being what it is these days, it’s your safest choice.
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