This Just In: Haters Gonna Hate

On being a good sport, and the limits thereof ("therein"?).

Coincidentally, days before Orli Auslander sent me her illustration of her husband, Shalom Auslander, wearing a dunce cap, I made this drawing of myself wearing one for the cartooning class I’m taking, led by the brilliant Aubrey Hirsch.

At Oldster earlier this week I published “A Word to the Unwise: Confessions of a Grieving Fool,” a humorous and moving essay in which Shalom Auslander —struggling to accept a close contemporary’s death and the ravages of time — pokes a little fun at me and my magazine, and at some of the more upbeat respondents to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.

If you read the piece (co-published in Oldster and Shalom’s Fetal Position newsletter, on the latter of which, “Oldster Magazine” shares the byline ) it should be pretty obvious that I’m in on the joke, and that, more than anything, Shalom is poking fun at himself for his constitutional inability to adopt a brighter outlook about getting older (or anything).

But not every one of my subscribers and Shalom’s got that, and a few took the post as an opportunity to act like assholes in the comments, bashing me, Oldster, and the upbeat questionnaire respondents mentioned in his piece. (I mean, it was only a very few, like five, between my post and Shalom’s, but to an approval-seeking Libra like me, this constitutes a five-alarm fire). I wish I could say I didn’t anticipate this, but I have been on this here Internet for decades now, and so of course I did.

Before publishing, I wanted to make sure Shalom’s piece wasn’t taken the wrong way by the upbeat Oldster Questionnaire respondents he mentioned. So, a day ahead, I emailed the draft to each of them, with a note explaining my take: that it was all in good fun; that mostly Shalom was roasting himself; that I’m not offended, and find the piece funny. They each wrote back, kindly assuring me they took no offense and found the piece hilarious. This was classy of them, and a great relief.

Once the piece went out, I waited for the first jerk to appear, and I did not have to wait long. More surprising than the mean comment was how much it hurt, and how inclined I felt to take the bait and argue with the commenter. I’d been able to be a good sport about Shalom lightly roasting me and my magazine, but this was something else, and it stung.

Then I remembered how a friend of mine handles nasty commenters on her posts to social media and her newsletter: just delete them, let it go, and move on.

As you can glean from these illustrations I made for the cartooning class, letting go of things is not my strong suit.

So that’s what I did — I removed that mean comment and subsequent ones, added a comment of my own and pinned it to the top, letting everyone know that insults would be removed. (Shalom kindly followed suit on his version.)

Maybe I should have just left the comments there. Honestly, it’s a worse look for the people who posted the insults — it does not speak well of them that they would strike out against me and my contributors on a post I had published in one place, and co-authored in another. But I’ve learned from earlier shitty comments on other posts — comments I did initially leave up — that all it does is invite additional jerks to pile on. Then others chime in defending you or the poster, and before you know it, a fight has broken out in the comments section. It gets complicated and ugly, and that’s not what I want my magazine and its comments section to be like.

Fortunately, overwhelmingly, it is not! Day in and day out, I find the Oldster audience to be kind and supportive, and actively engaged with one another, often inter-generationally. It’s been so heartening to witness this, again and again. I’m not going to let a few rotten apples spoil the bunch — not going to let them reset the tone, which has been respectful and positive, overall.

People are of course entitled to not like me or my work, or any given post by one of my contributors. (And I’ll note here that, fortunately, my haters and Oldster’s are very much in the minority.) Sometimes people post valid criticisms, and I tend to respond to those. Occasionally I’ll counter them.

For instance, yesterday I responded to one person in the comments of Shalom’s piece who sort of broadly characterized Oldster as a font of toxic positivity. I didn’t feel that was fair. I pointed out that every respondent to the Oldster Questionnaire answers the questions, “What’s difficult about being your age” and “What has aging taken away from you?” Most don’t hold back, complaining about everything from aches and pains, to loss of libido, to weight gain, to hair loss, to an increase in friends and family dying, and more.

I added that the question “What is surprising about being your age, or different from what you expected, based on what you were told?” sometimes leads respondents to lament they hadn’t been sufficiently forewarned by their forebears about the hardships of aging.

I also pointed out that I’ve published many essays about harder experiences contributors have had while getting older. For instance, just off the top of my head:

• one about encountering ageism on the workfront by Ray Suarez

• one about caring for a difficult elderly parent by Carolita Johnson

• one about experiencing housing insecurity in her 60s by Trisha Kostis

• one about progressive cognitive dysfunction, thanks to a combination of traumatic brain injury and aging by Judith Hannah Weiss.

I didn’t mention this to the commenter, but will add here that every other Friday, I post an “open thread,” inviting subscribers to comment on their experiences of various aging-related problems, such as:

• progressive alcohol intolerance

• menopause, and not being a candidate for hormone replacement therapy

• arthritis and other joint issues

• feeling pressured to “age well,” one way or another

• hearing loss and the stigma associated with it

That said, in my magazine there are many positive reflections on getting older, and — as a person living in an ageist, youth-obsessed, capitalist culture that wants me to feel bad about getting older — I am here for them!

Sometimes it seems as if the occasional jerk in the Oldster comments is just trying to seem punk rock by rejecting a contributor’s positive outlook. Who’s going to tell them there’s nothing edgy about echoing and reinforcing our culture’s dominant, shitty attitudes towards aging and older people? That it’s more punk rock to, for example, respond to my birthday post in which I confess to my anxiety around turning 60 in two years by attesting, You know what, Sari? To my great surprise, my life mostly improved after 60, and, who knows, maybe yours will, too. Don’t buy into the negative hype.

I actually believe my contributors who say that, despite some inevitable difficulties, they’re having positive experiences later in life. I’m inspired by them, and so are many of my readers.

Since launching two-and-a-half years ago, I’ve received a couple of notes from elderly people telling me that reading Oldster has made them feel less lonely, and essentially restored their desire to keep going in life — no small thing. I’ve also heard from younger people that older contributors recounting positive experiences of aging makes them feel slightly less anxious about what lies ahead.

This is good. I’m proud of it. Five assholes aren’t going to take it away from me.

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In other news…

• Tomorrow, April 4th, at 7pm, at the Elting Memorial Library in New Paltz, I’ll be in conversation with Will Hermes about his incredible biography, Lou Reed: The King of New York.