Rejection: Fiction

by Tony Tulathimutte

—but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life: they build a heaven before us, whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

For all people claim to hate being stereotyped, they love doing it to themselves, even better when someone they admire does it to them, they’re dying to be issued their personhood so they can pursue it without hesitation, hence astrology and personality quizzes.

Always with that syllogism that all bad-faith identitycels use: I am an X, and you don’t support me, therefore you don’t support X.

But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What people there really want is to be perceived on their own terms, which is so, so funny. Because if the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask mistaken for a face.

I can’t explain why I believe that privacy is the mainspring of personhood, that the more you reveal the less there is to reveal.