Briefly by Melissa Melissa Miles McCarter

I talk about my thoughts inspired by The New York Times article Can This Man Stop Lying. What does it teach us about the thin line between storytelling and deception? I share my thoughts on what good writing does that lying prevents.


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There is a picture I am not going to share on my private Facebook account. I won’t share the story behind the photo there either.
It’s a story that’s very meaningful to me. However, I decided not to share the experience there because social media judges you.
Well, to put it more specifically, people on social media may judge you. But, when they do, it can feel like that everyone on that virtual landscape is against you.
The picture is of my daughter getting a shot.
It’s a story about vaccinating my daughter against COVID-19.
(You can read the story behind this photo for free here, if you would like.)
Hopefully, now that you know this medical decision, you will not judge me. You won’t see me as a bad parent, or try to convince me that I made a bad decision. You won’t unsubscribe (or unfriend) out of disgust. You won’t speak ill of me and strive to ruin my reputation.
I decided not to share my decision to vaccinate my daughter on my personal Facebook because I was afraid my “friends” on there would.
I was afraid they would judge me.
Unfortunately, we are in such a politicized world, there might be people I know on there who would do that. They would judge me for a medical decision I made about my daughter.
The sad thing is, I am not as worried about being judged by strangers. You have to have somewhat of a thick skin to be a writer. It hurts when they do react negatively to anything you wrote, but it isn’t anything personal, really.
But, on Facebook, some of these “friends” may choose to be the judge, jury, and executioner. These “friends” might even be my relatives and neighbors in real life. These “friends” might even be friends.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
So, you might ask, why don’t you just unfriend them? Why not stop interacting with them on social media? The fact is, I have done that over certain issues. I won’t comment on certain posts, I will scroll on by. I have unfriended people.
I have to decide about each controversial post or picture, or thought: is this is a hill to die on?
I keep my private social media circle small on purpose. I have public social media for writing, but rarely post stories or articles on my private accounts.
I can’t say I am innocent of judging people on social media. So, it’s not me pointing fingers at horrible people I should just not be interacting with. At times, my own “judginess” has gotten the best of me and I have not always had restraint. It never feels good when I do judge, but it’s human nature.
So, at least for me, my solution is to not post anything controversial on private social media. In fact, I mainly share updates and pictures about my daughter. But that’s where it gets difficult. This update, that my daughter got vaccinated, is controversial.
But, it is also very important for us personally. It means the peace of mind we have wanted for almost two years. And, yet, people would call us sheep for wanting that peace.
So, what about you?
Do you separate your personal from your private in terms of social media? Or do you even care? Or do you just keep your circle tighter, only interacting with people who are supportive no matter what? Or do you risk alienating people?
When is it a hill to die on for you?
When social media judges you….do you care?


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There’s a common narrative in pop culture that people with disabilities are sad and frail. They are presented as individuals struggling to deal with challenges they are woefully defined by.
Movies and television shows often focus on the limits created by disabilities. In fact, it is a common trope in which having a disability means almost self-absorbed suffering.
On top of that, portrayals of disabilities tend to focus on external, extremely visible, limitations.
The more obvious the disability, the better.
I thought about this common portrayal while watching the ABC television drama “A Million Little Things.” One of the main characters, Eddie, struggles with drug addiction throughout the series. But, that apparently was not enough drama. Once that story-line seemed to hit a dead end, this character ended up losing use of his legs through an accident.
I will acknowledge that his disability apparently is permanent in the show. That’s a shift away from the commonly presented idea that disability is a temporary story-line.
However, the shift is from something he might heal from to having to painstakingly adapt to his disability. It’s in this process of adaptation that we see the problematic idea that living with a disability is only a sad and whiny existence.
The problem isn’t that the disability is portrayed in terms of a grief process.
Certainly a sense of loss occurs in the real-life experience of adapting to some disabilities. The show attempts to show that process in a realistic way. In fact, one guest actor, who plays a character who helps the main character grieve, is paralyzed in real life.
The problem I see is when this version of living with a disability is the main one people associate with being disabled. The fact is, the majority of disabilities are silent or invisible, and wouldn’t necessarily be as dramatic a story-line onscreen.
Here is another problem with depictions of disability: no one’s disability is a one size fits all journey. Some have a much easier time adapting; the circumstances are often different when they do.
As a result, having a stereotypical trope about disabilities gives audience a skewed view.
In an interesting article in The Hollywood Reporter, Alex Barone explores this phenomenon about disabled characters, “who are sad about their disabilities and must explain them constantly."
Barone writes quite astutely, based on his personal experience having a disability:
This is an example of what “real life” is like for a disabled person. In real life, my hands may come up once during my first conversation with someone — but that’s about it. They are not an ongoing focal point for conversation, as would usually be portrayed in film and television. My conversations are also not about how I can or can’t overcome this or that. Yet on screen, it can seem for disabled actors like the only characters we can play are characters who solely talk about their disability — or whose lives revolve around their disability as if that is the totality of their existence, when in fact it’s one of the most minor parts of our conversations and our lives.
Further, I agree with Barone when he writes, “We need to see characters with strength, tenacity and grit. We need superheroes, love interests and leading men and women.”
Interestingly, Marvel features the first deaf superhero in the upcoming movie The Eternals, played by Lauren Ridloff. She agrees with Barone’s idea that we need a superhero who provides a representation that includes people with disabilities.
Rather than just showing characters being limited by their challenges, depictions like Ridloff’s character show heroes using their disabilities to their advantage.
Rather than being inherently fragile, someone’s vulnerabilities become someone’s strengths.
As someone who has an invisible mental health disability, I always say my writing focuses on dealing with life’s challenges. I’m not defined by tho

Fame is now available to all, according to Chris Hayes, who has a show on MSNBC. And he thinks this can be a problem. And it is all social media’s fault.
In a sense, everyone is a pop star through the use of their social media.
In Hayes’ insightful essay on The New Yorker, he says,
“Never before in history have so many people been under the gaze of so many strangers. Humans evolved in small groups, defined by kinship: those we knew, knew us. And our imaginative capabilities allowed us to know strangers—kings and queens, heroes of legend, gods above—all manner of at least partly mythic personalities to whom we may have felt as intimately close to as kin. For the vast majority of our species’ history, those were the two principal categories of human relations: kin and gods. Those we know who know us, grounded in mutual social interaction, and those we know who don’t know us, grounded in our imaginative powers.”
The idea that strangers know us, and we may not know them, creates an uneven balance that used to be only in the realm of celebrities. It is more than just being subject to gossip. It being under the gaze of others.
Thus, Hayes says, The Era of Mass Fame is upon us.
He writes,
“In the same way that electricity went from a luxury enjoyed by the American élite to something just about everyone had, so, too, has fame, or at least being known by strangers, gone from a novelty to a core human experience.”
I think this is particularly true of youth, who have access to fame without cultural gatekeepers. While the song says, “video killed the radio star,” social media has given life to a new star. It’s not just the time of the selfie.
It is the time when YOU are the star.
Leaving the fact that this can lead to narcissism aside, we know that people seeking fame feel an incredible amount of insecurity and it rarely leads to happiness. It’s the annoying refrain we hear from celebrities, who bemoan the scrutiny of fame while enjoying its privilege.
But cultural gatekeepers kept fame as a minority. Often fame is just an illusive experience. But, now, anyone can be an influencer, have a notable name, or gain attention through social media.
It’s the almighty algorithm that makes it possible, rather than those gatekeepers in traditional media. It’s the most democratized notion of fame.
But, it is also perhaps more addictive because it is so random.
The intermittent conditioning that you get with a slot machine, where you keep feeding it quarters in hopes that it randomly spews out a win. It’s much stronger than if you got a win at every turn.
And thus you have people addicted to not only fame, but the hope that the algorithm gods look down at you with favor.
I see this in my own 5-year-old child, wearing sunglasses and saying “I’m famous.” She doesn’t know what that means. She just knows it’s a cultural value. And she also knows it’s something that’s totally available to her. The YouTube stars she follows are ordinary people with cameras. It’s my daughter’s gaze that makes them famous. And it’s a gaze she can easily achieve on her own through social media.
So, if we have a youth that is growing up under the gaze of others, what do we do? Do we see it as a necessary evil or cut the head of that monster off. I think we can only hold off that gaze for so long, if we do try.
All youth will eventually have access to that fame.
We adults can only be gatekeepers for so long. Whether we like it or not, our kids will grow up into pop stars.
Hayes’ essay gives no answers. His modicum of fame is made possible by cultural gatekeepers, so we have to take his siren call with a grain of salt. He is too old too speak to the next generation. His warning serves more to alarm my generation, and we are the pop stars “momagers” at most.
And the next generation knows nothing else, but this gaze.
They ARE famous.
They will not know obscurity. Pandora’s box has already been opened.
So, ra