At some point, my roommate and girlfriend at the time found me standing in the bathroom. Just … standing there staring at the door. She brought me to the couch, where I apparently went into convulsions and started vomiting. I blacked out and wasn’t fully conscious for thirty-six to forty-eight hours, when I woke up in the ICU and had a doctor patiently explain to me that I had type 1 diabetes, an immune disorder that usually shows up in children, which is why nobody thought to test me for it at twenty-five. Sometime the year before, an immune response from my body had backfired, and my immune system started killing the islet cells in my pancreas that produce insulin. I would no longer be able to survive without taking four to five shots of synthetic insulin a day and carefully measuring and monitoring everything I ate and all of my physical activity.

  What they did not tell me was that having this immune disorder also meant that outside of an employer-sponsored health insurance plan, I was now forever uninsurable. And the medication it took to keep me alive was going to cost me $500 to $800 a month without insurance. The ICU trip alone was over $20,000, with thousands more in bills coming in for weeks and weeks after I got out of the hospital. Even after my $2500 deductible, I still owed 20 percent of that cost. That was with insurance. I just laughed at these bills. Laughed and laughed.

  Four months later, still recovering from my experience in the ICU and adapting to a life totally reliant on taking medication, I was laid off from my job. To retain the same health insurance plan I paid $60 a month for through my company was $800 a month, paid for on my own. I had to cash out my 401(k) in order to pay for it, because unemployment was just $340 a week (rent alone was $550 a month). If I went just sixty days without some kind of insurance, my condition would be considered “preexisting” and I would become uninsurable for twelve to twenty-four months even through an employer-sponsored plan. So I had to find some way to pay for health insurance—health insurance that still didn’t even pay 100 percent for my drugs. So it was $800 a month for my premium plus another $300 a month for the only partially covered drugs. This was just to stay alive. To keep my head above water.

  I picked up temp jobs, and after getting through my thirty days with them, was able to sign up for some shitty insurance that technically covered me (so I wouldn’t fall between plans and get hit with the preexisting thing), but didn’t pay for my medication. So I was still paying out of pocket for that while trying to pay rent. Credit cards became my friend. I had four of them. Eventually, this situation became unsustainable, and in March of 2007 I packed up all my shit and moved to Dayton, Ohio, where I lived in a friend’s spare bedroom, rent-free, while trying to live on expired insulin and checking my blood sugar the minimum amount possible to save on the cost of the testing strips, which were $1 apiece and which I was supposed to be using seven to eight times a day.

  Without the temp agency I’d been at before in Chicago, I found myself uninsured once again while trying to rack up the requisite number of temp hours I needed from my new temp agency to qualify for their shitty insurance, which, once again, wouldn’t cover my medication anyway. So it didn’t make a difference to how much I was spending on drugs (most of my medication costs were going on a credit card at this point). But it did start the “preexisting condition” clock running again. I only had sixty days to get insured again, but I wasn’t getting enough hours yet to qualify for the new temp agency plan.

  I was sick, my medication was working sporadically since it was expired, and my credit cards were rapidly getting maxed out. I was mostly unemployed and only technically not homeless because I had a friend with a spare bedroom. I just stopped looking at my credit card statements. Being in debt, I figured, was better than being dead. But I knew that if I didn’t get lucky at some point soon, I was going to end up dead regardless.

  I signed up with another temp company, but was still sixty days out from being able to use their insurance. I ended up twisting my ankle and had to go to the ER. The bill was $800. When I got it, I just looked at it and laughed. I never paid that bill. I had to go back to the ER again with an issue related to my IUD. That bill was $600. I laughed at that one too, and didn’t pay it.

  I could pay those ER bills, or pay for the medication that kept me alive. Easy choice.

  My temp company had me working an assignment for three months at a local company. I finally went to the temp company and said, “Listen. I can’t pay for the medication that keeps me alive. Either these people need to hire me or I need to get a full-time position somewhere else.” I went to my employer and said the same.

  The temp company and my employer got together and—bless their hearts—my employer bought out my contract from the temp agency. My salary was just $32,000, and I didn’t negotiate at all, because I got first-day health benefits. And the premiums were free. Yes, free—the company paid 100 percent of the premiums and there was no deductible. I immediately ordered new drugs—the drugs that kept me alive—and paid nothing for them.

  That company saved my fucking life. My spouse sometimes wonders why I still do freelance work for them, and why I don’t charge them the rates I do everyone else.

  It’s because they saved my fucking life.

  But because they saved my fucking life, they also got me for a really good deal. At that point, things were so bad I would have worked for nothing. I would have just worked for the health insurance. Their insurance plan was so good, in fact, it was a common joke over there: “Hey, if you lay me off, I’ll work for free. Just let me keep my health insurance!”

  But today, that shit is over. Today, you don’t have to joke about working for a company for free, just to get the health insurance.

  Today, you don’t have to juggle eight credit cards to get the medication you need to live.

  Today, for the first time in the United States, you can sign up for health insurance no matter how much money you make, no matter what your health condition—even if you have cancer, or you had cancer, or you’ve got some shitty immune disorder like mine. You don’t have to go to bed on some shitty mattress in some friend’s basement hoping and praying that you’ll get some lucky break before your expired medication stops working. You don’t have to beg a company to hire you just for the health benefits.

  Today you don’t have to pay $800 a month for bare minimum coverage, and cash out your 401(k) and live on expired medication. You don’t have to run up multiple credit cards with medical bills. You don’t have to cry when the bills from the ER come in.

  You can go to healthcare.gov and find a health plan that works for you. Can’t afford it? That’s okay. The government will subsidize plans for people who can’t pay for them. You don’t have to worry about being unemployed and homeless and dying of some treatable thing in an alley somewhere.

  You don’t have to hope you’ll get lucky—hope that some friends will take you in and an employer will show you mercy. All you have to do is be a human being. And you’ll be treated like a human being.

  I don’t wish my experience on anyone. It’s my fervent hope that nobody in the United States ever has to live with the fear and terror I did during that year from 2006 to 2007 when my whole world imploded. I want people to forget what it’s like to live that way. I want them to think that this is the kind of story you’d only hear about in some SF dystopia novel. And I don’t want it to be a story that anybody in the country ever has to live again.

  Becoming What You Hate

  When I was eighteen I was living in a shitty apartment, far from home, with an emotionally manipulative boyfriend. I felt totally powerless in my own life. I contemplated suicide often. I would learn, later, that taking birth control pills had caused a debilitating state of depression, one I simply could not shake no matter how much I willed it. Being mentally fucked up by my medication and entangled in an ongoing bullshit relationship with an asshole left me feeling I had no control over my own life.

  So I decided to be someone else.

  I did what a lot of teenagers did, when feeling out of control and powerless over their own lives in the late ’90s:

  I created an online persona.

  Let’s call him Adam, for simplicity’s sake.

  Adam was several years older than me. Confident. Tall. Wiry. Cocky. Single, of course. He was a funny flirt, a writer, and after conversing with some SF/F writers in an online forum for six months, he got invited to edit an early online magazine, which I did for the next six months.

  Being Adam was a fabulous escape from my shitty life. It was the one place I could feel confident, because I was being somebody else. But giving myself that confidence boost meant duping a lot of people. Flirting with a lot of women who thought I was a hot twenty-something dude (and probably a lot of forty-year-old dudes pretending to be women) and spinning tales about a life I certainly did not have. And I did that with many people who were being open and honest with me in return. It was the Wild West of the internet, though, and I didn’t take much at face value. I had learned in the early days of the internet that you could be far more confident and get taken more seriously there than anywhere else at that age. I remember getting into conversations with people in online forums when I was fifteen, and having them speak to me as if I were an adult. It was addictive. It was an escape. It was fabulous.

  It was all a lie.

  Now, to be honest, Adam didn’t say things like the anonymous internet persona known as Requires Hate, the sometimes-reviewer-sometimes-ranter who has been known to say that author so-and-so should have acid thrown in their face, or such-and-such should have his dick cut off, but I conversed with several writers in the field (and interviewed a couple of them!) as this dude, and edited stories as this dude. I went around telling lies to people, because it was too painful for me to be anyone else but a fictional character.

  Eventually I escaped my shitty relationship, and quit editing the magazine, which went defunct soon after. I needed that persona to survive that year and change, though, and it worked. It reminded me there was a life outside myself, one I could build. If I had the strength to be that confident as Adam, I could learn to be that confident as Kameron.

  I started my blog in 2004, after traveling around the world and getting a couple of fancy academic degrees. I’d gone out and built the life I wanted, and I was ready to be me. But I had to become someone I didn’t hate before I could do all that.

  I’ve spent over a decade learning to rein in my anger, my resentment, my hatred for people, for situations, for bullshit. I used to get into angry screaming fights in my teens. I’d lose my temper at the sound of loud voices. I’d snap, lash out, grind people under my boots. It wasn’t until I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight that I realized I wanted a real healthy human relationship that lasted, and that if I wanted to do that, I had to learn patience, compromise, discipline.

  I had to learn to talk out the seething anger. I had to learn where it came from, and stop trying to destroy people with it. I learned my limits. I figured out I was severely introverted, and that when I was ready to lose my shit, I needed to tap out instead, and retreat to a dark place to gather myself again. Much of my anger, I realized, was driven by anxiety and fear. When I’d remove myself from overwhelming social situations, I was better able to manage it.

  But all this took time.

  I had a lot of growing up to do.

  I’m still angry a lot. I use tactical anger in many essays. But when I lose my shit now, it has a purpose. It’s no longer just blind rage on the internet. Confidence helped with that, but mostly it was just getting older; it was getting a chronic illness; it was finding that the life I was living was not how I wanted to live, and changing it.

  I was lucky in that I could do that. I had the resources at my disposal. My parents are solidly middle class. I have academic degrees. I’ve been working regularly since I was sixteen. I’m white, I’m reasonably presentable, my physical limitations are not obvious.

  I made the choice to change my life, and with those resources, and my own will, I was able to do it. But it was a hard slog, learning not to lash out at everything with hate. Learning to be somebody I liked.

  In my early days of reviewing on my blog, back when it was called Brutal Women, I said exactly what I thought of the bullshit sexism I saw in books. I received more than one angry email or comment from an author who thought my hurting their feelings by calling them out for writing a sexist book was some kind of crime, as if I’d actually physically taken a knife to them myself, when in fact it was their own ego-driven Google search that had led them to my review, and their own eyes that had continued to read it, and their own fingers that had typed up the email to send to me so they could engage with me and hear my opinion, once again, firsthand, delivered to their inbox at their request.

  Emailing me to argue about whether or not your book is sexist after I already said so online? Dick move, my friend.

  That said, time heals many rifts. Many perceived hurts. Many perceived wounds. Or they at least scar over. And I am, at least, on “colleague” terms with all those folks today.

  * * *

  Though I have scaled back those honest reviews, I miss them sometimes. I miss saying what I really think. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t occasionally consider creating another persona, a pseudonym, who could speak the raging, blinding, ballsy truth I want to piss all over the internet some days.

  But I realize this is my career. I’m a grown-up. I suck it up. I save the pseudonym for another day.

  I carry on.

  Having lived on the other side of the review divide, I have a particularly healthy(?) relationship with angry reviews of my own work, in particular the sort of angry reviews that have reached the level of those by Requires Hate, who was known for writing seething, hate-filled, pus-spewing reviews full of such vitriol that they were both horrifying and entertaining in equal measure. I eventually had to block that reviewer because people kept RTing her on my Twitter timeline, and my life was just too short to wallow in the mean-spiritedness of it all. And yet when Requires Hate reviewed God’s War, it was not a big deal at all to me. The review boiled down to “This book is so fucking white it’s whitey white white written by a white person” and I’m like, well, yeah, that’s true. You really can’t debate or cry about that. And the buried, useful parts weren’t anything I didn’t already know. I shrugged and moved on, because let’s be real, my friends, I’ve read worse reviews of my books, and I’ve written some pretty angry reviews of other people’s books.

  I’m an adult with book deadlines. I move on. I have shit to do.

  The reviews by Requires Hate hurt the writers who read them, sure (don’t ego-search!), and turned off a lot of readers who might have otherwise bought the book. But they also hurt the reviewer who reviewed them, in the same way I was hurt by all those sexist novels I ranted about back in 2004 to 2006. I understood the feeling, even if I was put off by how it was delivered. It may have lost folks some readers, just like a bad book review at any other blog, but it didn’t ruin anyone’s career. The hurt was not a real knife to the throat, but hurt feelings by pointing out perceived failures for the entertainment of a horde of readers looking for a public savaging of someone’s work.

  It turns out that I’m a big kid, and if I don’t want to read reviews like that, I don’t have to read them. So I didn’t.

  I blocked Requires Hate. I didn’t read the blog.

  I moved on.

  * * *

  At the end of 2012, I read an astonishingly beautiful short story that had me so enthralled that I read the whole thing on my phone, hiding it under my desk at work so I could finish. It was the sort of fiction I wished I was talented enough to write. I saw a lot of the same themes that fascinated me—war, relationships between women, SFnal worlds that felt more like fantasy. But it was from a gifted writer who knew how to turn a phrase with far more beauty and passion than I’d ever been able to.

  It was mind-blowing, heart-wrenching to see writing that good. I fell in love with it immediately.

  It turned out that the author’s work was all like that—exceptional, intricate, lovely. I voted for her for the Campbell Award without hesitation, and told everyone else to as well. I followed her on Twitter. We had lovely conversations. She tweeted about bees and makeup and beautiful stories.

  She was fabulous. The writing was sublime. I was in love.

  It was all a lie.

  * * *

  Back in 1967, a writer named Alice Sheldon created a whole new life, an entire persona, called James Tiptree, Jr. She managed this fiction for many years. Robert Silverberg famously said of Tiptree, “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.”

  Sheldon found a particularly beautiful world in that persona, for many reasons, among them the confidence and freedom it brought. After she was outed as Tiptree in 1976 (after fans saw a letter of Tiptree’s about his mother dying in Chicago, they looked up the obituary and made the connection), she said, “My secret world had been invaded and the attractive figure of Tiptree—he did strike several people as attractive—was revealed as nothing but an old lady in Virginia.”

  Being outed was devastating, but the secret, like all secrets, was bound to come out, and Sheldon must have known that as much as Requires Hate did when she decided to turn her hand at publishing fiction in the very venues she’d critiqued, befriending the very authors whose work she’d been shiv-grindingly reviewing for the lulz. The house of cards always comes tumbling down.

  Sometimes you are well prepared for it. Sometimes you’ve completed the transition and moved on, as I had with Adam. Sometimes you haven’t.

  When secrets come out, sometimes people feel betrayed. I’m sure Silverberg felt sort of silly, probably the way I felt at being duped when I learned the writer who wrote the fiction I loved was the same one pissing vitriol all over the internet. I was lucky in that I got to sit with the uncomfortable knowledge that it was very likely the same person for several months before it was confirmed. It gave me time to digest the anger, sure, but more than that—the grief. I physically grieved for an online character I’d developed an affection for the previous two years. It was like losing a real person.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24