‘The Great Collapso’ or ‘How I Learned To Start Worrying & Reconsidering Everything’
I’ve recently been blessed with the ability to do something I love while also making enough money to get by. It won’t, by any means, last forever and there will be times throughout this experience where I am so down on my own abilities that it will make me want to set myself on fire before pushing myself off on a barge. You see, I’m a writer and I write for a website that I love from the very bottom of my heart.
My work for hecklerspray is extensive and wide-ranging. People reading this will no doubt have seen me clamouring desperately for their approval and attention. A lot of what we talk about is based almost exclusively on potentially libellous fictions that we spin for the amusement and the ire of our readers.
In doing so, the hecklerspray writer takes on a persona, an alter-ego if you will. When you write for hecklerspray you have to take every negative thought and attribute in your entire being and multiply it by a factor of around ten to fifteen. You have to distance yourself from any genuine feeling that you may have toward a particular celebrity or, in my case, product in order to make sure that you can lampoon them and their actions successfully.
Hecklerspray writers are called a never-ending stream of obscenities for creating pieces of satire. The people who hate them are the people who don’t get the joke or, perhaps worse, are so blinded by their own perceptions of someone that they are unable to see the attempt at humour.
That’s what I love about it. In a way it is all things to all people. Like us or loathe us, the chances are that we provide something quite different to anything that you’ve read before. As such, I am hugely proud to say that I am a part of hecklerspray, a blog that has launched many a career and made many a celebrity think twice about themselves.
However tonight it came to my attention that my use of swear words may well be impacting upon my employability. Anyone can use google these days and it’s a well established fact that potential employers will use google to ‘check up on’ the activities of candidates.
That’s fine. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, the internet is a powerful tool that should be used as widely as it humanly possible. However, if my employability is being hampered by my use of the more colourful side of the English language then perhaps I should capitulate and remove the offending pieces?
You see, it is video content that seems to be my particular downfall. I don’t like making videos, despite evidence to the contrary. I find putting myself in the public domain as a more physical presence that you can see and hear to be very difficult. However, taking on the role of the heckler, the nefarious trickster who is charged with taking on all of the silly things we see in the world around us, I feel I am able to do it. I revel in it.
I swear in articles for the same reason that I swear in videos. Not because I am angry but because the context demands it. The context of my employment with hecklerspray is that I will go out of my way to be rude, craven and foul-mouthed in order to put across a point. Working for people who are focussed in a different area, I am capable of altering my own persona to take into that into account.
I don’t doubt that, taken out of context, my work might come across as ‘untouchable’ to an employer. It would be ridiculous for me to think anything else. In saying that, I am proud of the body of work that I have created in the length of time I have been writing. I might not be the best writer, the funniest or the most succinct but I’m certainly not the worst, dullest and I certainly don’t go on neverending monologues about my potty mouth. Moreover, in my work and my use of the internet I have managed to engage with hundreds of wonderful people using my real name. People who respect my opinions and my thoughts on the world and some who would like nothing better than to see me shot through the spine in a darkened alley.
What are my options? I could take down the offending videos and articles containing the ‘offensive words’ in order to censor myself and boost my employability. I could change my professional pseudonym- at the moment I go by my real name but it would not be too much of a stretch if I were to change that to ‘The Great Collapso’ after all, look at this blog. It exists and the people who are interested in what I have to say, swear words an’ all would be able to find me if they needed to.
The wider question of swearing is something for you to discuss amongst yourselves as, quite frankly, I wouldn’t care to get involved in such a back and forth. You either believe that it’s base or you believe that it’s necessary. Believe what you want, that’s not my purpose here but what I will say is that swearing is entirely contextual. If you look at The Guardian and read G2 and their Comment is Free sections then you will see profuse levels of swearing whereas their news content has none. There is a time and a place for swearing and it would seem as though swearing might actually have a place in the broadsheet media.
I’m not trying to hide from what hecklerspray has ‘made me’. My internet ‘presence’ is something that I am immensely proud of and I have worked very, very hard to cultivate. Some of you reading this will be thinking “you have got nowhere at all” and that’s up to you- we are all entitled to our own thoughts and opinions and I can categorically guarantee that there are people ‘out there’ who don’t like me or what I do one little bit. My videos and my articles are part of who I am and each one tells me something about who I am. If other people enjoy them, then great. After all, all writers really want is to be noticed.
To them, I say this. I have made my decision to be the person that I want to be. I have every intention of making a career from writing that may never see me rich but will always see me happy. When all is said and done, that’s all that matters. I feel like I’ve found my niche in this world, the thing that makes me employable and an asset to employers. I can write.
Whether I write profanity-laden articles or I write copy for a service or product, I have a style that people seem to relate to. I’ve created things that people have loved, I’ve created things that people have despised enough to wish aggressive cancer upon me and all of that is part of what I do and what I dream of doing for the rest of my life. If I go to the grave with nothing else, I’ll go safe in the knowledge that I said what I wanted to say in the way that I wanted to.
Anyone wanting to do a ‘swear count’ on this will be sorely disappointed.
