This is a long one, but it’s also an important one, so please bear with me.

Someone recently described me online as "a profoundly unpleasant person.”

He wrote:

“I friended him on Facebook because I admired his work, but his smug sanctimony makes him one of the most disagreeable people I have ever encountered."

That's a lot of superlatives.

I also don't think that person realized that I would see their comments, but I'm happy to hear that they admire my work.

I was speaking to a storytelling friend recently on the topic of vulnerability. Specifically, she asked how I was able to share so much of my life with the world. I tell stories about the most embarrassing, shameful, and ridiculous moments. I post an annual list of my flaws and shortcomings and invite friends and readers to contribute to the list. I expose my failures openly. I write and speak about things that most people prefer to keep quiet about.

Like sharing that anonymous comment that opened this post with you.

Most people would probably avoid publicizing such scorn.

I told my storytelling friend that I thought it was probably a combination of two things:

• At a young age, desperate for attention, I discovered that sharing my life, including and especially my least successful moments, garnered attention from my parents, teachers, and peers. Sharing moments of failure and embarrassment made them laugh, opened their hearts, and drew them closer to me.
• I also discovered that vulnerability was attractive. Opening my heart and mind to a girl was oftentimes the key to her heart. I wasn't always the strongest or the fastest. I didn't have the best car or the best job. My haircut was a perpetual disaster. My clothing was never right. But when I shared my failures and embarrassments in an entertaining way, it made girls laugh, and making girls laugh eventually made some of them turn their heads in my direction.

Elysha stated that it was my willingness to share my life that first attracted her to me.

So I stand by those two reasons, but my storytelling friend offered me a third:

• Vulnerability is my armor. If I share the things that others might use to insult or attack me, I disarm them completely. Openly acknowledging your weaknesses, embarrassments, and failures - especially in an entertaining way - prevents others from using them against you.

I think she might be right.

I didn't always have it easy as a kid. I was poor. I wore hand-me-down clothing that rarely fit well. Until I grew into my body, I looked like a bobblehead with two enormous teeth sticking out of his mouth. I was forced to learn to play baseball right-handed, even though I am left-handed because my hand-me-down glove was for a right-handed player, so I was a mess on the baseball diamond for a long time. I never had the right camping gear when my Boy Scout troop headed into the woods. I lived so much of my childhood on my own.

It was hard.

It didn't get any better after getting kicked out of my home following high school graduation and living on my own. I found friends who loved me, but I also struggled constantly and didn't always work for or with the best people. Life was hard for several years, and I often found myself in situations for which I was wholly unprepared and lacking any support.

But through it all, I remained an open book. "Living out loud" as one friend has described it. Sharing every trip, stumble, and face-planting fall that I suffered.

I think my storytelling friend is right. I think my vulnerability was and is my armor. Share everything, and there's nothing left for anyone to attack you with.

It's why I'm so good at making fun of my own last name. In fact, no one is better at making fun of my last name than me. When someone tries to tease me about it, I always dismiss their meager attempt with a far better barb of my own.

It's why I make fun of my golf game. I tell stories about every horrendous, embarrassing, humiliating shot of my life. Just recently, I started playing better, posting my best score ever last weekend, but as I've started to finally improve, one of my friends said, "I don't know how you could play so badly for so long and keep coming back."

Vulnerability. I was always willing to hit the ball poorly (or not at all) and laugh at my failure. Share my failure with my friends. I wrote an entire memoir about a season of mostly embarrassing golf.

I really need to publish it someday. It's a lot better than it sounds. Quite possibly the best thing I've ever written.

It's also why I posted that unkind comment at the top of this post. Remember?

Smug sanctimony
Most disagreeable person someone has ever encountered
Profoundly unpleasant

Harsh words. Also kind of funny.

And not entirely untrue. In fact, I argue in Someday Is Today that a certain degree of smugness will assist you in your creative pursuits. When the hill is steep, the obstacles are many, and the support is nonexistent, a certain degree of smugness might be just what you need to keep climbing.

What one person sees as smugness might be another person's desperate attempt at maintaining supreme self-confidence.

Sanctimony though? I don't think so, but then again, if you write a post every single day for 20 years - more than 7,200 in total - you're probably going to offer a lot of opinions on a lot of things, so perhaps over time, that might seem sanctimonious.

When you say nothing, or say very little, or share nothing with the world save the occasional insult, it's probably quite easy to avoid sanctimony altogether. So perhaps sanctimony is the unintended effect of writing a hell of a lot.

But disagreeable? Absolutely I am disagreeable. When I was 10 years old, I wrote to Stephen Spielberg, explaining to him that I loved his movies, but every one of them seemed to have one or two moments of stupidity that he didn't see, so I told him to send me his movies first, so I could point out the dumb parts and help fix them.

This was after seeing ET: The Extra-Terrestrial. The frog scene in that movie is stupid. I stand by that assessment today.

So yes, I'm disagreeable.

I grew up as a Yankees fan in the Boston area.

I love to remind people that lobster was once considered trash food, so awful that the servants in New England had it written into their contracts that they could only be served lobster three days a week. Only when it became rare and expensive was it deemed tasty by the upper-class.

I've always preferred the road not taken. I look to zig when others zag. I avoid conformity like the plague.

So disagreeable? Sure. Not the most disagreeable person on the planet, I think, but yes. I am disagreeable which is really to say that I am willing to openly express my opposition to things. In my mind, a disagreeable person is simply a person willing to share what he sees as wrongheaded, incorrect, foolish, stupid, morally objectionable, and dumb.

In fact, I think agreeable people kind of suck. I think agreeable people are just silent people, holding in their disagreements from the world.

If you don't have disagreements with this world, I suspect your eyes are closed or you're living in a rather lovely bubble. Just look around. There is a hell of a lot that you should find disagreeable.

In fact, If Elysha ever told me that she's bringing a friend over for dinner who is very agreeable, I think I'd find an excuse not to be home.

But "profoundly unpleasant?"

I really don't think so. If I were as profoundly unpleasant as this person claims, I don't think I'd have so many incredible friends in my life. I'm blessed with an enormous number of people who genuinely like me. But who knows? Maybe they are all profoundly unpleasant, too. Or perhaps they love my profoundly unpleasant nature.

I doubt it, but I'm willing to keep an open mind.

Either way, here's the best part:

I don't care about that anonymous person's comments. My storytelling friend is right. My armor of vulnerability prevents these blows from landing in any meaningful way. Rather than allowing the comment to stand, I used it to write this post. Expose it to the world. Acknowledge some of its potential accuracies and thus steal its power for my own purposes.

And I like this post a lot. I like a lot of the things that I wrote. I loved writing that agreeable people kind of suck. I loved telling the story of Steven Spielberg. I liked leaning on the wisdom of Robert Frost. And I really enjoyed sharing someone's rather unkind comments about me with you.

Truly.

Vulnerability. My armor against the world. Yes, I think my storytelling friend was correct.

Malke it your armor, too.