Be Brave Friday: I lost my cool this week and it somehow turned out to be a good thing.

Photo by Copper and Wild on Unsplash

The worst part of having a daily local news site is this: You mess up all the time. When you have a staff of two (yourself included), you copyedit your own work, you have to make decision after decision after decision, you’re liable to mess up a ton of times.

This is especially true when you put out more than a million words a year.

This is especially true when you’re trying to balance a whole bunch of things at once.

This is also especially true when you’re hyper focused on the heart of a story and trying to do more good than harm.

It was a mighty leap of faith for us to start this paper.

There’s already an exceptional and award-winning weekly on our island with a mighty staff of over 40.

And then there’s us: Carrie and Shaun.

This week, we had one of our brilliant mess-ups on The Bar Harbor Story. It was the kind that doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s the kind we’re so good at: whole word reading mistakes.

Possibly because we’re trying to juggle so much, possibly because we’re whole word readers, and possibly because it’s our own work (and it’s so much harder to find errors in your own work this is our major thing we mess up: whole word substitutions.

Photo by Jelleke Vanooteghem on Unsplash

This week we wrote: PROHIBITIONARY for PROBATIONARY.

Yep.

Immediately, we had people emailing us. We actually like it when the community tells us we messed up so that we can fix it. And this time, too, there were nice people doing that nicely. I’m totally thankful to them.

The key word here, though, is nicely.

And then there were the slew of people who sent us one word emails or two-words and a whole lot of exclamation points.

PROBATIONARY!
PROBATIONARY!!!
PROBATIONARY! JESUS.
PLEASE—IT’S PROBATIONARY NOT PROHIBITIONARY.

And a lot worse. Cursing. Insults. Nice, right?

Everyone who said something mean? They were free subscribers. That means that they get free news that we spend more than 40 hours a week doing for free. None of our paid subscribers (people can voluntarily pay to support us bringing everyone the news) were mean or used exclamation points. They were kind.

And that matters.

Here’s the thing: I was sick and my foot was injured and I lost my cool. I was just so tired, so run down, so sick of people just defaulting to mean.

We always immediately post corrections because we think that’s the ethical thing to do. So, I reposted the corrected article with a note on the top where I sounded like a school mistress in the 1800s.

That’s it right up there.

And I posted it. I just posted it and didn’t even pause. It went right out to our 4,000 readers. No take backs. For those of you who don’t know me in real life, this is not normal Carrie behavior. And I freaked out a little bit afterward because being brave and standing up for myself often makes me feel a little wiggy.

But pretty much immediately my inbox was swamped with people being supportive, people being kind, people saying they had our backs when we needed it. And people randomly donated to the Bar Harbor Story. And some became paid subscribers.

They didn’t have to do that.

They did that.

They did that.

They chose to do that.

That’s what it’s about right there, isn’t it? It’s about being a team in all kinds of way. It’s about supporting each other and sometimes being brave enough to support yourself. It’s about remembering that when people are being insensitive and cruel there are also people who focus on being kind and compassionate, people who lift you up.

Sometimes maybe you have to lose your cool a little bit (not in a bad way, not over something that doesn’t matter (a spelling mistake) when you feel super powerless. When people won’t stop going after you, it’s okay to tell them that it’s not okay to do that. For some of us, it might even be a little brave.

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There’s a whole bunch of calls to action down here. Don’t feel pressured!