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Now that the meme was created, with content ready-made, it was taken from Reddit and re-posted all over the Internet. It was "pinned" over 30,000 times on Pinterest, the folks at 9gag shared it on their various personal Facebook pages nearly 9,000 times. I was awarded the "Look at Me!" award for October 2012 from "diehipster dot com." Well-meaning friends took screenshots of Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter anytime they saw the picture posted or mentioned. I had gone from Reddit curiosity to "Internet meme." My ex-girlfriend texted to ask if I was okay. My parents finally saw it. My dad didn't know why I had dressed "funny." My mom was understandably worried for me, flashing back to the times I was bullied in high school. I knew it made her feel powerless, just like it used to feel when I came home early from school because someone threatened to pull a knife on me. Now, it was dozens of someones-faceless and impossible to control.

At lunch with a friend who was trying to get her web series off the ground, she asked me how I was dealing. "Okay," I said, "I think it would bother me more if people weren't so complimentary in real life." Thinking about her own troubles in creating something viral, she remarked, "It's too bad you can't figure out a way to exploit this somehow." Other than sometimes posting my Twitter handle on pages where I saw the picture, I couldn't do much. Part of me wanted to ignore it all, dismiss it like a pop-up blocker dismisses fake contest possibilities. Still, for every hateful comment online, there was a real person who picked up a short story and promised to buy a novel, if/when I wrote one.