The Day I Became Briefly Important

There is something specifically humiliating about caring how you rank. Not in the meaningful sense—that kind of vanity at least has ambition underneath it—but in the small online way, the chart, the counter, the number that proves you exist to people who would otherwise scroll past. And yet. This journal, this dispatch I’d been running since God knows when, had appeared at position 55 in the Deutsche Blogcharts—Germany’s ranking of its most-read blogs—and for approximately forty-five minutes I felt like a person who had finally arrived somewhere.

I had, in fact, announced some time earlier that I was on the verge of breaking into this list. I announced it with the full confidence of someone with no particular reason to feel confident. The list had ignored me entirely. Then one morning it didn’t, and the feeling was exactly as absurd as I should have expected: a brief glow, a mild wish for someone specific to call and tell, followed almost immediately by the certain knowledge that this changes nothing at all.

It changes nothing at all. But I will accept the invitations to the fashion weeks now, please, and also whatever free snacks are going.