I’ve started this a dozen times, and each time, it came out wrong. Then, when I realized that if I wanted to run this piece in time for Christmas I would actually have to write it before Christmas, I figured I’d just start at the beginning and let it go from there.

Once upon a time, I encountered Chris Guillebeau. He was awesome, and I really liked what he was doing over at The Art of Non-Conformity. Also, he was awesome. And cool. And awesome. We sent each other emails and commented on each other’s blogs and the world was full of unicorns and daisies. Yay for new internet friends!

One day, when I was living in England, I got an urgent email from Chris. He wanted to know if I was doing anything the following Tuesday. He was flying from Qatar to Johannesburg and had a 7 hour layover at Heathrow. If I was around, he’d extend it to a 31 hour layover and come crash on the couch at IttyBiz HQ. EEK! Much excitement. Chris was coming to visit!!

He came. Battling jetlag of doubtless epic proportions, he was a heavenly guest. He brought booze for me and business class airplane swag bags for Jack. We went to Camden and ate vegan sandwiches. I ordered a green smoothie which he said would be gross and I insisted would be delicious and he was very right and I was very wrong.

We talked about God and church and Africa and online business and England and travelling the world and living your dreams no matter what anybody told you.

It was one of the loveliest days of my life.

A little while later, he came to SXSW and we were able to hang out for an evening before we flew to our separate corners of the world. We decided we had to work together. We didn’t know what we’d do, but we knew we’d have crazy fun doing it.

Time passed. We thought about doing our thing. He travelled. I dealt with being the mother of a two-year-old. Somewhere in there I made Marketing for Nice People and he wrote 279 Days To Overnight Success. We touched base when we could.

Then he emailed me with his idea for our thing and I fell off the earth.

I had personal stuff going on. I had commitment issues. I had (and still have) an occasionally crippling anxiety disorder. The idea he came up with while he had no internet access was really close to the recession product I’d just done with Havi. He couldn’t have known that since he was sleeping on a dirt floor somewhere, but I felt weird about it. I thought I couldn’t sell my people the same product so soon after the Havi one. I thought it would hijack sales for him and I’d look like an idiot and he’d be broke. So I said nothing.

Hearing nothing from me, he kept working. He got a designer and a domain and the beginnings of a website. He kept sending me updates, and with each new update, I felt guiltier and guiltier for not getting back to him. Finally I realized I’d have to say something, and I sent him a long (and fairly pathetic) email, explaining and apologizing profusely. I thought he’d think I was a horrible flake and never forgive me.

He forgave me. He was incredibly gracious and I was incredibly grateful. We figured we’d do something in the fall instead.

Then I sort of got deported and my world fell apart.

I screwed up the SpeakEasy almost beyond repair. I bailed on pretty much everything. Email got to the point where it was practically uncontrollable. I cried every day. I hired the wrong VA, but he was a family friend and I felt like I couldn’t let him go. I worked like a dog to make enough money to maintain two houses at once and pay a VA who wasn’t doing any work.

Something had to give and it was one of my inboxes. I had to walk away or be committed.

Then, the incomparable Megan Morris came onto the scene and waved her Magic Megan Wand and everything got better. It wasn’t instant or perfect, but it was better beyond measure.

Life moved on, and I forgot about the horrible summer.

In the meantime, Chris was getting famouser and famouser. He guest posted for Anderson Cooper’s blog. Seth Godin mentioned his manifesto. More New York Times mentions. A column on CNN.com. Chris done got himself biggified.

But we didn’t talk anymore and it made me sad. Every now and again he’d send me a DM or I’d try to call his cell phone, but DMs are short and impersonal and answering machines don’t quite cut it. We lost touch.

Day followed day and I figured he didn’t like me anymore.

Week followed week and I figured he was too famous for me now.

Month followed month and I was pretty sure he was a jerk.

Coming up on the New Year, I couldn’t believe I was ever friends with him.

That all brings us to this week. I was sending a birthday card to Tei, and in registering an account with the ecard company, it offered me the chance to schedule cards in advance. I found some for my friends and hooked them up. Then I found one that would be perfect for my step-brother, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember his email address. I searched my contacts and came up dry.

Aha! It must be in that old inbox!

You know where this is going.

I logged in and saw my inbox. You know when you read in a novel that someone feels the blood drain from their face and you think, yeah, right? Sure enough, yeah. You really can feel the blood drain from your face.

Email after email from Chris.

From my aunt Nancy.

From Pace and Kyeli.

From Rebecca Leigh.

From Jonathan Fields.

From Jon Morrow.

From Pam Slim.

From GirlPie.

From CHRIS FREAKING BROGAN.

And more. People I respect. People I admire. People I couldn’t have made it without. All of them sitting there, languishing for months, while I talk smack about Chris Guillebeau behind his back.

Ouch.

But those people? Set them aside for a second, but not too far – we’re going to get back to them in just a minute. Right now, we need to talk about someone else. We need to talk about Sean Platt.

There was once a writer at Men with Pens who didn’t like me very much. When I took comments off of IttyBiz, he wrote a post that caused quite the sensation in our little D-List ce-web-rity circle. He took a lot of what I said out of context and ascribed incorrect motivations, but never mentioned me by name.

That was the first time I met Sean Platt.

When someone writes uncomplimentary things about you on the internet, it is an unbreakable rule that you keep your wits about you. You must be single-minded in your focus. You must click refresh on their blog post relentlessly, surveying your detractor’s allies and filing away their details for future reference. You must be like a buzzard stalking prey, waiting for people to accuse you or defend you. You must know who your friends are.

At this point, Sean didn’t look like much of a friend. (At the time, he was writing as Writer Dad.) Being a fan of Men with Pens, he took Harrison’s presentation of the situation as fact and expressed his equally unflattering (although mercifully shorter) opinion in the comments. He couldn’t fathom anyone doing something as disrespectful as what I had done. He would never do what I did. He answered every comment on his 10-week-old blog and, darn it, anyone who didn’t… well, you get the picture.

Sometime later, he came across IttyBiz. He reached out in friendship. He didn’t know that I was the one Harrison was talking about. He probably didn’t remember it at all. He wanted to be friends. I was mad as hell, and I did my best to ignore him in the rudest ways I could come up with. He wrote. I deleted him. He let me know about blog posts. I ignored them. He connected in social media. I stuck my fingers in my ears and shouted “LA LA LA”.

Eventually, his persistence wore me down and I was civil to him. Eventually, I read a bit of his story and figured a dude with kids that awesome couldn’t possibly be all bad. Eventually, I was nice enough.

But I wasn’t about to forgive him.

The thing about the internet…

Blogging is like no other business. You have all the responsibilities of a CEO, but you can’t shield yourself like a CEO. You can’t hide behind five layers of yes men and a marketing department and a public relations team.

Internet fame isn’t like real fame. You have all the responsibilities of a celebrity, but none of the budget. You can’t hide behind your publicist and your agent and the red velvet rope.

You can’t get an MBA in blogging. You can’t talk to the other guys in the locker room about what to do when you hurt the feelings of a big fan. You can’t ask the girls on the set what to do when you offended someone you didn’t mean to offend, and now so much time has passed that you feel it can’t be fixed.

We don’t have a clue what we’re doing.

No trail has been blazed. No rulebook has been written. You are going to screw up and it’s going to be horrible. The things you think are no big deal are going to turn out to be irreparable and the things you think are unforgivable will be solved with an honest, heartfelt phone call. Maybe you’ll write a blog post like this one and send it to everyone you think you might have done wrong.

You will be convinced that you’re never, ever going to get it right.

And then one night you’ll be at a conference and you’ll run into him — that guy who commented innocently, just that once, and hurt your feelings without having any clue who you were or what had happened.

And at the conference, he’ll touch you lightly on the arm and ask you to step outside of the party.

And once you step outside with that person who you used to think you hated, he will cover his phone with his hand and say, softly, “My son is on the phone. He’s a really big fan. Do you think maybe you could wish him goodnight?”

And your heart will melt, and you’ll feel like a jerk. And you’ll write about it and hope that everyone understands. And you’ll realize that if you’re lucky, maybe everything will be okay anyway.