You know you've made it big when an individual allocates a half-hour of his or her time in their day to focus on sending you a piece of hate e-mail.

Such was the case yesterday for one Christian Ulderman, a resident of Northern California from his or her IP address and likely someone using a false name since it returned no MySpace and Facebook search results.

I struggled with the idea today on whether or not to address the e-mail or simply ignore it altogether, but I figured this would be more fun. Christian opens his or her e-mail up with the following lines:

For someone with such mediocre talent, you're inflated ego is an incredible display to witness. Nobody cares about your perspective on anything, Matthew. You're just as contrived and desperate as any other blogger out there. In fact, it's very saddening to see you drone on and on about things that for the most part are inconsequential.

The line in there that bothers me the most is "You're just as contrived and desperate as any other blogger out there," somehow alluding to this idea that everyone who blogs in the world is some kind of attention-seeking psychopath. I don't see this to be as big an insult to me as it is to everyone who follows me and everyone whom I follow in the blogging world.

I've met some incredible people who I would not hesitate to defend if their character was attacked as it was by Christian. People like Monica Brady, who has risen to become one of Walmart's 11 mom bloggers along with 10 others in the nation; people like Lori Hahn, who rallied with her colleagues in the past election to raise a substantial amount of money to battle a political cause she believed was worth fighting against; people like Jason Daniels, who founded the Capital Elector and delivers some of the best political commentary I've seen in this market (I often wonder when he sleeps).

These are people who did not begin a blog as a way of gaining attention; they did so, like me, because they had something to say and wanted to gift their voice with the rest of the world. To boldly stand up and put your opinion out into a world where it'll likely be misconstrued and rejected takes a lot of courage and a lot of dedication. I think that's a pretty unselfish, un-egotistical thing to do, is it not?

Speaking of "ego", when it comes to my "inflated ego" and "mediocre talent," it's true that I have a lot of pride in myself and in my work. However, it's only because other people have made me out to be a viable resorce -- so much so that when I told my audience I was going to end blogging, it was written about in The Sacramento Bee.

And when my "mediocre talent" landed me a job with a respectable news organization (at 21, mind you, when a lot of people are still in college and begin working their journalistic career in Terre Haute, Indiana or Billings, Montana), that was also mentioned in The Bee.

Attitudes from people like Christian are most welcomed in my life, because they remind me just how far I've gone (watch out, that's my inflated ego talking there). To know that someone would take a few minutes out of their day to write a letter on how much they hate you means you're making an impact. May not be a good impact, necessarily, but it's definitely a large impact. And everything is circumstantial -- where people see something as negative, others will see it as positive (please, hold your Nazi Germany rebuttals until the end of this reading, okay?).

My opinion has, at times, been the source of controversy. Nobody's denying that. I'm not even going to deny it. It's unpopular at times. It's made people uncomfortable. But it's important to speak your mind, or you become victim to letting other people speak it for you.

My voice and talent is often what turns people off, but it's also what turns people on. And where I choose to focus that voice now is toward the people whom it matters most to.

To all the jealous twenty-somethings of the world, you're capable of doing the same exact thing. You're going to need the courage to stand up to your enemies, and you're going to need the determination to do what you want to do in life.