he was cc'd by accident on an email about himself

In 2013 Tim Kreider rented a herd of goats. He has never said how many or why, and in the essay he wrote about it he says the reasons don't matter. What matters is that he had goats, he found them delightful, and he emailed photos of them to everyone he knew.

Most of the replies were what you'd expect from people who have just been shown goats. They were jealous.

One reply was not addressed to him. Someone on the list had meant to forward his email to their coworkers with a comment, and hit reply instead. The comment sighed over what he was spending. It used the word oof.

That is the whole incident. Nobody was cruel. He writes that tone in email is easy to misread and that oof could even be affectionate, the noise you'd make at a friend's bar tab. What landed was that the note was unsympathetic. He knows he is bad with money. He had filed it under endearing flaws. The person who typed oof had filed it somewhere else.

The essay ran in the New York Times on June 15, 2013, under the title "I Know What You Think of Me." When he collected it in a book five years later he renamed it "Oof" and said a little more. The sender was his literary agent, the coworkers were hers, and what she was sighing over was how fast he was going through his advance. They talked it out afterward. The newspaper version already tells you how that went, because it was written in the days after the email and it calls her my friend.

Everyone has a version. The screenshot that went to the wrong group chat, or the text about someone that went to that someone. Kreider's point is that the accident is only the delivery system. People have always learned what their friends think of them by walking into a room one second early. He has written warm essays about friends that the friends found hard to read, and he has been written about, fairly, in ways he couldn't stand. Seeing yourself from outside is like a candid photo someone else took: proof that you are visible, with every flaw in frame.

a screenshot of the soul, a stacktrace of the mind

Then comes the part people skip on their way to the famous last line. Everyone talks about the people they love behind their backs, he says, because everyone is ridiculous and exasperating in some specific way, and sometimes that talk is how two friends check that they love a third person by the same amount. Sometimes it is just meanness, and the one caught at it learns something about herself. He mentions the twelve-step saying, what other people think of you is none of your business, which sounds wrong to him; managing your reputation feels like a full-time job. Then he notes that a person who tries to control every opinion held about him is running a purge, like a dictator, and dictators don't sleep well either.

The mistake, he thinks, is believing that to be loved unconditionally is to be seen without flaws. We allow ourselves to be complicated, fond of someone and unkind about them in the same hour, and we rarely extend that allowance to anyone else. A friend of his once dreamed of a staircase where you could hear everything anyone had ever said about you, the worst at the top and the best at the bottom. He doubts he could make it down more than a few steps.

The painting is Manet's bar at the Folies-Bergère, from 1882, the last big canvas he finished before he died the following spring. The barmaid, a real employee named Suzon, faces you blank and miles away. Behind her is a mirror, and in the mirror she is someone else, leaning toward a man in a top hat, listening to him. The reflection sits where no reflection could sit; people have argued about it for a hundred and forty years, and in 2000 a researcher named Malcolm Park rebuilt the bar to show it was possible from one odd angle. It doesn't matter which woman is her. The mirror is the reply all. For one second you see what the room sees.

The last sentence of the essay has outlived the goats. It became a meme, passed around by people who have never read the email that comes before it: if you want to be loved, "submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known."

The person who typed oof is still his friend.

The painting: Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), Courtauld Gallery, London. Public domain.

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