This is my personal experience with trolls online. I fear I didn’t leave much room for commentary, and I hope I am wrong. Because I feel, as an old friend would say, that this is my “download” right now. Or, to put my twist on it, “I am connected to the cloud.” When we are in synergy, communicating with ourselves and the world around us, I believe we can create positive change. And that doesn’t mean we must be all ‘love and light.’ Nature is violent and loving! But perhaps when we feel violent, questions to ask ourselves are, “What is eating at me? How can I change that?”
What are your thoughts?
I was trolled hard. I said it. What was said to me was both untrue and cut deeply. I was humiliated and degraded. I felt worthless. It felt like I was dying inside. During that time, it’s safe to say that I even had a plan. It’s me, though, so that would be a lie. I had a myriad of ideas. In some of those, I would leave this world mentally. In others, I would try to formulate a plan to leave everyone who loved me and hated me behind. In others, I tormented the people who violated me! I heard their screams, desperate to live. They all died in my head so many times in ways that I’m sure would make even JigSaw (horror genre) shit himself.
Every single day, I wanted it all to end. My parents were alcoholics. Dad hurt my mom so badly that one time, when I got to see the bruises, it reinforced what (at that time) he had already shattered. I didn’t look up to him. For so many years, I felt I had no love for him. I did, though, and to see him hurt my mom hurt me. The kids at school loved to pick on me. You might even call it a game of kick the carebear. My dad always said that there were no such things as friends, that we have acquaintances. And if you can count on one hand in your entire life the people who will have your back (including blood relatives), you will be beyond blessed, and it will never happen. He was wrong.
So, I was trolled badly! For the first time I can remember, in a Yahoo! Chat room when those still existed, I had my first Pagan Gossip experience. Facebook wasn’t even invented yet. I made friends. I was surrounded by love because people appreciated my zest for life and knowledge.
I wanted to know everything that I could. And one day, Barcode came. We discovered later that he said his name was Matt. Matt was something else. He wasn’t like the basic trolls that we saw day in and day out. His voice was smooth (yes! We were voice chatters who barely had time for text!) He was sinister. He was out of line. Cyber evil-incarnate even, perhaps…
He used a troll tactic to hone in on me. He analyzed me and set up a plan to leave a mark. What he didn’t know is that at that time, I still desperately wanted to die or to have the best friends ever. I wasn’t sure which. I wanted to be intelligent and funny. I wanted to be beautiful and magical. I wanted to live so much more than I wanted to die, and this cyber community, like Pagan Gossip, made me feel alive.
It made me feel challenged. It made me want to learn more and be more. It was almost like he knew exactly what to say to a gay guy with a flashy voice. I was barely into my 18th year of life. He stigmatized me as a gay person. He said some things that echoed the fear that a parent of mine had. It was like a curse.
So here I was in my virtual community, surrounded by all of my new-found friends, and he told everyone what I felt at the time that everyone already believed. Because I am gay, and I appeared strong, secure, bright, and magical, he wanted to infect me with his hate. He turned me into a meme. He said that I had a disease, the same one that my mom was terrified that I would contract, and I have been so blessed all these years later that she is still wrong. It was worse than being called a maggot with a capital F. Because, to me, this is what I felt everyone, including my family, thought about queer people. LGBT+ people are no more experiencing the tragedy of disease than our ”horizontal” counterparts. And those who carry that burden are no less than those who are privileged to experience otherwise. Even though none of what he said was true, it felt like all the kids at school hated me because of something that I never chose, something that I could never change. Now, I celebrate who I am!
Matt didn’t go away. He tormented us. We would block him, and he would return in a thousand other names. He had programs to throw you out of the chat illegally and block anyone from reentry. Any cheap troll at the time could download these for free. It did not take a brain, but they all loved to tote that they were what we called 1337 (leet), our way of referring to pricks that got off on hurting people on the internet and thought they were mega hackers. None of them were.
We showed him that he couldn’t get to us. We became harder. We became smarter. And eventually, we befriended Matt. And for a long time, we allowed his poison to seep into every crack and crevice of our sacred virtual space. One day, he disappeared. We continued. Eventually, we wondered, and you would start to hear questions like, “Where is Matt? Has anyone seen him?” People missed him. It was those of us he won over because he loved to laugh. He loved to MAKE US THINK! But above all else, he seemed to love to hurt anyone that he came into contact with. And his poison spread among us.
Matt lost interest in us when we became wiser. When we trolled him back to create change. We loved him. We loved him so very much! We told him that he was hilarious. We laughed at his jokes. We told people, “Don’t take Matt so personally. It’s just all in good fun,” it sickened him. He would leave. When we accepted him for who he was and looked beyond his trashy troll tactics, focused on hurting people for things that were not true or that they could not change, and celebrated his creativity and passion, he couldn’t hurt us anymore. He was done with us.
The mark he left on so many, including me, was not fading. We had learned nothing. I forgot somewhere along the way how it made me feel when I wanted to die. I forgot how empty and lonely I still was. So we continued a cycle. We were never ‘like’ Matt. Sometimes, we were worse because we were more innovative than he could have ever hoped to be. That’s why Matt was so angry. We were smart. And when he couldn’t outsmart us anymore, he flew south for the winter, waiting for another day when the room reset and fresh blood who were not prepared were ripe for the picking.
Pagan Gossip saved my life. I became everything I never believed I could before I came here. I thrived. I was everything that I always needed to be. And when I crashed, my world came falling around me. I was dead and still living. Pagan Gossip reminded me of Yahoo! Chat. It reminded me of the magical conversation on intellectual levels that stimulated my mind and made me think. These discussions made me want to learn again. They made me feel alive. They made me want to be better. And the Members, Mods, and Admins recognized me. They gave me a shot. They laughed at my jokes, complimented me, and told me some things I needed to hear and believe so that I could again believe in myself.
This place raised me up when I had no will to live. I’ve watched us change. I’ve seen us grow from trolls with FEW rules aside from “have common sense” to the group we have today. I’ve watched us evolve. I watched common sense #evolve! Many people on Facebook are upset because of community standards on this platform. They want the 90s back! Who doesn’t? The 90’s were awesome! I’m still there sometimes. What if trolling has evolved, too? What if trolling has always been about making people laugh, connecting us, making us think, and creating change? What if it was never about tearing each other down on things we can do nothing about? Spelling, we can change that. We have word editors and spell-check. We have dictionaries and thesaurus. We have a vast digital library at our fingertips. We can be more innovative than ever if we learn. And we do here, every day. You teach me, and I do my best to share my knowledge.
What if trolling didn’t have to end and it followed the community standards? What if we raised each other up (exactly like we have been doing for an age now) and shut down the Barcode of the world, creating change by listening to what they are telling us with the tactics that they use to troll us? What if we trolled them back with knowledge? What if we all realized that dumping down people’s throats did nothing for us but make us feel better because we feel bad about ourselves? Let’s feel great about what we achieve every day. We are movers and shakers! We are survivors.
