On Trolls

Image Description: Poppy from the Trolls movie is show. She has bright pink hair and a pink body. Hear pink ears stick out on each side. Her nose and eyes are pink. She’s wearing an aqua and green flower crown and and aqua felt dress. She has a smirky smile on her face. [Image Source: https://dreamworks.fandom.com/wiki/Poppy?file=Poppy_Profile.jpg]

Disability and Determination is a weekly newsletter about my experience navigating life with a rare disability. If you like this post, feel free to give a click on the ❤️ symbol below. This will help me get discovered by others on Substack. To be notified of future posts, drop your email in the field at the bottom and click the Subscribe button. If you’d like to further contribute, I also offer a paid subscription option (that includes extra monthly content), or you can Buy Me a Coffee ☕ I’m glad you’re here ☺️

Remember those cute little dolls with the hair that sticks up and the big ears? Or the movie(s) starring Justin Timberlake and Anna Kendrick? Yeah, unfortunately, I’m not talking about those trolls. I’m talking about the online variety.

The benefits of the internet and social media are plenty, especially for the disabled community. We oftentimes don’t have anyone in our immediate vicinity or in-person friend group who also has a disability—or who has one that’s similar to ours. If you live in a small town or rural area, the likelihood of knowing or meeting another disabled person out in the world is even smaller. Cue the internet. The only way I’ve met other people with my disability type has been through the internet (my blog and social media). The value of that is immeasurable.

Unfortunately, with the positives of the internet and social media come some big negatives. The biggest one being that when people get behind a screen and can be somewhat anonymous, they suddenly feel a lot more emboldened. Social media is a melting pot of angry, hurt, bigoted, hateful, ignorant people who want to take out whatever they’re feeling on anyone they think “deserves” it. People who just want to make others feel bad because they probably feel like sh*t themselves (which is absolutely no excuse for the abhorrent behavior that happens online).

These are the trolls I’m talking about, and sadly, they run rampant on disabled content creators’ pages. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen someone post the hateful and hurtful comments they receive as someone with a disability—someone who is literally laying their entire soul bare on the internet for everyone to see. Who is sharing their struggles and their joys. Who is simply trying to educate everyone on what living with a disability is like or to help other disabled people with their experiences.

Some people might say “well, if you put yourself out there like that, you run the risk of getting comments like that.” Yes, that’s true. If you’re creating content on the internet, you’re likely going to get hateful comments. That doesn’t make it ok though. That doesn’t mean anyone deserves the hateful and ignorant comments they get on their posts, especially people who are just sharing their experience and being extremely vulnerable.

Ever since I started writing publicly and created my Disability and Determination Instagram, I’ve been dreading getting those hateful comments myself. I’ve actively tried not to have more followers on Instagram because I know the more you have, the more likely the trolls will find you.

I do not have thick skin when it comes to this stuff. It might be slightly more thick than it once was, but it’s still pretty darn thin. I used to have a Facebook page dedicated solely to my blog that preceded my Substack here. It didn’t have a lot of followers either, and I mostly used it to share the links to my blog posts. One day I got this random comment from a guy complaining about why he was getting alerted to my posts because he didn’t want to read them. As far as trolling goes, it was pretty tame. But I got really upset and immediately shut down the Facebook page for my blog (after I sent him a snarky response to his comment 😂). I just didn’t have the energy to start combatting ignorant comments on my page too, especially when it was for a platform that I was so vulnerable on.

I posted my first video post on Instagram recently. Up until this point, I’ve rarely shared actual photos of myself and even my profile picture is my logo, not my face. I’ve been afraid that the more I put up, the more I’m putting myself in the line of fire for trolls (and there’s undoubtedly some privacy concerns too). Posting a video is one of the most vulnerable things you can do as a disabled content creator. People are seeing your face, hearing your voice, seeing your captions. I kid you not, I spent over an hour recording a 2 minute video because I was terrified to have even one thing wrong in it that someone could come after me for. I was excited I took the leap, but I was also exhausted after. I admire people who do video content all the time even more than I already did.

My writing is so important because I want to keep educating people on what it’s like to live with a disability (even though we all have different experiences). But I’m not sure where I stand on having more of a social media presence. These days, they kind of go hand-in-hand, but I’m just not sure I’m prepared for any kind of backlash. There’s enough hate and ignorance going around right now as it is. It’s easy to say “don’t listen to them” or “haters gonna hate” or whatever other platitudes exist out there, but I don’t think anyone can be impervious to getting this kind of a hate on a regular basis.

It’s not something I have to make my mind up on right away. I do want to be more active in community and find other things I can do in addition to writing here—whatever that may be. It makes me sad that we live in a world where you can’t be vulnerable and share your experience online without getting hate (to the point people tell you you should just die anyway). This isn’t a choice that anyone should even have to make—whether they want to try expand their audience and online reach or stay unknown to avoid getting hateful messages and comments.

To all the disabled content creators who keep going, who keep sharing, who don’t let the bastards get them down (to quote The Handmaid’s Tale), I salute you…big time. The world needs you. I need you.

☮️❤️