Don't Feed the Trolls

The Thing About Online Comments

I’ve taken a couple of days to recover from the whirlwind of having my coming out story published in HuffPost. It was an incredible feeling to get my story out to those who need it. I’ve had so many reach out to me via my social media and through my website to say things like:

I’m positive that your essay has helped many struggling with the same issues. Thank you for your openness, honesty, and authenticity.

And:

I thought you should know how you touched one person today and helped her look back on the journey and smile rather than feel guilt.

And:

I will be 59 this month, and I proposed to my girlfriend last month! It is just nice to hear a similar story.

This is my audience. These are the people I write for. This is why I write. That “me, too” experience. That feeling of knowing you’re not alone.

Of course, sharing my story publicly also invites criticism. And when it’s shared with the entire internet—the day one count from my editor was 350,000+ readers—that criticism comes in droves… and from some of the darkest places and hearts. 

Everyone says, “DON’T READ THE COMMENTS.” And I get it. I do. When I read the first you’re a horrible mother comments, my heart caved in on itself. But as I read more, I began to understand that these people have no idea who I am. They read 2,500 words about my 54-year life and my 25-year marriage, and they felt they knew everything they needed to know about who I am as a mother and a human being.

The assumptions they made from those 2,500 words were astounding:

• People assumed I’d abandoned my kids. (My kids are adults and still very much a part of my life.)

• They assumed I demanded alimony. (I didn’t.)

• They assumed I divorced because it was more financially lucrative for me. (It isn’t.)

• They insisted I have always known I’m gay and that I just used my husband for my own purposes. (Whatever those were.)

• They assumed my ex-husband is now sad, broken, and lost. (He’s very happily remarried.)

And the names they called me were horrifying. Here is just a small sampling: creepy voyeur, ugly, dumb, liar, evil woman, selfish, narcissistic, mentally ill, homely, villain, homewrecker, sinful garbage, cheating tramp. (If those don’t inspire a great country song, I’m not sure what will!)

I also pulled a few of my favorite general comments, and I’m going to break them down into categories because, without fail, every comment fell into one of these buckets:

I AM A HORRIBLE MOTHER.

• She’ll have 4 kids who hate her and she’ll deserve every ounce of hate.

• Poor children brought into this world by a selfish, self-centered creature. (I love that I have been reduced to a “creature” here.)

• You’re a failed parent.

• This is simply one evil woman who cares only about herself and no one else, not even her children.

Sidebar on the Horrible Mother accusations: I talked to George last night, my youngest. He was in high school when the split happened. I asked if I ruined his life, and he said I was in the 99th percentile of good moms. I think the kids are okay.

I AM A DEPRAVED HUMAN.

• Sad on so many levels. And a little sick.

• Purer selfishness doesn’t exist.

• Absolutely disgusting.

• You’re a trollop and your husband is a cuck.

I AM HARD TO LOOK AT.

• Now her husband can find an attractive wife.

• Dumb and ugly.

• A homely woman walks into a Pilates class…

I AM GOING STRAIGHT TO HELL.

• This woman is pure evil.

• She destroyed her family and she sinned.

• Katrina got energy transferred by a powerful woman. Think of it as a spiritual transmittable disease.

• Enjoy hell.

THE CONTENT OF MY CHARACTER IS MORE THAN QUESTIONABLE.

• Jerry Springer material. What a trashy individual.

• She’s alone in a trailer where she belongs.

• She puts her stupidity on full display, she gets judged.

• You are a terrible person.

• Yet another story of a woman shitting on her family for selfish and toxic reasons.

• Nauseating.

• Send her back to the streets.

• What a complete clown.

• I don’t want to know you.

I USED AND ABUSED “MY MAN.”

• No one ever considers a man’s happiness.

• She chose to use her husband.

• So, she cheated on her husband and they got a divorce. Surely she had some semblance of morals and ensured there was no alimony paid by him and she allowed him to set the rules for custody.

• Go have fun. Give your husband full custody and stay off Facebook.

I NEED THERAPY.

• Sounds like she’s identified the mental illness.

• Seek psychological help.

• You were not happily married and you are mentally ill.

• I love these stories. It shows it’s a mental disorder with all these liberal women.

GAY IS THE WORST THING YOU CAN BE.

• Lesbian recruitment article.

• Abnormal lifestyle choice.

• Leftist insanity.

• Gay isn’t even real.

• You are fooling yourself.

• A story like this might be true in 1924, but not today. She knew she was gay.

• These people just want to get their freak on.

• Fetish is more important to liberal parents than kids. No wonder you love killing babies.

• Stop this woke BS.

• The left pushing sexual immorality and railing against family values again.

I MIGHT BE A HORRIBLE PERSON, BUT THIS? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

• What Jew wrote this?

I have no words for that one.

We all understand that people are emboldened when their weapon is a keyboard and their superpower is the invisibility of the internet, but I didn’t realize quite how bad it was until now. 

One of the things that really surprised me is the reading comprehension level of so many humans. I mean, did they not read the essay? Did they not understand it? There was a common thread of me “abandoning my children,” but my children were high school/college aged when all this transpired. And they’re still my children. I left their father, not them.

Another common thread is that I did all of this for money, in particular, my ex’s money:

• She tore apart her family and will be financially rewarded for doing so.

• I’m willing to bet he’s paying alimony.

• So he was cool with it until she took him to the cleaners.

• Following your heart shouldn’t drain an innocent person of 50% of their material possessions and cash.

• Guaranteed she collected her cash and prizes on her way out the door even though the guy did absolutely nothing wrong.

Everyone can rest easy in the knowledge that my ex is doing just fine financially. (And I won’t even go into whether or not he “did nothing wrong.”) I’m the one who took the biggest financial hit, as most divorced women do. When we women trade some of our most lucrative working years to raise our little humans, we end up sacrificing financially in the long run. My career was never the family focus, his was. I supported him through two advanced degrees while I raised our four kids. And a lot of women who come out later in life also demand less from their spouses because of the guilt and shame associated with the divorce. That’s why he has the vast majority of the material possessions we acquired together.

I will also point out that at least 98% of the commenters were men. And of the few women who left comments, most of them had monikers like @conservativechick and @Mrs.M, which clearly suggests those are right-wing women who have played the parts of good wife and good mom that are societally expected—the ones who sacrifice themselves for everyone else. There was definitely a Trump-ism effect in the words those men left for me, an implied sense of being persecuted because they were men, an if the roles were reversed, men would be hung out to dry kind of defensiveness. I can assure you that as a woman, those commenters hung me out to dry. If they could have come at me with pitchforks and torches, I’m pretty sure they would have.

The other thing that kept rising to the surface were accusations of infidelity, but I clearly stated in the essay that my ex gave me permission to explore my feelings, and that we opened our marriage up to others in mutual agreement. I never snuck behind his back. We made these decisions as two consenting adults who were in deep communication with each other. But somehow, that message was ignored. It was easier to call me a cheating trollop than to actually acknowledge the time and effort we put into trying to save our marriage once I recognized my same-sex attraction.

And speaking of same-sex attraction, it would be so great if people in general had a grand realization that homosexuality isn’t all about SEX just because SEX is in the word itself. (There were soooo many comments about my same-sex “lust.”) I’m not sure why people see same-sex couples and immediately think about their sex lives. Do those same people look at heterosexual couples the same way? If they do, I think they might be the ones with the problem. Attraction to another human involves a million different things: communication, connection, comfort level, safety, security—sex is just one of many other components of love and attraction.

It was a lesson in humanity to compare the internet troll comments to the comments in one of my online female writing groups. In the second group, what stood out for them was the lyricism of the writing, the heart and soul of the struggle, the nuanced storytelling. It was never whether I just wanted to eat cooch. And for the record, I don’t know most of those women, either. We are mostly strangers on the internet who support and encourage each other.

Wouldn’t that be a remarkable place for everyone? An online (and offline) space where we could all just get along? But John Lennon has been singing that song for decades now, and we’re still no closer to living it. My wish for my adult kids—that I love with every inch of my heart and never, ever abandoned—is that their world becomes a little bit kinder and gentler while they’re existing in it.