Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(27)

It’s as if there were an international chain of delis that—no matter what franchise you went to and what you ordered and how clearly you articulated “PAHH-STRAWWW-MEEE”—forty-nine out of fifty times they just served you a doo-doo sandwich. A big, fat, steaming scoop of doo-doo on a sesame seed bun (special sauce: doo-doo). Then you went ahead and ate the sandwich. And you didn’t just eat the sandwich one time, or fifty times, or even one hundred, but you went back and ate there—with hope in your heart, paying for the privilege—every single day of your life. Thousands and thousands of days in a row. Plus, pretty much everyone you ever met had been to that deli too, and they all ate mouthfuls of straight stank doo-doo over and over again, and they told you about it. They warned you! Yet you still went back and ate the sandwich.

Because maybe this time it’d be different! Maybe—just maybe—this time you’d get the most delicious and fulfilling sandwich the world had e’er known, and the sandwich guy would finally recognize the trenchant, incisive brilliance of your sandwich-ordering skills, and doo-doo would be abolished, and Joss Whedon would pop out of the meat freezer and hand you a trophy that said “BEST GUY” on it and option your sandwich story for the plot of the next Avengers movie, Captain Whatever: The Sandwich Soldier. (Full disclosure: I do not know what an Avenger is.)

That’s not what happens, though. That’s never what happens. Instead, I keep slogging through forty-nine iterations of “kill yourself, pig lady” per day in my Twitter mentions, because one time in 2013 Holly Robinson Peete replied to my joke about Carnation instant breakfast.* Cool cost/benefit analysis, brain.

Still, I TRY not to click. I try.

PLAN B: When the temptation is too strong, when Plan A falls in the commode, I turn to the second line of defense—the mock and block. I take screen grabs of the worst ones—the ones that wish for my death, the ones that invoke my family, the ones with a telling whiff of pathos—and then re-post them with a caption like “way to go, Einstein” or “goo goo ga ga baby man” or sometimes just a picture of some diaper rash cream. (As Dorothy Parker or someone like that probably once said, “Goo goo ga ga baby man is the soul of wit.”) My friends and I will toss the troll around for a while like a pod of orcas with a baby seal, and once I’ve wrung enough validation out of it, I block the troll and let it die alone. Maybe it’s cruel. I know that trolls are fundamentally sad people; I know that I’ve already defeated them in every substantive arena—by being smart, by being happy, by being successful, by being listened to, by being loved. Whatever. Maybe if Mr. “Kill Yourself You Fat Piece of Shit” didn’t want to get mocked, shredded, and discarded, he should be more careful about how he talks to whales.

PLAN C: Wine.

Overall, my three-pronged defense holds up… pretty well. I am… okay. I cope, day to day, and honestly, there is something seductive about being the kind of person who can just take it. Challenging myself to absorb more and more hate is a masochistic form of vanity—the vestigial allure of a rugged individualism that I don’t even believe in.

No one wants to need defenses that strong. It always hurts, somewhere.

Besides, armor is heavy. My ability to weather online abuse is one of the great tragedies of my life.

You never get used to trolls. Of course, you are an adaptable thing—your skin thickens, your stomach settles, you learn to tune out the chatter, you cease self-Googling (mostly), but it’s always just a patch. A screen. A coat of paint. It’s plopping a houseplant over the dry rot. It’s emotional hypothermia: Your brain can trick itself into feeling warm, but the flesh is still freezing. Medically speaking, your foot’s still falling off. There’s a phenomenon called “paradoxical undressing,” common when a person dies of hypothermia, wherein they become so convinced they’re overheating that they peel off all their clothes and scatter them in the snow. They get colder, die faster. There’s something uncanny about a cold death; a still, indifferent warping of humanity.

I struggle to conceive of the “resilience” I’ve developed in my job as a good thing—this hardening inside me, this distance I’ve put between myself and the world, my determination to delude myself into normalcy. From the cockpit, it feels like much more of a loss than a triumph. It’s like the world’s most not-worth-it game show: Well, you’ve destroyed your capacity for unbridled happiness and human connection, but don’t worry—we’ve replaced it with this prison of anxiety and pathological inability to relax!

Yet, it seems like the more abuse I get, the more abuse I court—baring myself more extravagantly, professing opinions that I know will draw an onslaught—because, after all, if I’ve already adjusted my body temperature, why not face the blizzard so that other women don’t have to freeze?

Paradoxical undressing, I guess.

But it’s just the Internet. There’s nothing we can do.

This is my reality now. Pretty much every day, at least one stranger seeks me out to call me a fat bitch (or some pithy variation thereof). Being harassed on the Internet is such a normal, common part of my life that I’m always surprised when other people find it surprising. You’re telling me you don’t have hundreds of men popping into your cubicle in the accounting department of your midsized, regional dry-goods distributor to inform you that—hmm—you’re too fat to rape, but perhaps they’ll saw you up with an electric knife? No? Just me, then. This is the barbarism—the eager abandonment of the social contract—that so many of us face simply for doing our jobs.