Polly Vernon
I’m sitting in my coffee- office, AKA the café where I write,
when a woman who trolled me walks in. I’d been expecting her. When she started in on me, on Twitter – months ago, after I wrote about my experience of abortion in support of the Irish abortion rights campaign – I learned, via a friend of a friend, that she and I are neighbours. This gave me the heebie-jeebies. You expect to be trolled by far-away Americans, not the chick queuing next to you at Sainsbury’s self-checkout. I then learned she’d continued her tirade against my reproductive choices (specifically, my lack of guilt and regret for them) on her Instagram page… Where she’d also posted selfies. This meant a) I knew what she looked like, and b) it was only a matter of time before our paths crossed. And, oh look. Here she is. My heart beats faster; I feel prickly with sweat, hot with anger. She hasn’t seen me yet. What do I do? Ignore her, rise above it, be the bigger woman? Advisable, but… I remember the things she said, after I wrote about my abortions. ‘ You’re not well’, she’d tweeted. There’d been talk of my ‘killing the babies inside of you’. Then, she’d really got stuck in. I go and say hi. What ensues is… interesting. For as long as people have given me shit online – 10, 15 years or so – I’ve fantasised about what would happen if I encountered any of the shit-givers in real life. In those fantasies, I deliver stirring monologues substantiated with unarguable logic; the trolls listen, have epiphanies, beg for forgiveness. In the messier sphere of reality, things do not run so smoothly. I splutter and stumble, semi-coherent with rage and hurt; cafétroll remains remorseless, unrepentant, unmoved. She stands by everything she said (she says). She believes I am dangerous; damaging to women (she says). The only thing that surprises her, she concedes, the only thing that’s making her slightly reconsider her world-view is:
‘I didn’t realise you were…’ she stops. Human? I suggest. ‘ Yes!’ she says.
That’s the problem with the internet. It makes us so unhuman to each other. If the person you’re attacking, abusing, insulting isn’t standing in front of you, if you can’t see pain flare in their eyes, or their jaws tense with fury… Who’s to say they’re bothered? Who’s to say you should stop?
Not my café troll. Not her. She’s still fighting the realisation I’m flesh, blood, and capable of emotional responses to things she said, with every ounce of her being. ‘I didn’t attack you, Polly!’ she says. ‘I didn’t shame you! I didn’t judge you!’
You did though, I tell her. You really did.