When trolling starts to take its toll
You’d think that as you get older your skin gets thicker and criticism simply bounces off.
Turns out it’s not true. It actually gets thinner. Physically and metaphorically.
Confidence these days is a bit of a tightrope and sometimes it takes very little to put me off balance and send me tumbling into the abyss.
I say this because I picked up a troll recently. Well maybe not quite a full fledged troll but something like it. I think if ever an actual troll popped up in my life I’d blow a valve and, no, I’m not referring the bug-eyed dolls with shock-pink hair.
Real trolls of the online abuse variety are much harder to pin down. But I’ll have a go.
Socially isolated, marginalised, lacking in empathy, disinhibited, egotistical, irrational - pretty much a shopping list for psychopaths which is what I imagine true trolls mostly are.
I’ve read interviews with selfconfessed trolls where they state without trolling they’d be perched on the roof with a sniper rifle so there’s something to be grateful for.
Sadly the truly vulnerable in our society, those people with poor defences and no strength to fight back fall victim to this sort of cowardly cruelty.
But in the time-honoured tradition of most bullying the weak are the easiest targets. I think Charlotte Dawson would have been a wonderful person to meet. She seemed like a gentle spirit. She actually confronted some of her tormentors but in the end, sadly, she lost the will to fight.
You have to be prepared for criticism and teach your children to be resilient but it doesn’t mean you have to like it.
I was accused of being grating, sloppy, overly casual, semi-literate and undignified. Some or all of this may be true. I would be the first to admit that what I write is not to everyone’s taste. And I’m happy to take feedback but I would prefer if this was face-to-face or at least on the phone rather than an impersonal email.
It’s a prickly reminder of school reports. I’m sure some of you have the warm comforting experience of glowing reports all the way through school but mine were peppered with gems like: Stewart does what he can with what he’s got (PE); If Stewart is lucky he might be able to able to balance his chequebook by the end of the year (accounting); Stewart can’t count his fingers and get the same answer twice (maths).
So I made the last one up but it’s not entirely inaccurate. Another perennial is the old ‘‘easily distracted’’ chestnut but I don’t know of anyone being described as having supernatural levels of concentration and if they stared any harder at their work it would burst into flames.
So if you have feedback for me please by all means come see me and we can chat about it. I may even take your comments on board. Put my face on your dart board if you have to. But the will to stay polite via email is running low.