Some background - I am diagnosed with autism and it can be hard for me to just “ignore” the awful things people can say to me when I’m online.
The latest thing someone said to me really got me feeling down and depressed. Honestly having darker thoughts because of it.
I have IBS-D, which means there is an insane amount of food I cannot eat - if I do eat the things I cannot, my intestines get shredded and I bleed like crazy. Honestly the list is massive and my diet has basically been chicken green beans and potatoes every night for the past 3 years. I have lost over 60 lbs, and currently weigh 130lbs as a 5.11 male. Doctors have been trying to figure it out but they haven’t been able to and say I may just have to live with it.
This person was calling me a monster because I eat meat, even though I have a medical condition that makes my diet extremely limited. Unfortunately meat is one of the only things that agrees with my stomach across the board. I’d like to be vegetarian but I literally will die from malnutrition and weight loss if I did try. I explained this to the user but they didn’t care.
I explained my autism to them, and that what they were saying was making me depressed and they just continued with saying how I was a monster and killing myself wouldn’t be as bad as killing all the animals I have to “enjoy” meat. They said my condition wasn’t an excuse and compared me to the “sexual cycle of violence” of dracula.
This user made me feel really sad and crappy. Afterwards I cried for a while but I don’t feel better.
The problem I have is that there are many people online who seem to get pleasure from being awful to others, and it gets to me every time.
Does anyone have any advice for handling these situations online? Often I hear people say you should just ignore these people and move on, but I end up ruminating on what they’ve said and it can make me feel bad for weeks on end. Sometimes I feel like I should just give up using the internet because of these people.
Nina Jankowicz has a book called How To Be A Woman Online, about surviving harassment and disinformation campaigns. While it’s pretty focused on the experiences of women with semi-public profiles, it has a lot of useful things in it that helped me feel a bit better about myself and manage the small-scale, generic bullying that I sometimes worry about. Blocking people, being a bit harder to find, and ending communication with anyone the slightest bit rude or abusive has helped. The Verbally Abusive relationship also has some great tips for spotting people’s crappy behavior sooner. That book deals mostly with romantic relationships, but you can recognize the same kinds of excuses and similar conversation patterns the online bullies use.
Also- just in case you need to hear this- it is so freaking normal to eat meat. I eat meat. Your diet is absolutely nobody’s business, ever. When somebody gets focused overly on a minor detail of your life to be mean to you about it, even if they say it’s for a “moral” or political reason, you can be sure they’re not truly sincere about that issue - because why would they be focused on one stranger’s habits instead of working for system changes if they really felt strongly about it? Eat your food, live your life, and protect yourself from these people. They don’t mean what they say.