As many of my blog readers know, I’ve written about and wrestled for years about how to deal with the rising anger online.
Sometimes, I’ve handled it wisely, sometimes not. As time passed, I realized I was the one with the problem, and I had to face up to that. I just had too much anger when provoked. I’ve done that, and I wanted to share how. Anger was useless, just another magnet to draw more anger.
But in a way, I was almost addicted to it. Many people asked me to stop, and I wanted to, but I couldn’t. There were too many old and deep triggers.
Yet online rage and cruelty became one of the most important gifts I’ve ever received. It gave me the strength and motivation to change. And I have changed.
I never expected nasty emails themselves to be good for me, to help me finally stop feeling panicky and control the anger still buried inside me. I didn’t know how to deal with it positively and in a healthy way, and I tended to lash out at people who provoked me, sometimes going after people who disagreed with me in a rude (to me) way.
As a long-time book author, I rarely encountered cruelty or hostility in this protected and isolated life. People also tended to value manners much more; it was considered awful to be cruel and rude to be mean.
This only stirred my angry critics; it enabled them. That’s what they live for; these messages are often a cry for attention or even help.
I called it friendly fire when innocent people got shot accidentally. I couldn’t always tell the good guys from the bad. And in any case, they were playing to my wounds, not my decisions. I had trouble ignoring the bait; it was so complex a problem I took it to therapy.
I wasn’t sure who was trying to hurt me and who wasn’t. Online hostility has soared in the past few years. It used to be occasional, but now it is almost daily.
I lashed out, not able to resist the urge to fight back, much as Donald Trump, who was almost certainly traumatized as a child, strikes back at people he perceives to be enemies. I never thought of comparing myself to him in this way. It was a revelation.
This is a strange culture to me. I was taught to mind my own business and never question or criticize strangers, and I was taught to fight back against people who I believed were attacking me, something un-diagnosed Dyslexia can help promote.
It happened often.
I can’t and won’t tell other people what to do, but I can share what I have learned. Take it or leave it.
I can best illustrate my revelation in the hopes that it will be helpful in a culture mired in hostility, grievance, and distance technologies. It’s difficult to be cruel face to face; it’s a coward’s heaven online, balm for the wounded —simple, free, accessible, and anonymous.
What did I learn?
I learned that I was drawn to argue and strike back at people who are, in many ways, just like me in this way: Most of the time, I was dealing with people who were traumatized early in life and who, like me, learned to feel sorry for themselves and angry and suspicious of the world. I recognized the symptoms.
What I realized is that almost all of these people were wounded in some way and damaged in some way. How else to explain people who assault strangers they don’t know and will never meet?
A young woman who calls herself a vet tech (she is neither; I’ll call her VT) became obsessed with Zip and me when I wrote that he would not be permitted to sleep in the house during the winter.
I believe she is the person who called the police and said I was abusing my cat by letting him sleep in the barn. This aroused an animal rights group, including people who empathize with animals but not humans. They understand a certain kind of pain and isolation.
VT began collecting and saving my photos of Zip, writing me impassioned messages projecting awful pain and sadness onto him and accusing me of abuse. When I took a picture of him looking in our windows, she said it was apparent he was pleading with me to come inside.
When I took a photo of him yawning, she said it was clear he had broken a tooth and probably was suffering from various diseases and was seeking help.
She wrote that everything I said about him was false or untrue, and she insisted that I rehome him and that I was a fraud for writing in my books and blog that I loved animals and cared for them.
She never offered a motive for being so cruel but insisted everything she said was true.
She diagnosed Zip as having all kinds of illnesses and much anguish, from being forced to live in a barn in the winter or any time to not getting the care he needed. My vet said all of her claims and observations were false. She said Zip is one of the happiest and healthiest cats she knows.
I answered her once or twice but soon realized that what was happening inside VT’s mind had nothing to do with me or Zip. I might be a wonderful cat owner or a twisted monster; she was not, in reality, coherent or able to diagnose either rationally.
She could not hear my replies and was projecting much pain onto my pleased and healthy cat. She had transformed me into a cruel monster who abused Zip out of cruelty and dishonesty.
I had become a stand-in for the universal lousy guy, a familiar figure in the animal world. I was not capable of sincerity or kindness.
She had overemotionalized Zip to the point of total unreality. She doesn’t need an argument; she needs help. I was in no position to give her any or get her any.
I’ve been in therapy for much of my life and suffered, if that is the world, with general anxiety, panic attacks as well as Dyslexia. I was also savagely bullied and ridiculed.
I do know what it feels like to project my pain and troubles onto others, and I learned not to do it on dogs, cats, or other animals, and especially not on people. I also know that many people project their feelings onto animals; think about the people you know with dogs and cats.
There is epidemic hostility toward people in many parts of the animal rights culture; it is an ideology ripe for people who can over-empathize with pain and persecution and who mistrust human beings.
VT is one of those people. When people like that attacked me, I learned to look in the mirror and try to see my face looking back. Why were my anger and hostility better than theirs? The only way to be better was to change. I don’t accept those messages any longer, not in my e-mail or on my blog.
I delete any message that anyone might see as hostile or cruel. As I suspect, almost all of my virtual assailants are gone; there is nothing for them to hang around for.
Reading V’s anguish and hostile messages, I could almost feel the pain and hurt from her messages about Zip. She is certainly not a vet or a vet tech, but I do not know what she might be. What was she doing really? Her argument was about herself and her life. The best help I could provide was to ignore her and, eventually, block her.
Rather than argue with or get stung by her messages, I oddly empathized with her; I could feel her pain because I had felt that kind of pain.
I used to say every one of those things she told about Zip, about my sister, who was treated cruelly and abusively. I came to see her as a crippled human being, not as an enemy or ideological opponent. By being angry, I was being another form of cruelty and feeding my anger and pain.
I found the answer.
Do nothing. Walk away. This lesson was a lifesaver in many ways because I could apply it to the rest of my life.
My spiritual work was an even more excellent gift. I learned that the only way to deal with anger and fear is to acknowledge both and look deeply at the source. I could do this in therapy and meditation. It worked for me. VT and then the others all fell into place. When I went away from them, they went away from me. In some ways, it was just that simple.
My sister was the very person shut out of family and home and left to suffer and disintegrate. I was that person at times, ignored and forgotten even as I was breaking down as well. I projected my anger onto my parents.
What was the point of answering VT and, indeed, of arguing with her?
She could not help herself. She was me without the help and the awareness of my anger as a problem. I could afford help and receive it; she was another version of my sister, who had succumbed to the most painful kinds of mental illness and lost control of her life.
I couldn’t help my sister, and I couldn’t help VT.
She has no idea what is happening with Zip in his new life, and how could she? Social media makes intruding on strangers’ lives easy without ever seeing or knowing anything about them. It is unbearable for people like that to see animals and project all of their pain and trauma on them.
I take it now as a desperate effort at healing. She was trying to save Zip from me.
Over these years online, I found I was often unable to ignore messages like hers.
Something deep inside of me made me feel I had to respond, to speak for myself, to answer, and enable cruel people to enter my psyche and mess it up. As a child, I learned to fight back.
In therapy and meditation, I explored the truth about myself and now pay little or no attention to messages like that. I don’t read, reply to, or enable them with more hatred. I am proud to say that I have changed.
I feel genuine empathy for VT. She is looking for help in all the wrong places and will thus get none. I don’t need to add to her woes.
My anger has mostly faded away, and my panic along with it.
I wish VT nothing but healing.
My need to answer VT is my problem, not hers. I couldn’t help my sister; I certainly couldn’t help her.
I wish she could get the help that I got, but in messed up, money-crazed America, there is no appetite for seriously helping the traumatized and, especially, the traumatized who are poor.
My heightened exchanges with cruel and disturbed messengers online coincided with my decision to enter a period of spiritual reflection and renewal in my life.
It was my time to let go and put aside the anger and hurt that I carried inside of me and which had soiled my life, as it did when I fought with broken people online and sometimes with people I thought were broken who were often just pompous or obnoxious or rude.
There is a difference.
But this was a time—and time was running out—for me to ask questions about myself, not the stranger VT.
I wasn’t interested in entering her life the way she was obsessed with mine—quite the opposite. I asked myself what kind of person I was becoming all these years. Was I becoming more honest, decent, and merciful as I entered the final stages of my life? And what, above all, was I going to be better?
My interaction with VT encouraged me not to argue with her, which was pointless, but to talk with her, which has improved my life. I credit my spiritual work for helping me to move forward and turn away from people who can’t, most often, through no fault of their own. I had to face the truth about me.
I was always told that older adults become more and more difficult as they age. I don’t believe that. I’m less interested in anger, cruelty, and people who cannot empathize. I’m less interested in masks and appearances and am eager to accept the challenge of being human.
I am determined to face life’s smallness and rejoice in the time left to turn sweeter instead of more sour.
I felt something profound about VT; I could close my eyes and almost feel the grievance and hurt.
But I can’t help her and am not saintly enough to try; I can only help me and those who want help.
That means leaving her behind to make her way in a sometimes cruel and disconnected world. I fear for her future. So long, VT, you are blocked from my blog or email.
