We writers go tripping merrily over the bridges of culture, society, equality, and many others that give us our enlightened views of the streams of humanity below. Our goal is to add our particular wisdom and narrative to the flow.
As we go “Trip trap, trip, trap,” over these bridges, we unwittingly disturb the trolls lurking underneath. (Yes, I know trip, trap means something entirely different now, but trip, trap is what the Three Billy Goats Gruff did in my analogy. Deal with it).
When the trolls, with their “eyes as big as saucers, and noses as long as pokers,” according to the Norwegian fairy tale, come out from their hiding places, they demand to know what we are doing traipsing over “their” bridge.
By their nature of bullying, growling, and demanding, they challenge our right to passage. Like the three Billy Goats Gruff, we could try to bait them with bigger enemies than us for them to go after. One day, according to the fairy tale, the biggest Billy Goat Gruff comes along and knocks the troll off the bridge where he is swept away in the fast-moving stream.
Ah, the stuff of fairy tales. In fact, we are the ones who have to deal with them one way or another. Eat or be eaten, or ignore and run away, as fast as our little trip trapping feet will go.
First, how do we tell who’s a troll? Some are as obvious as the troll in the story. They’re easy to spot. They lurk in the darkness, jumping out to surprise and shock with a “Who are you, a lowly (woman, minority, life coach, unknown writer) to trip across my bridge?” they demand. “Why is it MY bridge, you ask? Because I say so.”
They are directly insulting, snide, and sometimes even as threatening as the troll determined to eat the goats Gruff. I’m going to hang out over a bridge here and say I don’t believe they even read our articles. Their gristly responses are to the headlines. In response to the headline alone, they like to refer to some particularly unattractive picture of us they have scoured the internet to find. The only point that proves, is the one on their pointy little heads.
How do they find the time to scour the internet for the lone, unflattering picture of us? Easy, they aren’t writers. Their life’s purpose is to lurk behind the scenes and under the bridge.
They demean us, our looks, our words (if they bother to read them), our family, heritage, education, ethnicity, gender and anything else they can think of to sling at us like rocks as we teeter on the bridge. They are the obvious ones.
Less obvious are the ones who may actually read the articles they’re trolling. Their comments may not initially be as insulting and personal. But they usually slip up somewhere and slide in a derogatory remark about the writer themselves. My latest had a somewhat good argument going, until he threw in “old lady” at the end. As if that mattered. He had to search the interwebs to even discover my age. Or he figured saying that to any grown woman was insult.
One of the best ways to catch such a troll is to check their profile. While only a few of them have long, raggedy beards, and “noses long as pokers,” they inevitably are following only one or two writers, or only the platform itself. They are not writers, and thus have zero to few followers. They just hang out under the bridge of the platform, and jump out when least expected, flailing away at those of us who are writers, trying hard to knock us off the bridges of our creativity, of which they have none.
If you choose to respond, do what I do. Say, “Well, that took a dark turn,” and trip, trap away.
Poor pitiful things. And they call us ugly.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Mark Konig on Unsplash