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.
It’s important to remember that there are children on the internet that comment like every other user making it difficult to tell whether the person replying to you has a fully developed brain or not. There are also a lot of stupid, unreasonable or unpleasant adults (or any combination of these things) who do not understand or care to understand your specific situation or take back the unfair things they said to you.
While it may not be easy for you to outright ignore them, it may be easier to ignore the feelings that may arise from those hurtful words when you put things into context. That is not to say that you should ignore the opinions of others online completely but that you should give less weight to any one individual comment. The anonymity of the internet makes otherwise polite people say things in ways they would never think of saying in person.