Reply to what is the worst thing someone has said to you, on DCUM?

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[quote=Anonymous]I started posting on DCUM during the pandemic (boredom + loneliness + anxiety over everything led me here -- I suspect I'm not alone in this). Even though I live in DC and had a 2 year old at the time, I wasn't even aware of the website prior to that.

I have been insulted lots of times though most of them don't really stick out and I can't remember exactly what people said. However I recall a time within my first year of being here where a poster was so cruel to me (repeatedly calling me a troll, ripping apart my posts and making fun of how I wrote, accusing me of sock puppeting, something I didn't even know about at the time) that it genuinely impacted my mental health for a few days. I remember I kept engaging with them to defend myself, and then reading these awful things they'd say to me in response, and becoming internally upset and leaving the site for a few hours to calm down, and then coming back again and repeating the cycle.

I finally recognized that they were intentionally baiting me, that my emotional reaction was obviously exactly what the wanted, and left that thread. I took a little break from DCUM after that, maybe a few weeks. But I eventually made my way back.

After that though, I discovered that when people would say rude things to me, I was better able to ignore them. Often I wouldn't engage, or if I did, it was in a detached way that didn't invite more debate. Not defensively. I learned, when I started threads, to mostly ignore the posters who would jump in right away to attack. I learned to report posts that were obviously against DCUM standards or totally derailing a thread.

In the end, I think the experience has been good for me. It's actually probably good for me to see the worst things people can say to me about my intelligence, my parenting, my personal choices. I am sure some of these are things people IRL have thought of me but never said. Confronting them on DCUM has helped me let go of the idea that it matters what strangers think of me. It's made me less defensive in general and more apt to write off people who are unfairly judgmental as simply not useful.

It's like going to grad school for dealing with vicious people. At first it tears you apart, but then you build back up stronger and wiser and with more tools in your toolkit, so to speak.

Now if someone insults me on here it doesn't even register. I know people have done it recently but I couldn't even tell you what they said. I skim over it and move on with my life.[/quote]

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