TW: trolls irl

My nervous system is badly out of whack.

A troll showed up to phil club Thursday evening and brought with him an alarming level of intolerance, bigotry, misplaced self-righteousness, fascinating ignorance.

He kept doing that thing where he used big words in order to sound like an intellectual, but he used them incorrectly, and when somebody told him what the big words actually meant, he would just keep using them as though he hadn’t just learned what they meant a moment ago. Lost track of the number of times he said “but that wouldn’t be optimal” or “we have to maximize the utility…”

Somebody implied that we might, like, have obligations to take care of others, and he came out swinging with yes but you can’t force your value system on other people, and I thought oh shit here we go again

I won’t repeat his comments, in part because they were so incoherent that I’m still reeling and partly because you don’t need that energy in your life.

I’ve run into people like him online. I didn’t know they were actually real.

We tried to engage with him respectfully, to a point. We really did. Ill-informed devil’s advocates will always exist in philosophy. I’ve been that person in the past (and felt like an idiot afterwards).

Part of my value system is honoring disagreement. I’m not here to be right, I’m here to understand. He was there for attention.

I don’t fuck around with overconfident bigots with delusions of cishet supremacy, and I’m not going to sit there and listen to a greasy puddle of slime talk shit about like two thirds of the people who matter to me.

He may have crossed a line.

Guest speaker politely told him she wasn’t there to discuss what he wanted to talk about, but he just. He just kept talking. Speaker was clearly upset. I was upset. Everyone was uncomfortable.

I remember realizing I could just leave. I walked out. I was worried that I was going to say or do something I’d regret later. Meeting ended soon after because we weren’t sure what else to do.

He approached me outside the building to try to continue his anti-queer soliloquy. I’m afraid I lost my shit and screamed at him to leave me alone, to get lost. I let him have it. But he kept talking over me, as though I hadn’t spoken. So I walked away for a second time.

As I was leaving I told him it would really maximize the utility of this situation if he would just fuck off.

That felt good. I will be cherishing that memory for a long time.

Friends walked each other home, to be safe.

And then, when I got home – I took a shower and time slipped away from me and I don’t know how long I stood shaking under the water but I remember when the water ran cold. I turned off the tap, wrapped myself in a towel, went into a freeze response.

I couldn’t speak or move or think. My mom found me. I communicated with her about how to help me without words, charades. I used what tools I have. When I thawed out enough to think, the panic set in, the big gasps and the ugly crying.

My nervous system is so badly out of whack.

It will take me so much time and energy to repair what he just did to my ability to focus and sleep peacefully and feel safe and comfortable in my own skin.

Don’t feed the trolls. They’ll only come back for more.