By Elizabeth Austin

The morning after my SNAP piece ran in the New York Times, I received an email from a man who inexplicably entered his personal information into my website’s “Contact” form. His name is Earl, and he shared the following message with me:

I hear you are a SNAP recipient and currently worried about how will you [sic] afford food for your kid who has cancer. Who did you vote for? … I hope you lose everything including your daughter.

Strange, horrifying, bizarre, unhinged, #notallmenbutalwaysaman— pick your descriptor, most of them apply! But we can all agree: Earl is upset.

This is not the first crazy message I’ve received, and I’m not counting on it being the last. Discourse on the internet is notoriously toxic, rarely beneficial, ever-enduring. The anonymity of the internet protects abusers and allows people to say anything they want about and to anyone, without any threat of repercussions (unless they tell on themselves by entering their full names and emails into website forms….)

I love a good faith argument. I’m usually willing to engage with someone if they read something I wrote and want to push back on its substance, but the messages that exist solely as cruelty equipped with a “send” button are things I try to dismiss as quickly as they come in. After every piece I publish in a major outlet, there’s a slew of them, but truthfully, I can’t remember the last time one of them got under my skin.

The Rules of Engagement: Don’t.

I almost never read comments sections. The one exception to this was my piece in The NYT about my couch—what could people possibly say about a woman writing about her couch? I’m thrilled to say that comment section passed the vibe check.

I don’t read comments on articles themselves, on Instagram, on The NYT, on Facebook, and I don’t read criticisms written in other outlets. I don’t even read the comments on my friends’ pieces— even when they ask me to. Setting a hard limit on comments sections has been one of my best moves, especially this early in my career. I do not, nor will I ever, need to know what the internet is saying about me, and neither do you.

If someone has something meaningful to say, I trust they’ll get in touch. My website has a contact form, and it gets a lot of use—I’ve made many wonderful connections from it that I’ve since made email-official. Same for my Instagram DMs, although I keep those strictly filtered and seldom check anything other than my priority inbox.

It makes me happy when I get a nice note from someone who enjoyed my work and who wants to connect. It doesn’t escape me that whoever is reaching out took time out of their busy day to first read my work and then contact me about it, and I always feel honored to be on the receiving end of that effort. It beats keyboard warrior energy any day.

So if you’re reading this because you publish work online and you’re struggling with the hate that comes with it, here’s what you need to know:

Comments aren’t feedback. Someone telling you something hateful is not providing you with actionable notes on your work. Someone telling me my children should be taken away is not engaging with my argument. These messages have nothing to do with our work and everything to do with the person sending them. The only thing these people are telling you is who they are.

You don’t owe anyone your attention. The comment section is not a town hall where you’re required to appear. You wrote the piece— that’s your contribution. You are not obligated to watch people tear it (or you) apart for sport.

Stick with your people. Whether it’s a group chat, a trusted friend, a partner, or a therapist, find someone who can help you process this stuff without letting it fester. Hate loses its power when you bring it into the light with people who actually know and love you.

Curate your information diet. I’ve built my entire online experience around not seeing the worst of what people say. As a rule, I avoid comment sections, but I’ve also muted specific words (check your Instagram settings!) and I block with abandon. I’ve done as much as I can to create a digital environment where I control what reaches me. It’s something I think more people should do— the internet is not an all-or-nothing proposition.

Return to your “why.” If you’re publishing work online, presumably it’s because you have something to say that you believe is worth saying. Unfortunately we live in a world where unhinged commentary has become part of the cost of admission to the public conversation. I don’t want to normalize it— it should absolutely never be happening— but it is happening, and you can’t control what people say, only how you process and respond. At some point the internet noise becomes just another line item in the budget: annoying, but not disqualifying.

You’re not alone. Every writer I know who publishes with any regularity gets crazy messages. It’s not just you, and it’s not because you’re doing something wrong or because your work is especially inflammatory. It’s because there are people out there who have decided that the proper response to reading something they disagree with is to try to hurt the person who wrote it.

I’m not sure if the Earls in my inbox think they can intimidate me into silence, self-censorship, or some performance of contrition or fear, but I’ve got things to say, and a bunch of strangers with anger management issues aren’t going to do much in the way of stopping me.

This essay was first published on Elizabeth’s Substack newsletter, Writing Elizabeth, and has been edited for length. You can read Elizabeth’s complete essay, which includes a funny discussion of Philadelphia sports fans, here.

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Elizabeth Austin’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and others. She is currently working on a memoir about being a bad cancer mom. She lives outside of Philly with her two children and their many pets. Find her on Instagram.

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Tagged: comments, essay, feedback, internet hate, internet haters, New York Times