I'm reeling from a spate of hate.

In which I share a shocking (for me) TikTok experience

Yesterday I posted a TikTok that previews a post I’m going to publish right here on Substack in a couple days. The TikTok and the post are about my observation that our new government is killing care. The executive orders that Trump has issued overwhelmingly aim to destroy government agencies that take care of people: babies in developing countries, farmers in the US, anyone who gets sick with AIDS or COVID or the bird flu, undocumented workers who care for our children and our elderly, people who are fleeced by credit card and other companies.

My TikTok expressed my outrage at and incomprehension of these moves our government is making.

And I was shocked by the hateful responses my video immediately generated.

I’m writing about it because my entire life, both personal and professional, is devoted to emotions and relationships. To making them right, to Being Better, to dealing with Fuckin’ People with, ultimately, love. To metabolizing unwanted feelings that others have induced in me by their nasty behaviors so that I can, at best, view those people with compassion and, at worst, sleep at night.

But damn. These Fuckin’ People are really hard to love.

I know people who post on social media have suffered at the hands of trolls forever. Many before me have figured out how to handle it. I have long revered Sarah Silverman for her compassionate response to a hater online. Truly, the way to combat vicious objectification is through compassionate relating, which is what Sarah Silverman did.

Another way for people, like me, who don’t have the energy or desire to engage with objectifying Trumpsters online is to work hard to metabolize the poison they’ve spread. If it’s already in me, I’ll digest it, use what I can, and poop out the rest.

So here are some approaches I’ve taken:

• practicing self-awareness: I noticed my feelings. Of fear, shame, and the expectation that I was in trouble — all feelings I experience whenever someone pushes back on me when I take up space. It is my job to notice these feelings when they come up and to ground myself in reality, which is that I’m safe, that I have a right to exist, and that — haha! — I’m right about Trump’s (and Musk’s) attitude towards care.

• entertaining fantasies of revenge: I imagined the comments I would shoot back at each troll. They were all devastating, just singeing. I imagined each troll collapsing in a smoking heap. Take that, you horrible human being!

• writing: I copied out the most devastating insults and neutralized them. Sure, I can see why they focused on that particular detail of my appearance. They’re not exactly wrong. But they’re still assholes. After I got that shit out of my system, I wrote this post.

• getting distance: I got into my Garden and pushed the commenters into their own Gardens. In my Garden, I Owned My Shit. I reminded myself that I had made that post voluntarily, and I chose to express my disgust and dismay openly. That’s on me. And I can live with that. In pushing the commenters into their Gardens, I reminded myself that their comments were not actually about me. They were about my appearance, OK. And they were about politics, which is appropriate, given the nature of my post. But they don’t know me. And I don’t know them. It is my job to get them out of my body and mind, to separate myself from their energy, and let them be.

• setting boundaries: I’m not going to look at any more TikTok comments, and I’m not going to Google myself to see what other nastiness is being posted on other platforms. I refuse to seek out more pain. And I am confident that this wave of hate will die down and (sadly) turn to another target in a hot minute.

• being educated: I learned that the TikTok algorithm is going to put anything political I post in front of the very people who will hate that post. I really doubt these commenters will see the posts I make about how to tune relationships. Note to self.

• feeling compassion: I am absolutely positive that people who leave nasty comments on social media are serving a particular personal need. The need to rid themselves of self-loathing. The need to feel superior to people they actually feel inferior to (“lefticals,” as one commenter put it) — or to whom they genuinely feel superior, either because of beliefs or looks or something else. The need to be self-righteous in the face of confusing uncertainty and powerlessness. The need to bond with unknown others for a valuable sense of belonging. The need, as in the Sarah Silverman case, to distract themselves from physical and psychological pain.

So, while these people are, in my opinion, Fuckin’ People, they are also just people. And, let’s face it: To them, people like me are the Fuckin’ People. If I can step back and accept this, I can see them as teaching me a little bit about themselves. At the very least, their innards at the moment they watched my TikTok were uncomfortable. At the most, their lives are awful. Likely, they are capable of love and kindness in select instances and, for whatever reason, can’t help watching TikTok videos that make them hopping mad.

That last possibility is enough for me. Poor fucks. I hope they find more productive and satisfying things to do than rage at someone they don’t know. I sure will.