Thanks, shitty internet troll, for showing me how far I’ve come

Here’s me, not giving a single solitary fuck about your opinion of my appearance — and why that’s pretty fucking important.

Liz Smith
The Mental Elf
4 min readMay 24, 2017

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Ahh, trolls. The internet is full of them. And they have a nasty habit of picking on women who speak their mind.

I commented on a story shared by a page I follow about a racist incident on public transport. Most people actually engaged with the content of what I’d said, but this one guy chose to tell me I was so ugly I made Quasimodo look like Brad Pitt and ironically also called me the troll — and fat to boot.

And do you know what? I actually laughed.

This is hugely significant for me, because I was bullied all the way through high school because of the way I looked. I was called ugly every single day for many years. I was told I looked like a pig, that I would never get a boyfriend, that I was so ugly I should kill myself because it was so horrible for other people to have to look at me.

So yeah, I developed some serious self-esteem and body image issues, despite being outwardly still successful — getting my grades, going to a good university, doing all the things that bright kids are supposed to do. But inside I was broken.

I’ve basically spent my adult life dealing with the fallout from that period in my life.

Every relationship I had, I worried I wasn’t attractive enough for my partner. I assumed and expected they would prefer other women. Every breakup I went through I blamed it on not being attractive enough. I assumed that my boyfriends’ friends would think I was ugly and ask them why they were even with me. I allowed myself to be used and treated badly because I thought ugly girls didn’t get to have high expectations. I held myself back in my career from being in any sort of position where I’d have eyes on me, or have any attention at all, because I assumed that people would not care what I said, they’d only be focusing on how ugly I was and that as an ugly woman, I wouldn’t be given the time of day.

In other words, I had conditioned myself to expect rejection and to protect myself from it.

Thanks to my counselling training, work in the survivor-led movement, and therapy, I can now question those internalised messages. I don’t necessarily now think I’m super-attractive — I am aware that by society’s standards I don’t meet conventional expectations about female beauty, but the difference is, I care 100% less about that. I believe now that I and all other women have the right to take up space in the world and to speak out even if I don’t meet those standards. I now understand that picking on a woman’s looks is a silencing tactic used by a certain kind of man who is threatened by women who aren’t afraid to speak up. Because we are supposed to care what this brand of misogynist, straight cis men think about how we look. It’s designed to make us scuttle away and believe that we don’t deserve our platform and our voice.

But seriously, fuck that.

One thing about going through what I went through as a vulnerable young woman is that now I’ve found my voice and I believe I have a right to my place in this world no matter what I look like, I won’t be going back to giving those kinds of men the power to make me feel like I don’t deserve to exist.

Even a year ago, a comment like that nasty ass troll made would have upset me at some level. I had to check myself when I initially reacted to his comment — where was the angst, the upset, the wondering if I really was so horrifically ugly that people can’t help commenting on it, is he just saying what other people are secretly thinking?

I looked for those emotions and they simply weren’t there. I got on with my day.

So if you’re out there, Chris Boyle, thanks dude, because you’ve shown me that I’ve come far enough not to care for your opinion — or that of anyone else like you, for that matter. And I’m not going to keep quiet just because you or anyone else doesn’t have a particular aesthetic preference for the way I look.

You have no more power over me. And if it took having to read those vile words to make me realise it, well in this case, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, as they say. You carry on wasting your time abusing women on the internet and I’ll just carry on living my life.

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Liz Smith
The Mental Elf

Writing about all things mental health and well-being. Therapist. Loves a self experiment. Embarking on a 365 days of yoga challenge.