Anonymous asked: What?! Why would someone lecture you for being too nice? That's just you. And it's not like you're loving on assholes who threaten your family. You just approach bizarre questions with some humor, and criticism with the possibility that you could maybe be wrong. Obviously it's you being good natured :P but I wouldn't enjoy being lectured on how to handle negative attention/feedback.

Listen, you don’t know what you’re talking about, which would be fine if you weren’t acting so authoritative. I often went to her with questions or just experiences of people freaking me out or making me question myself or censor myself, because she understood and had weathered the initial onslaught of that before I was even on the internet. You’re talking like someone who hasn’t experienced a lot of troll attacks, but let me tell you, plenty of them are vicious and in no way deserving of respectful engagement. You don’t see the name calling or the all caps or the “creepy motherfuckers trying to impersonate my relatives,” that I get. There are LOTS of comments on lj and questions here that I just delete without answering, and I’m much happier that way than I used to be when I tried to see eye to eye with everyone. What you’re interpreting as her acting controlling or snotty to me, was her caring and not wanting me to be a basketcase or disappear from LJ altogether. Those were real possibilities right around the “Wow if I decided to go for Hippy of the Year and my kid ended up brain damaged, I’d kill myself” phase of my internet comments.

There’s also some basic shit I am always baffled by people not understanding, at work here, where I came online as a person totally comfortable talking honestly with strangers of all sorts, who’s extremely chill in almost any social situation and generally truthful. In person I get an almost continuous stream of wildly varied people opening up to me, and saying, “I’ve never told anyone this before…” and I get along with…like…EVERYBODY. This actually left me very unprepared for the weird anonymous way people spazz and turn into freaks when they can go “anon” online, and misjudge my tone or phrasing, or assume totally off things about me and run with them.

Heather, on the other hand, is talking through her keyboard as a 4’11” person on the autism spectrum with pretty significant social anxieties, and this is one medium through which she really does not have to suffer fools. I didn’t experience the school bullying and the RL harrassment for being “different” (queer, disabled, nerdy, in-patient, sick, whatever) that she has always had. The internet has leveled her playing field, though, and allowed not just her, but a whole fucking lot of people to see that she’s not just “as” smart/well spoken/good at photography/researched/hilarious as many, but actually MORE all of that, than most. AND she’s doing many of the parenting things, and environmental/healthy living things, and constant growth and inner work things, that totally able bodied people with more resources at their disposal often cop out on, saying they’re hard or too unrealistic. I’d be kicking ass and taking names online as long as people continued to queue up for it, if I was her, too.