An Old Lady, a Troll, and a Very Nice Writer.

Definitely not a fairy-tale.

It sounds like the start of a very poor joke. The kind that makes people say,

Yes, it would be funny if it wasn’t true.

I don’t know what the hell is going on over there at Reedsy.com, but this is not my first experience with this troll nonsense.

Last September, I wrote a story about my very elderly mother.

Okay, not a topic to everyone’s taste, but I thought it was an innocuous little piece about my relationship with my then ninety-five year old mum. It won a prize, but I was more excited by the number of supportive comments and followers it attracted.

It also attracted my first ever troll experience, which I feel I handled efficiently, because he never resurfaced. And, I turned it into an article here on Medium about that experience.

A couple of days ago, I checked my Reedsy notifications, and this appeared.

Oookay!

It has been a tough month, centred around my mum’s growing dementia and her general “I’m over being alive” attitude. I had already just ‘reported’ some nutcase who used the comment space to tell me in detail how magic spells could make my love-life so much better, blah blah blah. I was in no mood to deal with little Gurkirat, and whatever repressed anger he has going on, down in his mother’s basement.

So I replied with this:

Then I came back to my tiny corner of Medium and consoled myself by reading beautiful articles of love, compassion and hope. And writing some more satirical nonsense.

Late last night, I checked back in to my Reedsy notifications and found this:

The Take-Away:

I am an optimist by nature. I have to believe that for every evil or just plain stupid person out there, there are many intelligent and compassionate people.

My smart-ass response felt deeply satisfying on a personal level. However, Patrick took action the way I should have done. Although he validated my written response, he did the best thing to ensure that the little twerp would be removed from the site. And hopefully be discouraged from trolling, at least for a while.

Sometimes we have to act as the ‘Patricks’ of the world, prepared to take action even when we are not sure if it is any of our business to do so. And that is the mark of a truly decent human being.