Thank you for your reply, because goodness knows I needed to hear some reason! I hadn’t thought about it the way your friend put it to you – that people comment based on their experience of me. And of course, if someone disagrees, it may lead to a bad experience. I’m going to remember your advice as I move forward. I’ve followed your blog for quite some time, but only recently started my own blog and started putting my voice out there. You’re a role model for actually speaking your mind and sticking to what you believe in.

Hi Emily,

No, I don’t take these comments to heart, especially on my blog. I know that they’re not about me. As a friend of mine once said, “Whether people speak well of you or not, they’re talking about their experience of you, not about you.” If complete strangers want to launch an attack, it’s about them and their own experience of whatever I’ve written about. They don’t know me and they have no basis on which to make a judgment about my character. If they get nasty, I figure that something I wrote triggered something in them that they don’t want to look at or don’t know how to handle.

But on the Internet as a whole, I choose my battles wisely. For the sake of conserving my own energy, I now stay away from commenting in venues in which people attack one another as a matter of course. I figure that anything I have to say there simply won’t be heard amidst the cacophany, and it really hurts me to watch people having at one another. If I comment in a venue in which there is some nastiness among some of the people and I don’t want to get involved in it, I make my comments solely for the sake of people who might be listening in and need to hear a voice of reason. I just say my piece and move on. I don’t stay to argue, because most of the time, it’s not really worth it. I’d rather spend my time in a good discussion with people who want to listen to one another. I think what upsets me in most venues isn’t an attack on my character so much as the idea of wasting time arguing with someone who really isn’t arguing in good faith.

Basic politeness and human decency shouldn’t be too much to ask, but on the Internet, they’re in short supply in a lot of places. So tread carefully.

Thank you for writing the piece — I haven’t found much else on the subject yet.

Oh, since the inciting event concerned beer, have some bitters as well.

Lead on!

But enough of me. Congratulations and Mazel Tov on your elevation to the ranks of the Great Embittered!!!!