The dangers and delights of being disabled online: Dealing with trolls and finding my people

It’s human to look over the fence at things we wish we could be a part of but can’t. For disabled folk, it’s even more familiar. It’s the military career made impossible by a mental health section. It’s the only karaoke bar in town having a staircase entrance. It’s the too-expensive off-road wheelchair. We look longingly into a world that doesn’t accommodate us, craving to belong. It’s a simple need, high on the Maslow hierarchy, and like so much in disabled life, it can take ingenuity to meet it. As a mentally ill teenager unable to live outside of hospitals, the shrunken world around me didn’t tell me who I was. Like any 17 year old, I needed to find my people, but my only connection to the rest of the world was an internet one.

It was the mid-2010’s when I started searching hashtags for a community. Social media was a different place, still teething. Does it make me old that I remember Instagram when all it could do was upload a single image? When I started sharing about my life, the landscape of the internet was only coagulating into the mountainous tech conglomerates who didn’t yet own the world, and internet etiquette hadn’t evolved. In the Wild West subsets of tumblr and Instagram I gravitated toward, we all over-shared and pretended we had constructive reasons for doing so, when really all we needed was connection to people who understood what we were suffering through. Most of those people were not my friends, but they were oxygen for my socially suffocated soul and it showed me the potential for community of any kind imaginable to form online.

For a really long time, I don’t think anyone around me saw these online communities the way I did. I seemed to see the connections made and communities evolving as more real and more valuable. You’re bound to be over-invested if social media has been your only social sustenance for years, I’m sure, but as I kept sharing through my recovery and disabilities progressing, I was seeing a world forming online that I really wanted to be a part of. I saw a way to help other people, and a way to be creative. I saw a way to find purpose in my past, and a way to connect people who understood each others’ experience even from opposite continents. My diagnoses and experiences made it so hard to bond with people “irl” but the more I grew through my social media, the more people I was finding who got me, and it didn’t matter in the slightest that we were all around the globe from each other.

Eventually I found myself amongst the online disability community, having crossed over its bridges from the mental health and chronic illness hubs, and I fell in love. I was home. From autism to PTSD to paralysis, pain and beyond, the disability community encompassed and embraced my experiences and offered enlightening frameworks for understanding them that no one in all the healthcare I’d received had ever shown me. As it taught me I didn’t need fixing - only accommodating - my life began to change in hugely positive ways. Paired with the countless friends I was making with all kinds of disabilities who were hilarious, creative, eloquent, driven, unapologetic, resilient, wise, vibrant people, a passion grew in me for this clan and I knew where I wanted my content creative energy to be spent.

By the time the pandemic hit, I was growing my passion and contributions to the disabled community I had come home to, but out of nowhere, I was suddenly being targeted by hateful conspiracy Reddit pages who spin hateful rhetoric about disabled creators and question their legitimacy. These anonymous trolls follow their targets secretly to screenshot their content and post it on their own platforms where hundreds of thousands of members can comment anything they want about how ‘subjects’ are lying or exaggerating. Their speculation is merciless and hugely damaging to those they target, an effect to which I have been no exception. It led to me becoming paranoid and questioning reality, falling back on self-damaging coping mechanisms. I couldn’t fathom losing the kinship I had found online though, especially at the hands of such heartless people. Instead, I promised myself I wouldn’t give them any power and would give my absolute best to the work I do so I can stand by every phrase and frame. This turned out to be the ingredient needed to render the trolls irrelevant.

These days my connections in the disability community are increasingly offline even if they don’t start that way. Through social media I have been able to write myself into a story I thought I’d only ever read. Perseverance across a volatile developing virtual landscape has made me a character not just a fan. I have learned that the best way to find your people is to first offer your best self and of all the places I could keep offering my best, I pick this technicolor tribe of brave, endearing, disabled masterpieces every time.

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