This post helped me a lot.

We were insulted and trolled last week, and it hurt my feelings. We created our blog so we could help people, and then people criticize us for what we say or who we are.

Though, as you say, they’re not actually criticizing us, they’re reacting to their own stuff that we brought up. Two of the chapters in our book are spot-on related to this, so you’d think I’d have internalized it by now, eh? (:

Anyway, this is something that continues coming up for me, perhaps because there’s so little difference between my blog persona and the actual person that is me. I try to be as authentic as possible, so it feels like the mean people are actually attacking me instead of just sticking pins in their little Pace voodoo dolls. Thanks for the reminder that I don’t need to say “Ouch!” when they do that.

I’m feeling quite a bit better now. Thank you, Havi! (:

Paces last blog post..Today is Pace’s birthday.

@Rudy – well-spouted! Spout spout spout.

@Pam – meathead, eh? Awesome. I’d forgotten how much that post pissed people off … just not your “right people” and they didn’t have context.

Which I think is a big thing. When Mark Silver from Heart of Business guest-blogs over at Huffington Post, he gets all kinds of mean comments that would never show up on his own blog. And a lot of them are really suspicious of his advice because they don’t have the context of knowing what an incredibly heart-centered honest guy he is.

Anyway, it’s an interesting theme, and I think also (hmm, maybe this is another article) a lot of the time we think a comment is mean when actually the commenter just got triggered by something and is expressing their true feelings. We take it as mean but it’s actually just hurt or scared or upset.

Even on blogs where the discussion gets a lot louder than I find comfortable it always seems to me that here aren’t nearly as many trolls as there are people who don’t feel heard or acknowledged. It’s harder to maintain that perspective though when it’s *your* blog.

My experience at least.