Yesterday, I woke up feeling good. I’d had a good night’s sleep and got a lot done the day before so knew what I had to do for the day ahead. Like most people, one of the first things I do is check my phone, read my emails to see if any work-related messages have come through over the night. Then I read this:
“You are nothing but a fat ugly f**king scumbag die slowly and painfully from cancer you piece of greasy shit and hurry up about it”
wow!
Just repeating it has left me a little dumbfounded. I was shaken and upset when I first read it. But then I remembered watching Ricky Gervais’s Humanity show the night before and he was talking about trolls and how he deals with them and it kinda made me laugh. This was pretty hurtful, but why should I let it ruin my day? It was sent at 5 am from some pathetic keyboard warrior who probably has a pretty pathetic existence because he feels the need to insult complete strangers while hiding anonymously behind his keyboard.
It probably wasn’t even aimed at me.
A few years ago I had a bad experience with trolls. A couple of national tabloid newspapers (The kind that decent people don’t read because they’re full of lies and sensationalist rubbish) published a story about a girl from Blackpool, UK, called Stephanie Curwen who had committed a horrible act of animal cruelty. I’m not going to say what it is if you have to know you can google it yourself. But anyway, because we had the same name and we’re both from Lancashire… and I was trying to start a business online… my name was more easily accessible via search engines a social media. The idiots would read the headline and look for the first Stephanie Curwen online they could find, and because I’d gone to the trouble of working on SEO that was unfortunately me. I was getting death threats sent to me using the contact form on my site (these cowards were still putting false emails in the form so I couldn’t respond) they were creating fake social media accounts just purely to harass me. I even had some idiots manage to get my phone number (they were intelligent enough to do that but not figure out that there was more than one person with that name??!?) and were posting my personal details in the comments sections of the Daily Mail and Sun articles (who were really helpful when I asked them to remove them… NOT as if I needed another reason to hate those newspapers). I had people threaten to come to my house and rape me, harm my family and set my house on fire.
It was a horrific time for me and almost broke me. The police did what they could and after a week or so it calmed down. I do know that every so often these articles probably resurface so maybe that’s what yesterdays message was.
Trolling and making threats to people is wrong. Most of these people are uneducated and ignorant because any decent person would find other ways to channel their anger and frustration. What makes me mad is that a lot of those chavs messaging me thinking I’m the other SC are probably pretty cruel themselves. To me, they’re no better than that vile, horrible woman with my moniker. If they can say such hurtful things they’re really just as bad as her.
This was one of the contributing factors to me legally changing my name last year. That and all the family trouble I’d had. The name “Stephanie Curwen” is cursed to me now. So I had to get rid of it.
So, to anyone thinking of sending me any hurtful messages, just remember I’m judging you. I’m imagining you as some disgusting chav with poor hygiene and a pretty sad life. If you think I’m the same person as the other Stephanie, I’m not. I’m about 12 years older than her. Never had an STI (apparently someones created a blog about her sexual exploits… ew), I campaign for animal charities and a huge animal lover. I’m university educated and a small business owner. Just because I happen to live in the same county and HAD the same name doesn’t make us the same person.
If that was aimed at me… then you’re pathetic. I’m actually laughing at you. Is your life really that sad? Is your penis THAT small that you feel you have to demean women to make yourself feel better about yourself (Yeah I went there)
The only thing I have to to say to trolls is GET A LIFE! Because I have one. A pretty good one actually, thanks. I have more productive things to do with my time than let some poorly written messages by an illiterate troll ruin my day.
