Let us avoid resorting to avoid ourselves.

First, he started flirting during zoom meetings.

The flirtation escalated to taking screenshots of me. Then he circulated my picture among his friends and emailed me sexually explicit statements. I stood in the middle of my kitchen, powerless and hurt, my body shivered as if my online harasser was standing in front of me, while my lungs refused to cooperate, no air in the room, no matter how much I sucked air in, air did not fill my lungs, and I crumbled on the floor, shattered. 

I have saved emails and created a log, which can help me see patterns to build evidence, and published my experience on my blog, and enlisted the support of allies. I’m speaking against online harassment. But, according to some friends and some messages I received from online communities, this is not enough.

Calling, texting, there they were, buried in their thunderous anger, clutching their revenge tight to their chests, suggesting I should swing my door open on hate, on darkness, some of my friends sent me drafts with obscene text bubbles, the nastiest words I’ve ever read.

Their emails alarmed me.

I’m supposed to bombard my online harasser’s email with lethal words to hurt the man who hurt me.

Sending a just-right poison cocktail of text bubbles to someone’s hateful text means an eye for an eye; an eye for an eye means hate.

Hate must not be fed. Hate is always going to respond to hate, always, always.

In spending 24/7 looking for lethal slingshots to respond to someone’s hateful comment or email there resides a place which leads to resorting to abuse yourself, which in turn leads to becoming proficient at being cruel. Into this place sits hate, its mouth wide open, swallowing anyone who enters. Into this place hate smirks. It gleams. It dances. It leaps. It soars.

I hate my online harasser for the numbness and shock my body still feels, and for the overwhelming emotional and psychological stress I’m still going through.

But, tell me, would I fix my pain by resorting to abuse myself?

I think not.

Plus, even if you bombard your online harasser’s phone with obscene text bubbles, online abusers, when confronted, they throw their thousands of arrows at you, somehow more violent than ever, while your blood pressure rises to the roof.

To me, it’s less about how much time I should spend responding to hateful messages and a lot more about deliberately spending that same amount of time with people I love. Or doing something of consequence. Like writing this article to persuade my readers to avoid resorting to abuse themselves.

Instead of responding to a hateful text or comment or email with more vicious words, trapping ourselves in a vicious cycle, we can put our phone down. We can be offline for some time. We can use that time to heal. We can block our online harasser so that person cannot communicate with or follow us. We can mute the account or even specific posts or words so we don’t have to see that person.

These actions, I think, are a million times better than feeding our mind with the plotting and planning to come up with hateful word punches.