Besides, armor is heavy. My ability to weather online abuse is one of the great tragedies of my life.
You never get used to trolls. Of course, you are an adaptable thing—your skin thickens, your stomach settles, you learn to tune out the chatter, you cease self-Googling (mostly), but it’s always just a patch. A screen. A coat of paint. It’s plopping a houseplant over the dry rot. It’s emotional hypothermia: Your brain can trick itself into feeling warm, but the flesh is still freezing. Medically speaking, your foot’s still falling off. There’s a phenomenon called “paradoxical undressing,” common when a person dies of hypothermia, wherein they become so convinced they’re overheating that they peel off all their clothes and scatter them in the snow. They get colder, die faster. There’s something uncanny about a cold death; a still, indifferent warping of humanity.
I struggle to conceive of the “resilience” I’ve developed in my job as a good thing—this hardening inside me, this distance I’ve put between myself and the world, my determination to delude myself into normalcy. From the cockpit, it feels like much more of a loss than a triumph. It’s like the world’s most not-worth-it game show: Well, you’ve destroyed your capacity for unbridled happiness and human connection, but don’t worry—we’ve replaced it with this prison of anxiety and pathological inability to relax!
Yet, it seems like the more abuse I get, the more abuse I court—baring myself more extravagantly, professing opinions that I know will draw an onslaught—because, after all, if I’ve already adjusted my body temperature, why not face the blizzard so that other women don’t have to freeze?
Paradoxical undressing, I guess.
But it’s just the Internet. There’s nothing we can do.
This is my reality now. Pretty much every day, at least one stranger seeks me out to call me a fat bitch (or some pithy variation thereof). Being harassed on the Internet is such a normal, common part of my life that I’m always surprised when other people find it surprising. You’re telling me you don’t have hundreds of men popping into your cubicle in the accounting department of your midsized, regional dry-goods distributor to inform you that—hmm—you’re too fat to rape, but perhaps they’ll saw you up with an electric knife? No? Just me, then. This is the barbarism—the eager abandonment of the social contract—that so many of us face simply for doing our jobs.
I’m aware of the pull all the time: I should change careers; I should shut down my social media; maybe I can get a job in print somewhere; it’s just too exhausting. I hear the same refrains from my colleagues. Not only that, but those of us who are hardest hit often wind up writing about harassment itself. I never wanted Internet trolls to be my beat—I want to write feminist polemics, jokes about wizards, and love letters to John Goodman’s meaty, sexual forearms. I still want that.
I wonder if I’ll ever be able to get back to work.
Strong People Fighting Against the Elements
I never wanted to fight virtual trolls; I wanted to fight real ones. With a sword.
My fixation on the fantastical is not difficult to trace. When I was very small, my dad read out loud to me every night before bed. It was always fantasy: Tolkien, Lewis, Baum, Tolkien again. I remember him nodding off in the chair, his pace and pitch winding down like he was running out of batteries—Bifur, Bofur, Bommmmbuuurrrrrrrrrrrrr. To this day, if someone even mentions riding a barrel down the Celduin to Lake-town at the gates of Erebor, the Lonely Mountain (even if they’re just talking about spring break), I am incapacitated by nostalgia. I made him read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe so many times that I could recite much of it from memory—I didn’t know what “air raids” were, but I knew that when they happened, you went on a permanent vacation to a country manse where a wizard let you use his inter-dimensional closet. I wonder if we can get “air raids” in Seattle, I thought.
Dad was a jazz pianist and an ad copywriter—an expressive baritone who was often employed as a kind of one-man, full-service jingle factory. By night, he worked in bars, sometimes seven nights a week, a lost breed of lounge entertainer who skipped dizzyingly from standards to Flanders and Swann to Lord Buckley and back again. Once in a while, I still meet Seattle old-timers who blush like teenagers. “I loved your dad. Used to go see him every night.”
My grandfather was a radio producer (The Burns and Allen Show, Lucky Strike Hit Parade), and in the 1940s, when he took a job at CBS, it was suggested that he change his name from the unwieldy and, perhaps, at the time, uncomfortably Austrian, “Rechenmacher” to the more radio-friendly “West.” So my dad became Paul West Jr., and now I am Lindy West. Sometimes people think “Lindy West” is a pseudonym. I guess they’re right.
Eighty years removed, my grandparents’ Old Hollywood existence seems impossibly glamorous. I imagine shimmering laughter and natty suits. Hats on heads, hats in hat boxes. Scotch in the winter, gin in the summer. Grandma Winnie sang with Meredith Willson’s orchestra, and when my dad was a little boy in the ’30s, she worked in movies (under her maiden name, Winnie Parker, and her stage name, Mona Lowe), dubbing the vocal parts for Carole Lombard, Dolores del Rio, and other leading ladies who, apparently, couldn’t sing. Dad had stories of going to Shirley Temple’s birthday party, of nearly fainting when his dad nonchalantly introduced him to his friend Lou Costello, of Gene Autry trying to give little Paul a pony to keep in their Glendale backyard.
They drank hard—“eating and drinking and carrying on,” as my dad would say. He once e-mailed me a little vignette he wrote in his creative writing night class:
“The living room is the part of the house I remember least, from the inside anyway. I remember it a little better from the sidewalk in front, along Kenneth Road. I remember standing there looking at the bright gold harp that stood framed by the green brocade draperies—draperies I once hid behind when my mother and father were screaming drunk.
“I heard a dull ‘thunk,’ followed by a big crash, and when I peeked out from behind the drape, my father was lying on the living room floor, blood spurting from his big, already knobby nose. Mother and the other couple in the room, my uncle and his wife, were laughing hysterically when my grandmother came down the wide staircase. ‘Vas ist?’ she said—with stern, Viennese dignity. ‘An orange,’ my uncle giggled, ‘Winnie hit him in the nose with an orange!’ They were all helpless with laughter. ‘Be ashamed,’ Gramma said.”*
I never met any of those people. In fact, I’ve never met any family from my dad’s side at all. My grandfather had a heart attack and died unexpectedly in 1953 when he was just forty-four, two days before my dad’s high school graduation. There was some dispute about the burial, between the deeply Catholic Rechenmachers in southern Illinois, who wanted a Catholic funeral, and my dad’s lapsed Hollywood branch, who didn’t. Paul West Sr. ended up in a Catholic cemetery in Culver City, where lingering animus led to nobody visiting him for the next fifty-five years, until, on a whim, my sister and I tracked down the grave. We called Dad and told him where we were. “Golly,” he said, his voice rough.