Becoming a troll

I woke up one day and found myself transformed into a troll. In hindsight, I should have seen it coming. I had been slowly allowing myself to transform. Earlier that year, I had a personal vendetta against a song lyric website. It allowed you to post your interpretation of the songs, but I always found myself terribly depressed at the lack of serious interpretive thought. Words were defined mindlessly, no connotations or relevant cultural events truly considered. I tried to infiltrate the community, to bring some kind of cohesion and thoughtfulness to what I considered a promising endeavor in public humanities, but my efforts were not appreciated. My contributions were often removed, and I got a warning email that threatened to take my account away permanently. All because I had the balls to point out the political and cultural implications of an Ariana Grande track.

In that time of my life, I formed many of the personal vendettas I carry with me to this day, including that one and against many of my fellow student journalists. I had just been pushed out of the college newspaper’s Opinions desk, as I had one too many controversial opinions. Anyway, there was a pause between then and when I could find my next job when I had all this energy and nowhere to put it.

I was only a student by the thinnest margins, having taken all but the last of my necessary credits for graduation. I had just moved out of the dorms, supposedly in with my ex, but he left me the second I came back from study abroad in Rome. So, I moved in with some medical student, who was never home except when she was asleep.

I was very lonely, having known of no parties or groups who might start one with me. I often spent my nights ridden with insomnia, listening to music at all hours of the night. It didn’t matter what kind, so long as I could lose myself in it. Rap, post-hardcore, indie pop, jazz. I became obsessed, particularly, with contemporary lyrics, trying in my head to categorize the references and double entendres. That’s how I found the website.

When that failed, I kept trying to direct my attention to good, but it was not welcome. It turns out, people online don’t actually want to have productive conversations. So I mouthed off on a few Reddit threads, in some dark corners of the internet. They started off being my opinions, but veered off into parodies of others, even myself. Ways to get angrier folks in the world to burst off, to make me feel stable by comparison. I knew something was up when I started thinking like the enemy, coming up with new and exciting ways to trip them up on their own agendas.

“I don’t know, it just seems like the Jonas Brothers are really Jews who play up a manufactured image of Christianity to more appropriately dominate a largely Gentile audience,” I once wrote anonymously on a platform known for its unsavory conspiracy theories. “Think about it: The Walt Disney Co. made them famous. GUYS. DISNEY.”

For a while it was enlightening, and for a shorter while it was even fun. But it mostly felt hollow and unsatisfying.

Soon I graduated and found myself with bigger questions to address, a sense that I should be Doing Something Productive with my time, something I could be proud of someday. I considered grad school, but I couldn’t bear the idea of more time in class. I just want to make the world a better place, even in the smallest and most insignificant of ways, I thought. Maybe that will make me feel whole.

I was very young and unbalanced then, easily persuaded into Big Ideas and Get Spiritually Rich Quick Schemes, especially when they were tainted with irreverence and further avoidance of all things sincere and natural. I was also influenced by others who made the internet work for them in broadly immense ways. People’s lives were being carried by the strength of their digital networks. If you knew how to game it, you could grift and grift and never grow up. I became reinvigorated with purpose.

It wasn’t difficult to find other lonely accounts online, who I could easily impress with carefully considered gameplays. We were all in it together, creating chaos to ease our own anxieties about the world. It’s not actually that hard to become a united force with others, either for evil or for good. People want to be given a reason to keep doing what they’re doing, especially when they really shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing.

One night, we were perusing the trending hashtags for something to subvert when someone posted an image of himself transformed into a troll to our group Discord PoonTang Clan. “I dreamt of a bridge last night, that I was stuck beneath it,” he wrote. “Now, I know it was more than a dream.”

“Nice one, bro,” a user called HitlersNutz wrote. “You almost fooled me.”

“This is a ‘shop,” FonzieCanGetIt posted. “I can tell because of the pixels.”

I agreed with Fonzie. The lines on his bedroom wall looked wavy, and his legs were disproportionately long. It looked like one of Khloe Kardashian’s Instagram posts. I dismissed the attempt to troll the trolls; besides, we weren’t really trolls. Just internet weirdos, tasked with the burden of keeping people in disarray, reminding them they shouldn’t get too comfortable online.

Others, however, believed the poster, and feared for their own states of being. “could this happen to me??” JaundicedPussy69 posted before deleting their account. “this exact thing occured in my last group,” HumongousWot noted solemnly. “If you want my advice,” a comment written by VoraciousVore420 started, “I say we just welcome any crossover. I say we become proud to be trolls.”

And so when I woke up in a troll’s body, it was not a real surprise. I looked exactly the same, in fact. Same curly hair, same acne scars that I’d given up on covering up with concealer. But I knew in my heart the change had occurred, that I had found my place in the world and would be unable to rejoin polite society. The mark of the troll stays with me to this day. Others sense it, walking by quickly at the grocery store. I’m careful to avoid any bridges, lest I play into stereotypes. It is simply my life now. I am not proud, but I also cannot say I am ashamed.