Trolls hide treasure if you pay attention (or Judge but judge wisely.)

From Canva, by author.

My mother told me that whenever I found fault in others, it was probably a fault with which I was intimately familiar. She used to say that we find our own warts on other people because it’s more comfortable than looking in the mirror.

Like so many of us, my mother was full of advice she rarely took.

But I still think about her words often, as talk of trolls and canceling unspools online. The trick of the successful troll (I’ve, ahem, heard…) is to find something that everyone agrees the victim does and that everyone knows is wrong and then keep bringing up this problem over and over and over again any time our victim tries to do something else or, Google forbid, tries to fix the flaw upon which the troll has fixated.

We are our worst selves for a troll at all times and for all time.

Yet we need the trolls, we do.

Without the trolls, we too easily forget how dull and ordinary we are and thus how much we mess up. In ancient times, when a young hunter had his or her (or their) first kill, the village used to line up and savagely mock the poor kid to remind everyone that failure is a given even when we think we’ve killed it.