Cyberbullying Disguised as Moral Superiority.

Recently I got bullied on the internet.

This person bullied me for posting a comment about my own personal experience on my journey with feeling beautiful in this strange world.

The reel talked about how, according to societal standards, most of us would never even have been considered beautiful, because the world’s standards are deeply dictated by the cosmetic industry selling an inhabitable ideal of beauty that is often only achieved through cosmetic surgery. So a lot of us might buy skincare worth hundreds of dollars and wonder why it doesn’t look flawless on us, when the reality is that for someone to look like that specific standard, they usually need to undergo surgery.

I went into the comment section, innocently sharing my perspective, unaware of what was about to come next.

I shared how while that was a really interesting perspective, what we choose to believe as the “world’s standard” is deeply dependent on who and what we allow into our immediate circle of influence. For instance, I grew up watching Tamil movies that mostly cast women who looked nothing like me or most other Tamil people. However, I had experiences where I perhaps received attention or validation from people in my life that made me feel okay about myself.

For the most part, life felt okay because of the kind voices in my corner.

And by chance, I mentioned that not everyone has the privilege of being spoken to kindly, because I know that people who have been kind to me have treated others poorly.

My point in stating that was simply to emphasise the fact that being spoken to with kindness is a privilege.

Someone decided to bully me for sharing that. They first attacked my profession, since I have a public profile, and they realised I was a therapist, and then went on to attack my looks.

My initial reaction when I saw that comment was shock and numbness. Part of me said, it’s an idiot on the internet, don’t let it bother you. But another part of me was physically shaking from the impact of that attack.

It wasn’t necessarily the content of the comment itself that shook me. It was the fact that someone believed they had permission to speak to a stranger in the most vile way possible.

It felt like walking down the road and suddenly having someone throw acid on you out of nowhere. Not because of the content alone, but because of the sheer entitlement behind it. The belief that they had the right to do that to another human being.

As most people do when attacked, I responded back, triggered by what they said. I didn’t sit and think about my response. I just said what felt right in that moment.

I told them that they were projecting their lack of empathy onto me, considering how unsolicited their attack was and how little they knew about me or my journey. I also mentioned that I had not once endorsed poor behaviour from people towards my sister, which they seemed to believe was their biggest concern — the fact that I supposedly accepted validation from the same “bullies,” as they went on to call people they had never met, who they assumed treated my sister poorly.

Are they bullies? I’ll let my sister decide that for herself. No one else gets to write that story for her.

Is that something this stranger has any idea about? No.

Do they have the right to comment on either mine or my sister’s lived experience? Absolutely not.

But that didn’t seem to matter. They disguised their bullying towards me with concern for my sister, someone who's lived experience, they have no idea about, and without any knowledge on our relationship with each other.

They kept commenting on my profession. They said that if people read the comment thread they would realise who I really am, that my clients would ghost me, and that I shouldn’t be a therapist.

Interestingly, my sister decided to jump into the comment thread. She spoke directly about the strength of our relationship and the role I’ve played in her life in supporting her, rather than pulling her down.

Literally from the horse’s mouth.

Since this person’s supposed concern was my sister, my own sister showed up and said there was nothing to be concerned about. And yet this person persisted.

That’s when it started becoming clear that this had very little to do with concern for anyone. What seemed far more important to them was holding on to their own narrative about me.

They continued saying that my sister and I could believe whatever we wanted, but the truth was clear, and that truth, according to them, was that I am a horrible person and that everyone else could see it.

At that point I wrote my final response, saying that their perspective of me seemed to be very important for them to hold on to, and that I could only speculate about why that might be. I wished them healing and decided to leave it there.

But they continued.

They went on to say that I lack self-reflection and awareness. That the “gag,” according to them, was that the validation I received from my so-called bullies had become the voice that shaped my reality. They repeated that I should not be a therapist because I lack accountability.

And I found myself confused.

Does it bother them that I feel fairly okay about myself in a world that constantly tries to belittle women for feeling secure in themselves? That I don’t necessarily feel poorly about my looks?

Or does it bother them that someone they believe is ugly, as they themselves mentioned earlier, is not behaving the way they expect them to?

The part that truly baffles me about social media is how easily we flatten each other into two-dimensional people. No complexity. No histories. No experiences. No nuance.

Another aspect of this whole experience is the risk that comes with flattening people into two-dimensional characters. When we do that, we start expecting the world to be perfect while conveniently accommodating our own imperfections.

Apparently, a therapist should have had the world’s most perfect response (if one such response even exists to begin with), to the shitty things that were happening to her sister when she was seven years old herself. A seven-year-old who had no idea, no awareness, and certainly no foresight that she would one day become a therapist, and that someone in the future would sit in a comment section judging her childhood responses as proof that she is a horrible person who does not deserve to be one. And somehow me showing self awareness and self reflection means that I would bully myself too for whatever I was also experiencing as a kid. Yes. That makes total sense.

Is it only therapists who are held to this impossible standard? Or are we slowly expecting this level of perfection from everyone except ourselves?

And even if that were the expectation, how exactly does bullying someone become the solution to that?

That said, even if I were an adult still holding on to my childhood experiences as a way to support myself, that is still no one else’s business. I was fighting my own battles to begin with. Just because I don’t lead with my trauma does not mean I don’t have my own share of painful or complicated experiences.

Just a comment in a reel’s comment section, and suddenly someone believes they understand the entirety of your identity.

In a comment section, I cannot possibly sit and share the full story of my identity development. What I can share is a glimpse of it. And I certainly do not owe my entire history to anyone.

But since we’re on the topic, here’s something I’ve been wanting to talk about for a while anyway.

My experience of feeling “maybe I’m okay the way I am” began with being spoken to kindly. As a kid, all I could do was feel grateful that I wasn’t being picked on.

But as I was growing up, I started realising the problems in my family and began questioning them. Let’s remember that at this point, I was still a kid.

That’s when I started feeling solidarity in sisterhood, where it became important for me to advocate for my sister when she was treated unkindly.

A few years later, when I moved to another city, I drastically put on weight and I was terrified.

For the longest time I thought I didn’t have body image issues. But then I realised that it was because I had “stayed in the lane” that ensured I wasn’t getting bullied.

Not because I was loved unconditionally.

For the first time, I realised that I had an eating disorder, started starving myself, and the body dysmorphia that had been dormant until then was suddenly activated when there was nothing I could do to control how my body behaved.

For the first time at home, I ended up being in the shoes of someone who could potentially be persecuted.

And I was.

People commented on my weight and made remarks about it. And it confused me how someone who had fiercely stood up for her sister was suddenly struggling to stand up for herself.

I realised that I had internalised the same body image scripts that had hurt my sister — scripts about how to stay safe.

Until my body stopped cooperating with those scripts.

What followed was a full-blown eating disorder, followed by a PCOS diagnosis, prediabetes, and IBS.

At some point I realised that the way I had survived the world until then was no longer working. It was a house of cards collapsing.

A small but important digression here.

Every time I’ve mentioned in this story that I wasn’t bullied, I’m specifically referring to the people who were treating my sister poorly but speaking kindly to me.

Because the truth is, I was bullied in other spaces.

I was bullied in school by kids in my class. They made fun of my facial hair. They made comments about my teeth. They've made fun of all sorts of things, but that's probably not what comes to mind first for me anymore, because I have surrounded myself with kinder people in my life.

However, back then, some part of me held on tightly to whatever morsels of validation I could find elsewhere.

In those moments, I couldn’t possibly have questioned the support I was receiving, whatever form it came in. I was just trying to survive the bullying I experienced in school.

So if someone told me I was pretty, that voice naturally became something I held onto as a form of safety.

And when I no longer fit those scripts anymore, I realised that those morsels of validation had also gone. I now needed to find new ways to support myself in this strange world. Healing that relationship in terms of how I see myself took time and is still a work in progress.

I began learning about indigenous cultures and the goddesses within them. Many of them were powerful, full-bodied women. Seeing those representations helped me breathe again.

Reading their stories helped me reframe so many ideas I had internalised about beauty.

At the same time, I began understanding something else. My generation, like many others, had grown up in a world where beauty standards were heavily shaped by paedophiles and systems that profit from making people feel inadequate.

When the Epstein files came out, something finally sedimented in me, something I had anyway been questioning and suspecting for too long now.

I realised I no longer wanted to appease standards shaped in a world where paedophiles and exploitative power structures had so much influence over what beauty should look like.

For about two years now, I have stopped removing my body hair, and I still find a way to look at myself in the mirror and feel beautiful.

I started dressing the way I want, without trying to live up to some said or unsaid codes about what matches with what. That in itself has become a way for me to feel empowered in my own self.

Because beauty, to me, at the end of the day, is being able to look at myself with love and joy. It is the sense of gratitude I feel for everything my body endures in order to house my soul, and how it still bounces back and wakes up for me every day.

Beauty, for me, is the resilient ways in which my body has coped with the world. Despite me not being able to afford organic food, or all the thousand products being sold to us as the way to "love ourselves" and take care of ourselves, and despite all the ways in which life is imperfect, my body still shows up for me every day, adapting so beautifully to the circumstances it is in. And when I operate from that place, I look at every single person out there in the world, their bodies carrying stories of resilience and adaptability, and to me, every single person out there is beautiful.

It is not about the features the influencer world considers beautiful, or the standards by which the social media world believes I should conduct myself.

And I have made peace with the fact that I will never look beautiful according to those standards. If anything, the Epstein files only cemented my lack of interest in ever wanting to appease them.

But that brings me back to my original point.

Who do I allow to influence how I see myself?

At this point in my life, it is not the people who validated me when I was a child, although back that, that is all I had, as a kid.

But today, it is the deconstructed, decolonial voices that encourage me to take up space. Physically and emotionally.

The people who recognise that bodies change. And that's how it should be. A healthy body ages. A healthy body will shapeshift throughout our entire lifespan. Will take up more space sometimes, and take up lesser space at other times. As it should.

And yet, here we are.

Back in a comment section where someone who has never met me feels entitled to question my profession, attack my appearance, and decide who I am as a person.

So I keep coming back to the same question.

When did we normalise cyberbullying?

When did it become acceptable to defame strangers, question their livelihoods, and make sweeping assumptions about their character, all based on a few sentences in a comment section?

I refuse to believe that the only way to protect myself is to stay silent.

I will comment on reels.

Yes, my comment will never contain the full complexity of my life story. And it doesn’t need to.

Even if I had never gone through the complicated journey I described above, and even if I were simply someone holding onto small moments of validation from my family, that still would not make it a stranger’s business.

It still wouldn’t give them the right to attack me.

And for that reason, I will advocate for myself when I am being bullied.

Part of me wants to dismiss this as meaningless noise. But another part of me hopes the world still has kind people.

People who refuse to flatten others into two-dimensional characters simply because it is convenient.

For that reason, I don’t want to grow a thick skin or lose my sensitivity.

If anything, this experience reminds me that the next time I’m in a comment section feeling suspicious or confused by something someone says, I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they have only shared a fragment of their story. Not that I comment hatefully anyway. But even for the small fleeting thoughts of judgement that might come up, since I am human, I can remember to exercise curiosity.

That fragment does not deserve cruelty.

And if my bully ever reads this, I truly hope you’re able to understand why I trigger such an intense reaction in you.

You deserve to be free too. 🕊️