COVID-19 skepticism & my very special gang of trolls
On May 27th, when I’d been in isolation with mild COVID-19 for 71 days — a period during which I experienced constant low-grade fevers along with a battery of other standard symptoms, including respiratory distress; constant, often debilitating fatigue; g/i issues concerning which I will not overburden you here; and oh, did I mention the day-in-day-out fevers?— I discovered, to my absolute shock, that a subsection of Twitter — hundreds of accounts, some with between ten and twenty thousand followers— had made mocking me their quarantine project.
What? You ask. And not unreasonably! I don’t know how it started, but I can tell you that in late May, someone among their number discovered my occasional tweets about my condition, and decided I was lying. You’ll find a few representative screenshots at the bottom of this post; I’ll not be referring to anyone’s accounts by name and I’ve obscured their identifiers, because a) I don’t want to give any of them any more glory than they’ve already covered themselves in and b) I presume that if I did, my Twitter life — generally a very pleasant existence, all told — would be made, let’s just say, unpleasant.
I think it began with an account that has since deleted all reference to me; this because one of the ringleaders referenced that account as his source. But who knows. Here’s what I do know: At least two mid-sized accounts, let’s call them Biff (19.3K followers), and Chad (13.3K followers) spent days — DAYS — retweeting me to their followers, alternately taking umbrage at and being delighted by my many, many falsehoods; dismissing out of hand every reference I made to the dozen or so doctors and nurses with whom I’d spoken over the course of ten weeks; dismissing out of hand every assertion I made that I’d been unable to get tested; and repeatedly agreeing among themselves that I clearly hated my husband and maybe should just get a divorce, already, since all I really wanted was to hog the entire second floor and not vacuum. (Yes, really). At least one of these tweets was liked 1.3K times; at least one was liked by someone with 300K followers.
Biff’s and Chad’s followers spent that week replying to the larger accounts breathlessly, and, not unlike cats with dead mice, offering screenshots and high-brow analysis as trophies — one went so far as to read some of my writing about Jason Isbell (feel free to go read those pieces yourself — they’re good! If you’re curious, this is the one that baffled our pal), declaring to Biff that a line that had made no goshdarned sense to him clearly suggested that my brain had never been very high functioning in the first place. In short, hundreds and maybe thousands of people spent a week or so in late May seeking each other’s attention by calling me an attention seeker. It was, I believe we can all agree (though if any of them are reading this, they may take exception) madness.
I was mocked for being stunned that they were mocking me. I was mocked for blocking them. I was mocked for chain-blocking them, and then when they realized I was actually blocking manually, was mocked for that. I was called the Rachel Dolezal of COVID-19; I was called “covid faking lady.” I was mocked for occasionally checking back in with Biff, to see if he was still obsessed with me, and mocked for noting that, despite the fact that he was blocked, he was still obsessed enough to be following my timeline anyway. Not that that’s, you know, creepy. Or anything. It was broadly assumed that I’d been faking illness for ten solid weeks, if not to enjoy the luxury of the second floor, then in order to write a book or (ROFL!!1!) a Medium post; when I finally emerged from isolation the following week, fever-free but very weak, it was assumed that I’d caved under the pressure of having been revealed to be a fraud; Biff shared a screengrab of a DM between himself and who knows who else, predicting that very thing. (Yes! Really!!) Madness.
Initially, alongside the shock, I was fascinated. Hundreds, possibly thousands of people who didn’t know me from their Great Aunt Betty, built a pop-up community around hating me. Hating me? Maybe not. Maybe just being obsessed with what a lying liar I was. But — I’m nobody! Neither influential, nor known, I couldn’t be more nobody. There was a little chatter about me being “a blue check,” but mostly, as far as I could tell, they just enjoyed agreeing with each other that I’m such an attention seeker that I would lie to my family and allllll of Twitter about having COVID-19, for ten weeks.
It was the ten weeks that got ’em. That and the fact that I hadn’t been tested. One of Biff’s followers ran to him to whine that I’d blocked him for asking me why I “didn’t just get tested” — because, I don’t know if you know this, but if randos on Twitter want to see your medical files? You must present those files, and thank the randos for the opportunity. It’s the law.
For the sake of clarity, I will repeat briefly what I said often on Twitter, but which was picked apart and rejected time and again by these rocket scientists: I was never tested because a) in mid-March there were no tests, then b) after weeks and weeks, even though tests had become a little easier to come by, my doctor (yes, my doctor, Biff and Chad, though you are convinced he was but humoring me) told me not to bother because it was still hard to get tested, and, as I was sick, he didn’t want me to go to the effort, only to very possibly not even get tested in the end. “I’m assuming you have it,” he told me (I took notes!). “Just stay in isolation until you’re 72 hours fever-free, and then wait another day or two, to make sure it sticks.” Then (and honestly, this is the best part), I actually did try to get tested anyway, out of sheer frustration, and got to the testing center only to find that — ta-daa! — they’d run out of tests — and when I tweeted about it later, The Gang didn’t believe me. Because if I’d done it, why hadn’t I tweeted about it at the time?!?1!
Fascinating. A case study in community building!
Eventually, though, I came around to also being very angry and wildly hurt. Because I’m fucking human.
Let’s consider: By some happenstance, you find an entirely random stranger with neither power nor influence who claims to be at what must surely be one of her life’s lowest moments — but you doubt her. Rather than, I don’t know, leaving her alone, you choose to make her, her health, and her family into objects of derision. You decide that not only is she lying, but that you, rocket scientist that you are, can read between the lines of her lies and discern the truth about her entire life — which it is then incumbent upon you to present to your thousands and thousands of followers.
Having already rejected the very notion that I might know my body and my life and maybe wasn’t lying to my own 18.8K followers about either, Chad diagnosed me with depression. Really. “Incidentally, depression is associated with mildly elevated body temp in some people,” they intoned wisely — and here I must ask you to stick with me: Chad had established that I was making the fevers up so as to avoid my husband, but the fevers were simultaneously real enough for Chad to diagnose me — a complete and total stranger — with depression. Madness!
I have some thoughts about all of this, about what this sort of rabid skepticism may have meant, and may still mean, for the spread of the virus, and about what this particular incident says about our society’s refusal to listen to women (ahh, yes, they did predict that I’d pull the woman card!), not least the instant labeling of any woman telling any story “attention seeking” — as if all of human existence is not, in fact, an act of seeking attention from each other; as if the entire gang of trolls weren’t engaged in using my life to seek attention from each other; as if seeking attention is, by definition, bad — and, finally, about our refusal to acknowledge that sometimes humans know things about their bodies that doctors haven’t figured out yet — especially if, you guessed it, those humans are women.
But when I first started laboriously blocking and screenshotting and blocking and screenshotting, my husband said to me, real anger in his voice, “I hate that you’re giving these people any of your energy right now.” He knew exactly how little energy I had, and it’s worth noting that he had to say this to me as he had said everything to me since March 18th: From a distance of ten feet. So I’ll stop here.
Consider this, then, a small artifact of the COVID age, and a brief window into the surprising depths to which people will go to perform assholery for each other. If you’re so inclined, you might also take it as an opportunity to redouble your commitment to being a decent person. You can never go wrong committing to decency.
Note: Reports on cases like mine have begun to pile up. Here’s The Guardian; The Atlantic; The Washington Post; and The Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic notes that when people are tested more than a week after the onset of symptoms, there’s an increased false negative rate — so who knows if I would have tested positive once tests were actually available and I was still living with low-grade fevers; I’m currently waiting on my doctor to find an antibody test that he trusts.
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