David Mills: You don’t need a thick skin to deal with the trolls

The poor guy got slapped around pretty badly, for the mistake of having an opinion some of his readers didn’t like. He got it in the comments section and he got it on his Facebook and Twitter pages.

He wrote me a discouraged letter. He wanted to know the trick for dealing with it. Here’s the note I sent him, a little revised, in case anyone finds it helpful, because almost all of us write sometimes and all of us have to deal with life’s trolls.

Basically, I think the answer is not a technique for dealing with hostile and abusive critics, but in being a certain kind of person, which isn’t the kind of person most people tell you to be.

The thick skin and the shell

People, I wrote him, will tell you to develop a thick skin and that’s true, but only partly and misleadingly true. By “thick