The Trump Trolls Came for Me a Year Ago, and I'm Still Reeling

I wrote about how the election impacted me…and got an avalanche of comments about how I'm fat, ugly, a bad mother, and should kill myself.

Illustrations by Qieer Wang

“There’s a woman in Montana who says she can’t date anymore because Donald Trump was elected,” Bill O’Reilly began on “The O’Reilly Factor” on December 6, 2016. It was the last segment on his show, called “What the Heck Just Happened?” That woman in Montana was me.

Over a year later, I still hear his voice saying those words, though in my mind his face is contorted into a sneer. At the time, I’d been caught in the cyclone of attention; shielding my face from it swirling around me, waiting for it to blow over. But it went right through me, robbing me of seeing good in people by default. Ripping my confidence away almost entirely as a writer, a woman, a mother. O’Reilly’s words emboldened a hoard of internet trolls to turn their focus on a most vulnerable subject: a single mother, struggling to raise her kids on her own as a freelance writer.

An article I had published in the Washington Post’s Solo-ish section had gone viral the day before. I wrote, basically, t…