Have you ever had an online encounter that left your heart palpitating, your head spinning, and your mind wondering what in the world just happened? You’re pretty sure you behaved normally and politely, but the other person was so angry or rude that you’re left feeling wrong-footed and off-balance … and maybe even a little guilty, though for the life of you, you’re not sure why.

I had one on January 1.

You might be wondering why I’m posting about it only now, when it happened so long ago. To be honest, it’s because the encounter left me so shaky that I wanted to take the time to evaluate and take stock of the accusations against me. Plus, for weeks, any time I read over the conversation again or even thought about talking about it, my stomach clenched and my heart raced.

I wavered in all those weeks between really wanting to talk with others about this encounter and really wanting to not give any more thought or energy to it, but I finally decided to share it in the hope that it can help someone else learn from—and not get discouraged by—a similar encounter.

Before I share the encounter with you, I want to provide a bit of background.

Nearly every weekday, I send out friend requests on Facebook, for two main reasons. The first is that I am an entrepreneur with 3 businesses, and of course, for any business to be successful, people have to know about it. When we go out once a week to do our grocery shopping, I also try to take some time to hang flyers, hand out business cards, and make others aware of the services and products I offer—though this can be rather rushed and haphazard because we have our kids with us.

The second is that I live in a rural area, and because I am legally blind and cannot drive, my only daily interactions are with my husband (before he leaves for work and after he gets home from work) and our children. We live far from our families and from most of our friends. If I didn’t have the internet to provide me with regular interactions with adults, I might just go a little crazy(er).

I am highly intentional and follow specific “rules” when I send friend invitations. First, I invite people from groups I belong to so I know we already have at least one interest in common. Second, within those groups, I send requests only to those who ask thoughtful questions, share positive things, and/or offer helpful comments and suggestions.

Thoughtful, generally positive, and helpful are key qualities I watch for in person before striking up a conversation with the intention of beginning a friendship, and I want my online friend space to be as uplifting and of as high a caliber as my “real-world” friend space.

Now, on to the conversation. [In the interest of at least attempting brevity, I’m reducing the conversation to its highlights here, but if you are interested, you can see screenshots of the conversation here.]

I sent a friend request, then some time later received a reply: “Can I help you?”

Unsure whether this was meant to be rude or simply hurried, I explained that I was looking to expand my network, and I wished the other person a happy New Year (this was New Year’s Day, and I was in the car with my family on our way to do our grocery shopping).

After the other person had sent me a couple of more messages and I had replied, trying to make pleasant conversation while finishing my grocery shopping (something I later realized I really shouldn’t have done, because my attention was so split), I asked this woman if she sold CBD, because I had seen that one element of her FB profile said simply “CBD.”

She jumped from my question to saying that she doesn’t “randomly friend request people or message them about it. I’m local, no need to.”

Rather than point out my visual impairment and relative inability to get out of my house requiring me to use an online space, I replied with a noncommittal “That’s cool,” and continued shopping.

Then she asked what I was building a network for, and before I could answer, she mentioned that she had figured out from my profile that I was probably with a multilevel marketing group. “Maximum effort for little reward,” she added.

Still shopping, and hoping to wrap the conversation up, I sent a voice message explaining that I am an affiliate with My Daily Choice, which is network marketing, and that “I’m doing fine with it. I’m looking to expand, in general, my friend network, not just my sales network. That’s why I also send those invitations.”

A short while later, in the car, I received her next response, in which she listed off all the reasons that network marketing is bad odds.

At that point, I was a little amused, because she seemed to be wanting to talk me out of network marketing, and wondering if I should feel a little touched, as it seemed maybe she was concerned about my prospects.

I am aware of all the numbers she gave me, because I do my research and I know the failure rates for small business in general, and the reasons. Building and maintaining a small business is hard work, and most small businesses run on very small margins. A lot of people prefer to work for other people instead of for themselves and seem to have the idea that they will be able to earn easy money (read: little or no hard work) in an MLM (multilevel marketing) setup. To a certain extent, they can, but being in an MLM is like any business, meaning you have success only if you put in effort; the more (smart) effort you put in to building—and the more committed you are to building and maintaining—typically the more successful you will be. For all of my business ventures, I have to talk to people every workday if I want any consistent success.

I explained that I was aware of the numbers, have been self-employed for 20 years, and make “extra” money as an affiliate with not a whole lot of daily effort.

She sent a long response mentioning her spiritual and educational backgrounds, as well as the fact that she uses homeopathic remedies and medicines “when she can,” and saying she couldn’t see herself using most of the products that the company sells. She then said, “I can’t imagine how you answer valid questions for anyone. But good luck to you.”

Finally home from shopping and putting away groceries, I thought this conversation was over, so I set my phone down.

But she didn’t stop there. She went on about research (or lack thereof) regarding the product ingredients. I was tired of the conversation and tried to end it politely by saying, “I do my best to answer honestly about anything, including that I don’t know of any research supporting things. I don’t sell just to sell. I’m primarily there because of the CBD,” and “I can agree to disagree on this, but if it bothers you, feel free to unfriend me.”

Her response was that she hadn’t accepted my friend request because she doesn’t “like strangers hav[ing] access to [her] friends to prey on them” (followed by a winking emoji). And then she congratulated me on what she called the condescending tone of my voice message and said she had made sure to forward it to some other people, including those in the IIH (idiopathic intracranial hypertension) groups she’s in.

 

And then she kept going. She again said that I was “preying on others trying to sell stuff.”

Ouch. “Preying on others”? That hurt, even though it was from someone who doesn’t know me at all. I consider myself one of the least predatory people on the planet.

I told her that I wished her the best, and I tried to set the record straight, pointing out that I have had IIH for more than 10 years now and am in the groups that I am for support, not to sell anything.

She then warned me that she was friends with the admins in other IIH groups and had let them know “what [I] pulled.”

I was laughing ruefully at this point and wondered how to respond. I hadn’t tried to sell anything; I hadn’t mentioned the business. I had sent a friend request, which she could simply have ignored.

I was more than done with the conversation and just wanted to get on with my life.

I decided to give a thumbs-up symbol and wrote, “I’m sorry you think I tried to pull something, but you do what you think is best.”

But then she kept going, telling me that she had known, before asking what I wanted, that I am with HempWorx. Then she sent a screenshot of a post I had made related to HempWorx a week or two before.

Even after I had stopped replying to her and she had told me she was done with me, I received 7 more messages from her before my phone finally went quiet. She accused me of many things before the conversation (inquisition?) was finished, including lying about my IIH, using voice messages to keep her from being able to take a screenshot of what I said, and being in support groups only to sell products.

I really, really wanted to set her straight.

But I finally realized that absolutely nothing I could say in this moment would change her opinion of me. It hurt that she had this conception of me that was so at odds with my own, but I bit my tongue and let it go, even while notifications of new messages kept coming in from her.

It took me until a couple of days later to realize why I had kept feeling uncomfortable while reading her messages: Not only did she accuse me of several practices that I highly disapprove of, but she just kept going, almost like she was trying to escalate the situation, the whole time I was trying to disengage, walk away politely, and let her have her view.

I don’t often mention HempWorx or My Daily Choice in my Facebook posts (which are nearly all public, since I do use Facebook for business as well as personal reasons), so that she shared a screenshot of my post in almost an accusatory way stuck with me for a few days, though I wasn’t sure why. Did she think she was throwing evidence in my face, as if I had a nefarious plan to be shady and had somehow forgotten to hide proof of my affiliation? Maybe she thought I posted too much about the company and its products and seemed like a walking billboard? Finally, I reviewed my wall and saw that I had made 30 public posts between the post she had made a screenshot of and the morning of our conversation. One of those 30 mentioned CBD.

I found her viewpoint on voice messages interesting. I had never considered voice messages as anything other than a useful tool that offers a nice way to establish rapport with people fairly quickly and to generally avoid the misunderstandings that can easily arise from text-only interactions. (I have generally had very nice responses to my voice messages, both before and after this interaction.)

In deference to her apparent dislike of voice messages, I had switched to using text messages only in the rest of our interaction … I guess to try to prove that I wasn’t trying to engage in any “shady” dealings? For some reason, I still wanted to correct her view of me.

I wanted to defend myself to this woman. I wanted to tell her that she had the wrong idea about me.

But I didn’t.

Why? For one, I realized that she was beyond being willing to consider that I might be speaking the truth. For another, I didn’t want to give any more attention to this unpleasant confrontation. I wanted to spend the holiday pleasantly with my family, rather than interacting with someone who clearly wanted nothing to do with me.

Finally, one of my goals beginning in 2019 has been to respond appropriately—rather than react—to situations, and had I said anything at all in response to her final messages, my words would have been in reaction.

What I did instead was remember the lessons that January could bring if I was willing to accept them, and I spent a few days mulling over the conversation, checking my motivation and my behaviors. And my words.

I was left deeply shaken by the encounter, and I wanted to be sure why. I could easily have told myself that she had me all wrong and all the unpleasantness was her fault, not mine. But again, I am trying to respond appropriately, so I examined this encounter with as dispassionate an eye as I could muster. I wanted to verify that I had not been acting in a predatory manner, that I had been acting with integrity, and that I am continuing to act in a way that is consistent with my morals and values.

Reading and reliving this “conversation” still causes my pulse to race and my stomach to grow uneasy. Still, I’m (somewhat) glad it happened, because it did lead me to examine a lot of my own beliefs regarding self-employment and multilevel marketing. Fear of comments like the ones from this woman were what had once kept me from putting myself “out there” as an intuitive practitioner, a Reiki practitioner, and a person with services and items to sell. A lot of people have a bad taste in their mouth from telemarketers and aggressive sales practices, and I can understand that.

What happened in this situation, however, was not like that. I had made no sales pitch, had made no mention of my company until she did, and had only sent her a friend request, which she could easily have ignored. The level of aggression and dislike that she showed was—to me, at least—totally disproportionate to the situation.

 

Knowing of other people’s bad experiences with aggressive sales practices and cold calls has always made me a bit wary of approaching people and starting conversations to talk about what I do.

I don’t (usually) feel guilty about talking about what I do, the services I offer, or the products I sell. I don’t feel bad about self-promotion, though I might sometimes be a bit embarrassed about it. But I do have to start those conversations, because (almost) no one on the street is going to walk up to me and ask me what I do, in the hopes that I have some skill or product that can help their lives. I do the best I can, speaking and acting with as much honesty and integrity as I can muster in all moments. And I keep going, because in starting conversations with people, I’ve discovered that some people I’ve known for years have no idea what I do, even though I have never exactly made secrets of these things.

I was “off my game” and shy, afraid to approach people online or in person, for days after this encounter, and it took all of my willpower and inner strength to keep sending friend requests and to keep talking to people about my businesses.

I realized that it’s all too easy to fall prey to negativity expressed by others.

In fact, I believe that letting such negativity get to them is what causes so many people starting their own businesses (including network marketing) to quickly discontinue their ventures.

Before this encounter, I had had a consistent practice of outreach—both in person and online—for months with only neutral or positive experiences. And now that encounter has happened, and I’ve made it through. Even if I am still a little shaken, a little nervous, about continuing to reach out to people, I like to believe I’m now at least a little more confident that my approach is acceptable, polite, and not predatory. I keep moving forward, trying not to think of this woman unkindly (internet troll?). Instead, I remember Albus Dumbledore’s words to Rubeus Hagrid after Hagrid received some potentially bad press: “If you are holding out for universal popularity, I’m afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time.”

 

I don’t have the luxury of holding out for universal popularity, because I have a family to help support. After forcing myself to keep going and making new connections, I have had numerous positive responses—to my friend requests and my voice messages. Those positive interactions have reminded me that I prefer to live and act out of positivity and hope, rather than to stay silent out of fear.

What about you? Have you had a strange, uncomfortable, unnerving, or even funny encounter this year? What has the outcome been?

 

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To learn how the products of MyDailyChoice/HempWorx may benefit you, visit https://www.mydailychoice.com/srsstringham.

If you want to learn more about how MyDailyChoice/HempWorx can help you change your life, visit https://www.premierabundance.com/srsstringham.

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