A message to the person who's been trolling me for weeks: I'm going to let you win

Through our days of pointless combat, I have thought about you a lot, and as I picture you as you really are - the flesh-and-blood you, not the carnival of characters you hide behind - it’s hard not to feel sympathy

'I've blocked 46 of your fake Facebook profiles with my face on them so far' (Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

Dear Troll,

Forty-six: that is the number of your fake profiles that I have blocked on my Facebook blog so far, and still they keep popping up. Many of those profiles are named after me, and feature my picture, so that you can attack my readers as if it is me doing the attacking (and when I type my own name into Facebook’s search bar, the empty blog pages all appear, a parade of masks you’ve made in my likeness).

I can’t keep up with you any more. I don't have a drug or a disorder to provide me with limitless energy; I am just an ordinary man who wants to express his thoughts on the internet. I cannot spend my life sitting with my phone in hand waiting to block you.

It was a post about not spell-checking racists that first inspired your anger. Not because you are a racist (you assure me), but because you thought the suggestion that attacking racism rather than grammar was deeply offensive to you.

Through your attacks on me, I can see why: you dedicate your life to belittling people, and perhaps you find it difficult to think of ways to express your disagreement that aren’t centred on hatred and aggression. What I wrote unintentionally hit upon a deeply-rooted fixation of yours - a desire to abuse - and it made something inside you crack.

Through our days of pointless combat, I have thought about you a lot, and as I picture you as you really are - the flesh-and-blood you, not the carnival of characters you hide behind - it’s hard not to feel sympathy.

I imagine you sitting there in front of your computer for unbroken hours, un-showered and unfed, endlessly opening new email addresses, creating new accounts to replace the ones I’ve blocked - a quick gulp of long-cold coffee to keep you going - frantically typing your furious messages, exhilarated by the thought of the hurt they will cause when I read them - gulp! - attacking my motives, my family, my sexuality - gulp! - calling me pompous, self-aggrandising, a cunt - gulp! - deluded, an egomaniac, an ars-licker, a racist, a fascist - gulp! gulp! gulp! - all the while trying to ignore the rising scent of your own unwashed body, growing steadily worse as the neglected hours pass by, trying to resist the painful urges of your bladder, the grumbling in your empty stomach…

Outside, in a world that existed long before Facebook, and will exist long after it too, days you will never see drift into nights through which you will hardly sleep, and the earth’s gentle tilt will shortly begin to tempt the little seeds that lie out of sight in the soil, waiting patiently to become the floral abundance of this year’s Spring.

Dear troll, our world is so much bigger than the internet, and so much more beautiful. No funny cat video will ever match the softness of a real cat’s fur, or that wonderful vibration in your toes when she is purring at the foot of the bed. The funny thing is, you have reminded me of the warmth in this world. You have brought me new friends - the many people who have rushed to my defence though they know me only through the words I have written for them; and you’ve brought out the best in my real life friends too: messages of support, phone calls, text messages, and at least six very good hugs (and counting).

If I had started my blog because I am an attention-seeker, as you suggested, then I never would have imagined it could bring me as much attention as you have sent my way. But the purpose of my blog is actually to bring more compassion into the world - and yes, even trolls need a little compassion sometimes.

That is why I have decided to hand my blog over to you. For the next few days, you have my permission to write anything you like there. You may clone my profile, attack and swear as much as you need to. Please, feel free to be creative: invent new characters, new methods of abuse. Don't hold back: I want you to know that you have been heard. I want to help you to get this anger out of your system.

As for me - my boyfriend has just come back from the isle of Eigg, and his parents are in town. For the next few days I will be out in our beautiful world, eating fish and chips, feeling the lips of the man I love against my own. I will squeeze his warm hand tightly as we walk headlong into whatever crazy weather this Scottish winter still has left in store for us, and his parents will entertain me with stories of my beloved from the time before I knew him (how could he never mention his school trip to Russia?!).

I hope you can get over this episode soon, so that you can get out into the fresh air as well - but if not, that’s alright too, because my blog will be there for you whenever you need somewhere to put your angst. I know you hate it when you think I’m being pompous, but I really cannot think of any words better than the ones I wrote in the post that originally inspired your anger:

“We will never change someone by breaking them down, only by building them up.”

And so I am building you up, dear friend; I am giving you the space you need to express whatever it is that troubles you. As you wreak your havoc my blog will surely lose some followers - but that’s OK.

Maybe you will be so effective in your campaign that you will whittle them away completely, until it is just me and you there, in a crazy hall of mirrors of your creation. But that’s OK too, because at that point I will switch off my phone and unplug my laptop, and I will go to visit my two beautiful nephews. I will prop them up next to me on the sofa, one on either side, and I will read ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ with all the funny voices.

I will be able to smell the clean shampoo smell coming from their hair, and hear the outrageous laughter when the protagonist finally admits that he does like green eggs and ham, after all: he just needed Sam-I-Am to help him figure it out. I will pull them close, and I will delight in the warmth of real human skin, soft and smooth and clean, a feeling that cannot be made up, copied, or stolen.

Good luck, friend. Enjoy your time as the virtual Emlyn; the real Emlyn will be out walking in the sunshine, searching for the first green shoots of Spring.