If you can convince someone to honour their feelings, they might find the power to get through one more day.

Angry manosphere adherents often rage under my writings because I dare to break my silence; dare to speak about the female experience—the gropings, rape, domestic violence we’re threatened with day after day. The manosphere doesn’t have a problem with those crimes. It has a problem with the fact that we speak about them.

Hannah Gadsby once said:

“I don’t tell you [my story] so that you think of me as a victim. I am not a victim. I tell you this because my story has value. […]I will not allow my story to be destroyed. What I would have done to have heard a story like mine, not for blame, not for reputation, not for money, not for power but to feel less alone. To feel connected.” 

I’ve long since recovered from trauma. Most of my friends don’t even know it happened, so I don’t write posts like these to drag sympathy from internet strangers. I write them in the hope that they’ll make someone feel less alone.

Our lives intersect in miraculous ways.

I believe our narratives hold incredible power to disintegrate loneliness. If you can convince someone to honour their feelings, they might find the power to get through one more day.

Narrative therapy can help us to externalise our experiences and approach trauma with less self-judgment. If it happened to you and it happened to me, we’re not crazy. We’re justified. I hope my writing gives you permission to cry. I hope it shows you you’re not out there in the desert experiencing an isolated trauma. You're not alone. You’re not abnormal. You’re reacting normally to sexual violence. 

That's why I speak about these experiences—because assigning value to our stories glues us together in ways we rarely acknowledge.

I’m here for the relationships. I’m here to meet you wherever you are, even if there are two oceans between us. I'm here for the narrative therapy we inadvertently participate in every day. Our stories matter. They help us to extract the greatest lessons of our lives. They melt away division and destroy shame. They also prove that we aren't all that different to one another.

I've never written something that was unique to me. I’ve learned that I’m not all that different, and that I’m even lovable in all my messed-up weirdness. Acceptance is a powerful thing. I live in one of the most divided countries in the world, but one of the most unified communities. That has changed the very fabric of my life.