Helen Hou-Sandí

I am angry.

I am angry because I cannot be myself.

I am angry because I will be told that my anger is not becoming for a girl.

I am angry because I have allowed others to affect my life and bring me down.

I am angry because I feel disappointed in myself when really I should be disappointed in you and YOU should be disappointed in you.

I am angry because I spend every day frozen by fear, a fear that was not directly caused by any one thing or any one person, and yet it is all-consuming.

I am angry because there are those who will say “yeah so I told a woman I’d murder her children over her statement of a fact, but that woman wasn’t you, so you’re just being oversensitive and stupid, ignore that what I did was neither an isolated incident nor socially acceptable.”

I am angry because it doesn’t just stop at threats: people are murdered over these non-transgressions.

I am angry that so many people are dead simply for having been born in a certain place or of a certain color.

I am angry that we look for excuses when there is no excuse, that we allow ourselves to fall prey to the fallacy that logic can always be found.

I am angry because my own freedom of speech is trumped by somebody else’s, logic be damned.

I am angry because I fully believe in the mission of democratizing publishing and yet I have to accept that that means the software I make can be used by others to squash my own will to continue to participate freely on the internet.

I am angry because in a comments section powered by that very software I give so much of myself to build, I am greeted with racial epithets directed at me.

I am angry because my withdrawal will be seen as a “win”, and the ensuing losses ignored.

I am angry because I collect inappropriate fan mail under the guise of laughter, but in reality I am collecting evidence.

I am angry that so many people are jerks, posting somebody else’s personal information without permission, wishing that others would be raped or murdered.

I am angry that other people are being cruel by way of attempting to deflect from those jerks, because they are too scared or brainwashed to simply denounce them.

I am angry because I am giving jerks what they want, because I am not a jerk to my loved ones and I absolutely will not put them at risk.

I am angry, and I am silenced.