I often don’t react to events in real time. The speed of my reaction bears no relation to the magnitude of an event. I need time to process. Time to sit on my feelings and sort emotion from fact, communication from gibberish, and truth from the convenient memes of utter bullshit that permeate any culture. I am careful in my reactions. I do not hold to the notion that if enough people say something, if they seem to know what they’re talking about, and if they say it with enough confidence, then it must be true. A lie told with authority is still a lie.
Do not mistake my quiet for silence. The words are there, and given time to parse them out I will endeavor to make myself heard.
I am a gentle person. I seek in all I do to harm no one, and like all humans, I fail more often than I like. But do not, under any circumstance, mistake gentle for meek.
So I want this understood by the person (and others of that ilk) who felt compelled to spend almost thirty days typing rape centered death threats coupled with my name into google so I could read them in my blog stats:
I am not afraid of you. I have not been writing because I have been busy with my life, not because you shut me down or put me in my place. No matter how many ways you combine my name with the words fuck, kill, and autistic in some pitiful rape culture “mad libs” game, it does not make me less of a person. I am real, valid, and surrounded by love. You are irrelevant to me.
The only reason I post this is because it stands as another piece of evidence. When autistics speak of hostility they face, that is not imagined.
When women posit that sexism still exists on an ugly, violent level, that is not imagined.
It took me a lifetime to get where I am; to reach a point where I believe in my own worth, and self determination.
Now that I am here, nothing you can do is going to make me go away.
It's Bridget's Word 