So... it's really not getting better? At all?
See for yourself.
I've let go of the hope that it'll ever get better for me. There's no precedent to indicate that - Anita's been hit by this since 2012, Kathy Sierra dealt with it for the better part of a decade, and there's no sign of any of it stopping. So, this is the new normal for women like us.
It's grim to say the least, but knowing that this will never go away for me, and that I'm going to keep being screamed at over positive coverage, that again, does not exist, that I'm going to keep getting death and rape threats, that the reports of attempted hacks on my sites and accounts will keep rolling in literally every day, that I'll always be looking over my shoulder and wondering if someone is eventually gonna make good on those threats... Knowing it, and planning around it, is less grim than hoping it'll ever stop and being disappointed every day when I wake up to a fresh new pile of threats and password reset notices while a choir of idiots screams none of it is happening as they pass around the same broken telephone lies and horseshit as fact with a lack of self-awareness.
Hope is a thing that kills you if you invest it in the wrong things. Ever hoping that I'll be able to do anything short of living in a cave without a mob of shitbags nipping at my heels and screaming "whore" after me is a pointless thing to hope in, and will only burn me. I wake up every morning and instantly ask Alex if any new threat has popped up while I slept, and that sort of thing is just a part of me now. I'm adapting to it.
Instead of investing my hope in that changing, I'm hoping to use this situation to fight back at the cause, not the symptoms, and push to make sure less situations like mine and Anita's exist, or at least help the other people who find themselves on our particular rung of hell. And the weeks that we've been running Crash Override have shown that there are a LOT of people down here with us.
I've let go of the hope that it'll ever get better for me. There's no precedent to indicate that - Anita's been hit by this since 2012, Kathy Sierra dealt with it for the better part of a decade, and there's no sign of any of it stopping. So, this is the new normal for women like us.
It's grim to say the least, but knowing that this will never go away for me, and that I'm going to keep being screamed at over positive coverage, that again, does not exist, that I'm going to keep getting death and rape threats, that the reports of attempted hacks on my sites and accounts will keep rolling in literally every day, that I'll always be looking over my shoulder and wondering if someone is eventually gonna make good on those threats... Knowing it, and planning around it, is less grim than hoping it'll ever stop and being disappointed every day when I wake up to a fresh new pile of threats and password reset notices while a choir of idiots screams none of it is happening as they pass around the same broken telephone lies and horseshit as fact with a lack of self-awareness.
Hope is a thing that kills you if you invest it in the wrong things. Ever hoping that I'll be able to do anything short of living in a cave without a mob of shitbags nipping at my heels and screaming "whore" after me is a pointless thing to hope in, and will only burn me. I wake up every morning and instantly ask Alex if any new threat has popped up while I slept, and that sort of thing is just a part of me now. I'm adapting to it.
Instead of investing my hope in that changing, I'm hoping to use this situation to fight back at the cause, not the symptoms, and push to make sure less situations like mine and Anita's exist, or at least help the other people who find themselves on our particular rung of hell. And the weeks that we've been running Crash Override have shown that there are a LOT of people down here with us.
