It Starts With Thomas. It Ends With You

Why we stop microaggressions before they become overt aggression. From TV shows to "Alligator Alcatraz".

I want to talk about trolls, assholes, and why we don't engage. Why we stop them before they can get started. They are just looking for a supply and they will starve here.

This morning, I had a troll. I had someone who decided to make his insecurity and his bad feelings my problem. Unfortunately for him, I have spent a lot of my life dealing with people at his level of emotional regulation. He is genuinely no different than a five-year-old who tells me that I’m stinky. He is willfully operating on that emotional level, and I am very serious when I say that my child development background helps me immensely. A five year old is expected to operate on that level because that’s all he’s grown to yet. An adult is not. I’m about as emotionally affected, but I not only know how to handle it, I will use it as an organic teaching opportunity 😉👩🏻‍🏫

I had written a post about the show The Last of Us. I found out a spoiler that makes me not want to watch the show at all. Thomas' comment has been deleted from the post because I don't engage with people who speak to me like that, but he said "you mean you're upset because the show followed the game?". For one, most people have no idea that it’s based on a video game, let alone are familiar with the story line. It’s actually common for people to have no idea what’s going to happen on a show until it airs, Thomas.

Most would say that's a "mild" comment, but you know what?

I wouldn't allow somebody to speak to me like that to my live face, so I'm not going to allow them to speak it to me like that in my online space

He is still talking to me, even if it's "just on the internet". He is still affecting me, even if it's “just on the internet”. It doesn't matter if he says it on the internet or to my face, he said it and he gets the accountability for it.

I promise you, if your partner was sending sexual texts to someone else beyond the boundaries of your relationship, you wouldn't say it's “just on the internet", would you? The internet is real, the people behind it are real, and the impact behind it is real. I'm about to get a lot stricter with my boundaries because allowing these little microaggressions emboldens them to the bigger ones.

It wasn't a "mild" comment. Let me take you through what happened before he hit send:

He didn't like what I said and he decided that he needed to not only let me know that he didn't like it, but in a way that demeans and diminishes me. For what? For existing?

His comment is insinuating that I should have known, and that I don't have the right to feel the way I feel because I should have known.

That I don't have the right to criticize.

That I don't know what I'm talking about because I'm not an expert on the show.

He is being ridiculously condescending, contemptuous, misogynistic, with an absolute undertone of violence ... and all because he wants to silence me

Over my opinion on a TV show.

What about my statement was there not to like to begin with? It's my opinion on a show that cannot affect anyone beyond me. Believe me, if posting my opinions had the power to change the world, I wouldn't be wasting time talking about a show 💅Yet he felt so strongly that he not only had the need to speak about it, but to attempt to diminish me in the process. It wasn’t enough for him to dislike what I said. He felt he had the right and freedom to punish me for it. He was entitled to.

For what? Making him feel a split second of discomfort?

He responded with violence. I will not diminish what it was. Comparatively mild violence or not, it has no place in my opinions of a TV show.

YOU ARE NOT OWED COMFORT, but we are all entitled by right of humanity to exist and be equutably included exactly as we are.

If I let him get away with demeaning me like this, then he's just going to try a bigger aggression next time and a bigger one next time until it's no longer microaggression and it's overt aggression. There is a direct correlation. If you allow the micros, you are paving the way for overt.

He was baiting me, and I didn't take it. You don't acknowledge them. You don't give them their supply. You go “not my circus”, and you walk away.

“I will protect my boundaries by any means necessary. You decide how far I have to go” Libby Rahl

So, I'm saying you know what, Thomas and Co? Maybe I can't stop people in the government from acting like this, but I can stop you from acting like this in my spaces.

All of them- digital or physical. If all of us stop them, they will start to get the picture. We have to stop tolerating the intolerable, everywhere.

I'm not “making a big deal out of nothing”. The rest of the world tells me that there's nothing to worry about as my identity, my rights, and my humanity slowly get chipped away. The United States government is coming after me on literally every aspect of who I am other than the fact that I happen to be a cisgender woman. I am a disabled bisexual atheist woman veteran of color who speaks out against fascism. They're not my biggest fan.

Women have been silenced our entire lives. We have been groomed and browbeaten and terrorized into accepting this behavior. We have been gaslit into minimizing the most horrendous behavior.

I mean all the way to "Alligator Alcatraz".

We have a catchy name for a fucking concentration camp. We have merchandise.

I am absolutely not being histrionic, as I have been called ad nauseam since I started speaking up about everything for microaggressions to the parallels of how we were going to end up here. First off I don't like the misogynistic connotations of that, and second I'm fucking right and I have been for years.

It is unacceptable and if you need permission to say that it's not, here you go.

It is not acceptable and you don't have to accept it.

The tagline for my page is that we cannot change what we don't address, WHICH IS WHY THEY TRY TO STOP US FROM ADDRESSING IT. They are already throwing people in concentration camps for addressing it.

It starts with guys like Thomas and his "mild comments"

It's going to end with me.

What about you?

Link to my facebook album of sass and clap backs for inspiration.

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