u/HorseSubstantial7951

I have been in a career for over a decade that on most days I feel disgust towards, as I clearly see the correlation between paid advertising and the current state of state surveillance today (re: Palantir, among other awful things).

I felt this way years ago when I found out domestic violence survivors are told at shelters to remove Facebook from their phones so they are less easily traceable by their assaulters.

I work in digital marketing because it was the lowest barrier to entry into the workforce after I became homeless, having been raised home-educated in a highly abusive upbringing.

I think the reason my Father tried to strangle and kill me at 17 was that he was angry I would not allow him to assault me sexually.

That brings us to the current day. I do not like people most of the time, and as much as I deeply desire to become an author, I can't stand how simple-minded the average person is on the internet. Nuance is dead; long live aimless bullying.

I have to see bots, and those performing indistinguishably from bots, foam at the mouth about Chappell Roan. A woman banned from performing in a country for a fight she did not have with a child. Whereas, back in reality, Donald Trump has been inside of a child, and not a single country has banned him from entering.

I see the general public give away their power on a daily basis in minor, incremental ways that do add up to impact.

Fixating endlessly on some nonsense around Blake Lively or Meghan Markle.

This offends me. Why? Because I know of a woman in the UK who didn't face prison for buying abortion pills solely because of the public backlash.

God knows what would be possible if the public could collectively be angry in the correct direction.

Every day I will see viral misunderstandings on the nature of domestic violence, and I am fully convinced that, as a society, we are going backwards, losing whatever fundamental progress was made from the 1970s onwards.

I go to the pub, and the worst of the worst insinuated is simply considered banter.

I think about how, when my Mother's friend was murdered when I was 19, the woman's own mother said that she could not have imagined her being apart from her killer, her husband.

In grief, people often say funny things; it seems the script is still to uphold the patriarchy in their knee-jerk reactions.

Who am I to feel like screaming at a supposedly grieving mother that her daughter would be alive today had she got a divorce?

Is my rage misplaced? In many parts, yes. My Mother was told by her own Mother that she deserved to be battered by my Father. I wonder if her dead friend was treated similarly, as her mother lived across the road from her own Mother. Did she really know fuck all was going on?

I want to write, but I know I will cause offence due to my nature. My contemporaries are writing asinine tripe like "Women Don't Owe You Pretty" and "is it embarrassing to have a boyfriend?"

The things I lived around daily are seen as fodder for true-crime vultures. The language of these tragedies is not translated as equally systemic to the more palatable topics. The cause of all these things is simply lost in the horror.

When I am correct too early, it alienates others from me. I have walked away from many situations safe, where others are not, because believing me, an unpleasant woman, is social suicide.

I ask myself, looking at media today, would Andrea Dworkin have been permitted to promote her books via TikTok, or would she be resigned to convey only palatable mush in order to be well known in any form?

I feel like the new sexism is that other women do not allow unpleasant women to exist in public these days, especially those from working-class backgrounds, as well as your everyday imperfect victims.

To be seen as slightly annoying is to attract more social ire than to be an actual violator.

Evil beyond our comprehension seems to attract fewer death threats than mild social faux pas committed on main.

If the trauma made you turn to critical theory over drugs, your presence of mind feels destabilising in a world where most people think living is "just don't think about it!"

I saved myself because I thought my way out on many occasions. One day I am called too sensitive for avoiding someone awful; a year later, the covert is made overt, and I am reading you his name in the local papers.

To follow your intuition is the best self-defence you will ever get in this world.

And acting in accordance with your instincts will cause offence everywhere you go.

Has anyone else noticed in themselves these extremes in the workplace or am I the weirdo?

In my first roles I used to be achingly type A and anxious about being fired and this often led to me being the top performer in the team.

I would often be critised for having a bad attitude as I fell out with the personality hires who were doubling the workload of not only myself but also my close team mates whilst trying to get the autistic girls fired (often graphic designers).

After burn out from workplace bullying including a coworker who tried to get me fired for being infertile (she just had to ask ten times in a row if I planned on having kids and we had no HR) I stepped back in my career surviving off my savings for as long as humanly possible.

When returning to the workforce all fucks I had to give had died and my manager consistently praised me for how pleasant and warm my personality was.

I also got next to fuck all done and my "lovelyness" was directly tied to how little I gave a damn. I only found it easy to be nice when I was doing the bare minimum to not be fired.

As soon as I am on my A game, my mind takes note of everyone else's incompetance, how it trickles down to end up on my plate, all the times I was ghosted, messed about or dropped in it.

When I don't keep the score and let BS flow past me like water, at the exact same moment, all will to do my best evaporates with it.

TW: CSA, betrayal trauma and hitting

I hope this is ok to post and doesn't come across as trivial.

Yesterday when I was just scrolling Tiktok a storytime Tiktoker opened her video without a single trigger warning by saying she was made pregnant by her father.

She was not sharing her story, but that of someone else's, she goes on to say how dare us as the audience be offended because she is doing a makeup story time as well as ackshually she is also a survivor of peer assault (as if other survivors didn't also cause me mental harm in years past).

I had a severe panic attack from the video, I can read articles fine about CSA without being upset but her intro felt like a fucking joke.

My heart rate is elevated severely for at least three hours, I go outside for a walk, I can not be at home, I feel I am vibrating at the seams, I feel sick, I can't eat, I feel faint after I get to my destination, I don't feel real, I can't cry, I feel like I am going to die, my music can't comfort me and I manage to purchase some cookies for my husband, I record a video journal of how upset I am, which takes me an hour to calm down by speaking about how systemically this shit upsets me so badly.

The thing is I don't remember being raped by my Father, or ever being raped by anyone.

By the age of four I had started threatening to kill him repeatedly loud enough for anyone to hear.

My mother was skitsophrenic, she didn't trust him bathing me at 7 so would supervise bathtime to keep me safer, but also at 7 told me she didn't have enough money to leave him after he jiggled my ass with his foot and I got up to tell my mother because it made me feel gross.

She once told me as an adult that either when I was a baby or toddler my father had asked her hypothetically that if he did "something" would she kill him, she said she said yes.

I ran away from home after he threatened to strip me naked at my "defiance" at not letting him see my stretch marks, he pinged my underwear and I screamed at him beforehand in a previous visit which had me being lectured for hours upon hours because I yelled at him for trying to touch me.

The first person I told the real reason I ran away said "did he have sex with you" with a smirk, his sister, my aunt.

I said no disgusted.

Mentally, I thought though, great, if I was raped, you people would call that sex.

My cousin told me that because I did not want to involve the police (and provide what evidence? No rape kit? Him threatening to SA me when I am of legal age? He already went to prison twice before I was born, you people could have warned my Mother when they first dated), that I am the reason children are sexually assaulted.

The fact I can't magically make the police put someone in prison without any proof that I was forcibly penatrated, they do not put men in prison for pinging their daughter's underwear?!?!

When I had a gun fired over my head, the police dropped my case, found new evidence and twelve years later arrested the guy and never updated me. My mum had fucked up my testimony as a 14 year old because she kept saying the guy was a good shot, if he wanted to shoot me he would have hit me, so I had spoken to the police deluded as a lamb and happily gave them the facts and said I didn't feel in danger because my Mother's delulu had contaminated my mind!

I used to have recurring dreams that when I was very very young, possibly 3 that my body had floated up to heaven and died and I was happy for it that people might actually love me if I was gone, easy to imagine me nice if I am not here anymore.

I used to struggle being so angry, but being nice never saved me either.

I used to be so polite writing thank you letters to relatives for gifts, my Grandma on my Mother's side joked my Dad was a pedophile, Grandma would not take me in when I was running away from home and set other relatives on me for complaining on Facebook when my Dad was hitting me.

My uncle said I can't be mean to my Grandma, she was an old lady, he copied and pasted a link to a shelter.

My uncle was given a house to do up and sell by his Dad, he allowed it to get infested with rats, he squandered an opportunity when I got nothing.

His dad, my Grandad, could only offer me £1000 in comparison, only if I left the UK and met him in a country where I didn't speak the language.

I had never been allowed out of the house alone, I was home educated.

My grandma, the only reason she wasn't homeless after her divorce with three kids was because her mother paid off the entire mortgage, most likely worth about half a million today, how about pay it forward, your grandaughter is in danger of being raped by her own Father?

These people outside of me and my mother were not poor in the slightest.

Before I was born my Mother had asked for financial help for years to get out away from him from them.

My mother was raped in her sleep because my Father wanted a son, he had a son, my half brother, he just couldn't be arsed to pay child support.

I only ever remember my Dad being nice to me when he could pretend I was a boy before the age of 7.

I wish I could stop getting triggered by unexpected media and situations that make me feel like my Dad is about to finish the job and then murder me through the sheer panic and fear I feel in my body.

I also have severe endometriosis, my uterus, bowel and rectum are fused together as found on an MRI, I was never offered surgery to fix it.