•¢ruel but cool•

Do not make homes out of people. This will leave you homesick and sad, missing arms that cannot hold roofs, hearts with shaky foundations.

You are stronger than you realise. You are crueller than you realise. The smallest words will break your heart. You will change. You’re not the same person you were three years ago. You’re not even the same person you were three minutes ago and that’s okay. Especially if you don’t like the person you were three minutes ago. People come and go. Some are cigarette breaks, others are forest fires. You won’t like your name until you hear someone say it in their sleep. You’ll forget your email password but ten years from now you’ll still remember the number of steps up to his flat. You don’t have to open the curtains if you don’t want to. Never stop yourself texting someone. If you love them at 4 a.m., tell them. If you still love them at 9.30 a.m., tell them again. Make sure you have a safe place. Whether it’s the kitchen floor or the Travel section of a bookshop, just make sure you have a safe place. You will be scared of all kinds of things, of spiders and clowns and eating alone, but your biggest fear will be that people will see you the way you see yourself. Sometimes, looking at someone will be like looking into the sun. Sometimes someone will look at you like you are the sun. Wait for it. You will learn how to sleep alone, how to avoid the cold corners but still fill a bed. Always be friends with the broken people. They know how to survive. You can love someone and hate them, all at once. You can miss them so much you ache but still ignore your phone when they call. You are good at something, whether it’s making someone laugh or remembering their birthday. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that these things don’t matter. You will always be hungry for love. Always. Even when someone is asleep next to you you’ll envy the pillow touching their cheek and the sheet hiding their skin. Loneliness is nothing to do with how many people are around you but how many of them understand you. People say I love you all the time. Even when they say, ‘Why didn’t you call me back?’ or ‘He’s an asshole.’ Make sure you’re listening. You will be okay. You will be okay.

Feminists have been characterized as whining “victim feminists” and “rape-crisis feminists” who portray women as too weak to defend themselves from men who would harass, beat, sexually assault, or discriminate against them. What’s most bizarre about this accusation is that the women who work against male violence and exploitation are some of the strongest, toughest, most articulate, and courageous people around, and to describe them as whining victims who passively sit around feeling sorry for themselves is about as far from reality as one could imagine. What makes whining so unappealing is that it is both a call for help and a form of focused self-pity that is so intense that nothing in the way of help has much chance of getting through. In other words, whining is a manipulative setup in which actually making things better isn’t the point. But this is a far cry from feminist demands for an end to discrimination, violence, and sexual exploitation. In spite of its loose hold on reality, the “victim feminism” criticism works because it draws attention away from men as victimizers and focuses instead on women who are victimized. In one sense, critics are correct that focusing on women as victims is counterproductive, but not because we should instead ignore victimization altogether. The real reason to avoid an exclusive focus on women as victims is to free us to concentrate also on the compelling fact that men are the ones who victimize, and such behavior and the patriarchal system that encourages it are the problem. Otherwise we might find ourselves concentrating on male victimization of women as something that happens to women without being done by men.