This is my sixth time being locked out. This is my sixth pop up when I go to log in that says “______” instead of taking me directly to where I need to be. This is the sixth time someone reported me to retaliate against me. And then my email was banned.

My dad died December of 2020 ten days before Christmas. A couple weeks before that he had been given two years to live. two weeks before Christmas I sat in front of our dwindly Christmas tree and cried, begged, pleaded for one more Christmas. Four days later, I got that 9:30 am phone call and you know it’s just a blur after that. The following summer  was when my mom finally agreed to move. The house was in terrible shape but we managed to sell it and that September I went home to help her move.. On the way I was rear ended by a guy going 55 mph while I was dead stopped, totaling my car. After the shock wore off, I got out to check to see if he was ok and the first thing he said to me was:

Could you let me go please? I don’t have license and insurance. 

I gestured to my car and said, look what you did. No. Also, I added are you ok?

FUUUUCK!

That’s what he screamed. He didn’t ask if I was ok or if I needed anything. He didn’t console me. I had rubbed my hand on his arm and told him it was ok. He screamed near my ear and walked away leaving me alone in front of my totaled car. Leaving me completely alone on the Virginia highway to think of what to do, where to go–about an hour and a half away from my mother still. The second thing he said to me, the last thing he said to me, can you move my car?

That’s what it feels like when I get an error logging in. That’s what it feels like when I receive some nebulous excuse as to why I can’t access my email anymore. That’s how it feels whenever they tell me I am no longer welcome on their platform. It feels like a man just hit me and devastated my life screaming fuck in my ear without asking if I am ok. How are you going to get to your mother’s? I am sorry this happened.  I am of no consequence. I am somehow interminably wrong. I have now ruined his day, therefore I am the villain of the story. 

I needed that car to move my mother. We were able to hold my mom’s stuff at my best friend’s house and drove up together. She had to return a week later with her sister to retrieve it. The whole way I lived in sheer panic. Getting in an accident scars you. The body remembers that it can happen at any given moment; the thud, the hit, the damage, the shot forward and had the car in front of me not moved, had the light not just turned green, I could be dead. I suffer from great panic already and now the highway has become an even scarier place. I just think of him. I know if I get hit, I’ll still be the problem. Everytime I am logged out of an account, the same fear takes over. My stomach tenses. I sit straighter. Braced.

It’s the disposability of it. That I am someone who is disposable.For women, safety is an illusion. For sex workers, that safety is removed entirely. It’s not just the accident or being banned, it’s the hundreds of trolls on tik tok that told me what they thought of me. It’s the constant catcalling and street harassment. The punishment in school for wearing a tank top. The backhanded compliments. The carrot dangling. The pushy clients. The actual rape and assault. The what were you wearing? The damsel sidekick I grew up reading in English, forced to read only male authors. Only male athletes being celebrated. Only male artists. Only males. Only males. 

It’s that women are seen as interchangeable orifices. They don’t exist to feel so they don’t need a platform to be seen. They guest star in a fantasy and then our shuffled away once the fantasy is over. We are disposable and silenced. When we speak out, we are silenced. Maybe I should have started with this but I wanted you to read the whole story to get a picture. Everytime I am banned or locked out, it’s because I have stood up for myself. This time I reported someone making phishing attempt after phishing attempt. Mysteriously after I was banned. Seems like they read the email to me and realized Tryst was an escort site, or the man reported me after I told him I report all his emails as phishing. Or they made a grave mistake and lumped me in with a phishing attempt. But every time I am banned, it is after I call someone out for doing something predatory. 
Like being hit with a big truck yelling fuck at you as you ruin his day. Better to hide me away then face it. Let’s face it–what I do is relatively innocuous if not godly–I change men. I break men, I save them. I confront them and teach them consent.  I hand their ass to them. I train them and I give them pleasure. I am relatively innocent but powerful. It is of no surprise that I have been banned six times when I am constantly telling the world the bad things men did. They will always silence the most powerful and they will always make us feel interchangeable so we don’t fight back. It’s the weariness they bank on. They never expect me to keep getting up.