The stories are what remind me to breathe:

I have some thoughts brewing, about being a woman and having to find ways to cope with the ways in which our society consistently denies us our sense of safety, our security. Because yesterday I was harassed on a train, and in the grand scheme of things it was a relatively minor incident, but I’m stewing over it still, today - because for half an hour or so yesterday I was legitimately frightened for my immediate physical safety, because a man twice my age decided he had the right to make me feel that way. 

It was gross and I’m angry with him, with the world, with myself for still being so knocked off-centre by it today - enough that I almost didn’t get back on the same train I was on yesterday to head back into London to meet friends. I didn’t wanna be on that train again, travelling alone again.

But I did it, and I listened to Happy on repeat the whole way there on my favourite Uncanny X-men headphones, and I met my friends, and I bought comic books and bubble tea, and I made myself a good day, although by the end of it I felt wrung out and exhausted. Whether that was the right thing to do for my mental health - whether it might have been better to simply allow myself to retreat and rest in my, I don’t know; I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to deal when something like this happens.

But mostly I did what I would have done either way: tried not to think about a tall, heavy man pinning me to my seat, demanding I have lunch with him, trying to stop me getting off the train, and when that didn’t work following me off the train himself, up the road, still demanding I come with him, saying he would follow me home, until I got so breathless and scared I had to turn round and scream at him (and the shithead got frightened and ran the fuck away, because when the girl is scared and clearly trying to get away from you it’s all good to push her, but god forbid she turn round and show a hint of something harsher, darker than vulnerability - something closer to absolute fucking rage - at you daring to try to pull this on her). 

Today I read the new Captain Marvel, and I bought Birds of Prey and Batwoman too. I wished for super powers - I thought about how much safer I’d feel in the world if I had super powers. I thought about how Carol Danvers must have felt when she couldn’t fly - how her friends built her a flying motorcycle instead and dang I wish irl was that easy.

In these situations, when your power is taken off you - when your sense of security, your feeling of having a right to exist happily and undisturbed in the world - is threatened, I think the power to dream, to escape an unkind world temporarily, is an important one. I remember curling up around a laptop reading fanfiction the night after I was violently mugged when I was eighteen (there’s still a lump of scar tissue in my lip where I was punched, where my front tooth was snapped in half and driven into the gum). I think about how every time I’ve felt truly afraid in my life, I have found fiction, until I’ve felt able to breathe again.

It reminds me of the other worlds in which we can be untouchable - of the power of art, of female creators writing female characters. Of the worlds we are conquering - the real ones, the fictional ones.

We are important: female writers, female readers, female artists, female fans. I think sometimes we’re the only thing holding 51% of the population together, huddled round a campfire telling ourselves stories to keep the shadows at bay.