I shall be me.

I wanted to be a strong and independent woman.

What I hated most was how easily my emotions could throw me around. It felt weak, embarrassing — "feminine." If love and malice were going to keep wrecking my heart, I'd rather feel nothing at all. In my twenties, I meant that wish with everything I had.

Now I'm in my thirties, and my emotions are as busy as ever. I cry. I seethe. I compose bitter little speeches in my head. But it turns out I never needed to stop feeling — I needed to stop being thrown around. That was all.

I'm not, actually.

Something ugly happened to me on social media. My explanation of English grammar was pinned up in front of an audience as "incoherent." I cycled through every emotion like a textbook case: shock, a racing heart, self-doubt, resentment, excuses. At every stage, I could have spat it all out at that exact temperature. I got as far as hovering over the send button.

And I still wonder: if that post had carried the avatar of a middle-aged man in a suit, would he have chosen to do the same?

But I can choose how to behave.

The answer I gave, after one night's sleep, was not a counterattack. Not swallowing it. Not silence. "I want fewer people to believe they're hopeless at English. As a fellow English lover, thank you — I'd be glad to have your help." I don't carry enough hospitality to hand a bully the reaction they came for. So I go make friends instead.

Because what I want is to reach the people who are suffering — who want so badly to communicate, and believe they can't. As long as I stand where my mission stands, he and I are on the same side. I will not allow my feelings to get in the way of my ambition.

I live it, not show it.

My battles never happen where anyone can see them. I don't have time to stand at the sink making faces at food scraps rotting in the summer heat. You put them in a container. You let them ferment. They become compost — food for the flowers.

Living as myself is nothing pretty. It's daily life. And to keep that life from being colonized by the exhibition inside the screen, it needs a line of defense.

No permission needed to be.

So I've stopped saying "Let me be." I shall be me. I am who I am — and I ask no one.

To the kind, exhausted someone who is tired enough to wish they could stop feeling: that force you've been using to hold yourself down — reverse it, and push back. I help people build their own way of playing the lead in their own story. That's my job.

After all, we are not saints on a cross.