Its frustrating when someone looks at me like I am crazy for carrying around pepper spray and for not walking a mile from my house to campus once its dark out. They give me this look like, you overreact, you are too afraid of nothing and it pisses me off. Especially when men do it. If I’m walking home alone at night and I get robbed/raped/murdered, it’s my own damn fault. Why were you walking alone at night? We live in a society that judges a womens actions before the mans. Seriously. You have a friend thats slept with a few different men and one night she says she got raped and what do most people think? “Ehh, was it really rape? She was asking for it. She’s known to be a slut. It’s her own fault.”

I just wish people would stop telling me I’m crazy and afraid of everything and overreacting because fuck you, once someone takes away that thought of “it could never happen to me” and it DOES happen to you, everything becomes absolutely terrifying. The man walking behind me, the person passing me in the car, the person walking towards me. Once one of those seemingly harmless people becomes a threat at some moment in your life, you stop believing “it wont happen to me” and start believing that every single chance you let your guard down is the chance that something really fucked up is going to happen to you. So please, stop judging me for carrying pepper spray and driving to class at night. And don’t tell me that the terror I experienced when I was followed home by two men was probably just a prank or a joke because to me, that fear I experienced was real.