Expression Is Cheap

Words, words, words. Expression is cheap.

I wanted this publication to set me free.

I believe what I offer is unusual. Every word of it has cost me.

What you can’t see, what you don’t see, what almost no one will see, is that none of us start in the same place. There is no level playing field. I’m not asking for one either — enforcing one could easily become its own form of tyranny and self-erasure. It’s how movements become what they fight. What is killing me, what drives me to madness, is the lie imposed asymmetrically, so some may feel justified or comfortable in their excess and position in the hierarchy. It looks like entitlement and sounds like fear dressed in stories oversized children tell to soothe themselves. The lie that what you hold measures what you did. Timing, luck, and variables you played no role in built most of it, and their absence is what holds a younger generation under.

I could walk you through the brutal, exhausting details of my life and the interlocking systems of entrapment that keep the cage in place indefinitely. I won’t. Why bother? I haven’t found a single person able to hold it. My lived reality threatens the comfort of every single person I have ever told. I’ll spare you.

This publication was supposed to be a way to escape from a life being crushed by the fiction that replaced it. Not running from responsibility — that’s been accepted and locked. But from the erasure, the forced impoverishment, and the powerlessness that comes when your abuse can be described and proven, and is still met with dismissal — enforced by law every single day, because of your gender alone.

And I chose to build this publication with integrity. I don’t buy the zero-sum fallacy. My benefit doesn’t require your expense. Value, not extraction, should be the bar for anything that asks for your money. I know the cheap clickbait tricks, the algorithmic optimization, the shallow frame that builds a huge following but only feeds the division, paranoia, or sedation. I refuse it.

This isn’t a neat piece. It might never leave this notebook. Some words make space for the ones that land. Where I was going, where I’m going with this, is to say my daily starting position is far below what this publication shows, and the fact I write at all is damn near unbelievable, but here’s the words on the page. Smeared in the way only I can smear them. A strange habit of holding a pen like a lefty but writing with my right, so my hand rubs against every freshly written line.

My “no” has been spoken and refused daily. “No, that’s not what I want.” “No that’s not what I believe.” “No, that’s not what I said.” “No, I don’t feel grateful just because you’ve decided I should.” “No, I don’t accept or consent to your authority.” The state’s violence — replacing a living being with an object it can measure — forces my compliance. Nothing honorable earned it.

The feeling of no comes built in. Don’t want is bedrock — its own word in the language’s deepest inventory, standing beside want, no assembly required. The no you act on is a different purchase. Refusing, warding off, holding a line another person must reckon with — that one you build yourself, at full cost, every time. That is why boundary-setting has to be scripted and rehearsed wherever it is taught. That is why “by continuing, you agree” works: consent piles up a scroll and a click at a time, while refusal has to be built by hand.

Assent scales.

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Refusal counts one no at a time. And a bound no counts even when it loses — overpowered, refused, it still keeps forced compliance from entering the ledger as consent.

The first tool starts there, small enough to run tonight: find your last disagreement in writing and the sentence that carried your no. If someone could quote it back as a refusal — a line that holds you to something — it bound. If it was “I don’t know about that,” it kept the peace and bought nothing. The next piece builds the no that binds.