When Your Skinhead Neighbour Goes Missing, I'll Plant a Garden in the Yard

The darkest secret about the internet isn't the hate---it's the arousal. Men jerking off to Mein Kampf and calling it discourse. Lost causes, all of them. More often than not, they crawl back into the sewer from which they came. In the digital underworld, you can be your most putrid self and still walk away clean.

There are these men—if you can call them that—who harass a woman I know. She runs a small but thriving t-shirt business with feminist, leftist designs. They flood her inbox with threats and plaster her feed with disgusting comments about her appearance. They tell her in so many words she needs to remember her place. Misogyny dressed up as free speech.

I want to snipe them with words—Mila Pavlichenko style. Line up my syntax like crosshairs and fire. But what’s the point? They feed off outrage. They multiply in shadows. They get off on the reaction—every little flinch a fix. Something to fill the emptiness.

And yet.

There's so much ugliness in the world today, online and beyond. We have to try to make something beautiful bloom in spite of it. Maybe that's what this space represents for me---a small flicker of prettiness amid the rot of the modern digital ecosystem. I like it here, in my own space. It feels safe, mostly. Imperfect, sure, but curated to my values, my taste, my sense of what is worth breathing life into and fighting against. A digital garden filled with an odd, overgrown medley of wildflowers----sown by me, for me, for the world I want to live in. Not like the rest of the algorithm-choked swamp we scroll through daily.

A small part of me must still believe that good can rise to the surface, even among the most damaged souls. Maybe that's why I work with men who've done such vile things. In grade seven, I was obsessed with Edward Norton’s portrayal of a skinhead in American History X. What a redemption arc. A glimpse of transformation in a world that feeds off hate. The possibility that, even though our choices are shaped by our earliest wounds, we can still have moments of clarity—moments that unravel even our darkest tendencies. I was fascinated by that. It remained my favourite movie for many years. Weird choice for a teenage girl, but alas…

I'm a strange and darkly lit little lady, and I always was.

I’ll always try to plant something better, even if I have to bleed to make it bloom.