The events of today strangely — eerily, in fact — mir­ror some­thing that hap­pened just over two years ago, some­thing that changed me for likely the rest of my life, some­thing that made me think twice. Three times, even. And while this sit­u­a­tion is not nearly as seri­ous, it hurts sim­i­larly, only with less emphasis.

I don't know if I have the energy left to fully explain the hope­less­ness I feel at this pre­cise moment. I will, how­ever, say this: It seems that no mat­ter what I say or the man­ner in which I say it, some­one I care about will either hurt because of it or, at the very least, be offended by it.

I can't han­dle that sort of respon­si­bil­ity. I don't ever want any­one I care about to hurt, and most cer­tainly not because of some­thing that I say. This place, in all its incar­na­tions, has always been some­where I could go to exer­cise my frus­tra­tions, put down my thoughts, or just rant about noth­ing. That abil­ity is both this place's beauty and its curse.

With one excep­tion — that being two years ago — I've never tried to use this place as a way of hurt­ing or upset­ting any­one, and it pains me incred­i­bly that it's had that effect at all. Since the begin­ning, I've treated this place as if it were a pri­vate jour­nal. It just hap­pened to be acces­si­ble to any­one who wanted or cared enough to view it, and per­haps that's the wrong approach now. Per­haps it was wrong all along.

I was always taught that there was no such thing as a bad word, that words in and of them­selves were not nearly as impor­tant as the thought, intent and con­text of their expres­sion. I've always believed strongly in that rule. That rule is the rea­son why I can't go around using the N word at my leisure with­out being the sub­ject of scrutiny (not that I would any­way), but rap­pers can, and get paid mil­lions of dol­lars for doing so. Peo­ple under­stand the con­text and the intent of who the author is, what they're say­ing, and how it applies to them.

As far as I'm con­cerned, it leads to two pos­si­ble con­clu­sions. Either the rule does not apply to this jour­nal and nobody told me or I'm just not artic­u­late or skilled enough to apply it cor­rectly. At this point, I don't know which it is, but until some­thing changes or I fig­ure out how to say some­thing with­out some­one think­ing it's designed to attack them, this place no longer feels safe to me.