I’ve, I’ve got a bone / to pick and a crow to pluck. / I’ve got my tail tucked, wound / to lick. I prefer not to talk. / I said, I prefer not to talk. — Andrea Henchey

“At least he didn’t rape me.” That is the kind of logic many survivors of rape and child sexual abuse employ when someone revictimizes them in ways that fall short of outright rape. “At least he only did x and not y” is our way of creating a sense of empowerment and protection in the moment and not allowing the person who has hurt us to strip us of who we are. We feel that as long as it could have been worse, we can still move forward. We can become whole again, or at least we can live with the hope of becoming whole.

I am committed to the fight, not to the spats.

A poet I’ve known for years said her abuse is buried so deep she can’t imagine touching it. I don’t want to live like that, with a splinter that’s made its way to my heart. My voice keeps the splinter from going deeper.

This is not the time for easy conversations.

He who directs his passion upon causes … deprives his passion for people … of much of its fire. — Friedrich Nietzsche

One man’s morality is higher compared with another’s often only because its goals are quantitatively greater. The latter is drawn down by his narrowly bounded occupation with the petty. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Conversation is the only route to understanding and even then, who knows.

Close beside the woe of the world, and often upon its volcanic soil, man has laid out his little garden of happiness. — Friedrich Nietzsche

To be conscious is not to be in time / But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, / The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, / The moment in the draughty church at smokefall / Be remembered; involved with past and future. / Only through time is time conquered — T.S. Eliot

Before language, my body was a verb.

You’re not a citizen of language or memory, / but I am. — Kathleen Flenniken

Art makes the sight of life bearable by laying over it the veil of unclear thinking. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Maybe a poet friends us on Facebook because they want to market their latest collection, or because their friend’s friend friended us. We might not even be acquainted with anyone beyond that first-level friend, the rest being nothing more than piggy-backed apparent connections which spread out and out from that one person. In this case, a true network is not forming. Instead we are seeing a proliferation of non-networks—collections of strangers that have the appearance of connectivity. And those strangers now have unprecedented access to us. We are no longer invisible to them, either.

I have eighty-four friends on Facebook. I have known sixty-eight of them for years or even decades. Twenty-five of them are kindred spirits. Sixteen of them are among my closest friends. I have school and work ties to twelve of them. I have the same rare disease as six of them. I will love seven of them until the day I die, and I am unwavering in my commitment to them. I have connections with each of them that extend well beyond Facebook: We are bound by shared experience and shared purpose. I know who they are. I trust them. They are neither strangers nor strangers who appear to be friends.

Theorists such as Robin Dunbar posit that our brains don’t allow us to manage more than about one hundred fifty close or relatively close relationships. We just don’t have the ability, even with established and emerging technologies, to increase the mental and emotional requirements to closely follow, and to emotionally and intellectually engage with, more than one hundred to one hundred fifty other people.

Only I can see my list of friends on Facebook. Many people make that list public, but I won’t. I don’t want to give anyone using Facebook—even someone I don’t know at all—the ability to peruse my friends list, message or send friend requests to my friends based on their connection with me, or otherwise create the impression of being something other than they are, which is a stranger.

What happens when we have more than one hundred fifty close or relatively close relationships, even on social media? Robin Dunbar says we can neither closely follow nor emotionally and intellectually engage with our connections. I argue that something else—something more important—happens as well, which is that we give rise to virtual communities which are unsafe, ones in which the bloated network’s intrinsic dysregulation leads to infractions that take on many forms, including denigration, harassment, manipulation, coercion, assault, and even rape. All the while, those who commit the infractions walk among us, glad-handing the network’s other participants, both buttressed and seemingly protected by his or her connection with those members. The perpetrator’s continued acceptance by the network seems, in itself, like a vote of confidence in the perpetrator and also a motion of no confidence against the victim. Who wants to stand up against someone so many seem to stand with? For half a decade, I did not stand up. Even now, I am not standing. Though I am no longer crouching, I’ve only half-risen. If you can’t see me, look down: I’m the one on my knees.