Kate Didd

Editor’s Note (Trigger-Aware)

This essay contains themes of self-defense, sexual violence, harassment, and systemic injustice. Details are intentionally non-graphic and written with care. Please read at your own pace, and step away if you need to. Your well-being matters.

Due to everything unfolding in the media right now, it feels necessary, urgent, even to pause and ask ourselves a question we often avoid: What is right, and what is not? Not as a slogan. Not as a talking point. But as a lived, breathing moral compass.

I have spent most of my life in advocacy. I was raised in it, shaped by it, trained through observation and survival. But the deepest lessons did not come from books or movements they came from moments when I had to choose whether I would disappear to keep others comfortable, or stand fully in myself and accept the consequences.

That choice first arrived early in adulthood, when I learned how quickly truth can make people hostile. When speaking up did not earn protection, but scrutiny. When self-defense was rebranded as disruption. When I realized that power often reacts more strongly to exposure than to harm itself.

What followed, over the years, was not a single incident but a pattern. Each time I refused silence, something was revealed not just about others, but about the systems surrounding us. About who is believed. About who is expected to endure quietly. About how often the burden of “being reasonable” is placed on those already carrying wounds.

There is a particular loneliness that comes with refusing to comply with injustice. It does not look heroic from the outside. It looks messy. It looks emotional. It looks like someone who has been pushed past the point where politeness feels like betrayal.

I have been called intense. Difficult. Unstable. These labels tend to follow people, especially women, who refuse to absorb harm without protest. But what those words often disguise is something simpler and more threatening: a person who will not be easily controlled.

I want to be clear: this is not a celebration of conflict. It is not an argument for violence. It is a meditation on boundaries, on self-preservation, on what happens when survival teaches you that silence can be more dangerous than resistance.

Over time, I found myself stepping in, not because I wanted to, but because I could not look away. Standing beside people who were cornered. Creating space where fear had narrowed someone’s world. Sometimes that meant speaking. Sometimes it meant standing still and refusing to move. Sometimes it meant being seen when others would rather I wasn’t.

Bravery is often misunderstood. It is not loudness. It is not the absence of fear. It is not ego. Bravery is surviving something that should have broken you and choosing to let that survival become a shield for others. It is quiet, relentless, and deeply human.

I learned early how manipulation works. I watched it devastate people who trusted too easily. I made a choice, conscious and ongoing, to use that understanding not to dominate, but to disrupt harm. To confront exploitation rather than enable it. To side with the vulnerable, even when it complicated my life.

Here is the truth we rarely name: oppression depends on compliance. It depends on exhaustion. It depends on the belief that defending yourself makes you just as wrong as the person who hurt you. That belief keeps the wheels turning smoothly. Silence is not neutrality, it is participation.

I am not asking anyone to become fearless. I am asking us to become honest.

Honest about how much harm we normalize to keep the peace.

Honest about how often we confuse “being nice” with being ethical.

Honest about how tired we are of watching the same stories repeat with different names.

I know who I am now. I know my limits. I know the cost of my voice and I choose it anyway. Not because it is easy, but because history has never been changed by those who waited to feel comfortable first.

So this is not a call to fight.

It is a call to feel.

To remember your spine.

To decide what you will no longer accept as the price of belonging.

The question isn’t whether the world is broken, we know it is.

The real question is this:

How much longer are we willing to pretend we don’t see it?