When I was in high school I used to shave my eyebrows and draw them on with liquid crayons. Blue, green, lurid. I wanted to look like a weird and intriguing alien; I probably just looked weird. Some months later, the school newspaper profiled another student who had just started painting her own eyebrows: what a fashion trailblazer. She was cute; she looked cute and intriguing. I don't want to claim that I invented the wheel but it was painful at the time to see someone else get credit for having invented very much the same wheel as I was spinning.
In the heady days of live journal, a young woman copied my blog posts and posted them to her LJ and added provocative photos to them. It was unsettling to see her posting my words, getting gushingly positive feedback. A group of my friends went and posted comments calling her out for stealing and eventually she disappeared but she didn't seem to ever get why what she did was wrong.
A few years ago a man who failed in a misguided attempt to woo me then turned and took my words to try to woo other women. Woo is a funny word. The combination of that and other factors at the same time gave me my first true case of writer's block, a feeling that having my means of expression stolen and twisted meant it was better not to express myself in writing at all.
These aren't the only times this has happened, my words lifted out of context and re-poured from someone else's mouth. I don't want to keep feeling this particular hurt. I suppose if I keep writing, anyone who might matter to me will know who said it first. Earlier this week, I found someone using my words again, uncredited, to promote their own agenda. I'm not doing anything because people who don't intrinsically know that stealing is wrong aren't worth the breath. I will take a moment to wish them crushing failure on the basis of who they actually are, which my stolen words are not enough to conceal.
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