Stuck at home and going swiftly down an online rabbit hole, I spent hours reading posts that extended beyond commenting on my rape-ability into users posting dozens of photos of me, commenting on my body, rating my physical attractiveness and listing my contact information. And halfway down one of those threads, I got to this:

“I actually happen to have met her before. She’s extremely pretty in person.”

It was an innocuous comment, even a kind one. But more followed, in other threads – people who claimed to know me in real life, or said they had at least met me, or seen me, or maybe talked to an ex boyfriend of mine. They had details about what I wore to class and what I said. I felt very suddenly like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room to fill my lungs.

I know how quickly the lines between the “real” and the virtual can blur. Before I discovered the AutoAdmit threads, I had already been blogging about feminism for a little while, and rape and murder threats weren’t new. It remains standard for people to leave comments like, “Here, babycakes, let me give you some roofies and fuck you up the ass, in the ear and up your nose until you weep and bleed” on my site. For the first year or two they shook me up. Then I learned how to roll my eyes, copy and paste them into a dedicated folder and hit the delete key. I did what all the male bloggers told me to do: I ignored the bullies, I grew such thick skin that now I worry about my lack of a fight-or-flight fear reflex, my ability to eat whatever shit is put in front of my face, how in real-life arguments with loved ones and moments of trauma I go stone-cold and it’s almost like my heart shuts off. But I bucked up. I knew how to be tough on the Internet.

And then, the summer after I graduated and was studying for the bar exam, one of the AutoAdmit posters showed up at my door.

But what about the things you can’t put a price on? How many stories weren’t written because the women who could best tell them were too afraid? How many people like me, damaged and lashing out, paid their online cruelties forward? How many women look back at the person they were before their skin thickened, before they learned how to deal, when they were a little more sure-footed, and how many of them grieve a little bit for all the good things that got lost in the process of surviving?

What does an online landscape look like when the women most able to tolerate it are the same ones who are best capable of bucking up and shutting parts of themselves down?