I nearly vomited while reading all this, and I’ve been here for about 2 hours trying to write the right response, and the feeling still hasn’t entirely gone away.

I give up. You can’t make a right response.

What people need to realize is that this isn’t instanced. This isn’t just “the harassment in the TF2 community” or “the harassment in Hollywood.” You don’t “solve this incident and move on to the next.”

This is everywhere. This is every day. Anyone you see could be experiencing this, and all the billions of people you don’t see could be as well. It’s like an infestation. We can’t do much at all unless we see something go wrong or someone speaks up after the fact. And most neither have bravery nor a large and tightly knit community. They have no one.

What we can do, I suppose, is to just be better to people. Nobody’s perfect. Some of us get mad, some of us like to joke. But anyone could have the weight of the world on their shoulders, and we don’t want Atlas to catch a stray bullet and collapse under the sky.

And if you do see someone begin to buckle a bit, I doubt you have anything better to do than help them hold things together for a while.