Wendy K. Laidlaw

And because they're so insistently masculine, it means they have no empathy for the feminine qualities in themselves.

And that's like living without a moon in the sky.

Well, you know, it's a weird thing because the first actual connection to it came when I was 13 and a half.

13 was like a big year for me in lots of ways.

And I had these dramatic things.

So I'm now 13 and a half and I'm in my little local crew gang.

And then one of our close, one of my close friends in our crew said,

um was going out of his mind and in in his exaggerations he had started to criticize and and and tease and challenge a gang from a nearby neighborhood that were older than us and bigger than us and he they couldn't catch him but we used to go every saturday to the movie theater and we didn't have the money for the tickets usually so we had a lot of ways that we would sneak into the mirror

That would be our adventure for Saturday.

How can we distract the people at the front so everybody can sneak in?

So we got into the theater and I'm going, I have to go up to the bathroom, which was upstairs in the theater.

And as I'm going up, two guys are in front of me suddenly and two guys are behind me and two guys are next to me and they're bigger than me.

And they're essentially escorting me to the bathroom.

We get there, they throw me on the floor.

And I can still actually, you know, the strange thing of memory and smell, I can still kind of smell the urinal smell.

And now there's seven of them and they have weapons, they have knives.

And they're known for hurting people badly.

And I realize I'm going to get really hurt.

i don't even know what's going on and then one of them starts to speak and that's usually the leader and that's good to figure out who the leader is because that's whose mind you have to change and he's saying you know your friend and we can't find him so we're taking it out on you

And in psychological terms, when I look back, what happened is my ego departed.