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The Rape of Words

I am so frustrated. I started my blog with the dream that somehow, someday, Someone like Ellen DeGeneres might see it and help me support my animals or that somehow in some miracle from an alternate universe, someone would see it and think it was good enough to be published somewhere other than some forgotten corner of the web. It hasn’t happened. I didn’t expect it to. But somewhere along the line, it became a very important voice for me. It was a chance to reclaim my freedom of speech. It gave me a chance to talk (or write) and pretend that people were listening to me and liked what I had to say. It was a place where no one (as yet) told me I was dumb, or wrong or wasting my time. The one comment I got from a stranger telling me she liked it and I was a good writer, kept me going for days, but then something happened. Someone else started speaking with my voice. Sometimes they promote wind power and alternate energy, sometimes they try and sell something, often they don’t even speak in English. None of this has anything to do with animals or wild life rehab or me. Someone has stolen my voice and it no longer belongs just to me. Every day I must go and take these hijacked pages off my blog and every day it makes me a little sadder. There is enough thievery in the world, must they steal my voice?

It makes me wonder if the people who register every day, that I think are actually reading my words, are really just finding a way to put their own in their place. Here I am thinking that someone is listening to me and instead, I am just calling out in the darkness.

WordPress has been of no help. I don’t think there are any live humans that work there, they ark for numbers and codes and things that I don’t even begin to understand. So I just keep removing the posts and there they are again, using my name, stealing my hope.

If anyone can tell me how to get rid of these people and stop them from coming back , please let me know. For now, it is just another way for someone stronger, smarter and with more money to buy a better computer to walk all over me I’m really tired of that. It took me nearly 4 years to put my voice and name back on the internet. I don’t want it taken away again.

In the meantime, you’ll have to excuse me. I have a duck in the bath tub who’s run out of minnows.

Jyl Gaskin

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