Dear Hacker,

So, you want to take my likeness and profit from it? Ok, take as well the scars, the pain, the sexual abuse, miscarriages and gaslighting. Take the humiliation and the suicidal thoughts I had to fight my way through to get to where I am. Take the exhaustion of having to survive in the middle of a pandemic in freckin’ Britain whilst fighting to keep my visa, my career and my home. Take it all, as it all comes with my face and my body, and you can't have one without the other. Take it and burn with it as I had to do in order to get to where I am - it's been 40 years for me, I sure you can handle them, right?

You thought you were being very smart by targeting one of us vain ladies who post on Instagram, right? Well, here’s a reality check for you: I was trying to be supportive of a dear friend** who'd just come out of the hospital after a kidney transplant she’d waited for nearly her whole life and who’d spent the whole of the UK’s mismanaged lockdowns on dialysis, even before she turned 18. You feel so smart taking over *her* account and sending her supporters messages saying “I’ve been picked to be an ambassador for a brand, click on this link to support me!”, don’t you? Yeah, right, you’re SO smart, taking people’s real struggle and profiting from it! She is stronger now at 18 than you will ever be in your whole life, and as for me, at 41, I will admit it was a struggle to lose my professional portfolio just because you thought it was okay to target us.

Why was it a struggle for me, you ask? I was 40 when it happened, it was only Instagram, it couldn’t have such a big deal, right? Wrong, it took me years to get to the point where I had got, and the pandemic had made it twice as hard to retain it, considering that I was already over 30 when I started acting and modelling and that effectively put me into the “mature” category, which is not a welcoming category to start in at all – people hate it when a woman takes charge of her image and her sexuality, to begin with, but even so there are certain differences: with young women there’s a conservative disgust but everyone else supports them and lifts them up; with over 50’s there’s this kind of veneration (the conservatives still hate it, but then again they hate everybody, so there’s not that much difference); but with women in my age range there’s this kind of desexualisation, as if the only way that it's okay for a woman my age to be sexy is that there isn’t an overtly sexual look to her style or the art which comes from her or about her, that even if she’s naked for an art class or a body art event, it’s okay because “this art is not sexual” (never mind that *both* art forms have had a history of depicting the sexuality of women, but then again, that’s when we’re talking about *young* women, NOT over 35’s). There’s a difference there which needs to be addressed, and female sexuality needs to be reclaimed. Note that not all women should continue being sexual as they mature, if they don’t wish it to be, just let those of us who wish it be so. The thing about me is that I didn’t have it when I was young, so I wished to reclaim it in my thirties, and your actions, hacker, seem to say that I should be punished for that?

I have already written a lot about my personal experiences growing up, and I’ll link the specific pieces at the end of this one, but in the meantime I’ll say that I had the experience of watching my classmates recoil from me since I was a teenager, and people constantly turning me down because I was not “as sexy as so-and-so” even far into my thirties. I was also told from a very early age that my body and face would *never* be what people would want to see in their screens and magazines, because I was too fat and too masculine, etc. I tried to get into modelling and acting in my early twenties and the response I got was appalling. Here I am pictured in my early twenties: I might not have been as sexy as so-and-so, but I genuinely don’t believe all the kinds of things that were said about me were actually warranted, do you?

In my early twenties I had a boyfriend who’d make it his duty to make sure I knew exactly who looked better than me in which clothes during all kinds of events, whether I was present or not (yes, he’d sometimes send me texts, or tell me all about it the next day), as he worked for a chain of restaurants and bars which catered to big government parties and sometimes went on all night. Well, that’s what he’d often claim, but later I learned that he’d spent a lot of that “working” time with his ex. Oddly enough, when I had the audacity to mention it on Twitter, I got a long line of responses saying that it was only natural for people to find others attractive and that a that in a healthy relationship both parties should feel comfortable with the other mentioning if someone else looks good; funny that I never said anything to the contrary and all commentators neglected to acknowledge that my ex was doing it to actively put me down and make me feel “grateful” to him for being with me when he was constantly surrounded by (in his own words) all of these gorgeous women with bigger breasts or longer legs than me who *everyone* around him desired but he oh-so-courteously abstained from sleeping with because even though my breasts are so much smaller and will never call the type of attention than those spectacular beauties around him do, he will (supposedly) always want to come home to me. I write supposedly because he, let’s call him Señor Rat to stop playing the pronoun game, never actually came home to me. He pushed, manipulated and gaslit me so that I ended up getting pregnant by him when he started saying that having a child would make him the happiest man in the world and that there would be no reason for me to ever think that he was cheating on me with those statuesque women he was always surrounded by, so I dropped my guard and got pregnant – and he refused to move in with me, and after I had a miscarriage in October he promised my parents that he’d help take care of me and necer leave my side, then broke up with me via email two days before Christmas. He had already broken up with me the previous Christmas via text, and then “crawled” to me in forgiveness a few months later. He’d had me going like a yo-yo, and twisted my brain in such ways I still haven’t recovered from. After that second Christmas, he “crawled” back to me saying that the loss was too big and he wanted to try again, to marry me, have my baby and create a home, and that no matter how many gorgeous and sexually available women he had around him that I could never match up with (again in his own words), I would always be the love of his life. I also forgot to mention that he’s borrowed $30,000 pesos from me for a business that he crashed shortly after. He claimed he wanted to leave his job at the chain of restaurants because he didn’t want me to be worried about all the temptation around him, so he put up his own mobile phone repair shop, with my money, and later crashed it and repaid me the grand sum of $5,000. Anyway, he’d manipulated me so much I ended up taking him back lowering my guard again and getting pregnant again. I miscarried again in October, and this time I broke up with him right before Christmas (when he had the gall to say “I knew you’d break up with me because something bad *always* happens to me at Christmas!”. When I called him on it, he admitted that both previous Christmases he’d broken up with me to be with his ex. The first flag with him should have been that right after we slept together he’d gone off to spend the night with his ex and left me with his friends, who all claimed they didn’t know he was with her and later they vouched for him to say that they knew he’d been with her to “patch things up in a friendly way” or some other bull. Señor Rat was that level of manipulative, and I regret him every day. He also accused me of cheating on him with a friend 10 years younger than me (he has then 15) when he helped me move (to the house Señor Rat had refused to move into with me, nonetheless), and of pursuing a relationship with another friend who I had previously studied with, and he cut me off from him, his sister and other friends (whom I have thankfully reconnected with, during the pandemic). He also actively very openly and sexually flirted with a 16 year old who pursued him while dating his friend, btw, and one time told her right in front of me: “Because I can’t have sex with you, I’ll go and sleep with my gorgeous girlfriend instead.” Oh, yes, in front of other people, he'd always say I was gorgeous, the most beautiful woman in the world, sometimes also comparing me to other ladies around us in a very detailed way, so no one believed me that I constantly felt inferior because in their perspective, he was uplifting me. And last for no regarding Señor Rat, was that when I met him I was just starting to act and model, but he forced me to stop because it wouldn’t be respectful to him if I was being displayed for others to ogle me or if I was given a role where I had to kiss another man (funny that kissing another girl was never a problem, the hypocrite). Funnily enough, on that Twitter thread I mentioned previously I was the one being accused of being controlling and that the commentator hoped my boyfriend had run away from me, all because I mentioned I had a trigger to porn.

Ah, triggers… finny little things they are, right? Just my luck to find the kind of guy that, after I told the kind of stuff that Señor Rat did to me, said that he would never look at porn if I showed him I loved him, then proceeded to leave porn pics on my laptop with very similar comments as my ex’s texts, such as, “Even though you’ll never be a model because your boobs are not as arousing as these, I still want to have sex with you”. I broke up with him. On that Twitter thread I got told that looking at porn is a completely normal thing for a man (it isn’t, as asexuality exists, and even so, men don’t always find porn arousing), and that I should have taken his “notes” as ways to improve myself and should have watched and enjoyed porn with him, which I found very problematic and misogynistic, btw. Note how my saying that he was emotionally abusive to me using porn was not taken into account at all. Also, I’m bisexual and hypersexual, and honestly, even before the actual trigger existed, I was never really aroused by porn. In my Twitter thread I said I have nothing against anyone who works in porn, and I continuously said that whomever enjoys it is free to do so, but that I had a very specific trigger to it due to my previous experience, and still I got told off for being so controlling that I didn’t want to let anyone enjoy porn and that all men should run away from me, apparently.

You might wonder why I am telling you all this? Because this is the kind of bull that many women have to put up with on a regular basis. I have been sexually and emotionally abused by two exes, supposed friends, teachers, total strangers, and even by two doctors, once during my actual miscarriage (the first one), the other after I’d had my appendix taken out. I never spoke up about some of them, because who would believe me? Some people know more details about some of the cases than others, and at some point I might write more about each of them, in the hopes that others will benefit from my experience. I’m already as broken as I could be by all of it and am not sure if a real recovery can happen, but I sure am trying to reclaim myself, my femininity, my sexuality and my own power. See, that’s what you took from me when you hacked my Instagram account, which was an actual professional portfolio and not just a social account, but that also means that, because of the kind of modelling I do, you had access to other people’s creative work, so every time you sent new payment links from my hacked account, you were looking to make money off OTHER PEOPLE'S ART, on top of it all!

That’s why I say you can have all the pain and sexual assault and the miscarriages to go along with it. You can have my best friend’s boyfriend at the time sexually assaulting me when I told him about my miscarriages, if you want, as well, because I’m assuming that you, just like him, think that I’m talking about the miscarriages only to arouse you, right? That’s the only reason a woman could ever have to talk about her past sexual trauma, right? Well, hang on to your hat, because what you did, taking my professional portfolio from me, opened up so much more of the sexual trauma than I ever thought I’d have to re-explore. The amount of nightmares I had after that, the way I saw my professional work be taken from me and exploited in such a way, the pain you uncovered, all of that still needs an outlet – and I might just have to follow through and write more about it all. But you can take it, right? That’s why you do what you do, pray on unsuspecting victims and take their work, maybe even their livelihoods, because God forbid a woman is ever in control of her image and sexuality on social media, right? You are the big hero who takes us all down one by one, leaving zero vanity in sight and profiting from our image at the same time!

Well, when I sat there staring at screen after screen as I secured the rest of my accounts, “RESET YOUR PASSWORD” staring me back in the face, as if The Internet was placing the blame on me for daring to take control of my image and my sexuality, as if it was my own fault that you hacked me because I exposed myself to you, as if it was only up to me to ensure that my accounts were secure instead of asking what *they* are doing wrong that their services leave us vulnerable to attack like yours, I decided you wouldn’t keep me down. I first had to endure months on end of nightmares of the kind that can only be seen in horror movies, and even then those movies seem tame in comparison to what your actions unleashed in my brain. I don’t claim to be confident, and it’s likely that I will always be an insecure woman, but now at least all this trauma is not only my burden to carry: it’s also yours, because you are profiting from my image so it’s only fair that you absorb my trauma as well. I created a new Instagram account, it's my actual PROFESIONAL portfolio, regardless of whether you or other people take me seriously as a model or not. It's artists work depicted there which I feel the urgent need to protect, although both you and I know that Instagram security is an absolute joke, so I make a plea to my followers to understand why actions like yours are so damaging, and to help each other be protected as well.

I feel like I have written as much as I can this time around, so apologies for not being able to give you more of my trauma just yet, my dear hacker, I’m sure you were really looking forward to reading more and absorbing more of the pain that you are so happy and willing to share, but it’s been a painful journey for me and I’m tired from the effort of opening up about it. Maybe next time.

Happy dreams, dear hacker!

____________________________________________________

And to all of you who read the whole lot, thank you from the heart – and may you receive the healing you need if you have gone through similar experiences.

Here are the links to His & Theatre Company’s Facebook page, and, of course, to my Instagram portfolio. Here's also a picture of the email I received from Instagram's "security" team with the name that my hacked account had the last time I saw it. Below the pic are the links to other pieces I have written about the subject. Thanks for your support!

The Naked Canvas

Swimsuits and Lingerie for Mental Health Awareness

What it means to be a woman

An Immigrant's Journey Through the Pandemic

** Three notes about this piece: 1) I'm keeping the info about who the hacker got me through secret to protect their identity. 2) In this piece I'm merely talking about "real world" women, or to put is as bluntly as social media likes to constantly remind us we are, "ordinary" women, as I have already spoken (very highly) of female movie stars and celebrities who have succeeded past their 40s in other pieces; I believe we are anything but "ordinary", and will always strive to call social media out on it, and the movie and modelling industries, too. And 3) on that very odd Twitter thread I mention, there was a particular Twitter account who stepped in my defense, and I really love how she talks about sexual trauma and sexual self-knowledge, so I'd like to link it here for anyone who might find it useful: Finding Self Love.

Additionally, as a note made on Feb 5th, I originally wrote this piece for a competition, and for that reason I held back in describing even more of what I went through, so I will write a part 2 going even deeper into my experiences, for anyone who might find that helpful.