Moderating your comments.

This is the first comment that has been unthinkingly cruel. Perhaps the exception proves the rule. People are generally well meaning. I look forward to your comments. I have left them unmediated out of a belief that we should not be censored. I have enjoyed your stories and your surprises. I have peeked into the window of your other worlds through your comments. I have known that you are reading and taking an interest and you have kept me honest in this way.

Yesterday there was the kind of comment that you might hear shouted out of a car window. Some bleary eyed drunk guy. The kind of guy I have seen picking on an intellectually disabled girl at a bus stop. The kind of comment that is spat at me if I walk into the wrong kind of bar. I forget that the world is a vast and various place.

I struggle to remember where I have learned to be unkind to myself when so many people around me prove that I am safe and loved.

Then your errant comment.

Then I remember.

So I have deleted your beer bleary shout and, reluctantly, I have started to mediate your comments to protect myself from them.

It is the end of an era.