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I want to tell you how I write songs and produce music. How singing makes me feel connected to a million miracles at once. How being onstage is the one place I feel the most me. But I can't untangle all of that from the background that is male violence.

I wish I could forget the guy who stalked me while I was making my solo record. How he sat on the roof of the building across from mine and looked Into my windows with binoculars as I worked. How he told my neighbors he thought I was a prostitute who "needed to be stopped." I wish I could slice him out of my story as a musician, but I can't.

I also don't want this book to be a list of traumas, so I'm leaving a lot of that on the cutting room floor. It's more important to remember that I've seen ugly basement rooms transform into warm campfires, dank rock-bro clubs become bright parties where girls and gay kids and misfits danced together in a sea of freedom and joy, art galleries that had only ever showcased white male mediocrity become sites of thrilling feminist collaborations. I also ate gelato on a street in Milan with my bandmates and cried because it tasted THAT FUCKING GOOD.

But yeah, there were also rapes and run-ins with assholes who threw water on my shine. I keep trying to make my rapes funny, but I have to stop doing that because they aren't. I want them to be stories because stories are made up of words, and words can't hurt me. But the things I'm writing about aren't stories, they're my blood. They're the things that shaped me. The things that keep me up at night rechecking the locks on the doors. The things that make me afraid and ashamed. The things that inspire me to keep going.

I don't feel much like a "rebel girl"-most of the time I feel more like a dirty napkin. But Dirty Napkin is a terrible title for a book. It's also not who I am.

— Rebel Girl by Kathleen Hanna