“The Difficult Ones” Will Show Everyone How to Kick Fascism’s Ass

Shame, survival instinct, and why the "difficult" kids are built for exactly this fight.

Difficult. The word that followed me since the day I was born. I spent my life trying to be small enough, quiet enough, agreeable enough to shed it and every time I stayed small, the resentment I was swallowing came back up, like bile in my throat — usually as a sentence aimed exactly where it would hurt most. I always told the truth. I just wielded it like a blade and aimed for the jugular every single time.

As a child, the story was that I loved acting out, enjoyed it even, purposefully did my best to bring out my inner brat. The truth, was that I had no guidance, no support, no love — just a developing brain being asked to make decisions it wasn’t built to make and getting screamed at for the answers it came up with. “What the hell is wrong with you? Why would you do that? Who the fuck do you think you are, little girl? You’re such an idiot! Why are you so DIFFICULT?” I made mistakes because I was a child. And in return, I was convinced the mistake was me.

So I grew up believing I was a screw-up. I grew up angry. I grew up unable to trust anyone else, because I couldn’t even trust myself. And I grew up defying everything around me — because by then, difficult was just who I’d been told I was.

I spent my whole childhood apologizing. I said “I’m sorry” so often the words stopped meaning anything — they were just the fastest way to end a lecture, not an admission I believed. In my head, I was doing the best I could with decisions no child should have to make alone and somehow always landing on the wrong fucking one. That’s what happens when a child grows up neglected and mislabeled. The label doesn’t stay in childhood. It comes with you. By adulthood, it was quietly running the show — how I handled risk, relationships, authority, even my own judgment of myself.

Shame moved in and made itself at home. Every “stupid,” every “difficult,” every “why can’t you be like everyone else” wired itself into a self-perception I didn’t choose, but also couldn’t shake. The result was a strange kind of double life. I became genuinely competent, but felt fundamentally incompetent anyway. A small, fixable mistake could still make me feel like a hot mess and a failure. So I became a perfectionist — hesitant, overprepared, and in some cases, too afraid to even start. Details mattered… lots and lots of details. And at the same time, on the other side of that same coin, I became someone unusually willing to leap, to fail, to start over and learn the hard way. I failed fast and learned fast. That second part came later though, after I’d folded myself into as small a shape as I could manage. For a long stretch of my adult life, my inner motto was “I’m going to prove you wrong,” cliché as that is, much like the stupid saying, “underestimate me, that’ll be fun” — a challenge I gave myself and accepted. Which meant I spent years arguing with people who weren’t even in the goddamn room anymore.

But shame didn’t only make me weak. I’ve learned, from the inside, that it can also build people who are extraordinarily capable. As a neglected kid, I learned early that no one was coming to save me. So I figured things out myself, however painfully. I got good at reading rooms — tone, mannerism, the things people didn’t say out loud. I became adaptable, self-sufficient, the person others could hand a problem to and trust it would get solved. Neurodivergent in every sense. My superpower.

The child who was told she was a screw-up never fully stops hearing it. Even now, in my forties, that voice is still back there somewhere, trying to climb into the driver’s seat. But this is exactly why people like me are the ticket to fighting fascism the hardest. We’re stubborn, we can read tea leaves, we’re adaptable and honest. There is only the mission. Feelings are for later.

It’s also why the children who grew up in the narcissistic authoritarian wound are the best equipped to kick fascism’s ass out for good. Our give-a-fucks are gone and we’ve spent an entire childhood saving ourselves more than once. Our brains are wired for the disruption. We understand how to navigate it. And we don’t give a good goddamn what anybody thinks of us — we just do, because we’ve already learned all the lessons of narcissistic abuse and authoritarianism.

Yes, it’s uncomfortable. Yes, you’re going to hurt feelings. Yes, people are going to be mad at you, hate you even. But sometimes doing the right thing feels like shit. Do it anyway. Because at the end of the day, right is right and wrong is wrong. And if this shit were easy, everybody would fuckin’ do it.

We’re going to show all the people who have no clue what to do, how to save themselves too. And our corrupt government knows it. That’s why they threaten us so much. The free thinkers, the empaths and the difficult ones. They say empathy is a sin and we are radical leftist lunatics. I say, “eat shit fascists.”

Leading this movement of unapologetic self sufficiency isn’t a podium. It’s not a person with the cleanest resume or the calmest voice telling everyone else to stay calm. It’s the ones who already know what it costs to survive the worst thing imaginable, that wasn’t supposed to happen to them — and did it anyway, without a script, without backup, without anyone believing they’d make it.

That’s the resume that matters now. Not composure. Endurance.

What true leadership sounds like is people who’ve stopped asking permission to be angry. It sounds unpolished sometimes, because grief and rage don’t always arrive in complete sentences and we’re not going to wait for a fucking communications team to smooth them out before we act. It looks like showing up before you feel ready, because nobody’s ever ready for revolution — it never came for us as kids either, and we survived that too. Revolution unfolds in real time, when we’re least expecting it. You can’t prepare for that. You just nut up or shut up. Fight or get the hell out of the way. Because the only way we get out of this, is through it.

What we need to strengthen is the instinct we built as kids — reading a room before anyone else in it knew something was wrong. The thing you almost convinced yourself was damage was really just the early-warning radar and it's exactly what's needed against people who lie for a living and harm people for their benefit. We need to strengthen our capacity to act without waiting for consensus, because consensus is often just fear speaking for us. Just because enough of us agree to the same fear, it doesn’t make it the truth. We need to strengthen each other — not just individually, but as a network of people who've already done the hardest thing life asked of us and are willing to teach others how. And we need to strengthen our tolerance for being called difficult. Realize being called difficult was never an insult, but rather, a warning to the people trying to keep their boots on our necks.

We don’t need to listen to the voice that says we’re not qualified — that’s the old script, not new information. Listen instead, to the people already doing the work without credentials, without permission, without a platform handed to them. Listen to the kids doing this right now, because they see the machine clearer than we do. They just haven’t been worn down by decades of being told to wait their turn.

And listen to your own body when it says something is wrong, even when everyone around you is calmly insisting it’s fine. That instinct kept us alive once.

It’s not wrong now either.

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~Eevie