After a while, these stories of violence begin to pool and form an inky river. It runs around me, through the university, across the neat lawns and through the classrooms, leaving black grease in its wake.

I saw the hashtag #metoo and listened closely to the stories of other women, but I also distanced myself from those public accounts. I didn’t want to admit that the hashtag is mine too. That I feel I do not have autonomy over my own body. That I feel I can’t stop others from violating my space.

In a competitive, capitalist culture, the descriptor ‘brilliant’ tends to refer to somebody who makes connections others have not, or perhaps to have made them faster, or first. It is to burn the brightest, to out-do, to dazzle to the point of disbelief. Brilliance, in this sense, is the fake currency of the elite humanities academy – the fissile defence that protects against wrongdoing; the light that shines so brightly it cannot touch, nor recognise, shadow.

I am sixteen and I sneak into a bar to watch my brother’s band play. I slink in the corner and try to blend in with the booze-stained walls. It is a school night but I am exhilarated and full of inspiration. I am eighteen and study music at university. I attend esoteric and experimental music performances and record nonsense that no-one will ever listen to on vintage cassette tapes. I am twenty-one and have joined my first band, and then I join another. I play shows almost every weekend with my friends. We get drunk and think that, soon, we are going to ‘make it’.

A few years ago, I had a male student, no older than twenty, who frequently took photos of me on his iPad while I was lecturing. I found out about the photos because he showed them to me. I reported the student to my head of school, and she called him into her office for an informal meeting. However, when she reprimanded him, he didn’t understand what the problem was. He told her we were in love.