Five syllables. They were painfully rhythmic, the cigarette in their owner’s mouth bobbing in time with each word: “You owe me, dumb bitch.”

In the spirit of proper punctuation, I should capitalize “dumb bitch.” It replaces the name of a human being — me. There’s the problem, though. There’s where I can’t capitalize it; he didn’t perceive me as a human being, one with a name, goals, interests, one who was walking the city distributing flyers for a work event she’s helping plan. One who doesn’t owe him or anyone else anything.

To him I am lowercase.

I felt belittled, my identity defined by the physical body in which it resides, that body finally reduced to two words: “dumb bitch.” Part of me wanted to immediately rant about feminism, about male entitlement, about privilege and equal pay and walking with my keys intertwined in my knuckles after dark. But part of me couldn’t process the blatant erasure of my humanity, all of it without my consent.

In a world of, “Get over it, move on,” rhetoric peppered with accusations of overreacting and over-emotionality, particularly for women, I worried I was making too big a deal out of five little words. Three days later, I’m realizing it’s OK to be angry, to feel demeaned by a stranger.

Rather than worrying about overreacting, then, I’m worrying about gender inequality, about privilege and the fact that I have a designated knuckle for each of my keys when I walk home after dark. I’m worrying, and I’m working to change things, starting with the sense of powerlessness that incident renewed in me. As a writer, I believe language is one means of restoring my sense of self.

So, I am Writer Taylor. I am Communicator Taylor. I am Tennis-Player Taylor. I am Runner Taylor. I am Reader Taylor. I am Wannabe-Paleontologist Taylor.

I am uppercase.

Fountains are a good place to think, I learned last night while tracing ripples in the water with my toe, errant droplets leaping up to catch the hem of my dress. In that moment, I realized several things: Half-marathon training is fine and cool until you see your tan lines, and it’s often in moments of meandering solitude that I find the capacity to share with others.

I’ve been thinking sharing recently, inspired perhaps by my childhood of matching dresses for every holiday. There’s a photo of my mother, my two younger sisters and me in matching, hand-sewn mitten-themed jumpers, complete with turtlenecks, of course. Even then, sharing was a physical, tangible experience, one that left me glowing (ha) in a mud-brown, blindingly patterned mitten dress.

Today I continue to cling to the physical, tangible experience of sharing. I feel comfortable typing or writing my thoughts on the page, but I often feel trapped, paralyzed at the thought of expressing them out loud, to anyone.

There is something concrete, permanent, tangible, about words on the page. In their existence I confirm my existence. Maybe, I think, if I physically write them, they’ll solidify, fossilize (I like dinosaurs). They’ll outlive me and more importantly, my attempts at verbally expressing emotion, attempts I find clumsy, inarticulate, never good enough; forever punctuated by the problem of being too quiet when I should speak up and too loud when I should shut up.

Ripples in the fountain ultimately vanish, but they exist beautifully, unapologetically in the moment. I think I’ll try to be more like them from time to time.