Last night I gave the boy hell. I mean proper, text message bombarding, angry tears over the phone at 3am, hell.

‘Stop it,’ he hissed, trying not to wake anyone up. ‘Go to sleep. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.’

He was *furious.*

He was right to be.

The only defence I had was that it’d been a *long* day. I’d done overtime, come home, made dinner and done three and a bit hours of coursework, finishing at just gone 2am. My period had started. I was that fatal mix of ‘Love me/leave me alone.’

What had he done wrong? Written a blog post that triggered my insecurities.

Remember this twat?

Well, there’s a new story. This week he got blind drunk, stopped a woman he’d never met before in the street and told her she was too fat to be wearing what she was wearing.

Stories like that make me absolutely fucking livid. You’re having a nice evening out and you’ve had a few drinks: what fucking right does that give you to ruin someone else’s night?

So I could write about misogyny, about men and their belief that women dress for them, and are fair game for comments like the above. I could, but there are bloggers doing it far better than I could, so I’m not going to.

Instead, I’m going to write about what I think is behind it: insecurity.

I use it as an excuse all the time. I think, I hope, that I’d never do anything as awful as the above to make myself feel better about myself, but insecurity is my fallback place to lay the blame.

It works well: it’s harder for people to take you to task if the reason you’re upset/angry/sweary is because they’ve hit a nerve. And obviously, if someone is attacking you directly for something that you might reasonably be insecure about, such as your weight, a disability or your intelligence, then of course you have every right to fight back.

But if they haven’t? If they’ve just accidentally triggered something? Then it’s not on. The boy isn’t perfect, but I’d expect him to address behaviour that I really didn’t like.

The least I can do is try and do the same.