Why this work is mine
I grew up in Myanmar. When I finished high school I was pushed into a system that trained merchant seamen. I spent years on iron ships in the middle of the ocean knowing in my gut that I did not belong there.
One Sunday, stuck at sea, I picked up a book. It was a memorial for Tar Yar Min Wai — also known as Shwe Phone Lu — a poet and student leader who spent years in prison for what he wrote.
He survived prison, but the years that followed were not kind to him. He struggled, fell ill, and died without ever seeing justice. What stayed alive were his words — kept alive by the writers and friends who loved him enough to build a whole book around his life and his poems.
Reading that book on a ship far from home, I realised something: power can take away a body, a career, even a lifetime, slowly — but stories can outlive that violence. And the people who tell and protect those stories are the ones who keep hope alive.
After that I turned my back on the sea and never looked back. I went home, became a writer, and eventually a communications person.
Now I work at Stop Online Harm, because the same patterns are still with us. The tools have changed — algorithms, harassment, coordinated online attacks — but the purpose is the same: to grind down and silence people who dare to speak, especially women leaders and peacebuilders.
In Myanmar, in Cambodia, in Laos, in Thailand, women working for peace and rights are being silenced online in the same slow, grinding way he was silenced offline. Different weapons. Same intention. That is why this work is mine.