Nandi Rose Plunkett is a vocalist and keyboardist in the indie rock band . She's also the singer and multi-instrumentalist behind the synth-pop project .

I have been making music my whole life. "You came out singing!" my folks swear, even with the umbilical chord wrapped around my neck. Music gave shape to my world and meaning to my life when I was still just a shadow unblurring into identity. I made up songs about everything around me: my Beanie Babies, the pie I was eating, the day my grandmother visited and the day she went away.

Struck by the Girl Power bug in 1998, I started a band with my best girl friends, and we sang un-ironically about fashion and Ancient Egypt. I will forever be grateful for the way music has intersected with my existence and held me close, how it has given me the lines in which I can color my days. Left alone in a room with music, I am in ecstasy, I am in battle, I am brutal and fragile and unafraid. I look at my life in the eyes, teeth bared and smiling.

But when the room opens, the world is let in, and with it comes the noise. I am no longer just a being breathed alive by music—I am a girl set on a stage to prove she is worthy of it.

It is a tiresome prospect, to have to keep defending my passion and career against the onslaught of some inconceivable prejudice. I feel caught, against my will, in some idiotic pantomime of no progress. No, I am not someone's girlfriend trying to sneak back into the green room before a show. Yes, I understand how my own gear works and have, in fact, built up the muscles to carry it. Don't turn down my vocals in the mix. Don't ignore me when you high-five my bandmates one by one. And don't call me "The Girl." You would never say, "Does the boy need help setting up his rig?" You wouldn't ask a man if he needs help, and you wouldn't call a 28-year-old man a boy—and no one would know which boy you mean because everyone else on stage is likely a man anyway. So why do those words seem acceptable to you when they are aimed at me?

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I keep coming back to that one little line of text in the comments section, dark and sharp as a spear: "The girl is beautiful and has a nice voice, but she doesn't do anything for the band." What terrified me then, as it does now, was that this anonymous (male) voice on the internet somehow verbalized the exact fear that I carry around with me all the time: that I'm not enough. That no matter how many instruments I play—and how well I play them—I will never be seen as anything other than a silly girl: so cute for trying, but ultimately a useless prop beside the real musicians.

It is a tiresome prospect, to have to keep defending my passion and career against the onslaught of some inconceivable prejudice.

"The girl is unnecessary and annoying" the comment reads, a sneer. Get out of the way, girl. That voice, translated into hard text, is suddenly made real. A human mind has seen me and turned away. It doesn't matter if it's a troll or a bot or a will-o'-the-wisp: This specter gives shape to the deeply haunting reality that female-identifying individuals are confronted with every day.

You may say, "It is surprising to me that you receive such sexist comments in this advanced year of 2017!" And I would say, "I am not surprised, because it happens all the time." I am sad because I do not want to focus my energies on this. And I am mad because it is a waste of my time, and it is a waste of the minds that fail to see why calling a woman "The Girl" is problematic—why calling her beautiful while negating her actions is putting a finger in the wound of this world.

Maybe we aren't speaking up enough about this. If people are surprised that this behavior exists, I think it's possible we aren't being vocal enough, getting angry and loud as much as we should. But perhaps we are exhausted by the sheer volume of these comments we receive. We don't want to have to post to Twitter or tell our friends every time it happens. Perhaps we don't want to draw attention to ourselves, for fear of being mocked. Perhaps we worry we won't be believed. Sometimes we silence ourselves in order not to be silenced by others.

Carly Hoskins

And even when we do want to speak up, there's the pitted terrain of sexist linguistics to navigate. Sometimes a comment or an action isn't overtly sexist, which makes it hard to explain to others why we feel upset. So we are forced to be sleuths, decoding the slippery nuances of a language that belittles us and offers no obvious translation. There may be times when we give people the benefit of the doubt—"I'm sure they didn't mean it that way." But when our skin goes cold and tingly, and we start feeling fidgety and self-conscious, our sensors are attuned to something darker lurking beneath the surface of an otherwise benign interaction. And we know that we have been wronged, though we often don't know why.

Armed with a feeling but no concrete proof, we stay silent. We are reluctant detectives uncovering the evidence of an invisible injustice.

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But we need to speak up and keep going: coat the walls of the world with our words and stare the monster in the face. We need to let ourselves get angry, amplify our rage. Share our stories 'til there's no more ignoring them. Give male allies a chance to understand and join our fight. Lay bare the insidious situations until we decode the coded language. Upturn every stone under which anonymous trolls lurk, throwing sunlight in their eyes until they see us as we are.

And when we want to be sad, be sad.

And when we want to be hungry, be hungry.

And when we want to be loud, be loud.

For too long we have been told what a woman should and shouldn't be. I want it all, to embody the multitudes of possibility. And at the end of the day, I want to sit inside my room and dance with the task of knowing myself. After all, I'm just a being who loves music, looking to turn down the rest of the noise.

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