I’m in a burn it all down phase. Not because I’m ashamed of what I’m sharing or that I don’t want to keep sharing.
It’s because I know I’m not being fully, honest, truthful, myself. It’s because I’m holding back (in so many places and ways – not just here.)
Do I really need to keep up another charade that’s not completely me? Aren’t there enough of those me’s walking around the world?
I envy, am in awe of and am scared to be those women who speak up courageously. Why get continuous death threats and have to take additional measures (on top of the other heavy precautions woman have to take just to live day to day life) to protect themselves and those they love?
I long to be strong enough. I also know that I don’t have the capacity – though I want it.
I have caught myself in various conversations over the last few months saying how I really feel (bonus – yay!) and finishing with “but no one wants to hear about that and I know it.” It is happening with family, with friends, co-workers, cashiers at grocery stores. I’m saying it. And aware that the more you say things, the more normal they become.
The more normal it becomes, the more it makes you the target of people – people who don’t want you to exist as an independent person with her own ideas, values, and life. Even if you do quite a great job of ignoring, hiding, covering up and denying those ideas, values and life on a daily (if not hourly) basis.
I’m a middle aged woman (happily) and I know the ideas of “This doesn’t work for anyone, least of all women and minorities” coming from me sounds like whining and being hopelessly out of touch. (And honestly who wants to hear from another middle aged white woman – even I don’t – and I am said woman!)
I’d like to think that if enough people state it, live it the best they can, then the tide will turn. Oh right, it did and then we lost basic human rights. Forgive me, if I’m not ready to jump back out there and lose what little is left.
But similarly, I know it’s a charade. I’m tired of keeping it up. Of playing the game for my safety, for some semblance of “control” over my little corner of the world. While I’m watching (and have always watched) my sisters being torn apart, physically, mentally, and emotionally destroyed for just, well existing. For having thoughts of their own, lives and trying to live them.
YOU DARE TO ASK
9/2023 & 4/2024
Collective rage
Bottled
Comes out
Inopportune moments
That make no sense
Not when talked over, disregarded, disrespected, ignored for eons…
What is wrong?
What is wrong, you ask?
How dare you ask?
Don’t you know (I know you know!) that my sisters are dying?
Have been dying for eternity.
And if not already dead, are regularly
Ridiculed
Mocked
Disregarded
Disrespected
Ignored
Gaslit
Taunted
Violated
Tortured
Beaten
Killed and
Discarded?
Don’t you know that every woman lives this daily
And wonders (if she gets the opportunity to fighting for herself if only in her mind)
Is this all there is?
Is this life? Is this what they say is Holy and Good?
Surely God (society) is a man because
No woman would ever send her worst enemy, nonetheless her beloved into this.
Yet we do. We send our daughters, our mothers, our friends, our aunts, ourselves.
Again and again.
I don’t want to stick my neck out, to not speak truth even if it gets hate comments, even if it gets me death threats. At the same I have to live, pay bills and be there for other obligations. Though I want to set myself aflame for it, in the current situation it is not feasible.
Though then I think, why would anyone care what I have to say, what makes me think my minuscule little writing over here is so important?
Because every call for freedom, every spark of truth in madness is a call. It’s possible I could do it and be ignored. (Which is what millions of other women have done over millennia. And some of them haven’t been ignored – they’ve been silenced – privately and publicly, made examples of in so many different ways.)
The risk, the risk to be truly oneself, knowing that you can’t be, can’t ever be, for survival, for practical matters…
I read the most amazing, honest, open, risky things on here (and other places) and I’m heartened, emboldened. I want to comment, I want to cheer. I want to add my voice to it but…at what cost?
I get it. And I don’t think I’m alone.
We tell each other to think before saying, writing, not because we don’t agree, not because we don’t see the injustice. We are trying to keep our sisters safe. And around, in this world, to keep doing what we can, within these walls of “safety.”
But when is enough enough?