mind body mama: The Legacy of Yeardley Love

Three years ago this month, University of Virginia lacrosse player Yeardley Reynolds Love was beaten to death by her ex-boyfriend.  Yeardley was becoming the kind of young woman we all hope our daughters will grow up to be: Kind, fun, accomplished and talented.  Her death was a loss not only for her family but also for our world.

Yeardley’s mother Sharon has founded the One Love Foundation to inform parents and teen women about the realities of dating violence and how it can be prevented.  Sharon Love said to NPR’s Michelle Martin:

“Violence was…not even on our radar at all.  There was absolutely nothing that would have made us even think that anybody was capable of this.  It was something that none of us thought that was ever possible.”

Research indicates that as many as one in three teen women experiences violence in a dating relationship.  Young people witness or experience dating violence as early as middle school.  Yet over 81% of parents say that they are not concerned about dating violence, or are not sure if they should be concerned.

Partner violence can occur in all kinds of relationships and people of all genders have the capacity to be violent.  Nevertheless, instances of partner and sexual violence overwhelmingly follow the pattern of a man perpetrating against a woman. 

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) notes that “approximately 80% of female victims experienced their first rape before the age of 25 and almost half ex­perienced the first rape before age 18.”  The vast majority of sexual assaults are perpetrated by known assailants— often intimate partners. The World Health Organization concludes that, “One of the most important risk factors for women—in terms of their vulnerability to sexual assault—is being married or cohabitating with a [male] partner.”   

These are dire facts that will alarm anyone who cares for girls and women.  But there is also great hope coming from those who study violence and violence prevention.

The Centers for Disease Control observes that when neighbors, friends, and family members step up and create a climate that is inhospitable to domestic violence, rates of violence go down in that community.  And emerging evidence indicates that how survivors are received by their communities following traumatic experiences of any type has enormous effect on their resilience and recovery.

Individuals and communities can learn the skills necessary to reduce violence and its negative effects.  Together, we can develop the abilities to: 

• Assess and identify the warning signs of violence.
• Talk openly and accurately with others about interpersonal violence.
• Establish boundaries, intervene effectively and de-escalate conflict.
• Physically resist or fight back if necessary.
• Respond compassionately to survivors of violence.
• Access resources to recover from violence.

On individual and societal levels, we take many steps to protect ourselves and one another. We install seatbelts in motor vehicles.  We build buildings with sprinkler systems.  We take the car keys from a friend who has had too many drinks.  We wear helmets when we ride our bicycles.  Individuals and communities can be similarly proactive about interpersonal violence. 

The first step toward increasing our individual and collective safety is knowing the facts.  Yeardley and Sharon Love remind us of a key fact: Young women are disproportionately at risk of relationship and sexual violence.  And they are at risk from people they know. 

All of us—but most especially, young women—must be educated about interpersonal violence.  We must become practiced in skills that can interrupt, neutralize and defend against violent and sexual assault.   And we must work together to create a safer world.

Self defense classes for teen and college women in Northampton, MA begin May 19.  Click through for more details. 

I am also available for speaking engagements and custom classes for mothers and daughters, faith communities, social networks and workplaces.  Contact me at trainer "at" compassionateconditioning.com for more information.

mind body mama: This I Believe

A credo for the heroic journey. With snacks and swearing.

I believe in the GDPA: The God-Damned Positive Attitude. I believe in hope, even though hope is ridiculous. I believe that it gets better even when there is no evidence. I also believe that before it gets better it gets different. When you can’t take whatever it is for another day, something will shift, infinitesimally. And even though everything will still be resolutely awful, that tiny variation will remind you that change is possible. I believe that growth and change are stupid, that therapy and healing and prayer and self-care and optimism are completely misguided and ill-advised. And I do them anyway, with total abandon and a failure of self-preservation. I hurl myself wholesale into possibility. Because why? GDPA baby. I can’t shake it, and it never lets me down.

I believe in doing the thing that needs done. You can sidestep that thing for a while but eventually it will sneak up behind you, punch you in your head, knock you down and kick you in the face. Then it will burn down your house and make time with your girlfriend while you’re picking up your teeth. What I mean to say is this: The thing that needs done will take everything from you if you don’t do it. So buck the fuck up and get going.

I believe my gay boyfriend when he says: Feel the fuck out of your feelings. They’re all in there anyway. On a good day, you are about 87% feelings you don’t want to feel the fuck out of. And on a bad day you are a toxic leaking storm cloud of constipated emotion and you are giving everyone around you a contact low. Feeling the fuck out of your feelings is the first step towards things getting different. Which is awesome because you’ll have different feelings. And by “awesome” I mean “stupid,” because you’ll just have to feel the fuck out of those feelings. But trust me, GDPA, this will work out OK. I don’t know why this is true, but it is.

I believe in asking for help. The thing that needs done looks so fucking hard in part because you are under the misapprehension that you are going to do it alone. You are not. When you fall down—and you will—you will need people to haul you up by your armpits and tell you to keep moving. And you will need people to bring you a jar of Nutella and a spoon. You will need a cheer squad with silver pompoms and a research assistant and someone to get pizza. You will need people to drink with and people to run with and people to pray with and people to cry with. And you will need to see your pain break the hearts of the people who love you because it’s the only way you will ever know how precious you are.

I believe in telling someone you trust. Fear and shame are a giant funhouse mirror; they make all the terrible terribleness infinite and enormous. And silence: Silence is like shit, it fertilizes the fuck out of terrible. Try telling. You will be halting and awkward at first. You will open and close your mouth like stupid guppy and smile like a dumbass hoping no one will notice. But the people who are worthy of telling will notice and they will sit very still waiting for you to find your words.

I believe that Bevin Brandlandingham said it best: Nobodyever died of awkward. And nobody ever died of doing the right thing. Or of standing up for themselves. Or of asking for help. And sure, people have died of fear and broken hearts—but you are going to die anyway. Life is short and hard. It does not get easier by being a lazy cowardly fuck. You don’t get out of the hard and short is all you’re getting. So you might as well be awkward, do the right thing, stand up for yourself and ask for help. If it’s going to be hard anyway, there is no good reason not to do the thing that needs done.

I believe that we don’t know everything. Our sad little species isn’t going to be around long enough—from primordial sludge to climate disaster—to run a proper longitudinal study on any damned thing. Not only do we not know everything, but what we don’t know has just as much chance of being awesome as it does of being awful. This is the secret upside of faith: You don’t have to be in charge of everything anymore. Why not let it ride and see what happens?

I believe that “the road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.” The work of your life is not a side project you’re going to get to after the laundry. Clear your calendar and pack-in your survival gear. That might be a go-bag and a new hunting knife, or a dozen sharpened number twos and a gross of index cards, or an afghan and a Firefly marathon. Or all of those things and also a bacon and egg sandwich and a pair of new wrestling shoes.

I believe we need to go big or go home. There is no shame in giving hard things their due, and by“hard things” I mean: Your life. In fact, there is no shame at all, because it is not shameful to be a person. It is the only thing we have to do here in this gorgeous, terrible existence: Be ourselves and love one another. You started out as an alien-faced poop monster with a vision of the eternal still visible in your rear-view and a drive towards connection. Be that guy. Remember that there is something bigger than this and we have no idea what it is. Love the fuck out of everyone around you and give them a version of yourself that they can’t help but love back. The actual stumbling growing feeling not-knowing hoping human version of you. She’s amazing. And all of us out here stumbling growing feeling not-knowing and hoping ourselves? We can’t wait to meet her.

Source: "The road to enlightenment is long and difficult and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines." Rick Field quoted by Anne Lamott in Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith.

 

mind body mama: Mad Was My Home

Dre said, “I used to have three feelings: Mad, sad, and – what was the other one?  Oh yeah.  Mad.”

Around the open table we laughed bitterly and smashed our empty glasses down.   We pictured the emoticons on a preschool feelings poster, not a smiley face in the bunch.  Mad.  Sad.  Mad.

In the house I grew up in, mad was the emotion that had license and power and space.  Mad pounded tables and revved engines and raised voices and punched holes in walls.  Mad was an almighty deity greater than any human: when possessed by mad, you didn’t have to control your behavior.  Mad was its own justification, mad made you do it; great was the woe to him who made you mad.  Mad was aphrodisiac and amphetamine and opiate analgesic.  Mad gave you energy and numbed your pain.  Sad was the jones on mad’s far side.

Sad was what you felt when you didn’t feel mad.  When you had made someone mad and they laid into you, you felt sad because you deserved it.  What else could you expect?  They were mad.  When you were mad for so long your jaw and neck and eyeballs ached, your stomach cramped, you could not see or think or speak straight, sad was the fatigue that overtook you when your body was not man enough to handle more mad.   Sad was your secret wish that mad might stop.

So I learned to lick my wounds and come out fighting.  I left home fueled by the power of mad.  I laced up my boots and learned how to punch.  I lost my temper over and over, dropping it in casual screaming matches with lovers, dropkicking it into consumer conflicts, slamming it down phone calls home.  And every time I lost it, mad came back to me, filling and refilling from an eternal acid well. 

For decades, mad was my security blanket, my friend, my go-to.  Mad was my home-girl.  Mad was the trump card playing sad for a chump.  Mad was the anvil that flattened fear and shame and longing and grief.  

Until it didn’t any more.  Until I saw the look of fear in my daughter’s eyes when I got mad and felt shame so great mad couldn’t kill it.  Until I saw my lover withdraw and felt the gulf of loss and longing and loneliness that mad chased up between us.  Until I raged with the fiercest, fieriest mad I had ever known, and fell on the ground weeping at the end because I still felt sad.

Until I started remembering the things that happened to me, the things that were not my fault.  And found out that mad was the smallest part of how they made me feel.

This is how I became a visitor in the world of not-mad.

Sometimes my heart pounds a wild rhythm in my chest, my pulses rattle like cymbals.  I scan the scene, looking for the fight.  The tiny child of fear that mad beat back all these years whispers in my ear: “Run.” 

Beyond the poles of mad and sad, I sometimes have no skin.  I don’t know what size I am, if I fit in the feelings or the feelings fit in me.  Mad always made me bigger, roared to the edges of my muscles.  But grief rises like floodwater, dissolves me like sugar.  Terror scrambles in the cage of my ribs, claws clattering, a frantic rodent scrambling for release.  Joy leaves me weightless and floating, gratitude cracks me open like an egg.  

I don’t know yet how to right-size these feelings, to line them up with the edges of my flesh.  They are borrowed, alien, around me but not yet of me.  Sartorial, not corporeal.  I try them on again and again.  I wear them like a toddler playing dress up.   I fall forward as my oversized heels catch my drooping hem.  I sit in the astonished emptiness that is the absence of anger, wondering what comes next.

mind body mama: Mystery and Agency: A Self-Defense Credo

Sermon delivered at Our House of Warship, Sunday, February 3.

 

I believe in the self-defense paradox:

If someone perpetrates violence against another, there is one person responsible for that action: The Perpetrator.  There is nothing that any one of us can do or be that makes us deserving of violence. 

AND:

In a dangerous world there are actions each of us can take to increase our own safety.

For nearly twenty five years I have been blessed to be part of a grassroots feminist movement of violence-prevention education.  Today I want to share with how this movement has shaped my philosophical stance—my credo, if you will. 

But first:

I need to acknowledge that violence will be in the room today.

We have already turned our hearts in prayer to Sandy Hook Elementary School.  We have invited that devastation here.

While this is not one of my educational talks on violence, I will share some facts which may be hard to hear.  Which should be hard to hear.

One of the things that we know is that survivors and witnesses of violence are present in any gathered community.

So I want to say, before I even begin: If you are someone who has been hurt—physically, sexually, emotionally—at the hand of another:

I am really sorry that happened to you.

That was not your fault.

You did not deserve that.

You deserved so much better than that.  

We all—every one of us—deserve so much better than that.

[PAUSE]

Several weeks ago Sarah Metcalf spoke from this pulpit with grace and passion on the topic of climate change. She said,

Probably most people in this room understand this very well.  If you do not, I suggest you have not looked at the evidence, or that you cannot bear to believe something so terrible.  Really, none of us can bear to believe it.  Our psyches just repel this knowledge.  Because once you take this knowledge to heart, how can you go on living your daily life?  So that’s the first task for our community: to help each other bear to look at the truth.

I turned to my wife and said, “This is how I feel about violence.”

But I don’t know that most people do “understand very well” how violence is present in our world.  I don’t know that most people have looked at the evidence. 

It’s very hard to look at the facts:

That one in five women and one in 71 men in the US have been raped.

 

That one in four girls and one in six boys is a victim of child sexual abuse.

 

That most perpetrators are not strangers, but friends and family known to their victims.

 

That there are survivors of violence present in every gathered community.

 

I do know that “our psyches just repel this knowledge.”   

Our psyches repel this knowledge because, as with so much of human suffering, it is almost too much for our compassionate hearts to bear. 

Our psyches repel this knowledge because, if we ourselves have been hurt, it increases that injury to know that it was not an isolated occurrence.  Realizing just how many of us have been hurt magnifies our own wounds.

AND:

Our psyches repel this knowledge because—if we are not the authors of violence, as most of us are not—we cannot  imagine how we will stop it.

It is so tempting to throw up our hands in the face of what we do not control.  To say, in effect:

“I am not violent.  I am not a perpetrator.  I may even be a survivor of violence.  These facts are repugnant to me.  How can I do anything to change them?”

The self-defense paradox teaches us:

If someone perpetrates violence against another, there is one person responsible for that action: The Perpetrator. 

AND:

In a dangerous world there are actions each one of us can take to increase our safety.

[PAUSE]

I am very proud to be part of the feminist empowerment self-defense community, even if our movement has a clumsy and off-putting name.

What I do as a self-defense teacher does not always match people’s preconceptions, so I’m going to define it for you.

My colleagues and I teach mental, verbal and physical skills that can be used to  interrupt, neutralize or defend against interpersonal violence.

The “empowerment” principle at the core of our work is the idea that people always have options. 

And while what we teach is far more complex than just fighting skills, this concept is present in even the most basic physical exercise. 

Let’s say I am teaching a simple release from a wrist grab.  The student’s first task is to face the truth about what is outside her control and next, to identify what options are available to her. 

If someone grabs my wrist, the option of being more than an arm’s length away from them is gone—for the moment.  But within that parameter, my choices about how to respond are limitless.  Rather than allowing the situation to be defined by what I cannot control—by the actions of the perpetrator—I can adopt a stance of empowered hope.  I can take action, using my mind and my voice, my hands and my feet, my courage and my determination.

"Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it,” says Pema Chodron.  “It is all we ever have so we might as well work with it rather than struggling against it.”

This sermon came about when I realized that the self-defense paradox had spawned in me a more far-reaching philosophical stance.

If the self-defense paradox is the micro, the macro—my credo—is this:

There are things in this world we do not control.

AND:

We have power and agency.

Our lives are lived in the balance of this paradox.

“Who made the world?” wonders the poet Mary Oliver.  And a poem’s breath later she asks, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Call it “mystery” and “agency.”  Or “God’s will” and “free will.”  Or “that which we are given” and “that which we make of it.”

So many pray, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Speaking on climate change, Sarah said,

“… once you take this knowledge to heart, how can you go on living your daily life?  So that’s the first task for our community: to help each other bear to look at the truth.”

I am reminded of many struggles for social justice that— like the movement to address climate change—began with individuals having the courage to look at the truth and invite one another to accountability and action. 

For example: It would have been easy for the abolitionist forbearers of this very congregation to throw up their hands and disavow responsibility for the scourge of slavery.  They were not, individually, slaveholders.  They were not, individually, authors of the racist philosophy that held some as more or less human than others. 

The machinery of slavery and racism was in many ways outside their control. 

But courageous people faced the truth about slavery, and were not paralyzed by what was outside their control.  Instead, they found ways to exercise their own agency.  They adopted a stance of empowered hope and took action, individually and collectively.  

And we feel proud to call them, “those who came before.”  

I am so humbled by the ways that we lean into one another in this congregation:

By the people who helped me create this service—far more than the few whom you saw, by the way;

By Sarah standing up in the pulpit and asking for our help to address climate change; 

By the generosity of those who serve on committees and minister to one another and perform countless mundane tasks.  

As we watch the children of this congregation—one another’s children—and our hearts burst with love and pride;

As we witness one another in times of sorrow and joy;

As we  hold one another accountable for right action;

We lean into each other.

We have agency and power.  But we need one another’s support and encouragement to fully realize it.

[PAUSE]

Someone I love is in the midst of one of one of those tragic circumstances that reduces life to a tunnel, where the crisis at hand blots out all other experience.

She wrote,

“Some day I will, Insha’Allah, be back in the "regular" world. Whatever that is. I hope to see you there when I get there.”

I had to look up “Insha’Allah.”  It is an Arabic expression, from the Islamic tradition.  Wikipedia told me,

Insha'Allah is said when speaking about plans and events expected to occur in the future. The phrase…acknowledges submission to God, with the speaker putting him or herself into God's hands….

This does not take away from the concept of free will. One's use of Insha’Allah indicates … one's desire … that the endeavor one embarks on will be within God's will, which might be interpreted as that which is best for humanity, the Earth, and all of Allah's creation. It indicates one's desire for being in tune with God's plan for the cosmos.

I hadn’t looked it up yet when I wrote back to my friend.  My heart ached with grief to hear of her suffering.  She is so dear to me.  I wrote,

There is a regular world out here, and it is filled with love and hope, and it is the exact same world that is filled with trauma and fear.

 

I don't understand how that is true, but it is.

 

There are things in this world over which we have no control, which will test the limits of our comprehension and endurance.

I will never understand why humans hurt one another in so many ways.  

I will never stop grieving the  injuries and  losses of this life.

I will forever be awed by a Universe that is, in the words of the Reverend Kendyl Gibbons, “always larger, more intricate, and more astonishing than we imagine.”  

There are things in this world over which we have no control.

AND:

We are blessed with free will and individual agency.  We can make a difference.

In a dangerous world, we can take action to keep ourselves and one another safer.

We can live lives in service to one another.  We can take inspiration from those who committed themselves to struggles that must have appeared insurmountable, and who left us the legacy of a world incontrovertibly changed for the better.  

We can lean into each other.  We can become our prayers.  We can live our love for one another.  

What we do here matters.  It is good that we are together.

mind body mama: A Prayer for Sandy Hook Elementary School

I am heartsick about the massacre in Newtown, empty and bereft.
But in perverse and inexplicable way, this unfathomable horror is a call to faith for me.
Because I don’t understand it.
I can't understand this.
And that means I'm not in charge.
The terrible, beautiful world is so much bigger than I am.
So I have to have faith that whatever is bigger than me does not only contain evil, but also contains hope, and healing.
I have to believe that our broken hearts can stretch open to hold one another in our grief.
I have to believe that something will answer when we fall on our knees praying.
Even if it is just the stubbornness of our human will to survive.
Even if it is just the gentle determination of the helpers, their tiny offerings against a mountain of pain.
Even if it is just the echo of those I love calling out at the same time,
“Help me, help me, help me.
Help us all.”

mind body mama: Reality Martial Arts

I leaned in to hear what the Coach was saying as he sat on Jender’s chest and took a break from punching her upside the head.   He was instructing me  how to calibrate my punching when I took his place, how hard and fast to hit my friend as she worked to block her head.  He told me to pay attention, to notice whether she kept pace with my strikes, to watch her eyes to see if she was panicking.  He wanted me to be a smart and generous partner, to finesse the attack to build her skill.

He said,

I’m not trying to make her tougher.  She was already tough enough when she got here. 

I’m trying to make her better.

Then he took her small hands in his lethal, gentle ones and stood up, pulling her to her feet.

I’ve been thinking of this moment all week because the Coach is going for his black belt on Friday.  It’s one of those twenty-four-hour, to-the-breaking-point orgies of physical conditioning, martial skill and mental toughness that some styles like so much.   

They need to break him a little bit, bring him all the way to failure, so that he can go beyond what he believes possible.  It’s what we do with muscle tissue, breaking it down so it can knit itself back together stronger than before. 

I am the last person who would tell him to substitute his teachers’ judgement for his own.  Not with what I’ve been through.  The betrayal—not just of me but of the deepest principles of our arts—that I suffered at the hands of my teachers.  At any other time I would tell him—my most respected teacher, my younger friend—honor your teachers’ wisdom.  Respect their knowledge and experience, the generosity of their teaching.  But never let someone else tell you they know your mind or heart better than you do yourself.  And if there ever arises that terrible vaccuum between what you know to be right and what your teacher tells you, be brave enough to step into it. 

Because the first principle of warriorship is to not be afraid of who you are.

Then I think of that moment that will come sometime on Friday night, when he is tired and confused in the dark, when his teacher tells him to do something and he thinks, faster than the words can even form in his addled mind, I can’t.

I want to tell him: In that moment, trust your teacher.  Do it anyway.  Because your teacher knows better than you.  He knows how tough you are.  He wants to make you better. 

He wants you to know, too.

Aren’t we all playing this art in preparation for the real?  This is exactly how it goes down in the real. We think: I can’t. I am not ready, I cannot do this, I will die.  Then, because we have to, we do.  We push the baby out, we speak truth to power, we tell our stories about the things that happened to us, the things that were not our fault.  We do the impossible thing, the thing we cannot do. 

After, we look back in astonishment: I did not know that I could be so strong.

This moment is also playing in my head this week because someone wants to help me and I have been saying “No,” to her help. Actually, I have been saying “BULLSHIT!” and “That’s a terrible idea,” and also, “Are you still talking? Why are you still talking?”

I will never again believe that a teacher knows better than I do. 

But when someone already knows how tough I am, maybe I can bring myself to trust them when they want to make me better. 

I think of the way I would take a friend’s hand to heave myself off the mat, pulling against it to let their strength ballast my own. 

Someone is holding out her hand to help me.   

I’m going to take it.

This essay was edited to correct an egregiously mixed metaphor and to improve the conclusion.  Sources:  "The first principle...." from Shambhala: The Path of the the Warrior.

Zeitgeist

A long, long time ago, in 2010, I developed an allergic intolerance to media and political discussion.  What irritated my sensibilities was the discussion among reasonable people of whether or not marriage equality should be the law of the land.  On the one hand, it only makes sense that a culture shift of this magnitude would require public discourse.  But as I prepared meals and reviewed homework and folded underpants accompanied by the smug commentators on NPR, I felt battered by the soft violence of the questions these reasonable people contemplated:

Why should we recognize your marriage?

Do you really deserve the same rights we enjoy?

Doesn’t being queer mean you’re a bad parent?

Why isn’t it ok to limit your rights in accordance with the rules of our religion?  

Sometimes it felt as though the entire electorate was peering in the windows of my house, catching my family in disarray and dishabile.  As my neighbors contemplated as optional honoring my full humanity,  I felt naked and shamed.

I miss those days.

Because this fall, the issue that makes me feel as though I am walking down the street not only with no clothes but with no skin, is violence—specifically, violence against women and children.

We are living in a particular moment, a watershed moment in which survivors are speaking out and—more or less, better in some cases and worse in others—being heard and believed.  It seems, of a sudden, that there is a chorus of truth-telling.  The swell can confuse even those of us who understand that there is not suddenly more violence just because we are talking about it.    

Last Wednesday a colleague posted on Facebook something like, “What was I thinking?  Reading this account of assault and victim-scapegoating at Amherst College just before going into an important meeting?”

And I countered, “I think you meant to say, ‘What was I thinking, getting up and going out into the rape culture today?’”

Because I stayed home last Monday and stumbled upon YeardleyLove’s mom and Tyler Perry, separately talking about how violence changed the trajectory of their lives.  The Sandusky scandal has barely receeded when we are suddenly talking about the Boy Scouts; we are reeling from what happened at Amherst when we hear about what happened up the road at U Mass.   

And your local paper, just like mine, will have a sexual abuse case, an incident of street violence, and a domestic violence arrest this week.  I guarantee it.

(This doesn’t even mention the bat-shit crazy right wingrape apologists going on and on about what the female body can shut down or the ways in which rape might be what God intends and how he [sic] bestows the gift of pregnancy upon you.  This is the predictable and regrettable backlash to telling the goddamned truth about what happens to us.  This is what they have always said to to women who reported being raped, but now the conversation is happening in public and everyone is hearing their shameful, self righteous cruelty.)

There is not more violence today than there was a year or five years or ten years ago.  But the movement that’s been building to end violence against women and children has broken out of the church basements and community centers, gay bars and anti-war protests where it was born. No one had to write my local paper to tell a young journalist that over 90% of sexual assaults are perpetrated by someone known to the victim.  She already knew, or she researched it and reported spot on, all by her lonesome.   It’s no longer just cranky feminists calling for an end to street harassment, but hip girls with tech.  It wasn’t just the lesbians down in gender studies who rejected a cop’s slut shaming, but women around the world.

The work is coming to a crescendo in this moment.  Those of us who have been in the trenches all these years want to take to the streets.  But if we could not tell our stories in real time—or even in the years that followed—this gorgeous and triumphant truth-telling is a stunning reminder of the silence in which we suffered.  If we were met with cruelty or blame when we tried to tell, every failure of compassion remind us how we were disappointed by those who should have helped us.  If we have used denial as a strategy for survival, this ripping off of the communal veil threatens our private shrouds.  Even if we have some measure of healing, the 24-7 all-trauma-all-the-time media blitz steals peaceful moments from us without warning. 

One in five women will be sexually assaulted, one in three will experience violence in relationship.  Any time women are present trauma is in the room.   Within and outside the movement to end gendered and sexual violence, we are and have always been the walking wounded. 

As we try to celebrate the enormous strength and courage and survival of those who speak out we must also remember to care for ourselves.  We must remember that turning off the radio and pulling the covers over our heads tonight might be the best preparation for a rebel yell tomorrow.  We must remember the examples of those who came before.  I think often of the very real suffering of Fannie Lou Hamer, of the grief she carried in her body during the struggle she waged for justice and freedom.  We must know to our bones the truth of Adrienne Rich’s words: “There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.” 

And after the weeping we must soldier on because there is still more work to do and the revolution is coming.