Crawling Out of Silence

Today, I decided to crawl back out of the silence. The silence was familiar and actually quite comfortable. I grew up in this kind of silence and learned how to thrive there (as long as I could suffer the subtle level of ongoing anxiety.) When I chose to start speaking and blogging just over a year ago, I left the safety of my silence and stepped into a world where it felt like my entire body was an open wound.

In the eye of the public, it became clear that speaking truths and lost stories that seemed so life-giving to me were threatening and unwelcome to others. It became clear that being alive in my body, full of my own sensual connection made me a target. It became clear that writing or speaking from a place of moral outrage would cause wagging fingers and comments about how “she’s still finding her way.” I made bullet point lists of the hurtful comments (sometimes subtle, sometimes not) that I received just so I could read through them and wrap my head around them, asking, “this is not right, right?” “No one would say these things to an older man, right?” I sent them to friends and my therapist to help me see more clearly. The fog of dismissive and belittling comments as normal female experience was making it hard for me to judge. To be entirely honest, I couldn’t actually define what was true; my sense of myself and the messages I found important to give, or others sense of me as some kind of child needing to be scolded and put in her place. 

So feeling raw, exposed, beaten, and exhausted, I went back into the hole of silence. I had left my speaking job and I took my blog entirely off of my website and frankly, it was a relief. I actually sighed out loud and thought, “good, now everything can go back to normal." I was way more comfortable. But I started to feel this nagging emptiness inside. As I explored what I was feeling, it became clear to me that the safety of my silence came at the cost of meaning, of agency, of the fight that lives inside of me. The silencing of my literal voice was also dimming my inner voice. It became obvious to me also that my silence meant that I had to turn a cheek to the injustices around me and to the rise of response in my heart.  I realized that, though silence was comfortable, it was deadening my life. When we lost a long and painful fight for police oversight in Ann Arbor the same week Kavanaugh was selected, I decided it was time to come out of hiding.

Like many women and our allies, I am rage-ful. I am brokenhearted. I am not surprised, but I am stunned. I have learned a lot about power in these few months. How power cares not about truth, but about retaining its hold. How words that seep like honey into my soul from the mouths of truth-talkers willing to shout light into the dark hit like knifes to the tongues of those in power. I learned that this fight would be harder than I thought. I learned how naive I had been and I learned that simply by being an outspoken woman, by sharing untold stories of others who have been silenced, I automatically would be named a feminist and a radical with all the meaning those words hold for both sides of the coin. 

There are so many things on my mind in these painful times and a lot of these thoughts have been spoken by authors all over the country in the last few days. I am so grateful to them for stripping their skin bare to say what I needed to hear. I am recommitting to stepping back out and joining them. You'll be hearing from me again soon.