"I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own."~ Audre Lorde
To be totally honest, I’m not okay. I’m angry. I’m sad. I’m scared. I’m just existing. I’m trying to exist. To go to the grocery store, and pay my bills. Show up for my job and do the work well. Show up for me and take care of my body still. Work out, eat healthy, shower, brush the tangles from my hair, put on sunblock. Lotion. Brush my teeth. Take out the garbage. Answer the phone when they call. Text them back. Tell them I love them. Smile. Make the bed. Wash the car. Open the mail. Go to the movies. The movie is about a dystopian future where aliens are controlling or lives with propaganda that creates an individualistic and selfish society so no one cares to care about anyone anymore. So no one will do anything about the damage being done. I laugh instead of crying. I don’t know what else to do.
I saw a Tik Tok therapist this morning who said, “There is nothing normal about having power and autonomy taken from you and your body and it’s bizarre that you are forced to continue with your everyday life as if nothing has changed. The unavoidable and required disassociation that women and those with a uterus have to perform is deeply mind-boggling and deeply traumatic.”
I was laying on a blanket in the greenest grass under a big gorgeous tree with a tall gorgeous man on a sunny day as I explained that right now I am living through the craziest current event ever in my history of living. The man seemed a bit shocked by that statement. What about 9/11 and watching as a plane crashed into the twin towers while drinking your morning coffee? What about experiencing a global pandemic and state-wide lockdowns and mask restrictions? What about a group of domestic terrorists and degenerates laying siege to the capitol building?
What about when all the women, Black women, and brown women, that led the fight and fought with their actual lives so that I as a woman in this country could be free? So that I could be protected. And then all of that work was destroyed. Ultimately sentencing millions of people with uteruses to death or servitude.
We are in the throws of historical regression in the most unprecedented way. One that will reverberate throughout time and space, coming back to us again and again to mirror the horrors of our decisions. Of our inactivity.
When I was a young girl, probably fifteen, I was walking home from my friend’s house as I always did. The neighborhood was mine and I knew all of the shortcuts through the neighbor’s lawns and which fences to hop. A pickup truck grumbled beside me as an older man with a pot belly and grey hair swung open the passenger side door. He said, “Hey little girl, do you like to party?”
The dilemma I faced in that quiet moment that spoke to me of life and death was that I did like to party. Very much so. At that time in my life, I was already stealing booze and cigarettes from my friends’ parents and the convenient stores where I could get away with it. As a child and a virgin, however, I knew there was a difference between the way this old man wanted to party and the way that I and my friends did. It meant sex. It would have meant rape if I had gotten in that car. It could have meant being bound and gagged in some old guy’s basement. Being buried in the hills of Carnahan where I built tree forts and went sledding and played.
It could have meant, in some states and in today’s reality, that I would have had to carry that old man’s baby had he raped me and impregnated me. Ending my life. Ending me as a person. Because some old drunk perv wanted to get his rocks off with a little girl.
Who will protect us?
Who will fight for us?
Let me tell you what I know is not normal. Creating coping techniques that allow us to be okay with and accept living in a broken system. It doesn’t serve anyone.
I don’t have a solution today but I do know that we must be vocal, especially with the men in our lives. Last night I said to a family member, “I’m not celebrating this country I’m not going to pretend to be free in a country where I’m not free.” And he said, “Oh you mean the lady problems?”
He’s a wonderful man that loves me very much and he knows better but that was his response because this isn’t happening to him. Most men don’t understand that this is happening to them. We must make them.
Go to your job, yes, do the work. Go to the gym. Wash your clothes. Make dinner. Pay the bills. But with every breath you take, with every step, with every word. With every single dollar spent. FIGHT.
I love you
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excellently articulated my friend 🙏🏼