4:00pm June 22, 2014

I have something I desperately want to say, something I think is important to say.

I’m almost crying.

It’s really important.

It’s a thing.

It’s a thing where echo chambers have come out with a universal statement about How Things Work. And they’ve come out with this statement for reasons that started out good. They came out with this statement to counteract another universal statement, one that was wrong, one that was doing a lot of damage and still is.

But this newer universal statement?

People like me are the collateral damage.

And it hurts, to the point of crying, because it involves things that happened to me when I was molested.

And the fact that it involves things that happened to me when I was molested, mean that I have at least three times written a post, and then thrown it away because I feel too vulnerable.

Because it’s like – I’m writing about a very vulnerable thing that happened to me. And I’m also, at the same time, contradicting a deeply held value in certain communities.

And I know that if I get backlash, it will hit me right in the gut.

And I know that no matter how carefully I word things. No matter how much I say “I am talking about my experiences and my experiences alone, and I am not trying to tell anyone else what their experiences are, and in fact I’m leaving quite a lot of room for people to have had the opposite experience to mine, entirely…”

Someone’s going to be massively offended, and someone’s going to rip into me, and it’s going to rip straight into one of the most vulnerable parts of my mind. And they will probably even tell me that my experiences don’t matter at all, and will have some amazingly glib way of doing it.

And I can’t do it.

I just don’t think I can do it.

Not today.

But even though I can’t leave out the little package I want to leave out. I can leave out this package. The package that talks about the anguish of silence. The anguish of being silenced before I can even speak. The anguish of being able to write, but not about what I want to write about. The anguish of knowing the outcome beforehand and not being strong enough to just sit there and take it.

I’m sure I’m not alone.

I’m sure I’m not the only person with a bunch of text files that have never been published, because they’re too vulnerable, because I don’t want people to have access to things they can hurt me with, even though they say things that need to be said. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s refrained from saying important things, things that need to be said, because today, just today, I can’t handle the backlash.

So this is the little package I am setting out.

Not the package I wanted to set out.

But the one about not being able to set out the package I wanted to set out.

Notes: