The fact I’ve finally sat down to compose a post on the months of sexual assault and harassment revelations we’ve read about signals the realization that telling myself “I’ll write ‘when things calm down and I have a clearer head’ was extremely naive. It’s been UNENDING. It’s gone beyond a catharsis, beyond a bloodletting; it’s an uprising of grand proportions. It’s a tsunami, sweeping up everyone and everything in sight, with no signs of slowing.
I’d marvel at how wonderful this all truly is if I wasn’t so agitated and stressed out about the constant conversation in and around sexual violence, and the inevitable debates about its origins. If I wasn’t reading DAILY about how female women’s fashion scion after gold-medal-winning female gymnast after publicly elected female official opens her mouth and says something completely ignorant and victim-blaming about how women should dress to avoid assault, maybe I could actually believe progress is ahead. That this isn’t like a running back who breaks for a 20-yard gain and then gets semi-tackled and dragged backwards farther than where he began his run.
I worry about fatigue. My fatigue. Victims’ fatigue. The general public’s fatigue. Emotionally charged subjects have a way of flaming out after a while; we were not designed to stay in a perpetual state of panic or arrest. And when we’ve had our fill of something, we inherently move on. But I don’t want us to move on, I want us to move ahead – out of the space of debate and into action.
What I figured out tonight is that instead of feeling overwhelmed by the notion I should use this space to dissect the news as it rolls in, I will continue to chronicle just one woman’s experiences and just one person’s learnings as she grows in her advocacy: mine.
I’ve been busy. Speaking. Teaching. Talking. Learning. I’ve got photos and special moments stored in my brain ready to be shared because there really is joy in doing this work, I promise you. I’d just misplaced it for a bit.
A Fight Back Woman 