I had a dream the night I secured the domain name UNSILENCED WOMAN.
I unexpectedly found myself in my ex-boyfriend’s house. When I realized I was there, I scrambled to get out. I left so quickly that I forgot the notebook where I had been writing down my ideas for this blog, my whole vision.
When I shut my car door, I looked up and saw my ex-boyfriend standing ahead of me in the driveway. We made eye contact, and he started to walk toward me. Panic jolted through my body. My fingers fumbled over the buttons to roll up my window and lock the doors. I turned the keys in the ignition, my foot jammed down on the brake, I shifted the car into reverse and slammed on the gas. He sped up as I backed down the driveway. He yelled things at me that I could half hear. When I stopped momentarily to shift into drive, he tried to write something in the dust on my windshield. He put his face up close to my window and said, “You sound like an asshole in your writing!”
And that’s why I am starting this blog. Because his voice and the other self-serving, fearful voices that have accompanied me in my life have a place in my world no more. And they don’t belong in yours either.
I used to think that I only had a voice when I wrote. Usually in conversation I feel like I’m speaking a foreign language. Word by word I manage to fumble through my ideas. But I’ve discovered recently that when I write, I speak aloud in my head. I sometimes even say the words to the air when I’m alone. My voice is there and has always been there.
When I empty my mind of the scary, condemning voices that have followed me, my voice is strong. My voice is clear. I make sense. When I surround myself with people who believe in me and who want to see the light in me, I feel like a genius. I feel fluent all of a sudden in a language that often feels broken and misunderstood.
I am here. I am here after years of emotional and sexual abuse. I am here after years of hiding parts of myself in darkness, scurrying from shadow to shadow to avoid revealing myself as a target.
I want to unsilence the endangered parts of myself before those parts become extinct. I am a peacemaker by nature, but I can make no peace with this silence. This is not me appearing at the end of transformation, a butterfly lighting on poppies in the meadow; this is me wriggling my way out of the cocoon because silence can be my home no longer.
Every step has brought me here.
The writing I began as a sixth-grader to cope with the glacial crumbling of my parents’ marriage.
The anorexia I nourished in order to be the very best at something measurable and to make a statement to my parents without words.
The relationship I walked into as a 17-year-old wanting so deeply to be seen and loved and escaped as a 21-year-old with new scars of emotional and sexual abuse.
The days that added up to months and years in a rural, high-poverty classroom where I was given authority and a platform but was stripped of myself and my sense of humanity in the process.
The journey of healing that has been shepherded by a fiercely supportive partner and an army of ever-expanding love warrior angel friends.
Have I been silent for 29 years? No. My written words have carried me through to this moment. They have been my best friends and loyal allies, sometimes my biggest critics. They have been my mirror, opening my eyes to the uncomfortable reality of a situation and showing me to myself, and they have been my shield, a place where I feel safe. My written words have been my ambassadors, representing ideas and feelings that I often feel less capable of expressing aloud. My words have been here all along, but they have been swirling in the protection of my notebooks and the inboxes of my inner circle of friends.
I am here now as UNSILENCED WOMAN because it is time.
I am tired of hiding in my own life, deeply wanting to be seen and understood while also being terrified of rejection and being discovered as an impostor of a special person. I am ready to live in the light. I will send my words out like messages in a bottle that could be discovered by any receiver. I will trust that the people who need to hear my message will find it. And while I will try to speak the truth in love, I will not worry about adjusting my message for the palatability of each individual listener so that I can avoid disagreement.
A feeling started to rise in me that my words no longer belonged to just me. The feeling persisted that my words were meant for other people, even for people who were not in my life. I’ve shared writing over the years that has comforted, stirred, or affirmed person after person. Each person has helped me believe in the power of my words a little more. Even as I write this, I’m telling myself,
“It’s ok to believe in the power of your words and to declare that. That doesn’t make you conceited or narcissistic.”
The risk of staying silent has become greater than the risk of speaking out. We live in a culture that put lies, fear, and irreverence in the most powerful office in our country. I can feel it like a fog in the air around me, emanating from my neighbors’ houses, slipping between my body and my family’s bodies when we hug. The fog of fear can slowly poison me or I can put on my gas mask and join the fight.
We need every truth teller, light seeker, and stone upturner to come out of the woodworks. When we all vacate our own protective crannies, we will leave behind so many holes from the space that our silence once occupied that the whole damn broken house of fear will crumble.
It doesn’t matter if your voice shakes like I feel mine does so much of the time. We need you. We need to say, “No. This is not who we are.” We need our children to hear our collective voice lifted up in resistance. We stand for speaking truth, for looking deep within ourselves, and apologizing when we are wrong. We stand for respecting the dignity of every human being. We stand for love. We will make no peace with injustice.
Here I offer you my heart, my rough edges, my brokenness, my resurrections, my hope.
I will often tell my own story, but my hope is that my words will extend beyond my own experience and give voice to the parts of yourself and the moments in your life that rest heavy on your heart. I hope my words will be a resting place for you, a place where you feel like you can breathe. Maybe you have endangered parts of yourself that could use a little light shone on them, too. Don’t we all?
I am UNSILENCED WOMAN, and I hope you will raise up your voice with mine.
Photo credit: Josh Hailey Studios
YES! Thank you. I love this sentence you wrote: “We need every truth teller, light seeker, and stone upturner to come out of the woodworks.”
Those of us who live in Mississippi really know how true that is, don’t we? Thank you for reading, Dr. Pieschel, and thank you for your support. It truly makes a difference to me.
Here are things I have thought about this blog that speak to the imprisonment of my own sexual abuse.
1. I can’t relate to this blog because I haven’t been sexually abused by a man I entered into a relationship with.
2. Sexual abuse is something that has happened to others, not really to me.
3. I was repeatedly groped by a relative, but that’s different. I shouldn’t talk about it with anyone but my therapist. I keep secrets even from her because it’s too scary to remember and shameful. Why would I want to talk about it with strangers?
3. If I speak or converse about my abuse, my life will be continue to be that abuse, and I don’t want it to be anymore.
5. This blog is too uncomfortable. It makes me remember too many upsetting things.
A relative once told me, when I confided that my other relative’s touch made me uncomfortable, that I wasn’t raped. I remember feeling as though my feelings of violation were delusional and dumb.
Recently, after running into a man I knew in high school, and speaking about him with my husband, I realized that that man sexually assaulted me. I thought for 15 years that what he did was “understandable.” In truth, he violated me, and I didn’t even recognize it until over a decade later.
The truth is, this blog is written for me. The one who doesn’t want to say anything about her abuse, who would rather hide it in a corner and pretend it doesn’t exist.
This blog IS uncomfortable, and that’s where its power lies. It caused me to reflect on the uncomfortable truth that I, like millions of women, have been sexually abused. To speak of it here, to label it as abuse and not be ashamed to tell, gives me power over and freedom from those who have abused me. I won’t be keeping their secrets anymore.
I am joining you in this conversation. It won’t be easy, but I will raise my voice with you, and with others, so that we will be heard.
Catherine, you are very brave for leading the charge.
Yes, yes, yes. You have done some powerful work here, friend. Those hard conversations with ourselves are the beginning of something big. Thank you for your vulnerability and your brave sharing. I am so sorry that you experienced the abuse and that your feelings and experiences were minimized by a family member. I know how difficult it must have been to share what happened to you, and responses from others that make you feel like you don’t have a right to your feelings can cause another layer of trauma on top of the original violation. Naming the abuse is such a big step. “I won’t be keeping their secrets anymore”–this is so powerful. I am happy to have you by my side on this journey.