The Silent Union

There is a silent union amongst women my age. It exists for all of us who know what it is like to be assaulted. It coincides with our natural female consciousness, but it is separate in a lot of ways. It has to be separate because we don’t live in a society that lets us both be successful women and victims of assault all at the same time. No, we are supposed to pick, and if any of us try to embody both at once, society strips us of our identities and reduces us down to one story.

We all walk around fearing our bodies are more memorable than our minds. From an early age, we feel this confused pain when it is abundantly clear that boys are treated as better than us in academics and sports. We start feeling animosity towards the mirror, because we were told our entire lives to look a certain way, and to prime and primp our bodies before special occasions. We start to feel animosity towards the mirror because it reflects a society that forces us to see ourselves how everyone else sees us, rather than growing up with confidence based on what we think of ourselves. As feminists, so many of my generation are fighting for a world that recognizes the inequality that women endure, but there is one piece of being a woman of our generation that even the most empathetic cannot fully comprehend.

This has been more than a difficult few weeks for those of us in the silent union; it has been traumatic and heart shattering. I walk through life seeming pretty normal to the common eye. For everyone who knows me but doesn’t know, I am another woman outraged by this injustice, and mortified that our country’s leaders have once again proven that they do not care about women’s safety. I watched the hearings like everyone else. I discussed them with family and friends, and I talked about the reasons that Kavanaugh makes me sick — well, the publicly accessible reasons.

I left out the personal reasons. I didn’t tell people that watching the Republican senators apologize over and over to a sexual assaulter made my insides turn to fire and my heart melt like lava. I didn’t talk about Dr. Ford’s face, and how her eyes mirrored mine each night that I recalled my assaults and felt the sour pain that poisons my body with recollections of those horrors. We are a silent union of bodies who are rewriting sensations on our skin in order to keep moving forward, but even our friends can offhandedly make us feel small and overlooked.

When we talk about assault, we are talking about individual people, but on an industrial scale. It could be your friend, your sister, or your mom, sitting in pain while you discuss the political ramifications of a man’s lies. This is bigger than politics. I am lucky to be surrounded by so many intelligent and kind humans in my life, but this is one thing that is impossible to talk about if you don’t have all of the information.

I am sitting among you, we both heard Dr. Ford’s testimony, but I was reliving my own. We both shivered in anger while Republican senators apologized to the assaulter, and I felt the searing pain spiral through my body similar to after my own assault. We both want to talk about how broken our judicial system is, but for me, it is a constant reminder that this country has always been on the sides of the boys that hurt me in such an invisibly permanent and soul crushing way.

If you are a woman in this silent union, then I hope you can feel my heart reaching out to yours. I have spent so long trying to ignore the very real damage that my own experiences have caused me. I was traumatized during the hearing. I envisioned every detail of Dr. Ford’s story as I have with my own so many times. I felt her pain and embarrassment just like the heavy bag of shame I have carried for so long. And now, this man will sit on the highest court of this country. He will be granted responsibility over the well-being of Americans, of women, of their bodies, of their freedom. That is what the Senate has decided, and once again, we have been overlooked and silenced.

But here is the thing my fellow members, this time, our silence scares them, because we won’t stay silent long. We hear each other’s sighs and unite our union against all those who do not protect women. And like an east wind rolling into the voting booths, we are screaming “NO”, and this time their bodies cannot and will not hold us down or cover our mouths. This time we are a force, fed up with the violence and cruelty towards women, towards minority groups, towards immigrants, and this time, we are going to confront each and every member of our government who does not believe, understand, or care about women.

The trauma that we have been through might stay somewhere inside us forever. Those boys who hurt us could, like Kavanaugh, go on to hold important jobs, start families, and continue a vicious cycle of ignorance and abuse; but they will fail. They will fail because no one with a soul, a sound mind, and a dedication to equality will let this go. This will not get filed away in Facebook memories or old news posts. We will be there to remind Kavanaugh, and all of the Senate members that voted him in, and President Trump, and our own assaulters as well, that we are no longer accepting the horrors that happen to women as individual tragedies. We are a movement, we are going to move our people into office, and we are going to make the Kavanaugh’s of the world members of their own silent union, a union of feeble, insecure, violent takers; and one day, they will be a minority.

Our government has failed, but we haven’t. We are just starting the fight. Our silent union has been carrying a heavy load for so long, but now is the time to use the strength we have built to change how this country treats women. Get ready Trump, we are coming, and you and the boys in this country you are worried about should be scared because, we are tough, we are mad, and we fight like girls.