I’M NOT HOLDING BACK AT ALL ANYMORE
For me personally, I’m at a point in life where my true voice is just getting warmed up. I have no intentions of holding back or diminishing its strength. I disregard backlash. I couldn’t give a fuck (well I used to….way too much). I’ve been in a war and I refuse to let fear win any longer.
I lived in fear for 6 years of an ex-boyfriend (a man who turned out to be a sociopath) and I was afraid to speak out online because of it. I was cyberstalked for the first year, and this particular scum of a man devised fake fb profiles, many of them. I could figure them out easily but the amount of energy I expended on this is disgusting. I wasted time and energy on thwarting a sociopath’s cyber grip that should have been spent on building a startup.
So I have been in a war inside my mind, fear comes and goes. This is the tragedy. I didn’t want to feed the fire in any way but I ended up just feeling scared, not wanting to have an online public persona. I think many women are afraid for similar reasons. Take elizabeth tobey who felt threatened with online sexual harassment to the point of moving.
It is a huge problem: men who threaten and subjugate women and minorities online. But if we quit speaking, they win.
This kind of fear is what the young white males (most of them anyway) can never get a taste of.
This is what warps women & minorities and creates an unknowable silent killer of advancement that privileged men don’t understand on a visceral level. This is why white men frequently act with utter disbelief and confusion when they are confronted by a woman’s story that explores being victimized. Before my personal horror, I too used to react this way when I heard grisly tales. I was raised in a vanilla family but my parents were exceptionally open-hearted and as non-racist as any white people could get.
But I, too, became another statistic (single mother) despite my own white privilege. You can blame me, that’s your choice. But I am but a reflection of society now because I chose to live, to love, to explore and dive into the unknown. If I had known that my ex was to bring me an incalculable amount of pain and fear, I would have definitely declined. But I did not know and I was blind.
You see, there are people in the world who create a smoke and mirrors personality to trick and ensnare others. They feed off others, use them then spit them out when they think they have ensnared them good. I was tricked, fooled and dragged into a world I didn’t even know existed. A world of pure evil. The world of a sociopathic criminal that forever changed my perception of the male species.
Later on after I had gotten away from him, I discovered his true past: he had beaten up a woman who happened to be pregnant. She was beaten so horrifically that it took many weeks in the hospital to recover. I was never physically attacked. My scars are inside my brain and heart.
To think I had been intimate with a man who almost murdered both his girlfriend and unborn child sent me to a dark place that almost devoured me. And worst of all, I was impregnated by this vile man.
The horror. The horror. If there is anything I understand now it is the horror.
This was the moment when my privilege ended. My world changed and suddenly I was thrust into the struggles that plague most victims: sheer survival because it was just me and my child. Alone. I suddenly had to become both a man and a woman, both breadwinner and nurturer. How does one person do this? They don’t. They have to get help from family.
No support has ever come from that vile man… I would send it back if he even attempted to give us money.
And oh how I began to hate men: lazy men, mean men, men who feel entitled, men who abuse women, men who add nothing of value to the world. Suddenly I could only see the worst traits in men. Now I realize that not all men are evil and there are good ones out there, but my eyes have changed, altered, my perception of the world Is different. I can relate to so many more people on the planet now.
My hardship wasn’t actually that hard when compared to others, say refugees. The blow was softened by my family. I have it pretty good even though I’m struggling still financially. But my mind is the thing that has suffered the worst of it. My suffering has been a problem. I’m changed. I’m trying to recover my trust in men. It’s not there yet.
I guess what I’m saying is that suffering is the thing that binds us together. It’s the fabric of empathy. Privilege insulates people from connecting with the rest of humanity.
Struggle creates strong bonds. Now, it’s essential for those who have suffered needlessly to gain more visibility, control and power in society. I think that’s the only way society can move forward. It starts within our minds.
