If you're not a survivor of sexual assault, let me explain what happens to you when an accuser comes forward. You relive every emotion around your own assault, often all at once, like someone lit all the 4th of July fireworks together & played all of the music at the same time.
You are depressed and angry and defensive and hopeless and hey, is that Stars and Stripes Forever I'm hearing too? You read a detail of the accuser's story and it reminds you of a detail of your own assault and you're right back there.
If you're "lucky" it's just the one detail. Just one assault. Sometimes it reminds you of an assault you forgot altogether, because in the lasagna of awful things that's happened to you, that didn't even make it to the crusty cheese on top.
It got buried under noodles & sauce & 3 other awful things that happened between then and now. Because all too often that's what being a woman is like: you read about an assault and think "Thank god nothing like that happened to me on a bus," and then you remember it actually did
You feel powerless: watching the apologists pull the accuser apart, seeing powerful people do nothing to stop it, it puts you right back in that place when you knew something was wrong but were too scared to say anything for fear you wouldn't be believed or would be blamed.
Or you did say something & those fears came true. It is a reminder that too many people don't give a damn about your safety or basic humanity. They think you are expendable, that your body is not yours to say who can touch it. And right now they are in control of your government
What? How is that possible? You always knew some people would be like this, but wasn't this getting better? At the very least, aren't politicians not supposed to be so brazenly callous and indifferent? Who would vote for them if they were? Who indeed.
And then you remember that this party who believes anyone can do as they wish to your body as long as it's not abortion and they get a tax cut - that this party is only in charge because of another violation against our will that we will also probably never see justice for.
You relive the justice you never got. The justice this accuser won't get. The justice none of us are getting. And you think about what you can do? But there's nothing you aren't already doing and it's not helping and you are just forced to live there with it.
And we have been living here pretty much every day for the last 2 years. Since the Friday that Access Hollywood tape broke to Weinstein to now. It depletes you. You alternate between sleeplessness and not wanting to get out of bed.
You try to channel your anger, empower yourself to not feel so hopeless. You make calls. You tell women you believe them. You speak up. And still the world tells you it doesn't matter. And you want to know when it will end & you start to think more & more that it's not going to.
