Twelve years old. I was happy. My friend had a Ouija board, asked when we were going to get our periods, looked down, and I saw blood.
I started thinking about how it’s actually hard to love Barbie the way she is now. She is very tough, so much plastic. She’s not cuddly at all. She can’t even put her arms around you. You have to do things for her: worship her, dress her, buy her things. She wants everything. She is very greedy and needy. That’s how they get you to spend more money.
I say it because I believe that what we don’t say we don’t see, acknowledge, or remember. What we don’t say becomes a secret, and secrets often create shame and fear and myths. I say it because I want to someday feel comfortable saying it, and not ashamed and guilty.
About violence, what it feels like to be nothing to someone else. What it feels like to be a consequence of someone else’s dissociated rage, disconnected fury.
We don’t accept your world your rules your wars We don’t accept your cruelty and unkindness. We don’t believe some need to suffer for others to survive or that there isn’t enough to go around or that corporations are the only and best economic arrangement. And.
Poor women suffer terrible sexual violence that goes unreported. Because of their social class, these women do not have access to therapy or other methods of healing. Their repeated abuse ultimately eats away at their self-esteem, driving them to drugs, prostitution, AIDS, and in many cases, death.
The trick has been to live in the contradictions while maintaining principles, beliefs, and purpose.
We have to say that what happens to women matters to everyone and it matters a lot.
She told me my clitoris is not something I could lose. It was me, the essence of me. It was both the doorbell to my house and the house itself. I didn’t have to find it. I had to be it. Be it. Be my clitoris. Be my clitoris.
As the Taliban circled the bazaar in their Toyota pickup trucks, the ice cream is no longer my enemy. Sunita is risking her life for this pleasure. She is sharing it with me. Finally, my being fat is clearly less important than being free. I eat the ice cream.
It is where we do not live that the dying comes.
What is a man cast out of the kingdom of men?
Wouldn’t it be incredible if everyone could find the joy that comes with committing to our own goodness? Perhaps we would stop dividing ourselves into malignancies of various forms.” SCAN.
So much of life, it seems to me, is the framing and naming of things.
The question is not: Will you die? The question is which you needs to die off, so that the new self can live and thrive in a new, loving world.
When the world is right, it will be the unpaid and unsung people like Cindy who will be the honored ones, the ones who get paid the most, and they will sit at the big table. When the world is right, it will be these invisible people who we see and cherish.
Doctors never believe how simple it is to give patients dignity. It takes a sentence. It takes a short walk around a table.
Wouldn’t it be incredible if everyone could be purged, somehow, of the projected not-them badness that they internalized and perhaps have acted out because their souls have been so damaged?
I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you? You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered by us, so why aren’t you standing with us? Why aren’t you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?
Hysteria – a word to make women feel insane for knowing what they know.