Very Personal Post

Okay, I must give trigger warnings in this post for emotional abuse and mental illness. If there's any triggers I should have warned about and haven't, I apologize - it's been a weird day.

Last week was Domestic Violence Awareness Week at my university. I walked into the school gym for my aerobics class on Monday and managed not to notice - that's Monday for you. However, I started seeing T-shirts hanging up all over campus. For two days, I didn't realize what they were. However, I was a bit more clear-headed on Wednesday morning. (Just for the record, before 8 AM is no time to be clear-headed...) I started READING the messages on the T-shirts and, looking around, I saw a piece of laminated paper with a key on it, explaining the colors. For a full description, please visit "The Clothesline Project." I actually wound up late to my class because I had to step into the bathroom and cry for a good minute.

Long story short, the T-shirts are a way for victims of various types of abuse to tell their stories without fear of any sort of repercussions. When I got to my class, I asked a girl sitting next to me, hypothetically speaking, if she thought the shirts might be upsetting or triggering to anyone. She answered that she honestly figured nobody cared. Not sure if she could hear me, but I said "I sure as hell do." Obviously, I had to kind of sit on that thought (figuratively) and get on with the workout. It came back and smacked me in the face when I left the class though.

I looked around from pink to blue to yellow to white to grey and everything in between... There was a young lady at a table not far away. She had pamphlets on domestic violence awareness and things like that, but most prominent were the stacks of T-shirts and containers of paint markers. I had a proverbial light bulb moment and I had to go over there. I selected a yellow T-shirt, the color for survivors of domestic abuse. On it, in green, black, and red markers, I wrote a simple statement. It was addressed to my abuser: "You never hit me. I honestly wish you had. Then you would be IN JAIL where you belong."

This is not a blog for personal venting, I promise, and there is a point to this story: every T-shirt on that line is one too many. Keep in mind, these particular ones - HUNDREDS - hang up on a college campus. This is a bullshit number I'm pulling out of thin air, but let's say in theory that the women of my university mostly range in age from about 18-25 years old. What. The. Actual. Fuck. Why the hell are hundreds of women at this one university all reporting abuse before they even live a quarter of a century? That's a really hard question, isn't it?

There's a lot of answers, and a lot of them are pretty freaking incendiary - bound to cause a lot of friction and even make people outright angry. Like the FACT that our culture PROTECTS AND ENABLES RAPE, VIOLENCE, AND ABUSE. Sorry, not sorry, there is no getting around that. The system is set for silence, and I am NOT cool with that. I am NOT okay with the fact that there is nothing I can do to my abuser because he never hit me. It is NOT right that:

• Women's clothes, sexual histories, and states of intoxication remain the focus of rape trials
• Men are told every day, by the lies people tell women, that they are potential rapists
• LGBTQ/Poly people have trouble finding support systems for their issues with violence/abuse
• Legislation to protect people from abuse is either not properly enforced or used to further shame and blame the victim
• Assistance of legal and medical varieties are withheld from certain people just because somebody doesn't like their choices.
• The majority of violence is committed by someone the victim already knows, usually an intimate partner

Every time I see another article about violence, I get sick to my stomach. I think of those T-shirts and I look around at the people I go to school with. I wonder who wrote what on which shirt. Look around you, every single person reading this blog. Wonder that too. Take a glance around at the people you know, and wonder how many of them have been the victims of violence. It can be ANYONE. You can be in a demographic that is LESS likely to be victimized, but the plain, cold, hard, ugly truth is that any human being can be the victim of abuse. And these T-shirts I describe, most of them are only representative of physical violence. Not spoken of are mental, emotional, and psychological abuse, which are very, painfully real.

I had always considered myself a strong and independent woman, yet here I am to this day, blaming myself for allowing myself to be abused. Maybe I'm not qualified to advocate for other women if I was weak enough to let someone do that to me? Maybe I can't help anyone because I'm not fully recovered myself? I would never, ever dream of blaming another person for getting victimized, but I had never thought for a second that I would allow it to happen to me. It makes me wonder how many of my friends and family lost respect for me. How many people reduced me to this pitiable wreck of a person? Have I been reduced to the label of "victim"? Even if I make it to "survivor" (and who gets to make that decision?) will I ever be seen as strong again? What if it happens again? Will it be my fault then?

Every day, I wonder if he won.

So, there you have it. I added my T-shirt to the clothesline. There were so many, just at this one university - relatively small at about 22,000 students. The people making T-shirts are not just our sisters, brothers, friends and family, or even strangers. They are US. Every human being could be the writer of a message on a T-shirt. Please, everyone who reads this - I am seriously begging you: get outraged. Make it your personal goal to see that NO ONE EVER NEEDS TO MAKE A SHIRT AGAIN. It's a big goal, I know, but I do not - I cannot believe it is impossible. Even without my abuser ever laying a hand on me, I would not wish the treatment I received on my worst enemy. I certainly cannot sit idly on my rump and be quiet about these T-shirts.

There are simply too many to ignore.

Marigold, wishing for love to overcome violence, sending you all love!