I will not allow my story to be destroyed

I’m an angry feminist. SpanishRed: Misandrist. That’s my name. That’s my label. Someone will write it up in my comment sections every time I write about gender-based violence. Angry white men are raging because I dare to break my silence; dare, for once, to speak about the female experience. You know the kind of experience I’m referring to. Gropings, rape, domestic violence… we’ve all been there, but straight white men don’t have a problem with those crimes. They have a problem with the fact that I speak about them.

And that tells me everything I’ll ever need to know. So you think I’mangry at pointless things like assault or violence? Perhaps I need to be angry about more important things like people writing posts I don’t like on the internet. The latter is so much more traumatic than the former. </sarcasm>

Do you even see yourselves?

“I don’t tell you [my story] so that you think of me as a victim. I am not a victim. I tell you this because my story has value. […]I will not allow my story to be destroyed. What I would have done to have heard a story like mine, not for blame, not for reputation, not for money, not for power but to feel less alone. To feel connected.” - Hannah Gadsby

My story doesn’t benefit me. I’ve long since recovered from trauma. I don’t talk about it with friends. I don’t even talk about it in therapy. I don’t think about it as I get on with the business of living. Most of my friends don’t even know it happened. It has become irrelevant to me, so I don’t write posts like these to drag crocodile tears out of internet strangers. I write them in the hope that they’ll make someone else feel vindicated or less alone.

My first professional writing niche was telling other people’s stories on the old “My Story” page of That Magazine That Should Not Be Named. I believe these narratives hold incredible power to break down loneliness. If you can convince someone to honour their feelings, they will find the power to get through one more day.

I believe in the power of our stories. Narrative therapy can help us to externalize our experiences and approach trauma with less self-judgement. If it happened to you and it happened to me, you’re not crazy. You’re justified. You feel you have the right to cry. You find that your feelings are like my feelings, so you’re no longer out there experiencing an isolated trauma. You are not alone. You’re not unusual. You’re just reacting normally to trauma.

That’s what I try to achieve. It might be pointless. I might be terrible at it, but that’s unimportant. What matters is that you’ve found fault with my voice but not the violence it draws attention to.

And that tells me you haven’t even earned your own voice. You don’t deserve it.

“Ignorance is a cage” – Hannah Gadsby