balances and hesitations

I wrote a post, put it out Monday morning just after midnight, and then took it down when I woke at 8 am. Apparently I am uncertain about this.

I thought about deleting the whole blog after I published the first entry in this series.

The downsides are obvious. Privacy is classier. Other people´s privacy is also in question. Telling these kinds of stories with the utmost of honesty that you can possibly muster can be difficult and ungraceful, and it isn´t fullproof. Memory is deeply fallible. Once public one is open to reactions that can be unbelieveably harsh.

And here are my reasons for wanting to speak--to tell. I am tired of living in a society which puts survivor´s stories in a ghetto. I want freedom to talk about something that impacts me every single day without creating the assumption that this thing is all I am, and I want other survivors to have that freedom as well. Given how common sexual assault is, the fact that we consider it an event every time someone references sexual assault in their own history is an indicator of enforced silence.

I want people to talk about it, to argue about it, to have ideas of what should be done about it. I want the less usual aspects of my own situation, which have informed my world-view very deeply, to be taken into the argument; I want people to understand where I am coming from, and I want them to think it is valid. I want people to know that I am not an aberration, that despite their relative infrequency, there are many other people who have had experiences similar to mine. And we should do something about them.


The price for this uncertain reward is making my personal life a matter of public record.