I’m good. I’m in a really, really good place. I am supported and I am loved and I am engaged in a handful of proven programmed solutions. I am parenting and wife-ing and working, all with a new sense of peace and pride. Don’t get me wrong, it’s wretched sometimes, yes, and it’s outlandishly busy almost all the time, and it’s equal parts mind-blowing and brain-numbing and it’s fresh and it’s wicked and it’s glorious and it’s foul and it’s all the time, all the time, all the time, all the time, but that’s okay. I’m okay.

The outpouring of generosity and support you’ve shown me defies description. Believe me, I wish I could describe to you what it means to me. I wish I could find just the right words but they escape me and I have to let them go, for now. Let them run. (I think they’ll come back, over time.) Right now please know that not only have you given me a tremendous gift, you have also loosened some of the fear that grips so many other people out there, people like me, who are afraid to be honest. I know this is true because they are writing to me. My honesty helped them, yes, but so did your support. Maybe even more so.

[And now, a disclaimer.] I spoke out because I want to be honest about who I am. Because every word I ever think or write from here on out will be tinted with shades of this Big Thing, even though I may not write directly about it at all. I feel like I need to say that it was never my intention to become a mouthpiece for any particular program, or a representative for any particular addiction. It was simply an unveiling, a very personal unveiling, so that I could move forward with my life and my work, particularly in this space. [End awkward disclaimer.]

I’m closing comments on this post because I don’t want you to feel like you need to offer more support than you already have. I just wanted to update the many, many of you who continue to so sweetly reach out to me. I’m good, I’m hard at work, I’m wholly supported by every single person in my life, I’m lucky beyond measure, and I’m ablaze with hope. Hope, and gratitude.

Thank you. So much.

I took my last drink nine days ago. I admitted I am powerless over alcohol, and that my life had become unmanageable.

There it is.

***

I have been silent online. I have been suffocating beneath the weight of my truth, the elephant on my chest, the muzzled agony in knowing that if I can’t say this, I can’t say anything at all. I don’t want to say anything else.

I have written and re-written this post in my head a thousand times. I wanted it to be just right. I didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know how it–I–would be received. In the end, it’s really about that word, powerless; there is no prettier way, no way less shocking, no way more poetic to speak my truth. I choose my words carefully and that right there is the one, the only one I need to know, the only one I have the energy to utter most of the time: powerless. I was powerless. I am steadily reclaiming my power now, one day at a time.

***

I am not one of those tell-all bloggers. I am uncomfortable in the spotlight. I love to write and I relish the community that blogging brings to this craft, the loneliness you break by being here. I do.

But I am not fully honest with you. I still stubbornly believe the people who bring me chicken soup and suffer through my neuroses in person deserve to know things about me that you don’t, and vice versa. I don’t believe in giving you all the details, in telling you the names of my children, in journaling my every move and thought. And you all know that, and yet you keep coming back. You make me feel like I’ve given you just enough of me, shown you just enough, that you find me worth liking and worth your precious time. I sit here behind this screen and think, But they don’t know me at all. Everything I have ever put out into this space is real and true, yes. It’s just that there are so many things I haven’t put out there.

I need to ease up, though, because I now understand I was keeping many of those things from myself, too. And one of the biggest components of my disease is the need to have everybody like me. Impossible, yes, but that doesn’t stop me from reaching, from withholding, from editing, from dancing, for you.

Most of you never saw me drunk. I met my deadlines, I excelled at work, I juggled all of my social and familial obligations well. There was no crazy rock bottom for me, no wild nights at the bar, no sloppy fool-making, no jail time, no apparent loss. You rarely heard me talk about drinking, whether in person or online. I know that. That was on purpose. If any of you are in shock right now, I hope you hold that feeling close. I hope you look around at the people in your life, the women in particular, with a little more awareness. I don’t look like what I thought an alcoholic looked like, and that kept me drunk for many years. Trust me, though, there are a whole lot of us out there who look just like me, and if I don’t say it, you’ll never know. I preach it every day over on Violence UnSilenced, that speaking out will set you free. I am standing here today, shaking, but free.

Up until a few minutes ago I did not know whether or not I would hit publish. I agonized with my husband, with a few friends. I spoke with a family member and asked her to speak for the rest, asked her if they would find it upsetting, or too revealing. She said absolutely not–but that she was worried for me. She worried that a future employer would see these words and judge me unfit for work, that a schoolyard bully might use the word “alcoholic” as a taunt. I felt her concerns deep in my bones and I retreated back inside myself again. I slipped back between the sheets of the fear and settled in to sleep.

And then I woke up this morning and, much like the last nine mornings, this one looks a little bit different. I’m a little bit more lucid. A little bit stronger. A little less ashamed.

I woke up feeling very calm, very peaceful about the decision to go public with this. I thought about my friend Erika, who lives her truth every day. It dawned on me that a gay person must have these exact same worries upon coming out–surely a future employer, or a schoolyard bully, could and will read her blog and judge her in the same way I will most certainly be judged for this admission–but she does it anyway. She does it proudly, bravely, because it’s who she is.

Why should I be punished for doing the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life? This is not some questionable behavior I’m engaging in, this is who I am. Alcoholism is a chronic, progressive, fatal illness, and though I had no control over its occurrence I have absolute control over taking responsibility for it, over its treatment. If there is anyone out there, future employer or not, who will dismiss a girl for an act of honesty, an act of bravery, well. I’d rather not work for that person. I have also learned over the past nine days that quitting drinking is a very different thing from getting sober, and that most people have something, something, whether they drink or not. Most of us have something we use to disconnect, to zone out, to hide, to run, to stuff away. There’s no shame in facing that something head-on. I am learning that if there is something that knocks my breath away with fear, then that is exactly the thing I now need to move toward, not away from. That is where this lives.

One of the things they talk about in recovery is that you cannot control other people’s perceptions of you, other people’s reactions, other people’s emotions. They talk about making a commitment to live without fear. Even just one short week ago, I worried I would never speak these words here. I worried I would never write anything again because early sobriety has consumed my entire existence and if I can’t talk about it, I can’t talk about anything at all. My words have been stuck behind these other ones, with no dam-buster in sight. I either pull the plug on this blog and quietly disappear, or I face you, it, this. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. Today, however, I choose the latter. I choose to stay and fight and expose myself to you with honesty and clarity, unapologetic.

It is the most utterly foreign feeling I have ever felt in all my life.

***

Alcohol is one of my oldest friends, one of my best. She is always there for me, right there, here, her breath hot on my neck, her whispers hissing in my ear. She slides a warm soft hand over my shoulder and down my chest, cups a breast and breathes into my hair You are mine. You are nothing without me. You can’t write without me. You cannot play with your children without me. You are not interesting without me. You are not a desirable wife without me. You cannot meet your deadlines without me. You cannot meet their expectations without me. You cannot carry their stories without me. You cannot cope, cannot deal, cannot face, cannot fight, without me. You are mine and I am yours and it is good, it is safe, it is warm, it is secret, it is ours. Stay. And for some reason I turn into her, not away, even though she cruelly names my biggest fears aloud. Or, maybe, because she’s the only one who does.

***

The amount, the circumstances, the longevity, the history, the escapades, the who what where when why, none of those things are important here today. (Though, if you want these details, I am willing to speak with you privately. I’ll answer any questions you have. Part of speaking this truth aloud is to help others, just in case you see yourself in me, as I finally saw myself in someone else. Someone who is an alcoholic.)

There is a trap in comparing my behavior to others, a voice, her voice, whispering, Well maybe you’re not an alcoholic. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. You’re not like them, after all. Come back. But I can’t compare myself to you, I only know what it was like for me. For me. All those nights of quiet, secret heartbreak. All those times my head hit the pillow and quiet disgust, the self-hatred, the shame that washed over me heavy, pregnant with salt, breaking again and again and again on my battered shoreline where I lay soaking, helpless, broken. My GOD it was exhausting, that secret, private, 24-hour internal battle. All those nights whispering You did it again. You weren’t gonna do it and you did. All those prayers on my knees, my heart on the ground, wailing Please! Help me stop. Please.

It’s just no way to live.

***

I’d reached out to a few people over the past year. Some of them are people you know, some are people you don’t. People I knew were in recovery, or people I knew would love me no matter what I had to say. I said a lot of things like maybe and kinda and sorta and what if and later and who knows but I never once used the word powerless. That came later, in a moment of clarity, a moment of great grace, a moment of tremendous, unexpected peace. It came spilling out of my mouth in a torrent of grief and fear and honesty and shock where it pooled at my husband’s feet and I saw my reflection in it, and I spoke those words for the first time, “I am powerless.” I cried those words ten hours before my very first support group meeting where I learned, to my great shock, that I had just spoken the first step out loud and I didn’t even know it.

From that moment on I have walked toward this beast, not away. I have walked with a dignity I haven’t known in years. I have walked on the backs of hundreds of people who have been there, and for once I have accepted that help without guilt.

And what a nine days it has been. Telling my story, over and over, to strangers, to loved ones in my life, to myself. The reading, the processing, the talk talk talk talk talking, these feelings (at least I’m told that’s what they are, these stealthy little bombs) assaulting me, invading my air space, pounding my former alcohol-fortified no-man’s-zone with bomb after bomb after bomb all day long, my God, my God, I am completely worn out. By 6pm every night my body is one giant ache.

But I’m grinning.

I have logged hours and hours and hours on the phone with my friend Heather, my personal tipping point, the match to my piles and piles and piles of alcohol-soaked shame. Together, we combust. Often spontaneously, sometimes multiple times a day. I have a lot of support in my life, but she is the only person on this earth who knows exactly what is going on in my head and heart right this very second because the inside of her head and heart mirror mine. What a gift. What an amazing, amazing gift.

***

Speaking of gifts, today is my daughter’s fifth birthday. I can meet her eye now, look at her straight as she dances across the room, alight with the pleasure and wonder I crave. All those promises I dared whisper only to my pillow, I can speak them now. I can keep them, I can hold them out to her the way she offers fistfuls of dandelions and crayons to me. I can sit next to her, and her ten-year-old sister, my girls, my daughters, and I can breathe them in and let myself feel it, sometimes terrifying, sometimes panicky, this hot, fierce, unpredictable love I hold so clumsily for them, for us, for this big, achy world. I couldn’t bear the weight of that feeling before and frankly, I don’t know how I’ll bear it now without my sweetest, most awful friend–but I will. I know I will. They are beyond worth it. (So am I, I’m told. I have faith that belief will come.)

I don’t know what’s next for me but I can’t think about that yet. I need to stay right here, sit here, inside this, in the now, soak, just be. Trust in the grace of the universe that brought me to this place today, that it will lead me where I need to go and that I don’t need to know exactly where that is. I don’t need to know. I need to let go.

***

I’ve got this very clear picture in my head, a memory that hasn’t happened yet, a prophecy of hope. I am barefoot on my porch, a summer skirt lapping lightly at my thighs, my arms bare and strong. I am squinting into the brightness. The warmth I feel on my neck is no longer her breath, but rather the sweet sun’s hot prickle. I am free and I am peaceful and I am open to what’s next. I am here.

I am Maggie, I’m an alcoholic, I refuse to be ashamed, and I’m going to say this out loud every day for the rest of my life. Thank you for letting me say it to you.

It is once upon a time, 34 Septembers ago, and a woman with apple cheeks and Pantene-commercial hair goes into labor. Her husband puts down the beer, sells a shotgun, and uses the $40 to drive 50 miles to the nearest hospital. They bring their baby Girl home to a cabin built by their unpracticed hands on a deep, black lake choked with lily pads, place her gently in a cardboard box crib and go on about the business of living on love, if nothing else.

422 miles away a six-year-old boy palms treasures of frogs and fish, proudly presents them to his mother between distracted back-of-the-wrist swipes to his runny nose, already looking so much like the daughters he is yet to have.

*

The Girl grows. She endures many little things and a couple of bigger, unwritten things. Her parents keep the love but opt for money, and the family, now three-children large, moves to Wisconsin. The Girl gets glasses. She earns the best friends she still banks to this day. She dances in Russia, she travels to Europe, she learns to ski, to get good grades, to get along. She plays basketball because all of her friends do, where she covets the hair of a stranger. She yearns for the breezy charm of other girls. Her self-esteem is a fresh-born fawn on shaky, slimy legs. She gives her heart (among other things) for the first time to a boy not equipped to hold it, a boy who crushes it inside his fist with a series of surprisingly gentle squeezes. The next time she gives her heart it is to a Boy who works with the Girl’s aunt, a Boy whose hands once held frogs and fish. He cups her face with the same gentle wonder. Five years later, they marry.

*

Life swirls in magnetic, unpredictable eddies. The Boy sells auto parts, builds roofs, manages tenants, walks tall. The Girl goes to college, sells advertising, makes babies, makes a home. There is love, there is loss, there is growth, there are births. When the Girl learns she can make a living writing, she does–article after article, some fascinating, some droll, all necessary. It is the right-est thing she has ever known and she’s not sure how she ever lived before, if she ever lived before. She starts blogging–at first hesitantly (okay, fine, dammit), then fervently. She finds her tribe, builds a community, watches strangers shape-shift into friends, feels her voice rising louder, braver. At her day job she works hard, builds loyalty and trust, earns the gift of an exclusive interview with an icon, learns. The icon is coming to town to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Domestic Abuse Intervention Services, a place the Girl has only heard of in passing. She is inspired. She is made different. She fights for a story, a story giving domestic violence survivors a voice, a fight that takes a year, an article that forever changes her map. She follows the new purple line.

Nothing can go back to the way it was before. It’s not enough. With the help of her blogging community she then creates a site. Survivors speak out and are changed, affect change. The executive director of DAIS–the same woman who helped the Girl find survivors for her magazine article–embraces the new venture, sings its praises, links it up, bestows a community award at a big, terrifying banquet. It is all thrilling and celebratory except when it isn’t, except when there are defeats, losses that defy comprehension, like the day the stranger girl with the pretty hair from 8th grade basketball and her tiny daughter are brutally murdered by their abuser. Turns out she wasn’t a stranger after all, because her cousin dated the Girl’s Boy back in the day and the Boy has known their family for 20-some years. At the funeral, mother and daughter are buried together. The Boy says to the Girl, “That was hands-down the hardest thing I have ever seen in my life.”

The Girl stops for a beat, sits, tries to remember her purpose, searches for her strength. Her community bolsters. The family of the slain girl discovers Violence UnSilenced, writes the Girl kind emails even in their pain, posts comments in support of survivors. Lisa posts on VU a letter to her slain sister that cracks the Girl’s soul wide open.

The Girl’s heart is swollen, bruised. Sometimes she feels too small. Sometimes she wants to pull the plug, to hide, to duck on out. Then she spends a magical weekend with 25 women eating cupcakes and shifting paradigms. She is rejuvenated, filled to brimming with a love for this art, for these people, for this purpose. They feast, and she is full.

*

It is last night and the Boy and Girl drop the kids off at grandma’s and go to a party. Except it’s not a party, it’s a fundraiser for DAIS, the place that has been so kind to the Girl, the place that the family of the slain girl and her daughter are now working with in their memory. The event is held on what should have been the girl with the pretty hair’s 34th birthday. There are hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of people there.

The Girl finally holds in her arms Lisa, the sister of the slain woman, the one who posted the letter. They cry. This sister holds the Boy, too, because they are classmates, they graduated from the same small high school together. The Boy and Girl see and hug the cousin of the victim, the Boy’s ex-girlfriend. They see and hug the executive director of DAIS, the woman who works so hard to save lives, the woman who works so hard to help VU. They watch that executive director hug that sister.

They see and hug the Girl’s former coworker from her advertising career, because she is the lifelong friend of the mother of the slain woman. Another woman approaches tentatively and introduces herself to the Girl–they are Twitter and Facebook friends, knitting comrades, and they hug though they have never met in person before, because that’s what bloggers do. The Girl is astonished the woman found her in this sea of faces. Her worlds smash and collide like meteors.

The Girl looks around the room, draws line after line after line but soon grows dizzy with it all. She has never in her life felt so solidly in the right place at the right time, though exactly when and where that is feels slightly fuzzy right now, cosmically smudged. It is hard to swallow the lump in her throat back down where it belongs. She stares instead into her drink, pinches the slim straw and stirs the ice around and around and around, infinite motion.

There are $20,000 worth of donated raffle items. When the numbers are called the Girl who never wins anything like this blinks stupidly at her ticket. She has won the cupcake package.

*

The Boy carries one sleepy potato-sack child over each shoulder, just as the Girl has seen him do on so many nights before. They move past each other in the dark with an easy precision. Dogs go in and out, beds are turned down, fires are stoked, face cream is applied in short, certain swipes. They lay their heads on pillows of down beneath a window framing crisp stars. They rest.

Seventeen years now and the Boy’s and Girl’s connections are a constellation; vast, exquisite, inextricably tethered, impossible to fully know, too many hot prick-points of light to count.

I used to roll my eyes at the very word, mommyblogger, spit it from sneered lips so I wouldn’t have to hold its taste in my mouth. And by “used to” I actually mean right up until this past Saturday, when I greedily gobbled an entire crow pie, followed by a cupcake chaser.

We all do it. We moms who blog have been trained to accept that we’re not supposed to like being called mommybloggers. Condescending newscasters say the word like they’ve got a mouthful of honey, closely guarded by bees. Tech and pro bloggers use it as the new “You throw like a girl.” Even those of us who clearly see the inherent misogyny and anti-feminist rhetoric folded neatly into these views often have our own way of dismissing the mommyblogger anyway. Maybe you’re not a parent. Maybe you’ve got a niche´. Maybe you’re a rock star, a professional, a businesswoman, an entrepreneur. In my case, I hid behind my Defend the Sacred Art of Writing shroud (if you squint you can see Mary in the red wine stain, I think.) I told myself the only thing I could write that would be worth your time should be well-written and universal. Why do you want to hear about my kids when you’ve got your own? Why would you want the details of my trip to the zoo, to see my vacation pics, to copy down my recipes? It made sense to me that I should only pop in here when I had something Very Important to say, which is probably why I hardly ever post. Back in the day, when I first started out, I posted all the time. Sometimes even twice a day. I posted about every little thing, and somewhere along the way I started to look down on myself and, eventually, on you, for doing just that.

Look, I’ll admit it: I’m flattered when I’m named to a Top Best Favorite Important List, however arbitrary [insert witty self-deprecating remarks here, of course.] I can privately vamp in front of my blogging mirror with the best of them, draw hearts into my breath’s fog on the glass, finger-swipe MD + MD 4EVR! and smooch my reflection. Figuratively, I mean. (Ahem.) I’m sorry, but in this manufactured cult of blog celebrity I just have a hard time believing that those who benefit aren’t flat-out thrilled. The new blogging, by nature, is all about instant gratification and positive reinforcement. It’s very rare that a blogger reads another blogger’s post and comments, “Hm. Yeah, I didn’t really like this.” And for some bloggers, there are 50, 100, maybe hundreds of bra-throwing comments–how can that not do something to your world view? The problem is, when cream rises to the top it sometimes curdles.

I’m not saying that those who’ve enjoyed big blogging “success” don’t deserve it–they do, whether because they’re just that good or because they’ve best learned the game. And I’m not trying to say I don’t prefer a more universal message, that I’m not still drawn more to sock-me-in-the-gut writing and provocative prose–I am. But I think somewhere in this gigantic popularity contest, in this never-ending quest for traffic and status, even in our well-intentioned movements to elevate the non-traditionally published writer, the work-at-home mom, women in general, we’ve made the mommyblogger our whipping girl and I, for one, am a little ashamed.

Blogging, in the beginning, was about connection–remember? This whole thing got started for so many because the front porch neighborhood is now an endangered species. Mothers have become increasingly isolated in the real world, and so they gave birth to online relationships. For so many women, these connections are as real and as vital to survival as any in my own life.

Most of my best friends don’t read this blog. Frankly, I think it annoys them. When we talk on the phone or over coffee, I don’t say things like, “Did you notice the way the snow ices the pines like yogurt covered pretzel sticks?” Believe me, they’d hang up. No, we talk about our kids. We talk about our vacations. We talk about our recipes. (Okay, maybe not our recipes, heh.) This weekend, surrounded by 25 “mommybloggers” I didn’t think I’d have any connection with, I had an aha moment of which Oprah would’ve been proud–Oh! That’s why they share pictures of their kids. That’s why they blog about their vacations. That’s why they post recipes. They are talking to their friends. Their friends are checking in on their lives. And damn, many of them can really write, but that’s not why they’re doing this. It’s not about SEO for them, or making it onto some made-up list. It’s not about creative writing coursework. And why, oh why, is that any less valid than what everybody else does?

Are there exceptions? Absolutely. Are there blogs that exist solely to trick traffic and leech free swag? Yes. But these are not mommybloggers. These are trickster leeches.

I guess all of this is to say I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the mommyblogger bashing from all sides. And though I don’t think of myself as a person who bashes anyone else, I think I realized this weekend that I’ve been doing it all along. And I’d like to stop.

On Saturday I spent real quality time with amazing women. Women I’m ashamed to say I’d prejudged, women I assumed prejudged me, women I thought I’d have nothing in common with based on paragraph long bios and two-dimensional Twitter persona’s. But when I met them–all of them vastly different, each of them beautiful, unique, individuals–I liked them instantly. And when I heard what each of them had to say about who they were, about why they blogged, about what connection and community meant to them, I felt a humbling so powerful I could hardly sit up beneath its weight. I left that place and I wanted to shout from the rooftops that I was wrong, that you are wrong, that you don’t have to identify with it but you certainly don’t have to relentlessly ridicule it, either. I wanted to dig out my old ring sling and dance some babies to sleep around the fire, I wanted to pound my proud mommyblogging chest and howl ’til all the other moms appeared on their porches to greet the moon with me.

And I guess that’s what this post is.

It’s the little things I remember. That time Sarah Hain and I were walking down my rural Minnesota highway in the third grade and that car full of men (teenage boys?) pulled over and did everything they could to get us inside, thwarted only by the appearance of a second car on the horizon. That time I finally socked Josh Schmidt in the gut for trying to feel my non-existent first grader’s chest one too many times on the bus. That time in eighth grade at that Florida hotel, running up three flights of stairs so fast my lungs blazed, two college-aged men in fast walking pursuit. That time in that elevator in Russia, the man standing closer with each floor, and then closer, and then closer again before that blessed ding and the doors yawning open like a prayer. The friend’s uncle who liked to hug from behind, his forearms crossed tightly across my breasts. The time my best friend’s boyfriend picked me up late one night to “talk” and I didn’t know how scary drunk he was until we were spinning out on a gravel road five or six turns past knowing where I was, how his voice kept rising, how he refused to take me home, the way his hand jumped back and forth between the gear shift and my thigh the entire time. My first waitressing job, and the married boss who guessed my uniform shirt size right there in the interview after careful, careful inspection, who started basing my hours on how well I did or didn’t receive his advances. Every single cowardly copped feel in a bar, at the gym, at the office. These are just a handful of the little things I remember, nothing that would ever make the newspaper, but the common thread is fear. Fear and powerlessness.

When I was in college I started having panic attacks. I didn’t know that’s what they were, though, and I spent three or four days in and out of the doc’s office with a portable heart monitor tracking my every second. They diagnosed something called premature atrial beats, which is basically a very benign skip in my heart, no big deal. My therapist, however, diagnosed the panic attacks and for a long time she was sure some Big Bad Thing had happened in my past. She tried just about everything to help me dig it up and, though I can’t say for sure, today I’m pretty sure there was no one Big Bad Thing. There are simply lots and lots of little things, and a while back I started wondering if we don’t all carry them, we, as women, you, as men. And it makes me wonder what that does to us collectively, as a society. That weight of so many little things.

I woke up this morning to a shit storm. My friend Neil wrote about a time in high school, a time he was rejected by a girl, and in a burst of anger he shoved his hand between her legs and made her cry. I got more emails about Neil’s post than I got on my birthday. I haven’t read the comments on his post, though, because I wanted to get this out without influence first, however clumsily—but from the little bit I’ve gathered from my email it would seem people are angry that he’s being called brave.

I don’t know about brave. What Neil did was wretched, but I’m glad he said it out loud. I would be a hypocrite if I wasn’t. This is what I want, this talking about it, this unsilencing. That’s not to say I support a bunch of abusers going on and on about their actions, I’m sorry, I’m just not that evolved. But I feel Neil’s shame seeping through that post—it’s not like he’s bragging. I don’t think he wrote it to be brave. I think he wrote it to hear from a community of people that purport to love him that they still do. That he’s not a bad person, despite this bad, bad thing. I think he felt safe.

In all of this supporting of victimized women (and my God, they do need our support, you know I believe that, I’ve built this big piece of my life around it) we can’t forget the roles the rest of us play. We can’t forget that we live in a society where women are equated with sex and men are equated with power, and we’re conditioned to accept that power play as “sexy.” It makes perfect sense to me that as kids especially we play out these sanctioned roles, that in an instinctual fit Neil shoved his hand between that poor girl’s legs and not into her gut. It makes perfect sense to me that some boys grow into men who never learned it was wrong, and girls grow into women who stay silent. Who believe little things are just that–little.

I want the weight of the little things acknowledged. Every single one of you is a product of a lifetime of little things, and I’ve always been in slack-jawed awe over what the body remembers when the brain thinks it doesn’t. Every time your heart races in an alley, every time you flinch in the movies, every time that little voice squeaks in your head but you shove it back down in the interest of polite behavior, stop. Stop and honor your instincts and remember that these things count, that they add up. Teach your sons about the little things. Honor your daughters when it happens to them.

We have to keep talking about it. We have to keep acknowledging the humanness in each of us, taking responsibility for the little wrongs we commit against each other. Creating a perfect public persona is easy. Supporting only the most clear cut of rights and wrongs is easy. I want to be aware of the little abuses that are probably happening to my daughters each day. I want the people who commit them to be aware that their actions are big, that the tiniest needle can deflate a soul, that it’s not necessarily those obvious life-crushing crashes that steer a life’s course. That abuse belongs to all of us, that it’s everywhere, and that we need to own it. All of us.

Thank you, Neil, for owning it. This is not a hearty back-slap, this is not a balm for your wounds, this is simply a solemn nod.

####

It’s amazing how affected I feel by this, and how my thoughts have swirled and changed throughout the day as I read your comments and the comments on other similar posts. One thing that stands out for me is the male vs. female language, which was unintentional. I can only speak from my own heterosexual female experience, and that involved a whole lot of heterosexual boys. I know that boys are victims, too. I know that females are perpetrators, too. But I wouldn’t know those things if other people, with other experiences, hadn’t told me. That’s my point. Keep talking.