Yesterday, palms sweaty, tentatively navigating fork choices, sweltering greasy-spit heat and bo-jangling nerves, I had the pleasure of sitting immediately to the left of this man before (and after) I had the honor of listening to him speak.

Lundy Bancroft delivered the keynote address at a very special banquet at which I was honored to be a guest, and he reminded me of so many things I didn’t even know I knew, being as I am so close to the heat, and so far from an expert. I am just a girl with a gut and a heart and so when it comes down to the nitty gritty, I find myself apologetic and empty-handed; still, he moved me deeply.

I spend a tremendous amount of energy helping women (and some men) reclaim their experiences, validate where and what they have been, help them through the agonizing questions that almost always come down to the sadly quintessential, “Does this count? Do I count?” I spend so much time listening to people sort out whether or not they have a right to this pain, whether or not they qualify as the “one in four,” that I find myself removed from the true point that Lundy drove back home into my gut yesterday: THIS ISSUE BELONGS TO ALL OF US. I knew that, I did… but I think I forgot.

I know many of you think you are not affected by domestic violence. I can’t keep track of just how many of you have said to me, “I’m one of the lucky ones. I have never experienced abuse.” I feel you and I always thank you nonetheless, perhaps  saying something like, “That means even more to me then that you are taking the time to support those who have,” kind of like the “Straight but not Narrow” bumpersticker crowd.

Lundy reminded me what matters.

This is why domestic violence is a big deal to you: Do you go to the gas station? Do you go to the grocery store? Do you pay taxes? Do you have kids? Do you send them to school? Do you know any  “juvenile delinquents?”

Lundy reminded me that whether or not we are specifically being punched in the face, we are taking the hit. Lundy reminded me that it’s just as traumatic for children to be exposed to a batterer as to witness battering itself, that batterers may strike out once a day, once a year, or once in a lifetime, but the manipulative, power-mongering, selfish behavior they display all the other days of the week has a profound impact on our children. Our children have a profound impact on our society. Our society belongs to all of us.

Lundy said between three and ten million children each year witness one of their parents battering the other.

Lundy reminded me that nothing is simple. That, “Why doesn’t she leave?” is a damaging and often misguided mandate. That children influenced by batterers have statistically far greater chances of developing behavioral issues, emotional issues, sexual issues, violence issues, substance abuse issues, social learning issues, and so much more. That children remain under the influence of batterers long after the abused parent leaves, and that they are often in worse circumstances once this happens. That nobody is served, particularly not the children, by a culture that continually blames the abused party for not leaving instead of laying the responsibility at the feet of the batterer. (Let us not forget that victims are nine times more likely to be killed during or after they leave their abuser.)

These are the children in school with your children. These are the people sitting next to you in the movie theater. These are the people serving your food and preparing your taxes and administering your vaccinations. If you think domestic violence has nothing to do with you, you are sorely mistaken.

I thank you for supporting the Violence UnSilenced contributors. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for volunteering, for donating, for listening, for speaking out. But if, after all of this, you still think of abuse as “other?” As somehow apart from you? I hope you will listen to a man far more eloquent than I, and embrace what he has to say.

I hope you will embrace this as your own.

***

Thank you Shannon, thank you Carrie, thank all of you at DAIS for yesterday. My heart is still swollen.

My feed reader is suddenly infested with BlogHer posts and for the first time I find myself lice-combing through every single one, searching for that tiny varmint of truth that applies to me (or at least its telltale eggs.) I have never gone before and this year I finally get to experience what I’ve been missing, and as excited as I am I have to admit your posts are kind of freaking me out.

It’s all the posts devoted to weight; too much of it, too little of it, a pound of flesh I don’t feel you owe and I hope to God you don’t think I owe you.

Now I have struggled with my self-image as much or more than the next girl and that struggle continues today. The thing is, I’m so busy worried about my own weight that I don’t think about what you weigh. I just don’t. If you think about it, it should unfortunately follow that because everyone is so focused on their own terrible self-images, they won’t notice how fat you look at all.

I see many of you have been shredding or shedding or whatever it’s called, tackling new work-out videos and diets inspired in large part by this conference. You’re buying new outfits and making comments on Twitter and Facebook about your worries, and as much as I get it that it can be hard to walk into a room of new people and not be thinking ohgodI’msofatI’msofatI’msofat, I really need you to know that I’m not looking at you that way. And I want to believe — I have to believe – that you’re not looking at me that way, either. That this is all a self-strangling construct.

When my best friend was in college she took a side job to keep her in sweet potatoes, posing nude for the art students in their live study classes. My best friend has always been athletic and I believe for the most part she feels good and solid in her skin – but even she was shaken by the portraits those students drew. If you had lined the likenesses up side by side at the end of the day, you never would have known they were of the same person. The myriad differences in how others perceived her body shocked her. For the most part, the heavier women drew my best friend much, much thinner than she was – almost skeletal. The thinnest women, nearly skeletal themselves, added dozens of pounds to her fit frame. (Interestingly, the male students drew her exactly as she was.)

I’m thinking about that story now and I’m feeling like the nude model on display around the blogosphere, drawn up a hundred different ways and not a one of them accurately. Which is silly, because you’re not doing that – right? I’m certainly not doing that to you. I promise. So why do we care?

We spend an almost unforgivable amount of energy obsessing over weight. The irony is we waste so much time worrying about how we are perceived that we have very little time to ponder what we think of others. This is my sad little bet: No one is going to think you’re fat at BlogHer because they’ll be too busy worrying about how fat they themselves are. I’d be willing to put money on it if I had any.

Maybe I’m incredibly naive. Maybe this is just my butter-churned aw-shucks rosy-cheeked Wisconsin-icity showing through. I just have a hard time believing that you who have been so kind to me here would suddenly turn your back at the sight of me. I know I would not do that to you. Why can’t we extend ourselves the same kindness?

If you and I have met and grown close in this space, I know your heart. I am in love with your insides. I am in awe of your writing prowess, or your resilience, or your wit, or your brass balls. I know you and I adore you and the chance to meet you in person is priceless. Let me ask you, do you not feel the same way? The people you’ve come to admire out here, do you honestly believe you won’t like them as much if it turns out they are fatter/shorter/uglier/thinner in person than you imagined?

Then why on earth would anyone think that of you?

Airport, June 19, 2009, 7:00am.

I will honor your family in your absence, bake meals for your wife and kiss the tops of your boys’ heads as often as they’ll allow, until you return. I won’t dishonor you by lying and saying I fully understand all of this; I’m not going to pretend that my feelings aren’t complicated. I haven’t done that yet and I won’t start now, because you know me better than that. You know the grassy plains of my heart and your sunny patch in it, and that’s where I’ll keep you, squatting there beneath an oak tree, boughs splendid with yellow ribbons.

Godspeed.

I hit some sort of wall Thursday night. Like, I couldn’t move my face and I couldn’t lift my arms and I couldn’t think or say or do one more thing and I realized I was mashed up against this wall, drool pooling at the corner of my mouth and sliding down the glaze to crust and I thought, I cannot do this.

It came on the heels of an emotional couple of weeks, I’ll grant myself that. Losing our dog was tough and although my kids, now out of school for the summer, still need plenty of attention from me, at four and nine they are at least past the ages where I have to stare at them every single second because they might bite that electrical cord or pee on the carpet or sprint happily into traffic (hello, puppy!) Complicating matters is the strange coincidence of two really intense, really compelling writing projects that have me swamped in interviews and research and honest-to-god tough conversations and did I mention we spent three days at a carnival and oh, yeah – my Internet has been down.

This is the first day in two weeks that I haven’t had every minute scheduled, and I find I have yet to peel my face from the plaster. Above all, I’m ready to admit it: working on Violence UnSilenced is hard. Okay? I’m not superwoman. I don’t have a purple cape, nor the ability to repel sad slings and arrows without falling wounded. I can’t leap these houses of pain in single bounds. It’s hard.

I won’t bore you with the details of the chaos on Thursday but I will say that throughout it all, I was learning about the world from three different people, each of whom were suffering, each of whom were trusting me, and in the end I crumbled. Let me quickly state for the record that these people were not burdens. They were not adding to my stress. My stress came from an inability to fix things, even though not one of them was asking me to. My pain came from too much seeing, too much awareness of how things are out there and knowing there is not a damn thing I can do about it. Most of all, I wanted to wrap my daughters in sunshine and rainbows and spirit them away to a place where bad things never happen, even if it meant we never saw the rest of the world again. That’s how Thursday felt and, quite honestly, it’s how I’ve been feeling ever since.

Because Lord, the world is full of awfulness.

I slept eleven hours last night and I woke up feeling more at ease because the truth is VU gives me far more than it takes. I can bear the hard stuff because in every single case — every single case! — I learn something and I come away with the sense that I am in the presence of greatness. I am in awe of what it takes to become a survivor, what that really means, who these people really are, all they’ve had to endure. And I am inspired.

There’s more. I haven’t mentioned it yet on this blog, but Violence UnSilenced is up for a “most inspiring” award at BlogLuxe. There is no monetary gift attached to it or anything like that, it is simply about awareness. The winners will be recognized at a party BlogHer weekend. Should we somehow win, a whole bunch of people who are not yet familiar with VU will learn about the site.

The reason I haven’t mentioned it yet is because I have a very hard time with these awards, particularly the ones that feel like a popularity contest. I also have a hard time promoting myself, especially when this thing I’m promoting has so little to do with me, as VU is written by others. Most of all, “inspired” is not how I felt on Thursday. It’s not the word that comes to mind when I feel that icky slick of competition and Look at me! and arbitrary rules. It’s not how I feel when I’m tired, when I’m sad, when I’m feeling completely and utterly helpless. My wanting to hide — or worse, cut and run — is not inspiring. But I can promote this award because it isn’t about me, it’s about them — and believe me when I tell you these people are inspirational.

I read these stories, all of these stories (have I mentioned we’ve had a two-and-a-half-month waiting list since the site launched in February?) and I marinate in them and I get to know each of these people and every single day, sometimes several times a day, I have proof shoved in my face that there are unspeakable things happening right this minute, as you’re reading these words, as I’m frantically typing them out, myriad unspeakable things and if you don’t yet get that then I won’t shut up until you do because it is the only way, the only thing, that can be done. The people perpetrating these bad things are crouched comfortably in the notion that fear and shame and power are on their sides and that if their victims won’t talk they can keep on doing what they’re doing, and so we are stripping them of that monstrous comfort with an ongoing cacophony of voices that will not be silenced because they did not do anything wrong and I’ll tell you what, that is inspiring to me. The idea that we can affect real change with our voices, with writing in particular, has got me peeling myself off that wall and turning around to face the foe.

These survivors have been through the worst things and they have somehow found the strength to not only rebuild their lives and believe in humanity again, but to share these intimate experiences so that you might learn, so that you might be helped yourself, so that someday it will stop.

I think about them and that wall evaporates. It was never there at all. Damn right that’s inspiring.

If you find VU inspiring too, I hope you will take the time to vote. You can vote every day, once a day in each category, until the ballot closes July 6.

Whether or not you participate in the voting, I hope you will continue to support the site as so many of you have so well and so richly and so steadily. To me, the fact that you have helped create and support and promote Violence UnSilenced is almost as inspiring as the stories themselves. Thank you for all that you already give.