I remember a time when none of it mattered — the traffic, the audience, the ABCs of SEO (and OMG, WTF.) I remember a time, at least, when it didn’t matter to me. When I burst out of the gates like a young racehorse, stupid and happy and bred just for this. When I was beyond thrilled simply to have an outlet for my writing. When I couldn’t wait to tell you everything there was to know about my kids, my life, my struggles. When I was home all day with young children and I just wanted to be heard, to be known for more than my deft ability to change a diaper or grind homemade baby food. I still remember how scared I was when I first saw my blog listed in another’s blogroll and thought I was being stalked.

As more people started reading, though, I was thrilled. I subscribed to the blog of every single commenter and did my best to visit their blogs each day. It worked for a while. It filled a space in me I didn’t even know was there. Having this window, this kind of 24-hour access into your lives, was addictive. An audience for my words was heady stuff. I reveled in all of it. And before long, I was in over my head.

Having all of these people take the time to read my words and leave thoughtful comments made me feel like a bad person. I couldn’t possibly reciprocate, couldn’t read all of their posts and comment as I wanted to, and I became obsessed with my failure and how poorly you must all think of me, what you might be saying behind my back. I panicked. I became exhausted. I shut down.

For about a week, maybe two, I felt a great relief. Then I missed the community. [Insert whispering: I still miss some of my early readers. I often wonder if they hate me for abandoning them.]

I came back a month after I quit and it was like I’d been rebuilt — no longer Maggie, but MaggieDammit 2.0; stronger, faster, streamlined. Better equipped to handle attacks, more adept at not taking every damn thing so personally. Aware that I could not do it all and unwilling to hurt myself trying. I retrained myself to think of my blog as a place to exercise my craft, as an extended umbrella to my freelance career (hence, the ads.) I donned new, impenetrable armor with privacy features, stronger safeguards in place to protect my interests, my loved ones, my delicate inner wires. I reentered the community and relished it, but did not let it define me. I tried to comment only when I had something to say, not when I felt obligated. I implemented the same practice with my posts, even if it meant they were spread a week or two apart. Now, I feel like I have a huge, generous support network — even though I have purposely kept large parts of myself hidden. I feel like I give when and where it is needed, and I admire more than ever the community I see before me. I’m in awe of the way we come together in times of pain. The myriad ways you support your fellow bloggers. I embraced it — but I decided whenever it felt too emotional, whenever I felt too exposed, I would back off. It’s been working for me for about a year.

Suddenly, now, I find myself at a brand new crossroads. Violence UnSilenced has changed everything. It crept up on me from behind, pounced, and felled me easily. It’s like I’m back at the beginning again, obsessing over who is reading and who is not, carefully combing through the comments for signs of dissent or judgment, making sure we’re listed in every directory, tweeting my little heart out. Right now we’re in the middle of this Internet contest and I’m making myself crazy over it, peddling for votes and emailing my posse and taking it personally when things don’t go our way — like last night, when for whatever unknown reason they deleted 3,000 votes from VU and put us neck-and-neck with the second runner-up (a blog that one month ago had 4,000 of its own votes deleted without explanation, alongside another 2,000 of ours.) I was very, very angry this morning over the way this contest has been run. I got incredibly worked up over what felt like a last-minute sniper shot.

Then I reminded myself: it’s just a contest. The top five finalists will go onto a panel of “VIP” bloggers who will arbitrarily decide the winner, regardless of the number of votes. Listen, I am grateful VU was nominated and I’m in awe of all of you who have worked so hard to promote the award process… I know I’ve worked hard myself. But I’d be lying if I said the entire thing, this experience of “competing” with my fellow bloggers, hasn’t left a terrible taste in my mouth.

A few minutes ago I took a look at the top five finalists in the “most inspiring” category. Each have endured great personal trauma, including those documented on VU. One recently lost a precious child whose face I still catch myself thinking about from time to time. Two are nursing sick children. One was involved in a fiery plane crash. A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country. These are the things that matter. These and only these things. Not a contest that seems to be dividing a strong, loving community for the sake of Swiffer Sweeper. (Yeah, I said it. And if, by that one statement I just completely ruined our chances of “winning?” I think I’m okay with that.)

Bravado and contests aside, I’m so emotionally attached to the Violence UnSilenced site it’s scary. I’m inspired by the candor of my contributors and in many ways it makes me feel like a fake, like a pimp, someone who is asking others to bare everything, all the while hiding further and further behind my gun. In one space my heart is completely open. In the other it is so closely guarded.

I want to talk about my kids, but I don’t like invading their privacy. I want to talk about my struggles, but I feel like it makes people uncomfortable, people I run into every day, at the grocery store, at the bank, at my kids’ school functions. I want to share more, but I feel like that would diminish the gifts of my real-life friendships. I want, I want, I want.

I feel a change in the air, though, like the two sites each are pulling me in different directions and I need to slip free lest I’m drawn-and-quartered. I just don’t know which way is better. I don’t know which way to go.

The usual solution when I’m feeling this way (this obsessive, this neurotic, this angry, this long-winded, this needy and unappealing) is to unplug. To go outside, to stare at my garden, to jump on the trampoline with my children, to call my best friend. This is what I always do, in fact, right before I delete posts like this.

But see, this is what makes me feel like change is in the air: I’m leaving this post up.

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.

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.

I thought about deleting last night’s post, but the comments are already too valuable. I wanted to do away with the post not because I regret the message, but because I could have and should have done better. I was tired, and I was sad, and I was angry.

I’m no night owl — I do all of my writing during the day, when the coffee’s hottest and the light is least depressing. It’s interesting the way a post comes out differently when you write it long past bedtime, half dressed and freezing on a living room sofa, cloaked in the heaviest of darkness, the screen barely visible through the tears. I’m going to try to do better right now.

On last night’s post, Elizabeth commented, “How many people are aware that October is Domestic Violence Awareness month? Most people associate this time of year with pink ribbons and fundraising initiatives to support breast cancer research. ” She had no way of knowing that simple sentiment is what started this all for me a year ago.

I’ve bragged endlessly about meeting Gloria Steinem last year. The reason I met her was because she came to town for the 30th anniversary of Domestic Abuse Intervention Services in Madison. Our city magazine scored an exclusive interview, and they gave it to me. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with her, and then she invited me to be her guest at the banquet, and that’s where we snapped that picture. From her, I learned how incredibly pervasive domestic violence is, and how even though we’ve come a long way, an honest community conversation is still very much lacking. I’d also interviewed a close friend who is a TV news anchor for the same article, and she told me how frustrating it was to sit there in the newsroom and listen to the scanners trumpeting all of these arrests and know, because of safety and privacy concerns, that she couldn’t say a word on-air. I learned that in our own highly-educated, affluent, white-collar county in Wisconsin, between one third and one half of all arrests are domestic violence related. But these stories most certainly did not make up one half or one third of the news. They were only reported when someone died. Murder-suicide.

The article with my Gloria Steinem interview ran in the October issue last year, right alongside a stunning portfolio profiling breast cancer survivors (written by someone else.) I thought to myself, why can’t we do an article just like this for domestic violence victims? But I knew why. It wasn’t safe. Where would I find women who were safe enough? Brave enough? Whose situations were uncomplicated enough? It would never work.

I decided to try anyway.

Thanks to the help of a prominent local advocate, seven women — seven women — agreed to be photographed, agreed to use their full names, and agreed to let me tell their personal stories. The article will be on newsstands before the month is out, in time for Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

This is the cruel, hard fact: One in four women will be a victim of domestic violence in her lifetime, according to a 2000 report by the National Institute of Justice. Tell me, do you know four women? Believe me, the men and women who are victims of abuse are all around you. They look exactly like you. They are sitting next to you at the PTO meeting and they are pumping gas in the next stall and they are your sons and daughters’ friends and they are your sons and daughters. And it’s not always easy to tell. And it doesn’t start out violent. Men don’t walk up to women and punch them in the face, to have women say, “Gosh, you’re romantic, let’s get married!” It is slow, creeping, insidious, until you wake up one day and find you are not the person you once were, and you have no idea how you got here. It has happened to me, and since starting this article I have learned that it happened to many, many people I thought I knew. Listen to me: Every nine seconds in this country, a woman is beaten. How many seconds did it take you to read this post? If you read fast, maybe you can do it in a two minutes. 120 seconds. That’s 13 women while you read these words.

The several months spent living inside the words of these wounded women have not been easy. I’ve mentioned before the unfortunate tendency I have to sponge up the emotions of the people around me, and the interview and writing process for this piece affected me deeply. It cut, and it itched, and it burned. But it also healed, and it evolved, and it surprised. These women were such a gift to me. Their stories are now forever entwined with mine, deep inside.

That’s what brought me to my knees about Viviana. I did not know her. She was not one of the women profiled in my article — but she was exactly like them. She lived in the same town as my seven women. She volunteered with other victims, just like my seven women. She had managed to leave her abuser, just like my seven women. She knew several of my women, and they knew her. To me, reading that article, it was like I’d lost one of mine. And in addition to the mourning, part of me felt a sick lump of fear forming in my stomach for my new friends, and what the exposure from this upcoming article could mean for them. Bravery is not a strong enough word. It just isn’t. So, please: we owe it to them to listen.

In my article, I speak these women’s names, because the fact that they are using them is the most powerful thing of all. That’s why Viviana’s name squeaked painfully out of me last night, why I whispered it over and over again. Why I’ll continue to whisper it in my heart, along with the seven others I’ve come to know as well as my own. Why I’ll continue to listen for their stories.

May they all be heard.

She was the first one to answer my open call — you know, the one where I ask perfect strangers to rip their guts open and offer them up on a steaming, wretched platter for public consumption. Where I ask them to share the most intimate details of what is almost always the most shameful time in their lives, all in the name of theories and public good, in the hopes of somehow, someday, affecting some sort of change.

And she’s terrified.

That so many people are willing to do this blows my mind. That a brand new blog that is not even 24-hours-old yet is nearing 2,000 hits is honestly one of the most humbling feelings I’ve ever experienced. Remarkably, I now have an arsenal of these stories awaiting your eyes and ears, many of them written by bloggers you know, or think you know.

That’s Cary’s point, actually; She writes, “I am just like you.”

Her piece is all I could have hoped for in an opener, and it wasn’t even planned that way. It’s written with a quiet clarity. She has taken each simple sentence like a wooden plank and laid it gently down, one by one, side by side, to form a long, white, quiet, whitewashed dock, the kind you don’t even realize you’re walking, the kind that makes you sit a spell at the end and dangle your feet into the cool, still water.

It’s an exquisite story. To me, the most striking thing about it is that I know this woman. I mean, we’ve never met, but I think you’ll understand after you read it.

So, please. Go read the inaugural survivor story on Violence UnSilenced — Cary’s story — and continue to spread the word.