All my life I sat with my internal knowing in the back of the car, in a million dangerous scenarios. And I knew my words would fall on deaf ears,

It was as if I was speaking to automatons or robots, unthinking beings. It was if I had no Power and no way out.

I began to question whether I even did exist. And there became the existential wound.

The wound of all women who came before me, who were trapped in the system, who’s wounds were so denied they became automatons to the system.

Who’s Voice was so denied, they began to think that they did not exist at all.

Who’s Power was so denied by the system that they became absorbed by it, before they ever knew how to use it. They became automatons, they carried on to deny their daughter’s Voice, Truth, and Right to Exist, Safely.

Quietly this happened. Loudly behind closed doors, those instances resonated through the silence, but it only takes silence to continue to let them ring.

All my life I knew I did not exist, not to my family. And this is the way it continued. I contracted when I am scared, threatened, unsafe. And in doing so assessed the danger. This much is Natural.

In my experience, the next safest thing to do was collapse. Fawn. Also Natural.

The part where it becomes unNatural: collapse on my boundaries, my needs, my safety, to remain safe. Then to attack myself to keep myself there in collapse, also to remain safe. My Fight response turned inward.

It is how I was prepared for life. And it would only serve me if I continued to live alongside abusive men, and abusive systems. Of which many of us are doing so by virtue of our birth.

My family calls this normal. They still believe in this way:

When I feel unsafe, which is the pervasive experience in my life and line of women, my immediate response is to neglect the feeling of being scared and outwardly to orient to the feelings of those that scared me. It is the way to protect the feelings of a man who is out of control, to keep him from going overboard, becoming more dangerous. It is a way to continue men behaving “safe” so women and children could be safe in their presence. There was no way to leave until the last 50 years. There was no where else to go. No one else to go to who would not be the same. Much like I was stuck in the back seat of my family car for 18 years, women lived marriages of this. We all continue to live lifetimes under the systems of this, abuse, violence, denial, and erasure of women’s experience and existence.

Do you know one mentor of mine, spoke plainly of her family’s story in which the male abuser finally died at the end of his life and the matriarch whispered to her “finally we are free.” This resonated, validated, radicalized me. Because somewhere back in our line, we all have one of those men, and the women who are alive today, barring some great amount of inner work and therapy, are still living in the ways the women who survived that passed down. Further enabling more men or people into positions of abuse. So much so that we’ve created systems on this indoctrination of abuse and call it society. Authority. The way things are done.

The message to myself is that I don’t care about me. I self orient to another to neglect myself: the radical thought and proposal of my own existence and right to my feelings, and this is the simple, silent way it happens. Internal.

Trust comes from inside. Trust comes from you, my darlings. If no one ever told you it’s because they didn’t know. Let me tell you now. Trust comes from a choice. From knowing I have a choice in every scenario and then acting accordingly:

I can accept this. I can not accept this. I can accept this with conditions. That my voice be heard. That changes are made. That therapy and recognition be enacted.

But the Trust comes from me. It comes from knowing I won’t collapse on myself, my feelings, my boundaries and smother them out so another can exist in the space that was carved out in the etch-a-sketch of existence, for me. For my body, my being, my experience, me. It starts with not collapsing on myself. And it ends with I can not accept this. In between there is I matter. In the moment of contraction, before the collapse, the internalized bully coming to do the dirty work of my abusers past, will I tell myself I don’t exist? Then I will disappear.

This shift in you- of Self Trust – is enough. It is enough to upend entire systems put in place to oppress everyone regardless of gender. It is enough to rewrite trans-generationally, entire lineages of learned response and behavior transported through time by tiny pockets of existence called molecules and DNA. You can rewrite the words etched onto that little droplet, you can send reverberations through time. Just. by. Trusting. Yourself. And Acting on it.

Our systems raised and created by men have forgotten the standard of humanity that we hold in our very DNA if we unlock this nearly permanent contraction we inherit as women born into a man’s world. We hold the balance by our very existence and first we need to remember what we had forgotten, what was purposefully taken from us: We have the right to exist. In or out of a 9-5 job setting. On a farm. In a Home. On the block. In your Cells. As you Are. Whoever you Are. Whoever you discover yourself becoming. You have the Right to be.

Don’t be an automaton damning yourself alongside future generations. Make you ancestors cheer, weep, and wretch from the Power of your Might that lives inside you. Letting it out begins with recognition, recognition begins with cognition. Mull the words I exist and see what comes up. Begin to trust that inner Voice who has been SCREAMING at you since time began. Take off the blinders, the deafeners, and speak up to remember. You are half the population. They have convinced us into forgetting: but we hold the Balance.

You Matter. I matter.

You Exist. I exist

You are Enough. We are Enough.