Healing For Who? - by Faye🧚

If you know me well, you’d know that I take human rights advocacy very seriously. Particularly focusing on gender based violence and mental health activism. When it comes to crimes against women, you’d know how intentional I am about it. I go after the most twisted cases and have seen the backlash that follows when a woman speaks up. I know the statistics and I know the instances. I can easily give you screenshots of people that got bullied online after sharing their stories. So when I advocate for people to speak up, know that I’m not being sentimental. I am being practical. But practicality is superficial. Giving you facts is something I can do without flinching. Showing you my wound beneath all this, though, is not as easy because that’s the part that makes my fury what it is. So permit me to stop being practical for a moment. Allow me the privilege of being sentimental. Let me show you my why. People understand why I care about cases like these. But they do not understand the reason for my fury. Last week, a friend of mine said, “I understand why you’re so upset about gender based violence but what I don’t understand is your rage. It almost seems deeply rooted.” And he was right. The type of rage I live with does not come from nowhere. It comes from a deeper level of understanding. It comes from personal experience. I’ve told people to speak up many times. I’ve shared my story with other girls and made them feel less alone and perhaps, begin to heal. I’ve watched them find themselves again. I’ve watched light come back to their eyes while I cheer from the sidelines. And then I sit by myself and do not even know where to begin to heal. So when the world tells me speaking up is how you heal, I can’t help but ask, healing for who? Does that count as being hypocritical? I tell girls that their stories deserve to be heard but I’d never tell my friends and family what happened to me. I just hate being pitied. Even the slightest bit of compassion makes my skin crawl. Perhaps I’m a hypocrite. Preaching one thing, and never having the courage to take my own advice. But lack of courage isn’t what’s stopping me. It’s the need for control. There’s this obsession with control I’ve gained since then. I never want to be in a situation where I feel helpless ever again. I always need to have some sort of control and authority over everything. That is what it does to the mind. It doesn’t last for just that moment. Not months or years. It lasts a person’s entire life. That’s the mental health story nobody puts in captions. And after years of building some semblance of confidence, the last thing I’d want to do is hand it over to an audience. There’s something nobody ever told you about speaking up. The aftermath is a whole trauma on its own. People start asking what I was wearing. And I cannot stand that. God forgive me if I do not want to be labeled. God forgive me if I do not want my whole existence to be defined by what happened to me. God forgive me that I rue the thought of the profile views on my socials increasing not because people like my content, but because they want to see if I look “responsible” enough to believe my story. God forgive me if I refuse to carry the title, “victim” as though it is an alias. God forgive me if the word “survivor” makes my heart drop every time. So no, I will not speak up. Not because I am ashamed. Not to protect the those that not only broke my body but crushed my spirit. But to protect myself. Whenever I hear the world say, “sharing is healing,” I keep asking, healing for who? For me or for the people that derive comfort from hearing my story— a story that shouldn’t even exist in the first place? Healing for me or for the audience that gets to feel something for a moment then scroll away? Because there is a difference between sharing my story and having it taken from me and turned into content. The world says we’re changing things by speaking up, and perhaps that is true. Every voice makes it easier for the next person. I genuinely believe that. But people should have the right to choose what they think is best for them. They should have the right to tell their stories if they want to and when they want to. I believe the right to stay silent should be part of the change we’re advocating for. Because for so long, silence has been forced on me. I had no choice. And now, if speaking up is the only way to be brave, the world has simply moved me from one cage to another. From forced silence to forced visibility. I’m not against speaking up. Not at all. I’ve seen the positive impacts it can have on people firsthand. But if this movement is about building a world where people can speak, it should also build one where people can choose to stay silent. Choice is the change. And until then, this story is mine.

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