2 Oct 2025: Seven years ago, I was going back and forth to DC to participate in mass peaceful protests against the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh. Showing up every day with other survivors of sexual assault and rape, demanding that someone who had clearly participated in these activities not be appointed to the highest court in our land.
We would knock on the doors of representatives, and if they let us in, we would tell our stories. Some of these stories were being spoken out loud for the first time by women in their eighties. After each story, we, collectively, said: “I believe you.” It was one of the most profound, healing moments I have ever experienced in my life.
So what were we afraid of? Aside from the obvious–that being a rapist SHOULD disqualify you from, at the very least, at the scrape the crud off the bottom of the barrel bare minimum FFS, this job in particular–we were also afraid that this was the first step in overturning Roe v Wade.
We were not wrong. Seven years ago. We said the thing out loud. No one listened, not in a way that mattered.
I would start my day at some ungodly hour, making sure all of my work tasks for my full time job were done (I also had the blessing of my ED to participate in these protests, and on more than one occasion was joined by one or two of our board members–belonging to an organization created to alleviate the trauma of children experiencing sexual abuse, which is reported only about ten percent of the time, this was kind of an important issue to us.) and then I would get on a train to DC.
My friend messaged me one day: I need your mailing address, my mother insists on sending you bail money and you cannot say no. (The bail money was covered, but the trains were getting expensive, so I did not say no.)
My other friends who were not close enough to DC to physically show up said: thank you for being there for us. Thank you for showing up every day. We are so angry.
I felt it in my body. My back ached from sitting on the floor of the capital building, or in the not very comfortable chairs, post-arrest, in the holding area waiting to get processed so I could go home, sleep a few hours, and get back up and do it all again.
I got some sort of sinus infection. None of this mattered. I was going to keep showing up. For as long as it took.
Meanwhile, on the internet, the trolls were telling me I was a failure to all women ever because I chose not to report my rape decades ago. It was complicated. I had my reasons. It’s nobody’s business.
Noted for the record: report and be called a liar; don’t report and be called a traitor.
I was. Have been since. So. Fucking. Exhausted.
Now, let me pause for a moment to tell you that, literally as I was typing up this post, I got my period. I am in what they call pre-menopause. For the menfolk, let me break this down for you. From approximately the age of 12, give or take about three years, women (for the sake of clarity, I am using this term to include any person with a uterus, no matter how they choose to define their gender) “become women” and get our periods, and for the next 40ish years, for the luckiest amongst us, we have about a week every month were we are not experiencing premenstrual pain, menstruating, dealing with postmenstrual things, or ovulating. At any point, we may become pregnant by choice or by force. Our country has decided to make laws about what we may or may not do when this occurs.
Then, around the age of 50, women enter pre-menopause. We survey our field of fucks and find it barren. We don’t give a shit about anything you think we should give a shit about. More things happen to our bodies that are unpleasant. This makes us even crankier. Currently, whatever possibly viable eggs I have left in there are pretty much phoning it in, and not making too much hassle. They, too, are fucking exhausted.
Menopause is one single day. Menopause is the day when we have not had a period for exactly one year. Then we go into post-menopause. Still with the weird things happening to our bodies.
All of this to say: menfolk, when you joke about women on their periods or being overly emotional or looking all sweaty because we are having hot flashes–dudes, you have no idea what we put up with for almost our entire lives that we mostly keep quiet about because shit needs to get done, and generally we are the ones doing it–I assure you, we find these flippant, dismissive one-off microaggressions not in the least funny, and are probably fantasizing about ways in which we could dismantle your corpse and hide it in the back garden if we weren’t so fucking polite and didn’t have 20 more pressing things on our to-do list (do you even wonder why women are so obsessed with true crime podcasts?) before we can settle in for the night and scroll mindlessly through social media for approximately one hour before we fall asleep with our phones on our chests.
I tell you this because I care, menfolk. I care about that one dude that will read this and actually take it to heart and maybe be a little nicer to their partner, maybe do a dish or two, change a diaper without complaining, ask, in replacement of aforementioned flippant jokes, “What is it you most need right now? How can I help you? Do you need snacks or a pillow or for me to turn the thermostat up or down?”
But back to my main point. Let me tell you about just one day, October 1, 2018, taken from something I posted on Facebook one night after arriving back home after another full day of protesting:
Still
Still
coughing up the phlegm
of patriarchy.
Still
feel the pressure of our
collective stories
pushing down
upon my
aching
chest.
Still
feel our voices
all women’s voices
hoarse with
screaming
in the face of our
elected officials
in my scratchy
throat.
Still
feel
the
exhaustion
of
centuries
of
misogyny.
Still
carrying the
weight
of all of this
in my
buzzing
angry
bones.
Sometimes
the personal
becomes
political
becomes
physical.
Writ
on the very
female bodies
we are trying to
protect
at all costs.
We were not wrong. We just wish someone had listened to us back then. When will you start listening? Today? Has it gotten bad enough that the sound of a woman’s voice, the heft of her opinion, the weight of the burdens she carries, the heart she breaks open every day… are you willing to hear it now? When is enough enough? Because we would really love to know.
Apocalyptic Whimsy 