No, Not Everything Will Be Alright

I know you want to comfort and reassure me. I know that you want me to cling to hope and tell me that everything is going to be alright. I know you are a good person. I know most people are good. But I also know hate has been emboldened and become entitled.

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This is for the people who will have to take off their nail varnish or bind their breasts in secret. This is for the souls we couldn’t ask, so we didn’t know. This is for the joy of living life fully and completely with yourself and feeling proud of it.

This is for the girls who have had it confirmed that qualifications and clear, logical speech are not enough. This is for the girls who have feared that their looks were all that they could ever influence.

This is for the boys who have to step up to the plate with false ideas about what makes greatness. This is for those sweet souls who have to learn to bully.

This is for the disabled who are allowed to be openly mocked and denied services.

This is for those whose employment and wages look insecure.

This is for the poor, the tired, the old, the ill and infirm.

This is for those not deemed to look right.

This is for those without papers.

This is for those who are told they live in garbage and that their lives are garbage.

This is for our planet that deserves a break from garbage.

No, not everything will be alright. Don’t ask me how I know.

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This is not for the rapists and the haters and the preachers whose own bodies are safely cared for by people they dislike or disrespect.

But it is for those who have become so much more than the sexual assault that others thought defined them.

This is for the people who have demonstrated and taken risks.

This is for the people who have been afraid to stand up to bullies.

This is for the hospital staff who chose to work to save lives and are now paralysed with decisions they can’t make.

This is for the sisters and friends who found ways to help in a wilderness of silence.

This for the students away from home for the first time and not knowing how to ask that he is sure they will be safe.

This is for the teachers who guided them with friendly faces and confidences, feeling unable to act.

No, not everything will be alright. And you know how you know this. Because you have lived it before.

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This is for the women who have been there and done that and hoped that it would never have to cross their minds again, because it was over now and things were better.

This is for the mothers and grandmothers who had hoped that their children would find it easier and safer and would not lose friends in medieval ways.

No, not everything will be alright. Don’t ask me how I know.

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This is a post for all the women who have clung to the cold tiles of a bathroom floor and silently hugged their pain and the lost bits of life flowing through them.

This is for the women whose pregnancies were either wanted or unwanted, but had to say goodbye.

This is for the women who have held their stomachs clinging to a hope to be told there is no heartbeat.

This is for their partners who have watched them faint from blood loss. Who have held their hands as they seizure at a threshold.

No, not everything will be alright. Don’t ask me how I know.