I have felt more like a passive observer, than riled-up revolutionary since Donald Trump became president. Yes, I blogged the day of the election and the day after that. I have shared others’ videos and posts on Facebook. I participated in the women’s march. And I have engaged in deep and difficult conversations with clients, family, and friends. It’s hardly as though my head has been buried in the sand.
But somehow, it feels like it. No, that’s not quite it. It feels like that’s what you will think, that you will judge my reserved presence and restrained voice as willful, entitled, and privileged withdrawal, that I will not be seen and understood for who I am: a strong woman with passionate opinions, a good heart, and a powerful voice who chooses to not act and not
speak. For now. Not forever.
I am deeply distressed by Trump’s election, his rhetoric, his actions. But I am also deeply distressed by the social-media induced demand that I rise up and speak out; that if I do not, implicit and explicit shame is amply applied.
Believe me, I am all for rising up and speaking out! Rising up and speaking out have enabled the most significant aspects of my own change and transformation.
Rising up and speaking out are what I long for and invite in the lives of my readers, my clients, my friends, and my
daughters in every aspect of life – relationally, emotionally, professionally, creatively, physically, spiritually.
Rising up and speaking out are what women, in principal and by birthright deserve to do without fear of reprisal or consequence.
Rising up and speaking out are manifestations of the feminine at its
strongest and most fierce.
But so are standing still and being silent. In strike. In solace. In sadness. In solidarity. In the wake of all this election has threatened – the potential loss of freedoms, rights, and dignities that so many have fought so long to secure and uphold – may no collateral loss occur because we lose sight of that which cannot be taken from us, that which cannot be legislated, disavowed, or signed away by executive order: our strength and fierceness for one another – in all our complexity, difference, diversity, expression and sometimes even lack thereof.
I am not a passive observer. Whether I rise up like you, or don’t, speak out like you, or don’t, I am actively, tirelessly, and endlessly standing steadily and (for now) silently by your side – in advocacy, in loyalty, in hope, in love.
Forever. For you.