Fighting The Cultural Training Of Women To Be Silent

because the world does not look kindly on good women who have demands. this post took a while to work through so it’s going to handle the load for last week’s paid and this week’s paid posts

Shenandoah National Park Skyline Drive | Credit Cindi ShardsAndWords

Part of my training to be a woman by the standards of this culture and more specifically the culture of my very large extended and deeply dysfunctional family, and eventually the poisonous marriage to a violent domestic abuser, was to be quiet in the face of abuse. To go along to get along. To take on the inefficient and toxic anger of others while persistently being shown my value is at the bottom of the list.

It has taken me into this likely last season of life and lots of therapy to recognize when I genuinely “deserve something” - good or bad - and call it what it is. What I mean by good or bad and deserving is reaching back to this training and that marriage. I deserved bad things like being hit in the face or dragged off a bed put on the floor and choked, because…whatever he chose in the moment meant it was fitting.

That’s pretty fucked up. And that, on a much different scale, was my training in my family of origin - only much more subtly setting me up to accept the vile violence of that weak man.

A couple years ago I bought the America The Beautiful lifetime pass for National Parks for older people with a disability. This was a thing I was doing for myself, something I wanted because I knew one day I would be traveling again when I was able to regain my physical health. I’m on a road trip now where that pass has covered the costs of my entry into some of the most beautiful spaces this country has to show us. I’m seeing the Appalachian trail by road/trailheads/trail towns. And the second time I used it I was unsettled in a way I didn’t recognize.