My Query:
How do we share our stories and have them be heard? How do we start to trust the stories that tell of an experience that is not our own? If no one else saw it, did it happen? Owner of a car, living in rural Virginia, I don't walk down the sidewalk as often as I used to. When I lived in a city without a car, I walked a lot. As a serial pedestrian, I used to play a game. Could I arrive at my destination without hearing at least one cat call? I'd be a half a block away, reveling in the idea that I had finally achieved my goal, and seemingly out of nowhere, it would come. The whistle, a comment, a yell out of a car window. It was like they knew I had almost escaped undisturbed. It did not matter if I was in a residential area, in the banking district, going shopping. It did not matter where I walked, what I wore, nothing matter except whether or not I was walking alone. When I walked with my husband, I never once heard a cat call. Sure, he knew they happened. But I never really discussed it with him. Never mentioned how tiring it was to never be able to be alone in my thoughts, truly safe in them, safe from intrusion. Tired of the pure predictability of it all. So, in his mind, did they ever happen? Even so, what was he to do? Tables turned when my husband and I moved to the US. He has encountered numerous acts of racism during his time here. From the crime of driving while Latino to having doors slammed in his face when coming to pick up a job application. And, then there are all those instances he did not tell me about, so tired is he of telling the same story with interchangeable names for the characters. Every time, he was alone, and I found myself second guessing his retelling of the experience. Because, now if I didn't see it, it didn't happen. After all, these things never happened to me. How could they keep happening to him without at least some of it being his fault? Right? The result is the self-centered world view that since these things don't happen to me, I somehow feel able to know that they don't really happen. They are a problem for somewhere else, probably not a problem at all. I was six or so when a man exposed himself to me and a friend in a parking lot near our houses. I never noticed what he was doing since I was looking at his face and not his crotch, but that does not change the fact that he did it in front of two young girls. He certainly did not wait for adults to show up! Maybe it didn't happen. I cut my hair short in high school, in part, so that I could walk home from the bus stop with less attention from drivers in the passing cars. They can't see your chest from the back, I found, and most of my jeans were hand-me-downs from my brother anyway, aiding my androgynous look. Maybe the decrease of cat calls and in the number of cars slowing down was all in my imagination? And the stories go on. Getting so repetitive that you almost forget how weird it is that someone feels compelled to enter your space uninvited for no other reason than to objectify you, to ridicule, to belittle, or whatever it is they feel entitled to do. Really, why mention them at all? It is like pointing out that grass grows on a lawn. Background noise due to the high frequency of events. Yet, how do others know they happen if they are not there? I think back to my conversations with my father trying to remember if I ever discussed these things with him. Perhaps I asked him questions in a hypothetical kind of way. But I don't remember recounting anything to him about my walks home from the bus stop. I never asked to be picked up in order to avoid the harassment. He wasn't there on those walks. He never asked. I didn't tell him. A constant part of my life that I never shared with him, never gave voice to, assuming he must know because it seemed so obvious to me. With my mother, we had conversations; sharing stories as a twisted coming-of-age ritual. A parallel story-telling to remember the never-ending obstacle course of being female. Often these events occur without an audience. And, when they do, the bystander may assume that the event is an anomaly rather than a pattern, or more painfully, simply how things are. So it continues that men dismiss the female experience, and whites dismiss the experience of non-whites, and rich dismiss the experience of the poor, and, and, and, the list goes on. Because we know things that we experience. It is not our experience when we are not there. Therefore, we know it didn't happen because we were not there.
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