Story 246

To Story 242, what you have written here is brave, and I want to honor that. But I also want to name what is living beneath the surface of this reflection, because you have already named it yourself, even if you pulled back from its full weight.

Angela Davis said that “we have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.” What you are describing is precisely that unfinished interior work. When you trace your distancing back to a mother who measured your worth by your womb, to a classroom that taught you femininity meant stillness, to decades of learning that women were the primary enforcers of your own confinement, you are not describing personal failure. You are describing the patriarchy’s most sophisticated machinery: the internalization of oppression so complete that the oppressed become its most reliable administrators.

Bell Hooks was unsparing about exactly this dynamic. In Feminism Is for Everybody, she wrote that “as long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized.” The same holds for the power of institutional survival, of proximity to safety, of the learned instinct to step back. Women who police, undermine, and abandon other women are not acting from freedom. They are acting from a script written for them by the very system they believe they have escaped.

Audre Lorde saw it structurally. In Sister Outsider she wrote: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And one of the master’s most well worn tools is women’s silence in the face of other women’s suffering. The distancing. The careful neutrality. The retreat into complexity when solidarity is what is being asked.

The catch-22 you describe, too quiet or too loud with no acceptable register for complaint, is not a paradox to be solved through better strategy. It is the architecture of suppression. The system does not have a preferred volume for women’s grievances because it was never designed to resolve them. It was designed to exhaust us until we turn on one another, turn inward, or simply stop.

You say you have received more support from men than from women. I do not doubt that. But I want you to consider what Toni Morrison said in an interview with O, The Oprah Magazine: “If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.” The men who supported you did so, in many cases, without risking what solidarity between women would have cost them. Women who support each other in patriarchal institutions risk being consumed by the same fire. That asymmetry is not evidence that women are less trustworthy. It is evidence of how much more the system demands from us when we choose each other.

You are right that none of us arrived at this moment clean. But as James Baldwin wrote in his 1962 essay “As Much Truth As One Can Bear”: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
You are facing it. That matters. But facing it is the beginning, not the conclusion.

The women you are distancing yourself from do not need you to be certain or absolved. They need you not to be the silence that erases them. Your unexamined complexity, left unexamined, is not neutrality. It is a vote cast in the only way the system requires: quietly, and with clean hands.

The path forward is collective. But a collective requires presence, not perfect, not ready, but present.

The question this moment is putting to you is not whether you understand. You do.

The question is what understanding, without action, is actually worth.