It has been a draining two weeks. I don’t think I’ve ever written more than I have in the past two weeks - maybe when finishing my thesis for my MFA, but as much as I agonized over the words, no one really read it. The fact sheets, blog posts, social media copy, speeches, and op-eds I write for work, people read, even though they are rarely my by-line.
While the politics of hunger are horrendous, the emotional toll of advocacy and communications work in our news and media ecosystem got to me last week. As I read the op-ed in Newsweek by Brooke Rollins, much of which wasn’t fact checked on the most basic editorial level and the rest of which was cruel, I couldn’t help the pull , the seduction of silence. “What is the point anyways?”
While trying to formalize a coalition of policy and advocacy organizations who work on anti-hunger work, specifically SNAP, in Maine, a young colleague voiced a similar despair.
“I wonder if research and data matters. Everyone knows what makes children healthier or what hurts kids and everyone ignores it,” she said calmly. It’s true.
We, and by we I mean the overwhelming consensus in the academic and scientific fields of public health, know how to prevent chronic disease, addiction, trauma, abuse, neglect, on a population level by ensuring children receive nutrition, care, education, and healthy housing and yet over and over we choose policies that instead make companies wealthier and protect adults from the truth of their behavior.
It’s one thing to speak up and to embrace the responsibility of advocating for people, children who don’t have the same access to power and influence when you have a man who supports you and loves you. As a woman, a mom, who doesn’t have that support, and has the opposite - a constant fear of retaliation for choosing words over silence, truth over secrets - my job is sometimes terrifying.
I’m ashamed to admit that, but there is a protection offered by being a likable mom, wife, and woman in the public sphere. Without you are professionally and personally vulnerable in a way we don’t want to talk about. Every interview, every post, every story brings out a quiet, but stead thrum of fear. Too much attention and starts the voice in my head.
Marian Keyes, an Irish author, calls this voice “The Fear” and I think most writers have it.
“Who do you think you are? Writers are egomaniacs. You’re always making problems. You put everyone else ahead of your own kids. That never happened. You make a big deal out of everything. You think you’re better than everyone. The kids are embarrassed by you.”
Being tired, lonely and failing are triggers for me. There is nothing that makes me feeling as worthless than failing to be heard. Not great for someone trying to convince the Trump administration or Republican lawmakers to release SNAP funds or to improve the program in order to protect the health of children.
The week dragged on - working 10-12 hours a day without eating well, one word texts from my kids and the guilt and fear got worse. The craving for a kind word or even the knowledge that anyone says anything positive about me to my kids ever became physical - and embarrassing.
This is when silence starts to feel easier. It’s a trap.
Wednesday morning at a conference of advocates, a room full of women, maybe 60 or 70, and 4 or 5 men, because these issues are “women’s issues” and therefore not important enough for men, Congresswoman Shontel Brown spoke about her work on the agricultural committee and came right out and said, “Silence isn’t safety. By keeping your head down and going along with this administration, you aren’t safe. They will come for us all eventually.”
Maybe someday someone will speak up for me. And if they don’t, I’ll keep speaking because my kids, all our kids need it, and despite my moments of weakness, I’m able. I have support. I have the skills and I have the confidence. And thankfully now I have the knowledge to recognize that voice isn’t real and it doesn’t stop me.
In the meantime here are some inspirations on silence, secrets and shame and stigma for those that need it.
Lily Allen’s latest album is everywhere and it’s being dissected from every angle. It’s about the break-up of her marriage to an actor who cheated on her in a pretty spectacular way. While the circumstances are probably unrelatable, apparently the emotions have hit a nerve. I have always been in awe of her bolshiness and vulnerability. Now that she’s a mom to two teenagers the pressure for secrecy and silence described as privacy and protection for her teens (who lived through the relationship and so their mom’s trauma) this feels even riskier.
Allen told Perfect Magazine “And I feel like having [the album] exist for as long as it has, and it not having been released into the world yet, has stunted my healing process or growth, as a result. It’s been something that’s been weighing on me. So I am excited about the possibility of it helping me to move on. And I’m trying not to feel shame around that, because there is a part of me that feels guilt and shame that I have to be able to share things on such a grand scale in order to process them. Like there’s a grandiosity or almost a sociopathic element to that. But that’s what I do! I do it on my podcasts, I did it in my book. I had a childhood where I felt completely invisible and in my adult life, for whatever reason, I’ve decided to be incredibly visible. And I guess I am a ‘character’ in lots of ways. And I feel like the character can’t move on until everyone knows the story. Can’t move on to the next chapter.”
An author shared a similar sentiment about her memoir with me. Once it was published and became a story for others, she could relate to the story of her grief in a different way.
Wharton’s essay about Allen’s album generated discussion about speaking and who has the right to speak about family and marriage. In the comments she reminded me of this great quote from Nora Ephron about Heartburn: “Everyone always asks, was he mad at you for writing the book? And I have to say, Yes, yes, he was. He still is. It is one of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it! I mean, it’s not as if I wasn’t a writer. It’s not as if I hadn’t often written about myself. I’d even written about him. What did he think was going to happen? That I would take a vow of silence for the first time in my life?”
Yes, because most people do - they don’t scream at their neighbors posting lies and insults about SNAP participants on Facebook because the stigma of needing SNAP or any assistance to feed yourself and your kids is so powerful that silence seems safer (and might be). Dozens of people have told me they don’t use their EBT dollars or even follow through with the application because of the shame.
It is hard to find the right words. It is hard to speak the truth about hard and secret things with compassion. It’s hard to avoid shaming people or making them uncomfortable if their behavior is abusive and hurtful. It’s exhausting.
But at the end of the day I’m grateful I can do it.
Clint Smith’s Ted Talk and his poetry are great reminder that despite the promise of safety by keeping quiet, we ultimately betray ourselves and we can’t escape that in the long run.
