When I was in grad school, I was often writing late at night, and I liked to share my thoughts on Facebook. One night, very late, I received comments on a Facebook from one of my doctoral professors who was quite a bit older than me. She said that I was lucky to have the ability to speak out against my abuser, that she didn’t have that ability because it would have killed her father. She said this, not in a supportive way, but in an angry way. A resentful way. Because her comments were personal to her situation, I wouldn’t mention them here, except that she commented on a public post, and everyone who followed me or shared the post could see them. She commented more then, and the comments became increasingly chaotic and angry. I had liked this woman. I never forgot something that she’d once said in workshop about how women grow up with the threat of violence always nipping at them. She spoke about how much that shapes us, and she was right. I’ve since used those words myself.
Still, she was in a position of power in my program, and I was a graduate student. I didn’t know what to do, so I unfriended her, and then she sent me emails that also didn’t make much sense. One of them simply read, “i am sorry.”
I wasn’t angry at her. I knew that she was a survivor too, and I understood that she was going through something, but I had to draw a boundary. I spoke to the chair of the department, not to get her in trouble, but because I was worried about her. She had, in fact, been acting chaotically in other ways and was forced to take a leave of absence. When she came back, I was still in the program. I said hello to her in the hallway, and she didn’t respond, but her hatred for me was palpable. She never spoke to me again, despite our program being very small.
I wondered what her rationale for hating me was. She, after all, had been the one to attack me, and I had not attacked back.
Later, I was speaking to another faculty member. He said that he thought she was jealous of my publishing success. I said that I, too, thought she was jealous, but not of my publishing success. She was jealous of my ability to speak about what happened happened, as well as the community that I had built in the wake of speaking. She had suffered in silence, and I hadn’t.
When someone has survived what I have survived, they have a couple of options. Both options have costs.
They can speak which will always involve being disbelieved (no matter how credible they are) and likely gaslit or ostracized from certain communities.
They can be silent, which has no social costs at all, but the cost of silence is that the wound becomes a kind of poison.
I was never silent, so I don’t know how that kind of poison feels, but from my perspective, it doesn’t look like it feels good. A friend said to me today that being bitter means you feel a little anger every day, and I had to stop and wonder if I’m bitter, but I’m not. I get angry, but I don’t feel angry every day. I think this is because, through the act of speaking, I have metabolized much of my anger.
Still, though I’m not poisoned inside, the earth around me is scorched in so many ways. Speaking has its price, and it’s not a small one. The treatment I’ve endured from misogynists and colleagues and friends and disbelievers and even other survivors is its own kind of poison.
We choose our poisons. I chose mine, and that professor chose hers.
Still, though she was, to my perspective, bitter, her decision to remain silent came with a lot of benefits. This was a woman who retired with tenure and a nest egg. She had created a career that was built, in part, by her proximity to powerful men, and it paid off—literally.
I will never have that choice. No matter where I go, I will always be known as a woman who speaks.
To speak is to be dangerous.
To be dangerous is to be a threat.
To be a threat means that you must be contained.
Recently, a woman from my hometown commented on a Facebook post (yes, I realize that I could just leave Facebook, but I get a lot of community there) with some unsolicited parenting advice. I asked her to please not give me advice, and she responded angrily. This was a woman who I had known, though not well, when I was in high school. She said, “Kelly Sundberg, don’t be condescending to people who care because you expose yourself.”
I’ll be honest. I was kind of shocked. How was asking her not to give me unsolicited advice “exposing myself?” I stopped replying, but she kept commenting, likely hoping for a response. She finally said that she wasn’t going to be my friend anymore, and unfriended and blocked me. This felt like a very extreme response because I had assumed that it would blow over, and we would just act as though nothing had happened. I’d had no intentions of engaging her further on the topic or unfriending her. Still, she was offended, and I respected her boundary. If she didn’t want to be Facebook friends, that was fine with me. It wasn’t like we were friends in real life anyway.
And what I knew was this: A couple years earlier, that same woman had sent me late night messages that resembled those of the professor. Messages about how she hadn’t been able to speak up when she was abused. Messages that seemed resentful of her inability to speak up, and that resentment was somehow directed at me. She’d messaged the next day that she was sorry, that she had been drinking. I chose to let it slide, but I approached her with wariness after that, often choosing not to engage with her comments. I guess I shouldn’t have engaged the last time either, but I work very hard at being a good parent and don’t really want advice when I’m not asking for it.
I imagine that the situation would have passed, except that one of her friends from my hometown saw the post and somehow got the idea that I had been the blocker rather than the blocked. And that woman unleashed on me. Commented multiple times, which again, I didn’t reply to. Then sent me multiple messages, which forced me to block her. Around the same time, another woman who I actually care about commented that it was a shame to end a friendship over social media, and I replied that “Yes, it’s a shame that X chose to end our friendship over social media.” I realize there is some generational stuff happening here, that older generations maybe don’t know how social media works. But here I was again, being bullied over something I hadn’t instigated or perpetuated.
And then, the original woman sent messages to me on Instagram at 3am. We weren’t connected on Instagram, so they went to my requests, but I found them. Perhaps she didn’t know how to unblock me and send the messages on FB? I’m not sure, but what I am sure of is that no one sends apologies at 3am, so I deleted the messages unread and blocked her that time.
Then, I wrote this on FB:
I wish that Boomer women would stop using me as their personal punching bag because they didn't have the space, community, or culture to process their own traumas (I get this 3-4 times a year). I feel for them 100%. I also can't change the fact that I live in a world that is more supportive to survivors. And I also *have been straight up monastic* in creating a community for myself that's supportive to survivors, which has cost me a lot. These Boomer women (and sorry, but they're always Boomers) harass me out of what is clearly jealousy (X from OU is a prime example for anyone who saw that debacle), but they themselves made/make decisions that kept them in proximity to communities of men (and gave the men power in the process). That is not my fault. Full stop.
No one has any right to be angry or begrudge someone for doing something that they were unwilling to do themselves.
Was the post angry? Yes. Bitter? No. And I don’t regret it because it is true. You might disagree with me, but this is true to my experience. My decision to be so outspoken about abuse has made me a target, even from friends and allies and purported feminists. There is something very wrong with a world where, when survivors become outspoken, they, too often, become targets of a different kind of bullying and harassment.
Speak out about abuse, and it leads to more abuse.
Look, just because I’m outspoken doesn’t mean that I’m bulletproof. I was deeply hurt by what both of those women said to me, as well as their behavior later. I am tender. Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a big softie. When my students cry, I cry with them. When my son’s heart hurts, my heart hurts with him. When I’m angry at my partner, but he makes that face where I can tell he’s feeling sad (even if he’s otherwise being a jerk), I can’t help but soften and grab his hand. I can’t really hold a grudge, for better or for worse, and I’m quick to anger but also quick to forgive.
I am not some soulless monster. The reality is that, in order to stop being a victim, I had to learn how to stick up for myself and others. That does not mean that I stopped feeling, stopped getting hurt, or became impenetrable. I am still every bit as soft as I ever was.
Audrey Kristine Miller, an Assistant Research Professor in Women and Gender Studies at The University of Houston, commented on my Facebook post, and her comment made me feel so seen. She said this:
Kelly, I think you're hitting on something very important here -- a kind of victim blame rooted in resentment by would-be allies who, for innumerable reasons such as fear of consequences, lack of means, etc., have felt paralyzed from challenging the individuals and systems that have victimized them.
As you say, we must empathize with all victims -- I mean, who that has had their life upended by unjust violence doesn't feel like they can merely muster the fight to live, if not curl up and die? That *alone* is an unfair and unspeakable burden we each bear.
But people also vary substantially in what they do following victimization. Most often folx decide that fighting for life is all we can mange, and again that's understandable. But we have to do a much better job recognizing and supporting the small slice of victims who take death-defying leaps, risking everything, into post-victimization activism. Do we as a society have the slightest clue what *that* costs? How deeply sacrificial it is to try to move systems, even knowing your own opportunities and well-being may be further destroyed by doing so?
If we can't figure out how to manage that jealousy or posttraumatic triggering into rabbit holes of social comparison, of whatever it is, how will we, or anyone, ever possibly move the needle in changing the victimizing systems?
I've been doing some empirical work on this very problem -- barriers to ingroup and outgroup allyship -- and want to do much more, because this problem is not only retraumatizing for the small slice of "maverick" victims who have refused to look away, but it seriously undermines the movements themselves. If you write more in this area, could you please tag me or otherwise share, so I'll be sure to find it? Everything you write helps clarify so much for me.. thanks as always for your clear voice and relentless courage. In solidarity.
What Audrey said sums up my thoughts far better than I could have. Let me repeat it for you:
“If we can't figure out how to manage that jealousy or posttraumatic triggering into rabbit holes of social comparison, of whatever it is, how will we, or anyone, ever possibly move the needle in changing the victimizing systems?”
The answer is that we won’t, and we aren’t. Women grow up with the threat of violence always nipping at us, but there are times when the violence is coming from inside the house.
Such an important conversation, thank you.