I don’t think most people understand how much trust it destroys when you tell survivors of nasty shit that we need to speak nicely to be heard.
Speaking nicely didn’t stop the bad shit happening to us and it won’t stop bad things happening to other people.
Our anger is justified. Our grief is justified.
Your discomfort with hearing it comes from your fear that the same bad things could happen to you.
So please stop shushing us.
Sit with your fear.
Hear our anger and pain.
Once you tone police a survivor we never trust you with that vulnerability again.
So good you need to share it?
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Published by Angela
Angela J Williams, PhD, is a writer, illustrator and story teller from Wollongong, Australia.
She is the author of Snakes and Ladders: a memoir and host of the Deboning Power Podcast.
A writer, thinker and yeller, Angela Williams is mildly notorious for seeing problems and pointing them out. She’s tussled with Fred Nile in the Sydney Morning Herald, taken academia to task in the Guardian’s Anonymous Academic, gone to Crikey about the treatment of mentally ill women in prison, and most recently blown the whistle on dangerous risks in her (former) charity workplace. Angela does one thing really well – find problems and yell about them.
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Angela J Williams 