Speak

I am 13 years old, in the supply closet of our Home Ec classroom. Michael Chambers has his hand up my shirt. I don’t want this, but I also don’t know how to say no. I tolerate it and my tolerance is his permission. My discomfort is probably clear to him, but as long as I don’t verbally resist, his mind can justify his behavior and allow him to look past all of the other signals that this is not what I want. Every cell in my body is screaming no. Every muscle is constricting with an absolute no. But I can’t get my voice to say the word. I sit, tense, unresponsive, as he moves his hands over my still developing breasts.

I will not realize for another 30 years that my voice is a powerful force, that it alone can alter entire scenarios and derail an uncomfortable situation in an instant. The teacher is right around the corner. If I use my voice, maybe he will stop what he is doing. If he doesn’t, if he persists, my voice will sail right past his unhearing ears to the teacher who will certainly put a stop to this. I have a way out. I am not a victim of anything other than my own lack of courage. Does he know I don’t want this? Yes, of course he does. The possessive, victorious leer on his face communicates this clearly. He will always be able to tell himself that in my lack of verbal protest he did nothing wrong, if he even cares about such things, which I doubt he does. He should know better. Other boys know better. Other boys don’t do this to me. Other boys have more respect and kinder hearts. Mike Chambers isn’t respectful or kind. He will go on to date rape a girl in high school. Another shy wallflower like me.

He knows what he is doing. And yet, despite all of this—despite his shittiness and his immorality—I am not his victim. I am my own victim. I have the power to avert this entire experience and I don’t use it. I am too frightened. Of what? I‘m not certain. Is it fear of being ridiculed? Being called a nerd? Being considered a loser? Probably all of these things. Things that at this tender age absurdly matter to me.

Mike holds the most valuable currency in the middle school ecosystem—popularity. All I have to do is tell him to get off me and then walk away, but I am insecure and think I should go along with what this popular boy is doing. My inability to stand up for myself nearly drowns me in shame. I don’t know how to reconcile the painful disconnect between who I wish I was—the girl that says Get your fucking hands off me—and who I am—the girl that silently allows herself to be pawed at and hating herself for it. I choose silence. In this choice I add another layer of self-loathing to my identity. I close my eyes and wait for it to be over. I won’t know until I am an adult and have the benefit of wisdom and self-compassion that I am not to blame. The shame belongs to a boy with roving hands who explores my body without an invitation.

It is a memory that I will think back on, along with other experiences in which I stayed silent, thirty years later when I am a forty-three year old woman facing a cancer diagnosis in—of all places—my throat.

With this startling news I will sit down on my porch and think of all the humiliating moments that I could have been spared had I dared to speak up. I will think back on all the people I couldn’t say no to. Of all the ways I sold my soul because it was easier than speaking up. Of all the things I should have said, declared, defended, demanded. They are easy memories to access because they’ve always been on the surface, reminding me how weak I am.

I will sit there on my porch holding a cup of coffee that has gone cold and marvel that the place in my body where my voice lives is getting very sick, and for what? So other people could get away with treating me badly? People who never deserved my time, let alone something so precious as my health? The absurdity of it will hit me like a like a tornado—full force and devastating, leaving an eerie sort of calm in its wake. My lifelong inability to speak up for myself will culminate in this moment.

The shame I carried for a lifetime will suddenly morph into clear-eyed awareness and from that awareness a lioness will emerge—a fierce warrior who stands up and says, “I’m not getting sick for you.” It is a declaration that will carry me through; a message I will continually send back through the threads of my history to all the people who should have heard ‘no’ from my lips, and into the future to all the people who will hear no.

I will stand up from my porch and begin fighting the illness, and I will win. And never again will I be afraid to use my voice. In fact, it will become so natural to speak up for myself and for what is right that eventually I will marvel that there was ever a time I wasn’t able to.

Heather Wallace is a former special education teacher who now devotes her time to writing and teaching yoga. She lives in Asheville, NC with her husband and two spoiled cats.