I've served the women who responded to violence and were facing harsher punishment than any man would have for the same crime. No one was willing to h
I’ve served the women who responded to violence and were facing harsher punishment than any man would have for the same crime. No one was willing to hear her. Police, attorneys, her attorneys, the children’s guardian ad litems, would come to the domestic violence advocate trying to “understand her”. For a woman whose native language is the same as there’s. But understanding the dynamics of domestic violence against the backdrop of this society can be complicated. You do have understand that even in the West, “freedom” is a mirage for some.
The Invisible Glue
There is a very hard, very quiet truth that I’ve been sitting with lately. It’s about the roles we are taught to play, almost from birth. The heavy lifting we do to keep things stabilized, even when they probably shouldn’t be stable. 
We are taught to be the glue.
It sounds lovely on the surface, doesn’t it? Being the glue. It sounds supportive. Essential. We are the ones who remember birthdays, who soothe flaring tempers, who make a house feel like a home.
But when you look closer at what we are being asked to hold together, the picture changes. It becomes painful.
We aren’t just holding families or communities together with love. Too often, we are holding together a system that relies on our compliance to survive. We are patching the cracks in a foundation that wasn’t built for us.
This conditioning runs deep. It whispers to us that our safety, or perhaps what looks and feels like safety (counterfeit safety), lies in maintaining the status quo. Don’t rock the boat. Keep the peace. Even if the peace is a lie.
This is the part that breaks my heart the most. And yes, I am always in my own state of unlearning. Always disappointed to find the enemy implant. For me-spirituality, older mentors, children, innocent laughter, art, studying history, good music, dance, good healthy love, studying other cultures-are my purifiers.
When a woman—or God forbid, a young girl—finds the courage to say, “I don’t feel safe here,” what is our collective instinct?
Is it to surround her? Or is it to hush her?
We have been trained, generation after generation, to fear the disruption more than the danger. We worry about the reputation of the institution, or the man causing the harm, more than the soul of the person he harmed.
So, we become gatekeepers. We turn on the one pointing at the fire because we don’t want to admit the house is burning. It feels safer to attack the whistleblower than to confront the predator they are pointing at. It’s a terrible, backwards kind of loyalty.
They pretend that it is only Black culture but that isn’t true at all is it? Because that’s a type of glue too….
And since we are here…..
This glue, doesn’t just hold up patriarchy. It holds up racism, too.
It is difficult to admit how often we, particularly women adjacent to power, money, or the majority, act as the buffer. We become so focused on maintaining a certain kind of “polite” order that we refuse to see the profound differences in power and safety among us.
We protect our own comfort by actively looking away from another woman’s reality. If acknowledging her pain means dismantling the systems that give us our own small measure of privilege, too often, we choose the system.
I say “we” because I am not separate from this conditioning. None of us are.
We often talk about “giving a voice to the voiceless,” but that phrase is a whole socially endorsed lie. No one is voiceless. Many people are simply unheard, or intentionally silenced, or living in the gaps where our technology and our titles do not reach.
If we want to find the truth of how the world actually works, we have to look toward what I call the socialized bottom.
We have to look toward the women and girls who do not have the luxury of an internet connection, a degree, or a platform.
The Illusion of the Center
It is a humbling thing to realize that even in our struggle, even in our advocacy, we can inadvertently create new hierarchies. We get caught up in the world of influencers and academics. We start to believe that the “front lines” are the ones we can see on a screen.
But the real work of survival is happening in the silence.
It is happening in villages without power, in the long forgotten neighborhoods where politicians broke promises, in homes where a phone is a distant dream, and in lives where the daily struggle for safety and bread leaves no room for digital discourse. When we build our movements only from the perspective of those with access, we are still only building half a house. We are missing the foundation.
The Privilege of the Platform
Having the ability to speak and be heard by a global audience is a profound privilege. It is a form of power. And like any power, it can become a wall if we aren’t careful.
We must be honest with ourselves: we who have the data, the degrees, and the airtime are still, in many ways, the elite of the world’s women. If we only listen to each other, we are just echoing our own relative comfort.
To truly “pass the mic” is not an act of charity. It is an act of necessity.
It is the recognition that the woman at the furthest margin knows something about power and resilience that we—with all our resources—have forgotten. She sees the system from the outside in. She knows where the walls are thinnest.
Building Upward
IF we want to dismantle the structures that harm us, we cannot start at the top and hope the freedom trickles down. It never does. It never has. It never will. Never.
We must build from the bottom.
We must center the girl whose name will never be a hashtag. No one will ever “say her name”. We must listen to the woman whose wisdom isn’t packaged in a curriculum. We must acknowledge that our “access” is a tool we should be using to dismantle the very barriers that keep our peers in the dark.
True solidarity requires a certain kind of ego-death. It requires us to admit that we are not the protagonists of this story just because we have the loudest microphones.
The center of the world isn’t where the cameras are. It’s where the struggle is most raw, most quiet, and most ignored. That is where the future is actually being born.
We learned it at dinner tables and in school hallways. We learned that being a “good girl” or a “good woman” meant being agreeable. It meant absorbing shock, not creating it.
It is a survival tactic. Somewhere along the line, we internalized the idea that if we just keep the powerful people happy, maybe we will be safe. If we are the glue, maybe we won’t be discarded.
But the cost is too high. It costs us our integrity. It costs us each other.
I don’t have an easy answer for how to stop. Unlearning a lifetime of instinct is slow and painful work. But perhaps it starts by just noticing the glue on our hands.
It starts by wondering what might happen if we stopped smoothing over the cracks. What if we let the things that need to break, finally break?
It would be messy. It would be terrifying.
But maybe, finally, it would be honest.