A vocab

Hi! Hope you guys are keeping well. The second wave of cooking is on us. We have been trying new things. I want to do a newsletter of recipes and my very DIY mother but this one is not that. This one is about a grant I got. It was from APC and it was to document how violence in personal relationships shrinks the space womxn take up online.

I want to write about them because they were so compassionate and warm to work with, it felt I could be open and didn’t have to hold back my apprehensions. It felt like a safe space for me to be myself and ask without worrying about shaming. It was so refreshing. As the project ended, I had to write a narrative summary and also send a financial breakdown about how I had spent the money. Now I find all kinds of paperwork intimidating and told them so. They said, “don’t worry, if you forget to fill in a part, we can always ask you.” That was so comforting. I was telling someone on Instagram about it and they said, “It is so nice you have a person and not an email to respond to.” I couldn’t agree more.

I still sat on my report till the last minute and then started work on it. One of things I had to answer was about how I made a difference. For once, I was happy with how I answered it and I am sharing it with you.

This project was proposed as #LoveSexandViolence but I decided to go with #LoveSexandTech because I felt many people may not look at what they go through as violence. When I faced gender-based violence in an intimate relationship, I didn't have the vocabulary to label it or make sense of it. I was so ridden with shame and so torn and heartbroken that it took me Meena Kandasamy's piece in the Outlook to make some sense of my pain: https://magazine.outlookindia.com/story/i-singe-the-body-electric/280179. Years later, when she wrote the book - When I hit you, I read that too. Meena's words helped me cope and make sense of my pain, I felt less alone. It took me years to unpack my experience and to stop blaming myself and it took this project to let go of the remnants of the hurt. 

I chose to drop violence because I felt some may not deem what they are going through as violence and may not engage. A younger me wouldn't call it violence because violence meant the complex relationship I was in was wrong and I was wrong for wanting to  fix it. I was also wrong in having found love in it. I saw this reflected when I asked womxn if they had shared what they were going through with their friends? Some said that they had shared a watered down version. Some said that they didn't because they didn't want their friends to say, "Why do you choose these men?" And another who said, “I needed the validation and I didn't want my friends to say - leave him.” 

In my experience, how people experience violence / transgression is not linear and which is why I wanted to have a safe feminist space for survivors to open up and share their stories, and for them to have control over their own narrative; to showcase these stories such that the listeners understand they are not alone, and build solidarity; and open up a space for respectful and kind dialogue to address issues related to gender-based violence. 

When the stories started trickling in, a lot of them chronologically mentioned acts of transgression and violence but not much about how they felt or why they stayed. In some stories, I thought it was necessary to probe and asked writers if they would be okay and to only share what they were comfortable with sharing. This was extremely tricky for me because I didn't know if anything I may be asking would be triggering to the writers. The writers talked about how they had shut down their experiences and revisiting it was painful but also cathartic. With the writers being vulnerable and generous with their experience they also gave readers a vocabulary, a similar kind of vocabulary that reading Meena Kandasamy's piece perhaps gave me. Reading messages like this made me feel  that I made a small change - For someone who always puts herself through hell for not being more smart about the obvious red flags, it gives a guilty comfort to read that others have gone through it too. And that maybe sometimes, it’s not always the bearer’s fault. I understand you must be going through a lot yourself, reading and filtering these stories must be tiresome and triggering. But thank you so much for doing the work that you do. ♥️

That’s it, I am going to leave you with this piece from the book (pdf) I am reading.

And if you will, please also read this: How Long It Takes Lessons To Sink In

Take care.
<3
Indu