(Video!) On fleek

Came across this video on the internet, and it brought me to tears. There are so many things we lived with all our lives without questioning, “is that right?”, “is that acceptable?”, “is that fair?”. Or maybe I was just too busy following the “rules” to keep myself as safe as I possibly can.

I have been really busy caught up in work/school the past weeks, and only had enough time to wheelie in with short spurts of highs, but yet to have enough time to sit down to churn out the lows in logical and structured thoughts.

The contents of one of the projects I was working on was about women rights / abuse / protection / etc, and I was kind of caught in a really depressive spiral for a while. Witnessing something is different from seeing it in words strung out in a thoughtful and powerful manner where action (at least bringing the problems to surface) can be taken, and where words are backed by numbers so shocking that I really paused and stared at the screen for a long long time.

When I lived in the mountains, I could hear the drunken shouting, the screaming, and the fighting in the village huts. I did not do anything about it. It never crossed my mind that any one should / could do anything about it – because it was people’s own household affairs afterall. And of course the other element aptly pointed in the video – it was a scary time, I was a foreign woman in a rural area, and my priority would be my safety. Also, I saw it as something “normal” because that is what is written about so often in the articles in this field of work. See? I read it as though it is just literature and none of my business. I did not question whether that is how things should / could be, and what it is that I should / could do about it.

I was pretty happy (although very depressed) to get to work on the project highlighting the abuse that women around the world are quietly / helplessly putting up with. Well, honestly, before watching this video, my thinking was more along the lines of how good it is that I get to now understand that a position of power can also be a position of positive change, and that the power of influence can really shake up the status quo.

Then I saw this video (totally on fleek!) and it touched not just a deep part of my heart, but shone a huge ray of light on some sleepy part of my brain. Sleepy for so many decades. Gosh. What is wrong with me / us?