Fragments of the Quiet Mind

I remember walking home that night, keys in my pocket, but my mind somewhere else. Not on the usual routine, not on the streets or the streetlights — but on a hashtag I’d been seeing everywhere: #YesAllWomen. It caught me off guard. Because I’d never really stopped to think about what it was like to carry fear like a second skin. I’m a man. I don’t have to walk faster. I don’t have to rehearse rejection in my head. I don’t have to dodge the way a stranger’s glance can weigh heavy, or how a joke can sting deeper than it seems. But the stories poured out—millions of them—carried on the backs of women I know and don’t know, stories of exhaustion, of rage, of invisible wounds. Stories about the daily calculus of safety that no one should have to learn. I had thought I understood. But #YesAllWomen taught me how much I hadn’t. It’s easy to think violence is only in the news, or in the shadows—something far away, someone else’s problem. But it’s woven into the ordinary—the classrooms, t...