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Learning to Listen in the Noise


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, the workplaces, the family dinners. The casual dismissals. The sighs when someone says “It’s just how things are.” The quiet that falls when no one wants to ask the hard questions.

What struck me most was the way fear had become the norm for half the world.
And how, for so long, I’d lived on the other side of that fear, not noticing it was real.

It made me wonder: what does it mean to be a man in this moment?
To be someone who could finally listen, without defensiveness.
To be someone who could use his voice to echo the truths women have been shouting into the void.

I still carry my keys.
But now I carry something heavier—the responsibility to hear without turning away,
to challenge the stories I’ve been told about power and safety,
and to recognize that real change won’t come from silence.

#YesAllWomen wasn’t just a movement online; it was a mirror held up to all of us.
To those who walk without fear—and those who don’t.

That night, walking home, I felt less like an outsider to this pain.
Less like a bystander in a story that wasn’t mine.
Because understanding begins when we stop pretending the noise isn’t there.
And listening is the first step toward breaking the silence.

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