Hunger

I’ve been working hard on writing a book. It’s a book about me and my mom. In becoming a writer, I have also gone back to reading. A lot. Although I wish I read more airport fun trash, the stack of books on my nightstand tell a different story. I want to dig deep into hard stuff. All the time.

The last book I read was Roxane Gay’s Hunger. I devoured it. Her writing of her trauma has staccato cadence. It pokes at you in a way that you can’t stop reading, mostly because you're heartbroken at what she went through. She was gang raped at the age of 12 by a boy she knew and his friends. She told no one. Bearing that trauma in silence made her life take a sharp left turn, to say the least.

As a mother of a daughter and a son, thoughts swirled like a hurricane in my mind the days after I finished the book. “What would this world be like if girls and women felt safe to talk about the assault? How do we create a world where sexual assault is not a thing?” You know what was more shocking than anything? My mind immediately responded to that second question with, “Well, that’s not possible.”

Friends, I shocked myself. I’m a feminist. A social justice advocate. A dreamer. Still, I couldn’t even imagine a world without sexual violence. I’m part of the problem. So I decided to get hungry for something unimaginable; a world where I don’t have to be afraid for my daughter or my son and neither do you. Are you willing to get that hungry with me?