Not Fifteen Anymore

There is a particular kind of fury that rises when you watch power protect itself while children remain unprotected. I do not pretend I am immune to it. I feel it in my chest, in the tightening of my jaw, in the old place where silence once learned to live. The body keeps records long after headlines fade.

When I was fifteen, I learned what unaccountable power feels like. The man who hurt me was older, and he came from a family no one challenged. I did not speak. Not because I failed to understand what had happened, but because I understood exactly what power does when it is threatened. I calculated silence to protect my family. That calculation shaped me more than I realized at the time.

It shaped how I moved through the world as a young woman, how my body responded in the presence of authority, how I interpreted what was possible and what was dangerous. Silence, once chosen for survival, has a way of teaching the nervous system that staying small is safer than standing tall.

Years later, when my children and I had to escape my marriage and disappear to stay safe, I recognized the pattern again. We changed identities. We rebuilt. The system did not carry the consequence. We did. That seems to be how it often works when power closes ranks. So when I see powerful men evade accountability, when I see children harmed while records are sealed and names disappear into bureaucratic fog, my body does not experience it as abstract. It remembers. And it is not impressed.

But here is what has changed.

I am not fifteen anymore.

I am not silent. I am not alone. And I am not powerless in the way I once was.

Rage is not hysteria. It is information. It is the body recognizing injustice and refusing to pretend otherwise. When children are harmed and power protects itself the way power so often does, fury is not irrational. It is correctly calibrated. Mothers are not unstable because they are angry about harm to children. They are awake.

Sacred rage does not disappear because it is inconvenient. It does not quiet itself to make others comfortable. It has outgrown that reflex. It burns because something is worth protecting. But sacred rage also knows what it is for. It does not waste itself on frenzy. It does not thrash in every direction just to feel active. It moves with intention. It chooses its ground and stands there.

Living in a constant state of physiological emergency is not strategy. It is depletion. A dysregulated population is easier to distract, divide, and exhaust, and exhaustion has never protected a single child. Clarity requires steadiness. If we want accountability that lasts longer than a news cycle, we need nervous systems that can hold focus longer than the chaos cycle.

Calm is not compliance. Regulation is not indifference. Steadiness does not mean I have stopped paying attention. It means I refuse to be baited into collapse. I stay informed, but I do not flood myself. I choose where to engage, and I protect my nervous system deliberately, because a dysregulated body cannot build anything lasting.

Rage can be sacred. Sacred rage is disciplined. It is directed. It is purposeful. It understands that endurance matters more than spectacle.

I will not raise my children from a posture of permanent bracing. I will not live as though collapse is inevitable. I have already survived the cost of unaccountable power, and I will not offer my present nervous system to the same machinery that once benefited from my silence.

We are not little girls anymore.

We are grown women who remember what it felt like to have no one speak for us, who remember calculating silence in rooms where power was never questioned. That memory is not weakness. It is fuel. It sharpens discernment. It strengthens conviction. It clarifies what protection actually requires.

There are girls calculating silence right now. They need grown women who can speak clearly without collapsing. They need women whose rage is disciplined enough to demand change and steady enough to endure the long work.

We are capable of that.

꩜ Ella