I’ve mentioned before that I once saw a quote on my facebook wall that a friend posted around the time she had her first child. It read, “We all just want to give our kids lives they don’t have to heal from.” And given recent events, the overturning of Roe, the clear beeline being made toward attacking the rights and lives of LGBTQ+ people, a new perspective dawned on me.

We all want to give our kids a life they don’t have to heal from, sure, but the irony of the statement is that we ourselves are living proof that, broken or whole – we heal.

So what does this mean in the context of what is happening today? Well I suppose it would be natural to make the connection and just say, “we heal” but I’d argue that saying that, after knowing the extent and the ramifications of recent supreme court actions is incredibly tone-deaf.

You see, if I were to say “we heal,” as a declaration, or as a distinct statement regarding next steps – as if it were that simple, I would be diluting the actual gravity of the situation.

To say, “we heal” as a and in the tone of “just” statement – to insinuate that a 10 year old girl, who was r*ped by her father and had to get an abortion out of state because her state outlawed it after 6 weeks, needs to “just heal” is inherently insensitive and tactless and far too on-brand with aggressive and radical republican christian values for my liking. In other words, it gives “you are in our thoughts and prayers” and that is just no longer acceptable.

So instead… we fight.

We fight not only for our rights to merely exist as we are and have full bodily autonomy like the men do, but we fight for the right to heal despite the odds and the laws being against us. We fight for the right to survive this deeply barbaric assault on our freedoms and our bodies and we fight to forgive those who thought for a single moment that they could take them — and to be clear we don’t fight to forgive them because they deserve it, we fight to forgive them because when we boil it down, we don’t really forgive others for them – especially in cases like these where they don’t deserve it, but we forgive others for ourselves. we fight to forgive them because the anger is too heavy and it will only slow us down.

Healing isn’t a linear path but it’s one many of us will be on for much of our lives – because the fact of it all is, whether or not our parents or our country give us a life that we have to heal from – we will fight and we will heal.