Lara S’s Reviews > Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems > Status Update

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognise that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work towards that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognise our sameness.

We dont have to romanticise our past to be aware of how it seeds our present. We dont have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permits us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding. We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves. We‘repowerfulbecausewehavesurvived,andthat‘swhatit’sallabout-survivalandgrowth.