Editor's note: Jill Filipovich is a New York-based journalist and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Was Left Behind.”follow her twitter. The opinions expressed in this comment are solely her own. Read more opinions on CNN.
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The reason you've heard the name “Christine Blasey Ford” is because of a series of decisions made by other people. The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Leaking the name of Blasey Ford, who sought to remain anonymous. Blasey Ford infamously claimed, and Kavanaugh denied, that he sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager.
Provided by: Jill Filipovic
Jill Filipovich.
That's not to say that the events that made her famous were outside of Blasey Ford's control. She also made a big decision. It's about coming forward and speaking out about what happened to you at the hands of the most powerful man in this country right now. But everything that happened afterward — from public testimony, to death threats and smear campaigns, to being ridiculed by a sitting president to becoming a feminist icon and celebrity — was dictated by Blasey Ford. It was far beyond anything I could do or control.
She is a woman who knows the power of stories. She has heard so many of her people told about her and has seen her own story completely slip out of her hands. In her new memoir, “One Way Back,” she tells not only the stories that put her name on TV screens and newspaper pages, but the previously unknown woman in her life, her Taking back ownership. She was “Christine Blasey” Ford (she was “Chrissy”, “Christin Blasey”, “Dr. Blasey”, and just “Blazey”).
“One Way Back” explores Blasey Ford's childhood growing up in a working-class family in the bustling suburbs of Maryland, his move west to escape the stifling power structure adjacent to Washington, D.C., and his girlfriend. Love of surfing, love of music (mainly grunge). And, of course, it tells the story of how she became Christine Blasey Ford, whose name is now tied to that of Brett Kavanaugh, which will never go away.
But “One Way Back” is more an exercise in empathy and rethinking than it is about what happened. Blasey Ford wrote this work at an interesting moment, when the storm has passed and her name has become a household name, but she no longer appears on television screens. Some people who hear her name may wonder, “Who is she again?”
You can feel her fear and understand the trauma she's going through, going through a period where she faced extreme threats to the point where she left her home and hired security. You can also feel the work she did to reconstruct these events in her mind, to break through the intensity of her emotions and make them meaningful. . She not only has her own fears and her guilt (she has her two sons and her husband and they too were put through her wringer), but also her strong purpose. He clearly stated that he had consciousness and reason. Remarkably, she expresses compassion for almost everyone in her story, including those who have wronged her terribly.
She also has concerns about Kavanaugh. She worries about how his children will feel when she hears that protesters have gathered outside her home in Washington, D.C. “I thought it was very strange that both my children and Brett's children had to experience this much hate directed at their parents.” He wrote that he hoped he would not threaten anyone.
Blasey Ford is a talented scientist, loving mother, and unwitting embodiment of the #MeToo movement, but her greatest passion is surfing. She writes about her sport with reverence, and her memoir takes on the gentle blue tones of the ocean. I can feel her learning to right herself and float, even when the big waves come and they push her down.
Perhaps what's most effective about “One Way Back” is that Blasey Ford doesn't take on the voice of a passionate activist. She is not trying to impart a clear, singular lesson. She guides her readers through the unlikely and terrifying situations she has faced, evaluating and reevaluating her own roles and her reactions to them.
Readers receive the sense of a highly sensitive, deeply thoughtful woman who resists seeing the world portrayed in black and white, who simply seeks to do the right thing, and who often second-guesses herself.
“As much as many articles described me as a 'bad guy,' I wasn't that bad,” she wrote. “I was a good kid who followed the rules, but look what it did to me.” Perhaps a feminist activist who protests and dissents and doesn't abide by the old rules of civility and civility. Maybe it should have looked a little more like , she writes.
She still has obvious scars, and she gently invites the reader to look at both the wound and the healing. “I have to constantly remind myself that I am the one writing this book and my words will not be paraphrased differently or printed without my approval.” she writes, bearing the scars of how the media and powerful people have shaped her words. what they wanted. “I can't seem to wrap my head around the fact that I'm in charge this time.”
Many experts say sexual assault is as much about physical violence as loss of control. Recovery involves regaining a sense of control over your body, the autonomy that someone tried to take away from you. Blasey Ford suffered the same theft of her autonomy when her story became public and she became the embodiment of what various political teams wanted her to be, rather than a complex human being with a story to tell. Experienced. Feminist villains, brave truth-tellers, and show-off women ensnare good men.
Reading her recollections of that particularly painful period, it is clear how much the real-life Blasey Ford was flattened and then often distorted for the purposes of others. Years later, she still feels it. Sometimes it's in the form of flattery that makes her feel proud, like being treated like a feminist hero, and sometimes it's like when a tough stranger tells her he knows who she is. I feel that in a horrible way.
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If there's one thing that's clear from her memoir, it's that almost none of us watching through our television screens, even those who admired and supported her, knew who she was. Thing.
“As I went through this alone, I found myself in an unexpected place: a sense of greatest empowerment in the abyss,” she writes. “Even if no one on earth believed it, you know it still happened. No one can take that away from you.”
Much has been taken away from Blasey Ford: her privacy, her sense of safety, her anonymity. Those of us who have been following coverage of her story might think she knows that. In reality, we only saw a small part of her life. Her memoir does more than just set the record straight, portraying her not as a feminist hero or a truth-telling villain, but as just a woman driven far out to sea and determined to seize control of her own boardroom. Telling her story in her own way. She paddles back.
