"I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin."
While I applaud her for being brutally honest and speaking out about such a taboo topic, I'll agree that her Twitter wording was a bit crass. However, I think everyone needs to keep in mind that people don't share the same feelings in the same situations. While one person may be devastated by a miscarriage, another person may be breathing a sigh of relief. How a person reacts to a situation isn't wrong or right, it just is what it is. We are all entitled to our own feelings, even if everyone doesn't share them or can handle hearing them.
Read her blog post and watch the CNN interview here.
(It’s somewhat necessary to at least watch the CNN interview linked above to understand what I’m talking about below.)
Penelope is right though. Miscarriages and other taboo topics should be explored. Because how else are people going to learn about, understand and bring awareness to things that happen in everyday life if we are too scared to discuss them? It's the very reason I have a Label on my blog titled "Taboo Topics" where I can discuss things that have happened in my life that others think should be hush hush/off limits topics - things like suicide and child molestation.
The reason I bring this up is not to debate miscarriages or abortion because as a man who has never gotten anyone pregnant, I'm in no position to speak even remotely intelligent on the subject, nor do I want to. Let's be completely honest, the vast majority of men out there don't have a clue what exactly a miscarriage or an abortion fully entails. We get the jest of it, but we really don't know the details of what happens in a woman's body. And it wasn't until I watched Penelope's interview, did I know just how common and frequent a miscarriage occurs. I also didn't know that the process takes literally weeks, which makes concealing what you're going through all the more difficult. We are unaware of these things because society has labeled it as one of the many taboo topics we don't dare speak of! I want to change that though. I think it's time we give taboo topics a voice. So when I read about Penelope Trunk being so brutally honest and candid about what she was going through, I wanted to stand up and clap for her, for giving yet another taboo topic a much needed voice. If we can't talk about things, we can't learn. And if we can't learn, how will we ever grow?
I'm not asking, nor suggesting, that everyone exposes the skeletons in their closet and airs their dirty laundry for all the world to see. I'm just encouraging people to talk. To educate. To bring awareness to things like suicide, child molestation, rape, domestic abuse, miscarriages, abortion, addiction, the list goes on and on. You know what the taboo topics are. They are the very subjects that are so widely misunderstood by the public because the public refuses to give them a voice. But if people would just muster up the courage to discuss them, you would quickly see how many others can relate. We are all more closely tied to one another than we care to believe.
Whether you agree or disagree with Penelope's views on miscarriages and abortion isn't relevant to this post. What I do want to know is if you think it's good or bad to discuss taboo topics? And have you ever been as candid about your personal life as Penelope or myself? Looking back, was sharing that "secret" a relief or a mistake?
I can't speak for Penelope, but I know when I came clean about my battle with depression and my suicide attempt (10/5/09 - My Deepest, Darkest Secret), it was a HUGE sigh of relief! It felt so good to get that weight off my chest. And if I helped just one other person by sharing my story, it made any of the negativity I received from that post totally worth it. What you get from me online is 100% me, but you don’t get 100% of me.
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