FemSoc Saved my Life

FemSoc Saved my Life - anon

TW: Abuse and mental health. 

People consistently ask me how I got in to feminism but from where I am standing my feminism seems like such an integral part of my identity that I find it difficult to know where it really originates. Maybe my feminist awakening happened at age twelve when I cried in a history class because one of my friends dismissed the suffragettes as boring or perhaps it happened when I was fifteen and my PE class staged a walk out against my school’s change in uniform policy.

I know that if I am really being honest with myself it didn’t happen until much later. When I arrived at Royal Holloway I was still hesitant about the idea of feminist society, I spent a few minutes lingering around their booth at the freshers fair wrestling with the idea. I was still new to the idea and very much afraid of anything that seemed ‘too radical’ (occasionally I wish that I could show 2011 me what I have become I think I would be impressed but also mildly horrified).

My life has changed a lot since first year and now I am talking to you one mental breakdown later and I want to tell you that FemSoc saved my life. I failed my first year at university due to severe agoraphobia and anxiety that rendered me unable to attend vast swathes of my lectures. So when I arrived back for my second year alongside passing my incomplete first year courses I launched my own personal campaign to try to ‘be braver’ (This was a goal that is very simple to say but near impossible to realise).

The first step I took on my mission to ‘be braver’ was attending a Post Secret event alone. Whilst I was there the floor was opened up for people in the audience to be able to share their secrets, this was the first time that I spoke about my ex-boyfriend having raped me. I told my most painful secret to a room full of 500 strangers and I felt supported. Two people came up to me after the event and told me that they shared my secret; the first was a police woman who specifically dealt with cases involving abusive relationships, the second was a feminist blogger who I recognised and admired and it was this interaction that encouraged me to become as involved with feminism as I could. 

I knew I needed people around me who could provide me with a sense of support and community and FemSoc was where I found them. My mental health has been through ups and downs and I have had some awful ‘cannot get out of bed because the world is far too scary’ days and on those days it has been friends that I have made through feminism that have encouraged me and supported me and I have tried to offer them the same sort of support in return. Feminist spaces are where I feel at my happiest and most fulfilled and I mean it in complete seriousness when I tell people that FemSoc made me feel safe and supported at university and that is what saved my life.