I have been quiet on here for some time. Mostly because I am listening, mostly because I want to amplify other voices right now. Also because I am in recovery from the worst period of Generalised Anxiety Disorder and Major Depression I've experienced yet. But I am still here.

I'm alive, I'm surviving. Also listening, attending and amplifying. Reading a lot. Crying a lot. Meditating a whole damn lot. Planning my future. Thinking about what that future has to look like, given events in the recent past.

It feels to me that the three key issues dominating my feed: Black Lives Matter and anti-racism, trans rights, and disability rights, are fully interconnected. I'm in a period of self-reflection, thinking about how my privileges (cis-gender, white, middle-class) relate to

my other lived experiences as a straight-passing-but-queer, invisibly-disabled woman, who comes from a fairly atypical background as far as academia goes. I'm also in a period of enquiry, thinking about how I can show up for BIPOC, trans people and disabled people day to day.

These things take time, and they are slow. They are also the antithesis of institutional BLM statements, of which I have seen too many, and which usually promise nothing which has not already been done (very little), and risk nothing. They are disingenuous, and

too full of institutional guilt and whitewashing to make a difference. They try to cover over injustices done, rather than work towards transparency. I'm not singling out particular institutions because examples are innumerable. The problem isn't one institution: it's all of them

So my question for me, and perhaps for others is: how to co-exist with institutions that have done substantial harm? How to sit with the discomfort that I may never be doing enough to support BIPOC, trans, and disabled people? How to live with myself when my own health conditions

prevent me from acting? Plenty of other people are talking about these things too. I'm not the first. Nor the last. But I guess I want to make space for silence, and for enquiry. These aren't things that social media are good at, but I think there is room for quiet too.

Silence is often a space for thought, for breathing and for feeling. So I am going to be silent for a little while longer, while continuing to amplify voices that need to be heard. There will be time for mine.