On 'Making It Difficult'

Silence Was Never the Choice

Jun 05, 2026

Dear Curious Minds,

Glad to be easing back into my proper newsletter this week. I’m nudging more corners of my brain awake than I have in a while. What helped most was going back through my older pieces. Re-reading them was a strange double feeling. Gosh, I could write like this, quickly followed by gosh, things got worse from there. Anyway. Happy to be back here.

If you’re new: fair warning, you are about to find out how these are rather long thought spirals. If you’ve been here a while, I hope these angry, nerdy, griefy posts are still enjoyable and a safe space to park your brain for a bit. Thank you for being here. I appreciate you.

It’s been one of those weeks where the same shape of question kept arriving: in a workshop, in a good-faith question from a friend at a celebration, and, in a news story about how our government again doesn’t see a problem with murky procurement decisions. Each time I ran the rapid internal triage, we all know. Do I have 30 seconds for this, or does it deserve a 30-minute conversation? Does the room actually want the 30-minute one, or just the version that lets everyone keep their polite smiles, dinner plans and their self-image intact?

Well, it’s Friday night, and here you’re getting the 30-minute one. You earned that privilege that I didn’t give other people in those rooms.

Because underneath all three sat a single piece of machinery. The habit of taking the silence that violence forced on someone, calling it a free choice, and then posting them the invoice for the damage.

The Room Where Withdrawal Becomes a Character Flaw

A family and sexual violence prevention workshop. Genuinely good kaupapa led by a facilitator I highly respect. That kind of pilot is meant to surface disagreement, because that’s how you find the gaps. Different views on the table, as there should be. No quarrel with that.

What I will no longer let walk past me is one particular line, delivered with an acknowledgement that he will get pushback on it, which was a familiar worldview: victims make it so difficult when they retract or drop the case/interview. Quickly followed by its cousin: well, why didn’t she go to the authorities? Why not the media?

Something in me went very still. I really can’t. Not this.

Then the old training kicked in — the voice that says don’t be the difficult one, don’t derail a good workshop, you can raise it quietly with the facilitator afterwards. I gave that voice about four seconds, ignored my own otherwise-deceiving stereotypical quiet Asian female image, and put my hand up.

I invited the room to try a different frame: consider every retracting victim-survivor, and every withdrawn case, as a systemic failure for our community. Not a character flaw or an individual choice. Just like how easy it is for us to attribute child poverty and homelessness to an individual failing until it happens to us. Whatever you do, don’t mistake withdrawal for a cheerful, autonomous decision made on a sunny afternoon between errands.

You see, after working with and for gender-based violence advocacy of military sexual slavery survivors who have been telling their story all the way to the UN Special Rapporteur, only for them to still have to face a multitude of denial and delayism 80 + years on, you really cannot sit still at a suggestion this is a matter of a woman who didn’t try hard enough to make herself heard.

The “why didn’t she just report it” question runs on the illusion of individual choice and the myth of meritocracy. It is such a comforting fantasy that we would report things instantly, we would tell our side in spite of all risks involved, we would have infinite energy to trust the institutions to catch us when we fell. The fantasy might hold up until you’re the one gut-punched into the process with no warning. It feels like character. It is actually a privilege you simply haven’t been forced to spend yet.

For those who’ve never had to walk it, gosh, as much as I want you to understand the pain, I also wish no human being ever had to experience this firsthand. Unless there’s immediate physical violence in front of an officer’s face, the system does not catch you very well. If you are cognitively overloaded in having to recount the trauma of psychological or financially abusive experiences, the health systems and agencies are about as well-connected to each other as exes at a wedding. They are technically in the same network of health and justice systems, conspicuously not helping. You are left to ring each one, such as counsellors, doctors, refuge services, police, social worker, lawyers and more yourself and recount the worst thing that happened to you, from the top, with feeling, to a new stranger every time. Re-narrating your own trauma as an admin task until you’re fluent in your own catastrophe, delivering it crisply enough to be believed.

There’s a name for the part where the institution that was meant to hold you loses your file, doubts your timeline, or asks you to be patient: institutional betrayal (Jennifer Freyd’s term). And when the person who harmed you flips the script to cast himself as the wronged party and you as the aggressor, that’s DARVO — deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. Naming them matters because they are patterns, not accidents. Patterns are designed, even when no one will own the drawing.

So no. Going public is not on the menu for most survivors, and least of all for a woman with a financial responsibility for her family, and a thimbleful of sanity she’d like to keep. We don’t decline to speak because we’re weak. We decline because, generation after generation, we have watched precisely what happens to the woman who speaks. She is the cautionary tale told to keep the rest of us quiet. The silence isn’t an absence of courage. It’s a risk assessment, and an accurate one.

The Bedtime Story Adults Never Outgrow

Why is the reflex to blame her, and not the machine?

Well, if you are lucky enough to have grown up with a bedtime story, this is the kind of warm, fuzzy assumption we never quite outgrew: that the world is basically fair. Psychologists call it the just-world belief, and it’s exactly as childish as it sounds. If the universe is just, then good things happen to good people, and bad things must have been, on some level, invited/deserved. So if she withdrew, she must be unreliable. If she stayed, she couldn’t have minded all that much. Anything, anything, rather than sit with the plain fact that harm lands on people who didn’t do anything to deserve that violence, and the system just shrugs.

Then there’s how generously we tend to explain ourselves to ourselves. We read other people’s choices as character and our own as circumstance. She dropped the case because she’s flaky; I’d never do that, because I have principles. The cost, the disbelief, the months of re-narrating her worst day to a new stranger every time… all of it quietly falls out of the story. There’s a tidy behavioural-science name for this one, but you already know it by feel.

And then the mechanism I keep circling back to. The one I gave at least two whole essays to. The people a system fails are so often the ones who defend it most loyally. That was the whole knot of The ‘Play Nice’ Conundrum: the marginalised quietly investing in the very structures that undermine them, because believing the system basically works is so much more bearable than accepting that the system is the anomaly and any of us could be next. It’s easier to be the exception than the evidence. Quieter, too. (And if you sat through Casual Paper Cuts with me, you’ll know I have a whole separate rant about the tax we pay for that quiet.)

None of this needs a villain in the room, which is exactly the part that should keep us up at night. Cruelty this efficient runs perfectly well on nice people who’d simply rather not. Morbidly conflict-avoidant people, we are as Kiwis, will also flinch at the word cruelty.

Demure Was Always a Control Mechanism

Here’s where the intersectional lens earns its keep, because the training to go quiet is neither evenly distributed nor random.

Feminine “niceness.” Model-minority “gratitude.” Not personality types or control mechanisms, but doing the same job from two directions. Be palatable. You should be grateful. Oh, please don’t make it about race, and certainly don’t make it about gender. Why do you have to make it weird at dinner?! Yes, there is an immediate reward for that compliance. But that reward is conditional safety. That seat at the table they squeezed in for you (which, yes, you also worked very hard for) is on loan. It is withdrawable without notice. The penalty for using your voice is to be relabelled: too aggressive, too emotional, too political, can’t read the room, not leadership material, difficult to work with, ruining the vibe.

The comedy of my own wiring is that I was raised by the fiercest people with muscle memory of building commercial success from rubble. Here I sit in an Auckland workshop, having given the inner voice telling me to stay measured a four-second hearing. The woman with the career who can’t afford to air it all out and the migrant child who learned to swallow the slight and smile are graduates of the same school. Both were taught that silence buys protection. Both discover that the protection was always rented, and the silence gets blamed on them regardless. You go quiet to survive, and then the quiet is held up as proof that nothing happened.

Demure was never a virtue. It’s a leash. Someone just tied a nicer bow on it for the women they wanted to keep.

할머니 Did Not Choose Fifty Years of Silence

If you want the clearest case of a silence the world mistook for consent, look at the 할머니 (halmoni, the grandmothers), the survivors of Imperial Japan’s military sexual slavery euphemised as “comfort women.”

They stayed silent for roughly half a century. Not because the harm was small, and not because they’d made their peace one quiet afternoon, but because the structure made speaking unsurvivable: shame turned against the victim, a society ready to punish her for what was done to her, and political convenience on every side that preferred the quiet. The silence was engineered, then read as absence.

It was 1991 before Kim Hak-sun (김학순) hamoni testified publicly and even then, the response from the powerful carried that same familiar note: why now, why so late, why make this difficult. It was the same sentiment I heard in a workshop in Aotearoa this week, scaled up to nations and arriving half a century late, addressed to women in their seventies who had already paid in full for a state-level crime committed against them.

We don’t have to cross the Pacific for it, either. Survivors of abuse in state and faith-based care here carried their silence for decades for the same structural reasons, were finally heard by a Royal Commission, received a Crown apology in late 2024. But many are still waiting years in a redress backlog thousands of claims deep. Believed enough for an apology; not enough to be paid before some of them die.

The halmonis didn’t lack courage for fifty years, and then find it. The conditions for being believed simply didn’t exist until survivors built them, at ruinous personal cost, with no help from any benevolent institution. Don’t you dare read that as choice. It was a precise measurement of how dangerous speaking was.

A 30-Second Answer and a 30-Minute One

The third room looked unrelated to the other two.

A dear friend, a climate expert and deeply involved in advocacy, asked our table, in all good faith: Do you think New Zealand can help a country like Indonesia decarbonise?

I paused. Because my social battery was running low at this point in the evening, my 30-second answer could be spicy. I managed to give a diplomatic thought, somewhat coherent and calibrate to the oxygen the room actually had. Something along the lines of “Well, a country like New Zealand, or any colonial power, could really help a country like Indonesia decarbonise by cancelling its debt.”

I swallowed a longer version, because I read the room and there wasn’t enough air in it for the full kōrero. But you’re here for it, so: the question contains its own answer, the way “why didn’t she just report it” does. “Help them decarbonise” quietly assumes the slowness is theirs. Like a deficit of will, of capacity, of education and that we, the enlightened West or developed nations, arrive bearing the cure. It’s the exact move I sat through nearly a year ago at the Ocean screening in Christchurch, when an audience member asked, in earnest, how “we” might educate the “developing countries” that are “far behind where we are.” Some of you were there with me for Normal was Never Neutral. You know, same machinery, a different ocean.

Decarbonisation, as the corporate sustainability world tends to mean it, is a beautifully siloed little instrument believing itself to be a hero. Reduce the emissions. Swap the technology. Hit the target. Like a Hollywood superhero that just appears and fixes things, it lifts the carbon neatly out of its context and leaves the context exactly where it found it: the centuries of extraction, wars, genocide, slavery, land theft, forced migration, and the ways of life utterly destroyed so someone else’s economy could grow. It doesn’t know shame, so it hands the invoice back to the people who were stripped in the first place. Buy our green tech. We will be generous because you can borrow to afford it. Reorganise your economy around our deadline. Oh, we can’t let you ask about reparation, that happened a long time ago. Be grateful for the lesson and how you will be the new emerging market. You will get an invoice with a leaf on it.

And then there’s the urgency. The sheer audacity of the urgency. Climate change gets shouted as an unfathomable, civilisation-ending catastrophe bearing down on us… which it is, for those who have only just begun to feel it.

But for a great many Indigenous communities, the apocalypse already came. Their worlds ended decades, sometimes centuries ago, under the very same extraction and exploitation and war that built the West’s wealth and its capacity to now “lead.” So forgive me if the spectacle of colonial powers turning up to scream about urgency, at the people whose worlds they already ended, does not move me to applause. You do not get to end someone’s world and then lecture them on the importance of saving yours. I invite you to look at the annual carbon emissions of the US military and/or what environmental damage Israel has caused over the last three years.

The wealth that lets rich nations even contemplate an orderly transition was extracted, with interest, from the places now being told to hurry up. Many are still servicing debt that forces them to keep extracting and burning just to make the repayments. We loaded the boat, pushed them off it, and now we’re standing on the dock offering swimming lessons. Oh, how very generous of us, honestly. The honest word for what’s owed here isn’t aid. It’s the ecological debt running the other way, and cancelling the financial kind isn’t charity. It’s the first small instalment on something we’d much rather not name.

Who Profits From the Choice Myth?

The illusion of individual choice is load-bearing. Meritocracy is what fuels career-porn that these rich and successful must have earned their place through rigour and proof, right until you notice such rigour and the proof are only ever demanded downwards.

The victim-survivor must document, report, and repeat. The “developing” nation must bear the cost of catching up. The migrant must stay perfectly palatable. The vendor gets a handshake without an open tender for taxpayer-funded government contracts.

In every case, the damage was done upstream: the violence, the extraction, the hollowing-out. The bill is posted downstream to whoever went quiet under its weight. We charge the flailing and never the push. We tone-police the drowning and never the hand on their back.

So this is the line I’ll hold, in workshops, screenings, and good-faith dinners alike: silence and withdrawal are not the crime. They’re the societal wound. They are the most accurate map we have of how dangerous it was to speak — scaled from a body, to a nation, to a public service being quietly switched off.

Don’t you dare blame the damage on the silence.

If your first instinct, when someone finally speaks, is why now, why like this, why are you making it difficult, I invite you to sit with it for a second. Ask who taught you that the problem was the noise and never the thing that made them go quiet. Then ask who, exactly, has been profiting from your discomfort with the answer.

We all have some unlearning to do.

Entangled Curiosities

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