Every time I turn around these days, it feels like I am reading or hearing another story of a young woman being assaulted on a college campus. It has gotten to the point where I am no longer surprised by these stories, but instead just filled with terror and sadness for the many thousands of women of my generation who face these risks as they walk across their college campuses. And while I realize that there are people taking steps across the United States to end these types of attacks, it is not the actual assaults that concerns me the most.

What concerns me most is the silence, fear and isolation that survivors face after the fact. It is not enough, the amount of guilt and blame our society places on women when it comes to physical assaults, but the complete lack of recognition and knowledge surrounding other forms of abuse ends up completely disregarding the experiences of millions of women around the world. In the U.S. and across the globe, we have become completely disconnected and desensitized to violence, so much so that oftentimes we can't even see it when it is right in front of us. Bruises may be easier to see and understand, but the emotional abuses that humans can inflict on one another can be equally as damaging.

I would like to pause here for a moment and make two important points. While I write this from the viewpoint of a woman mainly for other women, I do realize that men are forced into abusive situations every single day, and it is not my intention to disregard their experience, but simply to share my own. I also want to make clear that this article is in no way pointing fingers to men as sole abusers; I am all too aware that both men and women are capable of -- and commit -- acts of abuse regularly.

That being said, as a survivor of both mental and emotional abuse, this issue hits close to home. For many months following my experience, I lived in silence, fearful that I had somehow deserved being treated this way. I wrestled with my own guilt before coming to terms with the fact that I was not responsible for the actions of my abuser -- and by that I mean, there is no action that I take that warrants any form of abuse or manipulation as response, be that physical, mental, or emotional. But between my own guilt and a general lack of understanding, I found myself very isolated from those around me. It was hard to speak about what had happened without feeling the need to justify and analyze all the decisions I had made at that point in time, only furthering my belief that somehow I had done something to deserve this.

But I hadn’t. And no victim of abuse ever deserves it.

So I am ending my personal silence with this article. I am asking you, my readers, to take this matter into your own hands and educate yourselves. I realize that abuse is scary and the last thing most of us want to think about -- we tend to believe it will never happen to us. But unfortunately, given statistics in our world today, it is not unlikely that someone you know has also lived in this silence.

I have waited a long time to write about this, fearing I would not do it justice on paper. But it seems, especially given recent events, that there is no better time than the present. I am tired of watching the women around me suffer in silence, and I am tired of suffering in silence.

By being able to recognize the signs of physical, mental, or emotional abuse, and choosing to speak out, we stand a chance and ending this treatment once and for all. And here, I’ll even get you started.