“Why do I have to live with the fear that a man hurt me at twenty years?”

My name is Cecilia, I am 20 years old, and I’m afraid. Fear of what too often happens to girls like me: stories of violence and femicide that mark who remains and those who leave, who interrupt the path of many women and erase their future.

Just some of the too many victims that cannot be forgotten: Martina Carbonaro, 14 years old, killed with stone strokes by her former nineteen -year -old boyfriend after a dispute. Ilaria Sula, stabbed by the former partner unable to accept the end of the relationship. Sara Campanella, 22 years old, stabbed on the street by a university student who had been persecuting her for months.

Here, that’s why I’m afraid. I am so afraid that I come to cry and scream. I am so afraid that, sometimes, I would like to disappear to avoid the risk that someone else will disappear me.

I am so afraid because I love life deeply, I want to live it to the end and I have the terror that one day someone can choose that I no longer have the right.

As you grow, terror grows and disgusting. As a child I thought it was dangerous to be small and I wanted to become great. Now that I am great, I understand that it will never depend on my age, but only on my sex. I am a woman: girl, teenager, girl, adult, still a woman.

I cannot escape from my condition and I cannot fight it as it can be done with other anxieties; This fear is part of me, belongs to me, flows into my veins and is written in my DNA. I am helpless, because I am a woman.

I suffer as if it were my mom, my best friend, my sister, a colleague, a partner every time I hear another murder and I think: why? It seems as if, by now, to read a new news of femicide – I primarily, no judgment or condemnation – it reacts by inserting it automatically in a category: that of women killed by men who love them too much !!! And therefore they cannot accept that they want to leave them, or by men who get angry because the wife, the girlfriend or maybe only “loved” does not do what is expected, it is different from how it should be.

In short, men who come out of mind because a woman decides to live a bit like you like, be an independent human being. Maybe even betraying them! Treating them badly! And then? And then who cares. But who are you? Men, who are you? How do you allow yourself? Men not because of male, but as human beings: how can you?

That woman who kills could be the one who kept you in the womb for nine months.

These tragedies afflict us, are indignant, but they end up being collected as a blow: We feel helpless, unable to react or really change things. I myself feel overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness; I wonder what is going on, and why all this continues to happen.

Unfortunately, we have to live these facts as if they happened to us, because they seem far away, but I am around the corner. None of these women expected any of this, they were like me, like you, like us. For this reason I feel so connected and linked to each of them.

I am an extroverted person, I speak with everyone, and the most serious thing: I trust humanity. This does not mean that I am irresponsible, on the contrary. Yet, with all the precautions I can have, I feel in danger.

I realize that I’m not safe, e The more I feel this news, the more I think I am wrong to be as I am; Maybe my being open and spontaneous can be misunderstood, as if it were enough for someone to convince themselves of having the right to go beyond a border, to demand something that I have never granted.

More and more often I happen to find myself in situations where I don’t feel comfortable, because what I consider kindness and education is interpreted for anything else. Can you live like this? Can I be frightened to be expansive and sunny? Can I be frightened that my way of doing a meaning that is not there is and that someone feels legitimized to demand something from me?

For some time, the reality that surrounds us weighs on me, I often feel crazy. If my sister comes out in the evening, I’m not happy for her, but I’m with tachycardia until I see her sleep in her bed. And if I am like this, I can’t even imagine the pain of those who lose a loved one, and not for any fate, but by someone else.

It is as if each of these deaths took a piece of life from any woman.