I actually started crying during a work-related meeting last week.

Thankfully, I was with a group of women who understood my melt down.

An employee with a local domestic violence program was sharing how her agency has been dealing with the local fall out from accusations against now U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

They’ve experienced a significant increase in the number of calls from women who needed to talk about incidences they’d kept quiet for decades]. Their efforts to convince Senator Joe Manchin to consider how his confirmation vote would impact rape and domestic violence survivors had been frustrating. And then there was her story about the teenage girl who had called insisting that she had to meet with a counselor immediately.

The girl said she had been sexually assaulted by a boy at her high school, but her parents wouldn’t believe her. At least she was convinced they wouldn’t believe her.

They had, after all, spent the past few days calling Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in high school, a liar. And they had insinuated that a teenage girl should have known better to go to a party where there was drinking.

The girl pleaded for a counselor to listen to her story then speak to her parents. She believed they were more likely to listen to a professional than they were to her own daughter.

Listening to that story is what made me cry.

Only days earlier, a childhood friend had shared via social media her story of sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather.

And I hadn’t known.

I had spent countless nights at her house and gone on trips with her family. I had coveted her canopy bed, her horses, her boat and her ability to fit in with the popular kids.

And the whole time I’d been comparing her seemingly cool life to mine, she had found safety and reprieve in my childhood home.

Only decades later would I discover the vast chasm between the reality of her life and the one she presented to the rest of the world.

Which is actually true for most people.

We can never know the full truth about someone else’s life but only what they choose share.

But we should all feel safe sharing our own truth without being shamed or blamed or dismissed when our reality doesn’t match what other people want to hear.

So here’s to the truth sayers, the people who believe them and the people who won’t tolerate those who want to silence them.

You are my tribe.