The writer is a Messina woman of just over 50 years old, who has decided to return to school to graduate. His class task has become powerful testimony against violence. He asked us to remain anonymous, but his voice deserves to be listened to by all.
“Good afternoon … I would like to give my testimony staying in anonymity. I send my writing … I would like to be able to help many women victims of stalker or mistreated”. The message, received in the editorial office, begins like this and comes a few days after the stress for the death of the young woman Sara Campanellabrutally killed with five stabbed by a colleague of university whose advances he had rejected.
To send him is a woman who attends an evening course of high school. He decided to return to study to get the diploma that someone, in the past, denied her.
The text he sent us was born as a class task. But it is much more than this: it is a cry of freedom, a raw and authentic testimony of those who have collected courage and love of their own, and made it.
“For a long time I remained silent with my pain and my deep injuries. Today I consider myself a survivor, because after years I found the strength to rebel“.
His story starts from afar. By a sick love, exchanged for salvation. The man who had idealized became his torturer. A executioner that isolated, hit, humiliated.
“First there was a slap, then a punch, then I stopped counting them” He writes. And in his story there is everything: shame, fear, silence. The eyes that ask for help, but who remain invisible to others. The apologies, hypocrite, after all violence, the bouquets of flowers such as a script, those phrases and those implications that point the finger at the victim.
“But if I acted like this it was only your fault”.
The woman tells how she canceled herself, how she became a shadow. How to hide bruises, and how physical violence was also accompanied by the psychological one. Until one day, looking at his son, he understood that he could no longer keep silent: “The courage and the strength to say ‘enough’ were taken in me. I reported, I spoke”.
Today that man has moved away. And she was saved. It is alive, in the fullest sense of the term. He has taken up everything, he enrolled in school, and wants his story to be useful to other women.
The story of a mother who found the courage to rewind a ribbon and write her rebirth between the school desks. Turning from a student to Maestra he taught that it is never too late to free himself. It is never too late to start again. And that whoever is in difficulty must ask for help, because they are never alone.
The number 1522 is free and active 24 hours a day, to offer support and assistance to those who suffer violence or stalking.