Lauren takes a good, hard look at why she and so many of her friends are maxed out.

Lauren Herold examines Lady Gaga's statements - or lack thereof - about violence.

Around this time every year, we start thinking deeply about the relationship between gender and sexual violence at Take Back the Night (TBTN), the anti-violence group I co-coordinate. We are in the thick of planning our annual March and Speakout and for the last few years, we’ve organized it as a women’s led march (that is, we’ve constructed a safe space in the front of the March reserved for individuals who identify as women). This year we’ve been revisiting the issue.

Last week my mom, my little sister, and I went to see the latest Disney movie (the first to feature a black protagonist), The Princess and the Frog. As a feminist wary of the whole Disney Princess “some day my prince will come” thing, I didn’t get my hopes up and was prepared to leave the theater mildly annoyed at best and angry and offended at worst.

I’ve been reading a book called Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism by Nona Willis Aronowitz and the late Emma Bee Bernstein. In the book, Nona and Emma, two young feminists, recount their recent cross-country road trip. The goal of their trip was to meet with more than a hundred women—most of them young women—in order find out what women think about feminism.

In the anti-sexual assault community on my campus, there’s a lot of talk about “self-care.” We start every group meeting with a check-in about how we’re feeling and end every meeting affirming one thing we are planning to do in the next few days to take care of ourselves. We promote self-care since anti-sexual violence work takes a huge emotional toll on those in the community: in order to keep working in the field, we have to proactively work to prevent burnout.

This past weekend, in a happy coincidence for me, Columbia University hosted the first Take Back the Night National Conference. Since I’m the co-coordinator of Columbia and Barnard’s Take Back the Night (TBTN), I was pretty psyched about it.

When Simone asked me to write for this blog, I was excited and nervous (nervcited!). I wrote a bunch of practice posts before I was satisfied with one and finally submitted it—my first post about my Consent Facilitator training. Before I submitted it, however, I sent Passion (one of the other fabulous writers here and another intern at GLI this past summer) an anxious text message that said something like ,“Can we talk about the blog?

About three weeks ago, I spoke with Rachel Simmons at her book tour event in New York City and talked about my emotional journey pre-GLI and post-GLI.  It was a really great experience for me--I got to share parts of myself that I never share with anyone with a group of strangers (ok, a few of my friends were there). Actually, I felt really scared, but felt great afterwards. So I thought I would share what I said that night with this community: