by Abigail Bent
I didn’t learn the word “equality” from a dictionary. I learned it from silence.
Not the peaceful kind. The kind that happens when a girl starts speaking and someone interrupts her without realizing they did it. The kind that happens when no one interrupts a boy at all, because no one thinks to.
At first, I didn’t notice. Or maybe I noticed, but didn’t know it was something to name.
In class discussions, I started tracking patterns the way you track weather. Not officially. Just mentally noting who got time, whose ideas were repeated later as if they were new, whose hand stayed in the air a little too long.
It wasn’t always dramatic. That’s what made it harder to explain. It wasn’t one big unfair moment. It was lots of small ones that never announced themselves as important.
I remember one group project where I had done most of the planning. I didn’t mind. At least I didn’t think I did. When we presented, one of my teammates spoke first. Then another. Then somehow the conclusion sounded like it had always belonged to someone else. My name was on the slide, but not really in the room.
No one did anything wrong in a way you could point to. That was the strange part. It all looked normal.
Later, I started noticing it outside of school too. In conversations where someone would repeat what I had just said, but slightly louder, slightly slower, slightly more confident, and suddenly it became a “good point.” In spaces where I would second-guess myself out loud and someone would say, “Yeah, I don’t think that makes sense,” without realizing I had just been asking a question, not making a statement.
I began to wonder how much of being heard was just timing. Or tone. Or luck.
There was a period where I tried to speak differently. More clearly. More firmly. Less like I was asking for permission to exist in my own sentence. It worked sometimes. Other times it felt like I was acting in a version of myself that required too much energy to maintain.
What I didn’t expect was how tiring it would be to notice everything.
Once you see it, you can’t really unsee it. You start realizing how often people are assigned space before they even speak. How often confidence is mistaken for correctness. How often being quiet is mistaken for not having anything to say.
But I also started noticing something else.
There were moments that didn’t fit the pattern. A teacher who paused and said, “I want to hear what she was saying.” A friend who repeated my idea in a group chat and wrote, “this is what she meant.” Small things, almost easy to miss if I wasn’t already paying attention.
Those moments didn’t fix anything. But they made it clear that nothing is automatic. Not silence, not voice, not who gets remembered.
Equality, I started realizing, wasn’t something that just existed once things got “better.” It was something that had to be practiced, constantly, in real time, in the middle of conversations that were already happening.
Not perfectly. Not all at once.
Just repeatedly, in small interruptions that went the right way for once.
I don’t think I believed in equality as an idea at first. Not really. It felt too abstract, too distant from the actual experience of being in rooms where things were unfolding unevenly.
But I do believe in attention.
In noticing who is being heard.
In noticing who isn’t.
And in slowly learning that what feels “normal” is often just what no one has questioned out loud yet.
I still don’t think the world is balanced. I think it is constantly being balanced, unevenly, by people who decide to speak, or step back, or try again when it doesn’t work the first time.
And maybe that is the closest thing we have to equality right now.
Not a finished state.
Just something we keep interrupting the old patterns to make room for.
Art by Vivian Browne, “ My Kind of Protest”
About the Author
Abigail explores emotion, memory, and everyday moments through honest, reflective storytelling.