Hold on. It looks responsible.
And don’t forget to smile!
There’s a performance by Yoann Bourgeois I keep thinking about, where a man climbs a staircase. Partway up, he falls, and a trampoline below catches him and flings him back onto the stairs, and he climbs again, and falls again, forever. Critics loved it.
“Success isn’t linear.”
“Look how he always lands on his feet!”
I have watched it hundreds of times, and I want to scream because none of them are saying the obvious thing.
The trampoline isn’t saving him; it’s the machine that’s guaranteeing the next fall. His grace everyone finds so mesmerizing - the soft toes, the single-footed landing - that isn’t triumph, that’s the performance. The part where you transform the fall into something they can admire, so they never have to confront why it keeps happening.
Years after the original performance, Bourgeois staged another version of the piece over a pendulum. Not just any pendulum - the Foucault pendulum, hung in the Pantheon in Paris in 1851 to make visible something science already knew.
The Earth was turning.
The evidence had been piling up for two centuries. We had the math, and we had built entire bodies of knowledge around the truth of it, but knowing, apparently, was not the same as seeing.
The world needed a demonstration.
It needed a dome, a sixty-pound weight, and a line dragged slowly through the sand.
A spectacle.
So Foucault hung a weight from a wire and let it swing. The pendulum kept its plane while the Earth slowly turned beneath it. To the people standing in the Pantheon, the path of the pendulum appeared to shift.
Except the pendulum wasn’t shifting.
The room was.
The floor was.
The people in that room, searching for proof, were moving too.
The Earth had been turning the whole time. Before the math, before anyone thought to suspend a weight from the ceiling and make the truth perform for a crowd.
It was not discovered because they finally saw it; they simply became willing to believe what had already been true.
So many women know this pattern. We have been standing on a moving ground for generations, describing the sensation, while everyone around us insists the floor is still.
We know something about that kind of ‘discovery.’ We know what it’s like to name what’s happening, to document what’s happening, to live inside what’s happening - and still be asked for a demonstration.
We say:
Something is happening to my body.
Something feels wrong in this room.
I am not safe with him.
We say it before there is a scan.
Before there is a witness.
Before there is a bruise someone can point to.
But the answer, over and over, is the same:
Prove it.
Oh, not like that…
We’re going to need dates.
Rate the pain from one to ten.
Record the conversation.
Find a witness.
Come back when it’s worse.
Come back when there is evidence.
Come back when the numbers change.
Build me a pendulum.
Make the invisible thing swing from a dome and carve a trench into the floor.
Stand beside it while strangers inspect the mechanism and debate whether the rope is long enough, whether the weight is heavy enough, and whether the sand was level to begin with.
And don’t forget to smile!
Cue the lights! Cue the cameras!
That’s the part they left out of the staircase piece. Women would have to fucking smile.
We would fall gracefully. Soft toes, controlled landing, a little laugh as we stood back up.
The audience can tolerate your pain; what they can’t tolerate is your pain asking something of them.
So you make it beautiful.
You make it inspiring.
You make it anything except what it actually is.
And then we would climb again, with a smile, of course.
Some days it feels less like climbing and more like hanging there, upside down, with one hand still holding on because letting go would be too dramatic, and holding on looks responsible.
Why are these the only options we have?
Fall gracefully.
Hold on quietly.
Climb again.
Still suspended between the demand to ascend and the permission to simply exist.
Maybe that’s the part no one wants to see. Not the fall, not even the pain; the exhaustion of having to make survival look graceful.
The Earth was never waiting for permission to turn. The women standing on it were never waiting for someone to discover what we already knew. We were waiting for someone to believe us.
After all this time, the performance is still the price of admission.
The pendulum didn't move, the room did!! Truer words have never been written, especially in this patriarchal, capitalistic timeline we have been surviving in. I haven't stopped thinking about this since I read it. You took something everyone already half-knows about being disbelieved and gave it a mechanism! And the line about smiling through the fall being the actual performance, not the fall itself, is going to live in my head for a whileeee. This is one of the best things you've written. Well done!