
We made it through the toughest day in terms of walking—about 14 miles by the end of the day, climbing up and over the moors, which while not fully blooming with heather, gave us bursts of pink, white, and the rusty red of drying buds for many miles.
Whenever I walk this way, the Kate Bush version of Wuthering Heights plays on a loop in my head. If you look hard through the mist (which there was plenty of) you can almost see the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine wandering the moors.
My mind wandered for a while with them before I fell in step with one of my walking companions. There's a beautiful intimacy that sometimes emerges as you walk with someone knowing there are miles ahead and no need to rush conversation. It comes as a sudden and simple trust. It may well be short-term—who knows if you will manage to stay connected across the thousand miles that separate your homes. But in this cocooned space it invites you to reveal your vulnerability as much as it invites your acceptance as a gift the other's vulnerability.

The two of us opened up about painful abuses that occurred in our separate childhoods and we talked honestly about the legacy of those experiences. I'm not shy about difficult things that have happened in my life. I've published pieces about a lot of difficult experience of my last 40 years.
Although years ago I stepped out of the shame closet and made it public in a newspaper article that I am a survivor of sexual abuse, I haven't discussed the aftermath of that experience outside a therapist's office or the intimacy of romantic partnership. And never with another woman. It never occurred to me back then, that another women, whether or not they had experienced similar abuse, might be innately able to listen without judgement, hear without needing to fix. Sharing my story felt cathartic—and it helped me to recognize that the experience simply has no hold on me today. To realize that some time in the past four decades, I did indeed, reclaim myself and take back the power lost. The conversation was a gift in this way.
It felt like an oddly synchronous moment when following the day's walk, this was the writing prompt for our evening session: Recall the most painful critique of your writing that you've ever received. Then, turn it into a positive. That is, take back the night from the critic who has been at the back of your mind for too long.
The most painful critique I ever received from an editor had to do with a newspaper article I wrote that revealed the aforementioned trauma. To say that the catharsis of the day continued in the writing is an understatement. While the incident itself no longer has a hold on me, it turned out the critique still did.
I am so grateful for the walking release and the writing release this day on the Moors brought.
The story below comes with a trigger warning. While I don't describe assault, the setting here may be disturbing.
PROMPT: Recall a critique that you were given, one that was painful or made you angry. Write a piece, fiction or non, poetry or prose, that turns that critique around and makes it emotionally useful to you.

Too Quiet
By Cheryl Murfin / September 2024
“It’s too quiet,” the line editor, a woman I respected but did not like, smacked me. I was never sure why she was always exceedingly hard on my work. I was 22 and just out of journalism school and she acted like I had no place in a newsroom. In fact, she said as much.
“Who even hired you,” she once bellowed across the desk when I failed to ask a source the particular question she wanted an answer to. "Do you even know your ass from your elbow?" There were no HR department complaints back then if you wanted to keep your job.
"Your boss," I wanted to yell back. I didn't. I decided to accept her harshness as part of some newsroom hazing ritual. I learned from others in the newsroom that she simply, oddly, didn’t like other women reporters.
After sending her one particular story, she crossed her arms and gave the most painful critique of my career:
"It's too quiet."
The criticism came in response to a story I had literally bled to write: about a new mandatory support group for paroled sex offenders.
“What’s the support they are getting? What do they talk about? Is group therapy effective for lowering recidivism?” The editor-in-chief, the one who had hired me—in fact, sought me out for my position—sent me in search of answers to those questions.
To get them, I found myself sitting in a circle of men. There were twelve of them, 11 offenders, and one therapist. The therapist introduced me and as he did, I felt 22 eyes look me up and down. Half the men crossed their arms over their chests in the way of men who feel it is their right to dominate women. The other half smiled nervously in the way of men trying to look nice, despite, being sex offenders.
“We’ll just continue as if you aren’t here,” the therapist said.
For the next 90 minutes, I listened as the men, moving one to another from left to right around the circle, shared when and exactly how they had reoffended either by thought or action in the prior week.
Jim stood for a full hour outside an elementary school playground fantasizing about the 4th-grade girls.
“But I didn’t need to get closer,” he said. As if that were enough. As if that were good.
Allen had ever-so-slightly touched the buttocks of a little boy who wandered away from his mother in the grocery.
“He liked it, he laughed,” Allen said.
Cory had another dream about . . . I don’t need to repeat it.
“But dreams are just dreams. I’d never act on it,” he said.
Of course, these are not their real names. I never knew their names. My job was to protect their anonymity. Each time, the therapist, Steven, stopped and addressed the action or the thought.
“You’ve got to watch that, Cory. What are you doing to make a clear line between dream and reality? What physical action can you take?” Hands shot up. Cold showers were suggested. Eating hot peppers. Running.
I sat there stunned, my pen frozen.
Any one of these men, and all of them together, could have been the teen who assaulted me as a child. Any one of these parolees sitting there admitting they still grappled with urges to abuse, walking the street of my city, some looking at children in my neighborhood.
When I got back to the newsroom, I was still sweaty. I needed to stay neutral and stick to the facts. Neutral, neutral, neutral, I repeated the word under my breath like a mantra. But I couldn’t get my fingers to move.
With the deadline approaching, I went to the editor-in-chief and told him I couldn’t write it. I told him why. I could not be neutral.
“So, don’t be neutral. Be honest,” he said.
So, I wrote about being a victim in a room full of sexually dangerous men. What that felt like. What that sounded like. What that smelled like—I could not get the scent of Old Spice cologne out of my nose.
My whole body felt re-violated as I wrote. And it felt liberated.
Until those two words: “Too quiet.”
As a victim of assault, I was told to be quiet. I was told it didn’t happen, that it was in my head, that a teenager couldn’t have done that.
I was told, in more ways than I have words for, that my voice meant nothing.
“That’s ridiculous,” my mother said when I tried to tell her what happened. The teen was a kid she took care of, along with several other kids, after school when I was in first grade. “I was home the whole time,” she said. As if it could not have happened in her house, right under her nose.
So, for many years, I was too quiet.
With this piece, I let my voice be heard for the very first time. My voice. Not the line editor’s.
In the essay I wrote, I did not scream. I did not dramatize. I wrote in a voice that was quiet and sure. A purposeful quiet, but one that refused to hide. But my voice was not the one my the line editor wanted to hear.
She told me to go back and cut the bulk of my story and instead find sources that would speak to the potential dangers these men might still represent to society. To get another authority in there—beyond the three that were already in it.
I rewrote the piece, took out the edges, unwrote my truth, and once again made myself invisible. She edited it, cutting more of me out. A news story. A report.
Her shift ended at 10 p.m.
Too quiet sat on me like an elephant. I felt I was suffocating as I did the night calls to the coroner and all the police stations.
At 11:30 pm, half an hour before press time, I went back into the editing system. I returned my story to the article I first submitted. I hit send.
I won a press award. Letters flooded my desk. “Thank you,” they said. “Thank you.”
The line editor tried to get me fired for insubordination. She left a year later. But before then, every time I walked by her desk, I felt her angry eyes.
On her last day, she cornered me to tell me that my lack of professionalism would result in a short career.
I told her: “I am a lot of things. But I am not too quiet.”
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