Wounded

Untitled: © Irina Sidorowicz - Visit NoHappy.com to see additional artwork and photography. The artist studies Graphic Design and Visual Communication in Buenos Aires.

This picture, posted as a writing prompt at Every Picture Tells a Story is powerfully evocative for me. My first reaction was that she is Palestinian, but she quickly became bigger than that. She is Afghan, too, married at ten or eleven to a man decades older than she. Then she became all wounded women.

Inside every battered woman, every woman who was sexually abused as a child, every rape survivor, lives a girl-woman like this. However bright and strong and confident she may look on the outside, and they do, this wounded girl-woman looks out from behind her eyes. I may see a flicker in the first session, or I may not catch a glimpse until she's been here a few times.

If I can earn her trust, sometimes she will come out.