The Posters Were Never Made for Me

The matches have started. With them came the posters.

Airports, rest stops, stadium concourses, the backs of bathroom doors — this month they are everywhere, because the World Cup is here and the warnings always arrive with the crowds. Know the signs. See something, say something. Report it. The intentions are good. The people behind them are working hard, and some of those posters will matter to someone. I don’t want to take that away.

But I keep thinking about who they are written for. And who they quietly skip.

Every one of those campaigns asks a bystander to look outward — at a stranger, at a stadium, at a suitcase being carried by the wrong person. They train the public to scan a crowd for someone else’s emergency. And the trouble is that for most people who are actually being harmed, there is no crowd, no stranger, and no suitcase. There is someone they trust. There is a slow tightening they have learned to call love, or loyalty, or just how things are. There is no scene a passerby could catch, because the whole thing is happening in plain, ordinary daylight, inside a relationship that looks, from the outside, completely fine.

I know this because I lived a version of it for years without a single word for what it was.

You cannot report what you can’t name

Here is the part the posters can’t hold: recognition comes last, not first.

Before you can name a thing, you spend a long time simply feeling that something is off. The body knows before the language arrives. You flinch at a tone and can’t explain why. You over-explain yourself in rooms where no one asked. You keep a running ledger of how to keep someone calm and call it being thoughtful. You are not in denial, exactly — you genuinely do not have the vocabulary yet. The word for what is happening to you has not reached you.

And no awareness campaign built around “spot the victim” was ever designed for the person being the thing it describes. Those messages assume you already know. They assume the gap between experience and language has already closed. For the people still standing inside that gap — and there are so many of us — the loudest month of the year can pass right over our heads.

That is the awareness problem nobody names: the unaware are, by definition, the hardest people to reach. You can’t search for help for a thing you don’t yet believe applies to you.

Naming is not the finish line. It’s the first real breath.

When the word finally arrives — and for me it arrived embarrassingly, devastatingly late — it does not feel like relief at first. It feels like the floor moving. Because naming what happened means you also have to grieve the version of yourself that survived by not knowing. That self was loyal. That self was good at keeping the peace, at staying small, at reading the room. That self kept you alive. And alignment — actually coming back into yourself — asks you to set her down.

That is a real loss. People rush past it. They want the survivor to skip straight to empowerment, to the after-photo, to the tidy testimony. But you cannot grieve, and you cannot leave, and you certainly cannot report, what you have not yet been allowed to name. Naming is not the resolution. It is the first honest breath. Everything real starts there.

What awareness could be instead

So here is what I wish those posters said, in the month when everyone is finally looking.

Not just watch for someone else’s emergency. But: if you have spent years managing someone’s moods and calling it your job — that’s information. If you keep a private list of rules to stay safe with a person who is supposed to love you — that’s information. If something has felt wrong for longer than you can explain — you are allowed to take that seriously before you can prove it.

That is awareness aimed at the unaware. It doesn’t ask you to identify a victim across a crowded concourse. It asks you, gently, to consider that the person you’ve been worried about might be you — and that not having the word for it yet doesn’t make it any less real.

You aren’t broken. You might just be standing in the gap before the language arrives. And you’re allowed to be here. The word will come. When it does, I’ll be here for the breath after.

If something in this landed a little too close — that counts. You don’t need proof or a perfect story to start paying attention to your own life. Reply and tell me what came up, or just sit with it. Either is enough.

If you’re new here: I write every week about recognition, alignment, and finding your way back to yourself after manipulation — the slow kind nobody warns you about. Subscribe and walk with me.