My 16-year-old niece pointed out to me over the last few days that the word 'triggered' that many of us women have been using in the wake of #MeTooIndia is inherently violent, given its easy association with ammunition. I have since been searching for another terminology that could best embody the feeling of how being exposed to someone else's trauma can almost spontaneously and subconsciously evoke your own memories of vulnerability.

Many of us have been struggling with incidents that we had relegated to our unconscious; moments of helplessness, of feeling overwhelmed, overpowered, undone. Could we have acted differently? Could we have been more vociferous with our dissent? Why did we feel like we had to navigate certain power dynamics for the sake of our livelihoods? Have we really been so jaded by the systems of due process that we no longer had faith in the solidarity of the sisterhood? Or had patriarchy been so complicit in compromising the ethics of this gender-based community, enforcing a lack of cohesiveness?