As part of the work of the Parrhesia Collective, Talin Suciyan and I co-host an English-language podcast titled This Is No Ordinary Life, through which we closely examine the violence and micro-violence woven into our everyday lives. In one of our recent conversations, we found ourselves returning to the same question: How did we, as girls, learn to protect ourselves? In a world where violence could emerge at any moment, who taught us how to stay safe? Was this knowledge passed on through love, through clear and reassuring guidance, or through fear and prohibition?
One of my earliest memories is tied to a song we sang in kindergarten. Yes, a song. A cheerful one, in fact. One of my favorite teachers, Oryort Araksi, greeted us every morning with her piano and the colorful yarn balls she had prepared herself. Accompanied by music, we were invited to move, skip, and delight in one another’s company. One of the songs she taught us went something like this:
“Where are you going, little girl?”
“I forbid it, I forbid it.”
“I am going to pick violets.”
“Don’t forbid it, don’t forbid it.”
I no longer remember the rest of the song. Even writing it down now sounds somewhat strange. But at the time, nothing about it felt strange to us. We were allowed to run and skip freely around the classroom while singing it, and we had so much fun. Years later, when the song returned to me, I realized that it had been a song of prohibition all along. What felt more unsettling was recognizing how prohibition had quietly settled into our small bodies through joy itself. As children, we did not question it. When prohibiting authority intertwined with love and play, it became harder to recognize, even easier to internalize.
Of course, tenderness was not absent from our lives. The care my mother and grandmother offered through nourishing meals, the warmth of home, and their protective presence shaped some of my earliest experiences of what safety could feel like. Love often appeared at the table: being well fed, kept warm, looked after, knowing someone was waiting for you. Looking back, I see this too as a language of protection.
Yet protection and connection were not always the same thing. Home often represented safety, while the streets felt more uncertain. Restrictions multiplied when it came to the outside world. Where we could go, when we had to return, and with whom we were allowed to spend time all became important. Curiously, however, schools and their surroundings continued to be imagined by many adults as safe spaces. And yet, years later, I came to realize that school corridors were not always safe either, that boundaries were rarely spoken about openly, and that I have to learn many things through my body. At home, there were no warnings that unwanted things might happen to us at school. Our teachers were to be respected and trusted without question. Yet over time, we learned through experience that schools, and even extracurricular educational spaces, did not always offer safety.
Like many women, I learned early on to scan my surroundings. To anticipate a glance, read the emotional atmosphere of a room, adapt before conflict emerged, avoid drawing attention, and please others. Protection was often learned at the expense of connection to the body. I became attuned less to what I felt than to what the world expected of me. Canadian physician and writer Gabor Maté suggests that chronic adaptation, the suppression of anger, and the tendency to prioritize the needs of others, particularly among women, can place a long-term burden on the body. He speaks not of a direct cause-and-effect relationship, but of a meaningful convergence worth attending to. When a person cannot say “no,” the body may begin to express what could not otherwise be spoken.
For our generation, saying “no” as children was nearly impossible. Expectations of our parents, teachers, and other authority figures were clear: we were to be compliant rather than disruptive. After all, we were both Armenian and girls. Who knows how many stories live within us of bodily boundaries being crossed, leaving a child feeling devalued and painfully permeable? We often think only of overtly violent interventions as violations of bodily integrity. Yet a meal forced upon a child, or a face compelled to smile, may be just as sufficient to quietly estrange a girl from her own body.
Writing this essay has reminded me that childhood continues to speak to us not only through memory, but through the body itself. Unnamed boundaries, unspoken fears, the pressure to be a “good girl,” the demand to adapt… Some things only become legible in retrospect. Feminist trauma theorist Judith Herman reminds us that experiences that cannot be spoken do not simply disappear. They return in other forms: in silence, in unexplained unease, in burdens carried by the body. When a story cannot be spoken, the body continues to speak.
Looking at my body through this lens again, I cannot help but wonder how I might care more tenderly for the porous boundaries shaped over the years. Though the quiet pedagogies of childhood have formed us, we also learn, over time, to enter into different relationships with our bodies, our boundaries, and our voices. How might we create spaces where protection can be learned not only through fear and prohibition, but also through trust, boundaries, and the capacity for connection? Beyond learning how to protect ourselves, perhaps what matters is learning how to live without losing the bond we hold with ourselves in the process.
