Column: Stay blessed; love one another

T here’s a reason the image of a Columbia University student hauling her mattress across campus, helped by many of her peers, has imprinted itself upon the nation’s conscience.

It is a visual representation of the weight individuals affected by gender-based violence must carry — and the power a community can have in helping survivors carry that weight.

Everyone affected by gender-based discrimination carries its effects with them daily. It’s up to us to help each other lighten the load.

Emma Sulkowicz, a senior at Columbia, has recently attracted national attention for her performance art piece “Carry That Weight.”

Sulkowicz said she was raped in her own bed by a man who has been accused of sexual assault by two other students.

Sulkowicz said she will carry her mattress everywhere she goes on campus as long as her attacker still attends Columbia. The performance has a list of rules: She has to carry the mattress whenever she is on Columbia University’s campus. She can accept help carrying the mattress, but she cannot ask for it.

Many people I know have this rule for themselves, even if they don’t acknowledge it and aren’t literally carrying a mattress.

I wish I could fly to New York and help Emma carry her mattress and the weight of what happened to her. But students at UNC are carrying their own burdens right here.

If you’re at UNC and have a marginalized identity, you have probably felt “that weight” on your shoulders as you walk from class to class.

Abiding by Emma’s rule isn’t a sustainable way to live, but many do. It’s hard to ask for help, but once someone offers, we exhale, just then realizing that we’d been holding our breath.

If that rings true for you, if you know what it is like to carry weight and then feel the relief of sharing it with someone, it might be time to offer to help someone carry theirs. We all carry so much of it.

“That weight” isn’t always a memory of sexual assault. There’s weight in all the little microaggressions women deal with on a day-to-day basis. It can be men telling you that they’re surprised you have a firm handshake, or a professor suggesting that many of the women in his lecture hall are online shopping instead of paying attention.

In the bliss of the summer, I’d forgotten what it felt like to walk down Franklin Street staring at the sidewalk, afraid of street harassment. This place holds a lot of pain for many people. I love UNC the most when I see us standing together, helping each other through pain.

And by the way, helping each other doesn’t need to always be a dramatic talk. Last week during my break between classes, I didn’t run to Davis Library to finish my readings.

Instead, my sister suggested we go to my dorm and watch “Broad City” together. I didn’t realize it, but by lying on the couch with her and laughing, I was letting go of a little of that weight.