On Accountability

Written by: Liz Cerven

Dear Reader,

There are moments when a conversation does not hold. When language frays at the edges. When someone refuses to see what they have done, and instead builds a shrine to their own pain. A monument to misunderstanding. A fortress against change. We have all been there— seeking repair and meeting a wall. Speaking truths that tremble, only to be told our honesty is an attack. Offering care shaped like a boundary, and being mistaken for cruel.

It is to the ones who know that accountability is not punishment.
It is practice. It is presence. It is listening even when the mirror stings.
It is letting the truth rearrange your interior.
It is knowing that harm denied is harm repeated.

Accountability, to me, is sacred. Not a courtroom, but a hearth. Not a sentence, but a summons. It is the long, slow work of saying: I see what I’ve done. I see who you are. And I choose to stay in the room, trembling, and try again.

Feminism taught me this: That power is not just who speaks the loudest, but who listens with their whole body. That care is not a soft blur of forgiveness, but the bright cut of clarity. That love demands more than tenderness— it asks for transformation.

Feminist love is not passive. It is not the soft murmur that smooths over harm. It is the firm voice that says: Something broke here. Can we tend to it—together?

In feminist circles, we speak of power not as domination but as relation. Relational power asks: What will you do with what you hold? How will you respond when someone says, “You hurt me”? Will you meet them in the room of discomfort, or will you slam the door and call yourself the injured one?

So many men—yes, them, again—have been taught that to be wrong is to be nothing. That being held accountable is an assault. That their feelings should be shielded from the weight of impact. This is patriarchy’s illusion: that empathy is a weakness, and that control is a virtue.

But what of repair?

What of the sacred labor of mending what was torn?

To those of us raised among silences and shapeshifting,
to those of us told to smooth things over,
to be soft, forgiving, grateful—
I say: your anger is not an obstacle to healing.
It is the fire that clears the field for truth.

Accountability is not linear. It is not a checklist or a script. It is messy and tender and often slow. It demands that we stay when it would be easier to disappear. It asks us to lay down our armor and listen even when our pride wants to speak.

As adrienne maree brown reminds us, “We are learning to practice accountability, not to shame each other, but to grow.” And growth is not always shared. Sometimes it spirals in separate directions. Sometimes, our healing requires the grief of unmet repair.

I do not believe in disposability, but I do believe in boundaries. In saying: if you cannot meet me in your mess, I will not clean it up for you. I will not carry your story that casts me as the villain so you can remain untouched.

This, too, is care.
This, too, is love.

Feminist love is not martyrdom. It is not silence in the face of harm. It is fierce, it is complicated, and it is real. It calls us into integrity, not perfection. It says: I see you. I see the damage. Are you willing to step into the work of repair?

And if not—

I will walk away. Not because I do not care, but because I care too much to stay inside a story where harm is rewritten as hurt feelings and accountability mistaken for cruelty.

And when we find ourselves in the in-between—between rupture and repair, between the truth we carry and the silence that follows— we can remember Gloria Anzaldúa’s nepantla: the liminal space where contradictions live, where discomfort becomes fertile ground, where we hold truths that may never be reconciled, but still insist on naming them. There is power in this borderland. It is not resolution, but it is real. It is the place where transformation begins.

So I say this to the ones who have been told they’re too much—
too angry, too honest, too unyielding—
your refusal to make yourself small
is not the problem.

Your tenderness is not weakness.
Your rage is not failure.
Your clarity is not cruelty.

Let this be a small altar for those of us
choosing another way

With care and clarity