When friends and former colleagues started sharing #MeToo stories, or, in those first furtive days of virality simply dropped the hashtag and left the details opaque, it was palpable: Something was shifting right before our eyes and the power of women speaking, typing, screaming what had for generations mostly been whispered or not said at all, was weighty in the air.

The way we grappled with, identified and discussed sexual assault would never be the same, it seemed.

MeToo—the hashtag that took off after Alyssa Milano, using activist Tarana Burke’s decade-old campaign, put a pound sign in front of the rallying cry—prompted a tsunami of stories and a national intervention on sexual harassment and assault.

https://twitter.com/Alyssa_Milano/status/919659438700670976

It was an eye-opener. Many women I know, myself included, began digging through moments that we’d waved off—the unwanted hands, the inappropriate boss, the ass-slap at work, the boys who’d been boys—and wondered how we’d become conditioned to accept it. Many men voiced surprise and shock at such pervasive harassment and assault. Women described groping , a constant flow of harassment, molestation and even rape. Powerful names started to emerge with accusations attached: Larry Nassar, Kevin Spacey, Roy Moore, Louis C.K., Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Russell Simmons, Al Franken, Woody Allen (again), Mario Batali. “The Silence Breakers” were Time Magazine’s People of the Year. The language had changed. Posting #MeToo stories was a part of a national movement to decondition our society. Doing so was both brave and necessary.

But this necessity, unsurprisingly, came with a cost. Survivors gave a piece of themselves, their stories, in exchange for a movement that was supposed to create a wave of change. The burden, it seemed, was on women to free our culture of abuse and assault. Unfortunately, the burden was also on them to endure the very specific and unique abuse that survivors face when they come forward—the insidious shaming that puts the onus on victims instead of their attackers and aggressors.

A year later, in the same month as #MeToo’s internet anniversary, we find ourselves in more of the same. Now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed and sworn-in to serve on the highest court in the land despite the sexual assault allegations brought forth by three women, including Christine Blasey Ford, and a belligerent show of defense during his Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. Ford, who says the judge attacked her more than 30 years ago when they were in high school, has been mocked by the president for coming forward. She is unable to return home due to death threats. Women—and some men—reported mentally reliving their own attacks after Ford’s testimony, and took deeply personal umbrage at the suggestion that Ford’s delay in reporting somehow indicated she’d fabricated her story. And the vitriol against Ford is not unlike the kind those who shared their stories using the hashtag #WhyIDidntReport, experienced. It might be easy to wonder, is hashtag reporting to eradicate and illuminate our society’s ills all worth it?

Given the historical response to survivors of sexual assault, especially in the age of Twitter, I asked Karestan Chase Koenen, PhD, licensed psychologist and professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, what can prompt survivors to voice an incident they held inside, for years or decades. Often, there are spikes in reports “anytime there’s a really high-profile sexual assault case,” says Koenen. This was true during the Clarence Thomas hearings. It was true with Kavanaugh.

Moral obligation also has an incredible power to draw out the truth: Survivors tend to report after their attacker faces other allegations. Koenen herself went public with her own experience: “It was this public thing where I had a purpose for speaking out,” explains Koenen. “For some people, speaking out now has a purpose.”

Then there’s control: “Assault takes a person’s control and power away, and it should be in someone’s own power and control to tell their story, and I don’t think they’re under any obligation,” says Koenen. Your story, once on the internet, is always there, she warns. She’s known women whose new dates Googled them and knew about their assaults before their first dinner. Sharing the story, no matter how important, cedes some control over it and how it will later be revealed to others.

I certainly do not fault anyone for sharing their #MeToo or #WhyIDidntReport stories; it shows staggering courage. For some, it is empowering to finally say it. That shouldn’t get lost. But I worry about so many people who carried a gnawing hurt and fear around for years, who never wanted to speak the words. Early on, I didn’t pause to see how making a disclosure in such a public way also leaves one open to trolling and further harassment, or in Ford’s case, ongoing death treats. Such is the cost of the truth. I’m at once awed by the survivors’ courage, and mourn that this moment again required it of them—and repaid them with so much cruelty. There’s a burden in being a bearer of truth; there’s punishment meted out for telling it.

I wonder how Ford feels now. How ought outspoken survivors all feel, having aired indignities and pain publicly and across generations, to receive lip service from politicians, but ultimately see justice evaporate again?

There’s an unbearable lightness in telling a difficult truth, a freefall sense, a burden cast-off—perhaps traded eventually for new burdens—but in the moment of truth-telling, there’s power in choosing the words. We saw that astonishing power in Ford. She may not have been taken as seriously as she should have been by those seeking other forms of power for themselves, but she changed lives.

There are millions of stories still held in silence.

When truths are told for a higher good, one hopes the teller will be rewarded with seeing some justice. In a good, fair world, that’s how things would work. We don’t yet live in that good, fair world. But we do live in a country where now, the fight is more deeply shared. Losing a battle but ending up with more soldiers isn’t exactly a loss.

For a year, we’ve heard the tallies of the millions of dollars powerful men lose when their “scandals” surface. But I continue dwelling on what’s been sacrificed by so many women who exposed their hardest memories at the cost of waking up the rest of society, the cost of reliving and opening up stories—because the cost could be exponential a moment that never ends.

Unless, because of their courage, eventually, it does end.

Sarah Stankorb is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Vogue, Marie Claire, Longreads, Catapult, and Slate, among others. @sarahstankorb

MORE: A Year Later, Is the #MeToo Movement Stuck in Hollywood?

The set of The Hate U Give could have been a somber, hushed place. After all, the movie (and the book on which it’s based) centers on the effects of police violence after a local cop kills a black teen. But what Amandla Stenberg, 20, remembers is the music. She and an almost all-black cast and extras, many of them heavily involved in grassroots efforts to support Black Lives Matter, would rap between takes, breaking into Kendrick Lamar anthems like “Alright.” (Sample lyrics: “Do you hear me, do you feel me? We gon’ be alright.”) People were able to be their full “authentic selves” on set, Amandla says, and that time between takes “was a celebration of our community and the ability we have to use our collective voice to stand up.”

Amandla tells me this over the phone at the end of August, the same week that I have to attend orientation at a new school. Before I dialed, I took a deep breath to calm a rush of nerves. We’re not so different, I thought—we’re both readers and writers, both activists. But Amandla has become a voice in social movements like Black Lives Matter, even as she promotes movies and poses for beautiful photo shoots (like this one). Sure, I founded #1000BlackGirlBooks to call for more diverse stories and once met Angie Thomas, who wrote the novel The Hate U Give, at a book festival. But when it comes down to it, I’m just starting high school, and Amandla was in The Hunger Games.

Amandla puts me at ease in an instant. As she says, it’s a skill black girls learn from birth: “We have a unique voice because we grow up with the ability to empathize. We constantly have to do the work of placing ourselves in other people’s shoes.” That can be a burden, but Amandla calls it a “superpower of empathy.” She reminds me that “the way that we talk, the way that we love, the way that we express ourselves, how we do our hair”—what makes us different also makes us special.

In The Hate U Give, Amandla plays Starr Carter, a 16-year-old who sees a police officer shoot and kill her childhood friend. Starr has to decide whether to serve as a formal witness, all while navigating her parallel lives, split between her mostly black neighborhood and her mostly white, wealthy prep school.

That divided universe reminds Amandla of her own childhood in Los Angeles, but while Starr feels alone in her experience at school, Amandla feels fortunate she had people who understood where she came from. “We became kind of like a band, like a little squad,” she tells me of her black friends. “We had to squad up in that environment in order to feel comfortable.” Those relationships meant she was never isolated in her experience or disempowered. “People did not understand where I lived, never went to my side of town. They didn’t really understand what it feels like to be black or how beautiful our black communities are,” she says.

Today, Amandla isn’t afraid to tell them. After all, she is the same Amandla Stenberg who came out on Snapchat at 17 and made the video “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows,” which went viral. The video is pure Amandla—honest and personal but pointed about the issues, in this case about the harm that cultural appropriation can do. At the end, she asks, “What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture?”

The Hate U Give asks the same question. Amandla isn’t worried about the reviews or box office numbers; she cares about the lessons the story will teach audiences. “If we’ve done the job right, movies like The Hate U Give will be a tool in depicting that sort of cultural appropriation, why it’s insensitive, why it’s not cool.” What she wants most is for us, no matter who we are, to feel like we have the space we need to express ourselves.

Lately she’s made a bigger effort to follow her own advice. At red-carpet events she doesn’t stick to pastels. She wears burnt-orange suits and sleek dresses, her hair natural. “[Fashion] is just an inherent part of my job. It’s something that I love,” Amandla says. But when she started out—like Starr transitioning from hoodies to a fresh school uniform and Jordans—it seemed easier to be one person on the red carpet and a different person at home. That’s begun to change. “I am learning how to integrate,” she says. “I want to express myself as authentically as I can.”

Marley Dias, 13, is an activist and the founder of #1000BlackGirlBooks, a movement to collect and distribute books with black female protagonists.