For so many years, I lived as if I didn’t have a body. Childhood abuse meant mine was a conquered land, a place that had been pillaged and vanquished from the very start.

Thirteen years ago, I found out I had stage 3b/4 uterine cancer. I discovered it late and by the time I did a tumour the size of an avocado already occupied my uterus. It had busted through my colon. I did not know it or feel it.

This sent me off on a quest, travelling the world in search of answers, asking women everywhere: when did you leave your body? Who owns your body? What space is your body allowed to occupy? How has your body been hurt, changed or refused by the government, your job, the supreme court, white supremacy, climate catastrophe, poverty, police violence, settler colonialism, transphobia, imperialism, capitalism?

Women’s bodies are forever under threat. On alert. Ducking. Crouching. Hiding. Making themselves smaller, less obvious. Waiting for the insult. Guarding against the unwanted touch. The grab. The punch. The rape. The murder. How does your body fight back? When does your body rest?

Nurses are expected to sacrifice their bodies for those who refuse to wear masks. Restaurant workers are forced to take down their own masks, risking sickness and death, so the unmasked customer can decide if their face is pretty enough for a lousy tip.

Californian farm workers’ bodies are assaulted so routinely, while harvesting fields, that they have nicknamed them field de calzón, or “field of panties”, because their underwear is ripped off them when they are raped.

Black women’s bodies are shot by police in their beds, in their cars, for a traffic violation in front of their child, on a “wellness check”. The wrong body in the wrong house. Afterwards, even their stories and names are disappeared. Speak her body, say her name.

The body of a girl child sold by her parents to an old man in Herat, Afghanistan, to keep her starving family alive. The body of another girl sold online for the price of a mobile phone, and another, sourced by a British socialite for her rich, sadistic boyfriend, who serves the child’s body to his luminous circle of the depraved.

Women’s bodies, carrying the memories of trauma, predisposing them to cysts and tumours, bumps, lumps and sickness, long after the damage is done.

Women’s bodies always serving, feeding, bathing, holding, carrying and nurturing other bodies, never having time to think about their own. Women’s bodies hated for their “perfection”, for their “imperfection”; hated for being too thin, too fat, too round, too flat. Hated because they can do all that and make you feel all that.

But bodies are now remembering, reattaching, returning, becoming bodies for the first time. The burning from daddy’s unwanted fingers shoved inside at five now becoming word, becoming fire, the language of purpose, of power.

Bare-breasted bodies in the streets pushing back against femicide. Indigenous women’s bodies on horseback and in kayaks, protesting over pipelines about to spill oil. Fist-raised bodies pressed up against rows of erupting police. Bodies rising: my body, my choice. Differently abled bodies occupying the corridors of Congress. Enraged bodies smashing the steel doors of a factory where their sister and brother workers needlessly died.

Women’s bodies, unapologetically alive, freeing the beauty and birdsong inside, no longer captive or denied, but becoming one surging body, sweeping in other bodies as they rise.

V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright, activist and the founder of One Billion Rising, a global protest campaign to end rape and sexual violence against women (cisgender, transgender, and those who hold fluid identities that are subject to gender-based violence). This year’s campaign, Rise for the Bodies of All Women, Girls and the Earth, takes place on (or around) 14 February. It invites survivors and their allies to “rise politically, outrageously, artistically – through dance, art, marches, ritual, song, spoken word, testimonies, and other ways that best express your outrage, your resistance and your vision of a world without violence”.

• In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International