Just do it, women told. Then we hear that voice

God, it’s been a grim week of deja vu. It was only a few months ago I was writing a column about Eurydice Dixon’s gutwrenching death, and how maddeningly unhelpful was the general response from the public of ‘‘well, if women just followed these simple 55 million rules for living safely then they wouldn’t die, duh’’.

Now, after a harrowing fortnight of seeing Grace Millane’s murder unfold over our news screens, we’re back hearing the same arguments that young women would be fine if they didn’t backpack alone/go on Tinder dates/generally leave the house under any circumstances until their mummified remains are discovered 200 years from now by Martian archaeologists.

It’s simultaneously frustrating, gut-wrenching and exhausting. And it’s all underscored by a deepseated, low-bubbling sense of dread and panic in the stomachs of many young women.

Like the rest of New Zealand, we all followed Grace’s tragic story with fixated, horrified interest. We texted our girlfriends all over the world, ‘‘God, it’s terrible,’’ ‘‘it’s the worst nightmare come true’’ and ‘‘man, that could have been any of us . . .’’ We said the same things over and over until we ran out of proper ways to express grief and fear and watched our notifications ping in numb,dumb silence.

One of the many reasons this horrific case gripped me, and my 20-something girlfriends, is that it hits that fault line in us. See, there’s a crack that runs silently underneath all young women, under all of that irritatingly bombastic enthusiasm and confidence. It’s that voice that, when we’re presented with something new and exciting to try, whispers to us from a back corner of our brain, ‘‘It’s dangerous for women out there. If you do [insert practically anything that involves leaving the house] then you could die . . .’’ It’s that voice which comes from years of being told that women need to follow the ‘‘safe rules’’.

Now normally we ignore, squash and silence this voice and just get on with our normal lives. We go out with our friends, eat poke bowls and stand around making sure everyone knows we’re super cool because we sling our jackets over our shoulders instead of putting our arms in the holes.

But the thing is that this is the time when the #findingyourself rites of passage moments are also presenting themselves to us and they challenge us to break our small, normal routines of adolescence. Go clubbing till 4am in shoes with heels more suited to making surgical incisions than walking in! Go on a Tinder date! Go on an OE! Go alone! To Mexico! With nothing but a bag of wheatgrass and a protein shaker!

We’re told constantly by everything from our activewear to passing Contiki buses that we should just do it! Get out there and do it! All of it! Now!

Yet whenever we get presented by these opportunities, that’s when we hear the voice. What if your drink gets spiked in the bar? What if your Uber driver attacks you on the way to the airport? What if you get abducted while backpacking and raped and . . . you die? What if, what if, what if . . .

So what happens is you bounce backwards and forwards between wanting to test your independence and penning in your actions to avoid getting hurt.

A perfect microcosm of this is why I don’t walk two minutes to the gym at the end of my road at night. I tried, and the last two times guys stopped me and tried to get me into their cars. I constantly tell myself how ridiculously stupid it is to be worried about this tiny walk. But I still don’t go because I each time I force myself to the door I remember the jogger who was stabbed to death in Remuera.

This is magnified 1000-fold when faced with every exciting new opportunity of your freshly gained adulthood. And it’s deeply frustrating because all we want is to be able to take these experiences with the same level of risk as dudes have.

We’re not asking for it to be a cakewalk. The point of these experiences is to test your limits. But for dudes going to a bar for the first time, they might be worried about being laughed at by a girl or getting into a fight on the street afterwards. Women are worried our drinks are going to be spiked, we’ll be dragged off and raped and murdered.

The other deeply annoying spinoff effect of having this voice in your head is that it makes it much harder to make rational decisions about any action at all. It’s like having a bipolar monkey in your head that switches between jabbering at you to stay at home and knit and telling you to go and snort coke off your boss’ butt.

Often you end up listening to the stay-home-andcross-stitch monkey . . . until you get so frustrated by the situation you think, sod it, get blind drunk and run naked through a park.