Because It Is Too Much
My dear, precious 25-year-old me,
When it happens, it won’t be the first time. But it will be the first time it happens at your place of work.
You are being sexually harassed, by a co-worker everyone else seems to love. He’s a dad, married with two kids. Their picture hangs in his cubicle. He plays on a softball team. He’s funny and charming and great at his job, and he won’t stop commenting on your breasts.
He tells you your tits would look great in a Madonna cone bra. He comes over and rubs your shoulders, gives you unwanted massages right there in the open office, with everyone around you.
All of it makes you question yourself, and what’s happening. He’s doing it right there in public. How does he not know it’s wrong? Are you imagining all of it? Is any of it real?
Every time he walks over to the intern, the girl a few years younger than you, your stomach turns out of fear that he will do it to her, too. You want so badly to protect her, but you can’t figure out how to protect yourself.
One day he comes behind you and places his hands there again, on your shoulders. And you don’t know where the courage comes from but suddenly the words are there. “Stop touching me.”
And he panics. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he says. “I have a wife.” He walks back to his desk.
This is gaslighting, a term you know. But knowing a word and living it are such different things.
You leave this job because of this man. You are too scared to go to HR. Sometimes you’ll worry that you were a coward. My sweet self, I want to tell you: you are not.
You got through it, and you got out.
A few years later you are a mom, walking on the subway platform, on your way back to Brooklyn to pick up your daughter from daycare. When a man walks by and grabs your ass, you will turn around and punch him.
And now, 15 years later, the world has changed but also it has not. The #metoo movement has happened, and Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby are in jail. A sexual predator is President.
There will be more ass grabbing, and comments, and so much systemic, large-scale misogyny and oppression. Sometimes it feels like too much. Because it is too much.
But know this: you have changed. Because of that man and other men like him, yes. But mostly: because of you. You are brave, and you were brave, even when you thought you were not.