I’ve had a hard time with this one. Even to the point where I’m still not sure that I should be making this post, but maybe that’s why I am. As a woman I have been harassed and assaulted many many times. There is one in particular that I have a hard time talking about publicly. It’s not that I don’t want people to know, I actually do because it’s a very important topic to discuss. It involves a boss and inappropriate behavior. How do you stand up to this kind of behavior when your job is at stake? How do you speak up when everyone could be out of work? People ask why it took so long for women to come forward about Harvey Weinstein but I know why. I know what it’s like to be too afraid to say anything. He had us all believing that people would hate us if we spoke up. Lives would be destroyed. It turns out nobodies lives were destroyed but his.
The reason I haven’t talked about this is because it involves other people that I am still friends with, people that I really respect. To out myself publicly would also be outing them and I can’t, in good conscience, do that. It’s also something that we haven’t discussed with each other, and at least to me it’s still an open wound. It was an ongoing incident over 2.5 years that ultimately cost me my job (because I would wake up wanting to stab myself rather than go back to work and my productivity dropped). To the people involved, if you are reading this, you are amazing and I am glad we are friends, although I wish it had been under better circumstances. Stay strong and fight the good fight!
