I’ve been doing massive work and dismantling the shame I’ve been carrying around for years, and as I’m reclaiming my power, I’m realising that I can remember loads of times when I didn’t speak up because I feared I would be shamed.
A few months ago, I went out for a drink with a guy I’d met online. The whole thing was pretty laborious, as he came from a complete different world, with a completely different mindset.
Maybe I should have left when he exclaimed “you can’t say you have lived fully until you have a child” when I said I didn’t want children, or when he said “women in their 30s freak out because they know their game is going to be over once they’re 40”, or “well, it’s normal for a man to go for younger women as they ARE more beautiful, that’s a FACT”, or when I told him I was a coach and he looked at me with a condescending look and asked “And you actually make a living from this?”, ooooor when he called me “Boring” for ordering sparkling water instead of an alcoholic drink, but the fact is, I stayed….
However, towards the end of our pseudo-date, something came up and he freaked out over a detail, and started accusing me of things, even raising his voice and getting all agitated. What’s wild is that instead of telling him to go fuck himself, I caught myself thinking of ways to show him I wasn’t lying, that I wasn’t a bad person. And when he reacted by saying things like “Really? Seriously? Do you think that’s normal?” I even considered trying to defend myself and explain the situation. Yikes!!!! But I smiled, wished him goodnight and left.
That rang an alarm bell, though… Because I got home and thought I shouldn’t block him on my phone because then he’d think he was right, that I’m hiding from him because I’m afraid, etc etc. But then I thought: How long are we women going to give a shit about what people think? How long are we going to let that keep us small?
I blocked him, deleted our conversation on WhatsApp, and deleted his number. We don’t have to put up with dicks because we’re afraid of what people will say or think. Especially what THEY will think. Yes, he might be talking behind my back right now. So what? It just reminded me how I let other men in the past get away with shit just because I didn’t want people to talk about me behind my back. This has to end.
A few months prior, a man I’d been on a job interview with, started sending me ambiguous messages on WhatsApp one late evening. Even though they did make me uncomfortable, for a minute I considered not saying anything. I was afraid he might say I was imagining things, or tell me I was being vain. But did what he thought really matter? If his messages made me uncomfortable, wasn’t I simply allowed to express that? So I did, in a polite but firm way.
I have become very protective of my inner Self now. Because I know I wasn’t in the past. But things have changed. And I hope my living that way can inspire other women to do so as well.
It’s time to stand up for who I am. For myself, and for all those sisters out there who think they have no other choice than put up with the shame and keep their place in the dark.
Who’s with me?
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