Here is my nothing of sexual harassment.
The incidents that are invisible, intangible and don't exist in any record apart from my mind and heart.
Every woman reading this will have a list like this too.
It starts early. 12-year-old boys rooting through our bags in breaktime classrooms, gleefully finding our stash of Always and pulling it out with a jeer. What were they laughing at? Our wombs? The very organs that gave them the breath in their lungs that they now use to embarrass us for having female bodies.
I was an awkward, gangly, bespectacled, train-track wearing girl, painfully aware of my utterly unbeautiful self. Male hands poking you. "What's that on your chest? Oh, nothing!" accompanied by guttural laughter and kudos.
Fast forward a while. I've learnt how to be pretty now and work as a waitress. It's a nice pub. A middle class pub. Still full of men who hate women.
I bring the pudding menus over, written in chalk on mini-blackboards (it's part of the mass-produced quirky charm). "Are you on it love?" The bellows of drunken laughter echo round the table. No man would ever say this on his own. They work in packs; it's all about the power play. I never tell them I've heard their hilarious joke several times before. I don't say anything. Ever. Especially not when they ask how big I like my steaks. I scuttle, embarrassed, around the table, not meeting their eyes as I clear their plates, trying to lean in beside them as little as possible, feeling eyes combing over me.
I walk into the glass-wash and there's my boss, pressing himself up against another waitress again while his wife works in the kitchen, thinking he's funny, thinking it's a game. He hates racism because he's from a traveller background. Misogyny's working out well for him so far though.
None of us say anything. We congregate in angry whispers around the dumb waiter instead, by turns ranting quietly, by turns each making fun of the men who've abused us to cheer each other up (ask him if he wears his steak on his head).
I like going out clubbing most weeks. I love dancing with my friends. The entry price of the inevitable groping hands on your bum and unwanted crotch grinding up against you is silently accepted by all of us.
After shoving once such hand away on a night out a few years later I angrily point to my engagement ring. (Now I'd call this capitulation; is the absence of a ring acquiescence to sexual assault?) I quickly find out I'm a FRIGID BITCH - should I let my husband-to-be know?
I walk around my university city crossing the road to avoid any scaffolding and the hi-vis jackets that are filled with cat-calling men.
You can't avoid the vans though... you're fair game to them. Horns honk, words are shouted, sometimes inaudible but enough to let you know you're not worth anything. Walking down the street becomes a game of roulette. My heart pounds whenever I'm anywhere on my own.
Apparently I don't smile enough.
I edit the university newspaper and leave the office at almost midnight every Wednesday after sending it to press. Walking alone through the pitch black campus I speak to my boyfriend the whole way home, giving him minute by minute updates so he can call the police with my exact location if I'm assaulted. We were all given rape alarms on arrival at university. I wonder if the boys were given instructions not to rape anyone?
Second year brings an online, anonymous, ongoing campaign of harassment on my public blog. One of the most memorable messages I received read, "We want to see you raped by a gang of syphilitic sailors who cut your legs off so you hobble around on the bloody stumps."
Everyone tells me to go to the police so I do. They take it seriously but there are no resources to police anything online then so it peters out.
I take the pile of printed out evidence to the University harassment office. The woman who's Head of the department has stepped out but her colleague flicks through the sheaf. "This is just what you have to expect if you're editor of the paper", he says. My stomach drops.
The Head of the Department walks in and asks to see what's going on. She takes one look at the papers and tells me it's harassment pure and simple. I feel relieved and broken.
Nothing comes of it. They can't formally identify the students even though I'm pretty sure I know who it is. I'm told one option is for me to tackle it myself in a team meeting.
For a while I'm dazed, paranoid and highly anxious, not knowing when the next comment is going to drop, not knowing who's writing the stuff but knowing they're close to me, totally unable to relax in any situation.
Since I've been married and had kids the incidents have been far fewer and farther between. Save for a drunken man shoving himself up against me on a seat on a train and stroking my leg while singing to me, and a few cat calls, life is calmer now.
But every time I get in the car I check the back seat.
Every time my car's idling and a man's walking past I flick the lock switch.
Every time I have to walk past a group of men my heart still pounds.
I don't walk anywhere at night on my own, save around my immediate neighbourhood where I know someone on every street.
If I hear footsteps behind me on brief walks when I have to walk in the dark, I pretty much have an anxiety attack.
A few weeks ago a man stared at me in town and said, "so pretty, Jesus Christ". I felt weak, violated, and panicked, and my first thought was "it's my fault for putting some nice makeup on today".
That epitomises what it is to be female. To feel used and devalued and to blame ourselves, because of how society has been set up.
Throughout my teenage years and twenties, my peers and I just accepted that was how things were. You went out, you got groped. You walked down the street, you got yelled at. We never liked it but we never ever questioned it. It wasn't until the #metoo movement that I think a lot of us woke up to the fact that this was never ok, and for myself I not only felt anger at the men who had conducted this gross wrongdoing but anger and upset at myself for accepting it.
The point is that none of this stuff is a statistic. None of it is a rape or a murder and I'm not coming close to suggesting it's anywhere on the same plane and carries anywhere near the level of trauma that has been inflicted on survivors of these things by male perpetrators.
The point is that it may be invisible but it's absolutely life-changing.
Assault and abuse doesn't need to get to the stage of rape and murder before it traumatises someone because it IS violence and it traumatises and traps and makes women slaves to fear even at this level. If a man is happy to swear at you in broad daylight, how far would he go in a dark alleyway at night? We're enlightened enough now to understand, to the extent that the law recognises it, that abuse can occur with no physical scars. But when it comes to misogyny and sexual harassment, we as a society have for too long completely ignored and failed to recognise the impact that sustained, life-long abuse has on women's quality of life, even when it doesn't make it onto a police report. It leaves scars.
I believe that Jesus Christ, when he was on earth, was a radical when it came to women and is a radical now who invites women to come to him and be unconditionally loved. The gospels show him time and time again valuing women where society vilified them, welcoming women where powerful men spurned them, comforting women where others ignored them, and honouring women where others disparaged them.
It's no coincidence that women were the ones that God chose to first have the privilege and blessing of seeing the resurrected Jesus. A woman was the way God chose to bring his Son into the world.
I wholeheartedly believe in fighting for societal change because I believe that God's pattern for humankind was not the mess of misogyny and inequality we have currently.
But realistically we're going to be left with some degree of this mess until Jesus comes back. So ultimately it's God that my comfort comes from. I know that the most powerful Man in the universe sees me as a precious, loved and valued woman. He created me with this body and this mind and this soul and he never, ever makes me feel hurt or devalued or worthless. In fact, he gave his life for me and for anyone who trusts in Him.
I woke up this morning feeling utterly exhausted. The news of Sarah Everard's senseless killing, allegedly by a male police officer, the subsequent outpouring of women's trauma, the sense of people refusing to listen and the sense of despair was last night capped off by the Met police violence in response to the peaceful vigil. It's left me and many others feeling again the weight of the problems we face and the brokenness of the world.
God cares. He sees. He will have his way and he will right every wrong one day. In the meantime, we wait, we comfort one another and we do what we can to fight for what's right. While we work and grow weary, I found this song really helpful tonight. While I am a woman and I am tired and I am sad and I am tempted to despair I will lean hard in his everlasting arms.
He sends us more strength as our labours increase
To added afflictions He offers more mercy
To multiplied trials He multiplies peace
When our strength has failed and the day is half done
When we've reached the end of our earthly resources
Our Father's full giving is only begun
Our Father's full giving is only begun
Lean hard
Lean on the everlasting arms
Lean hard
Lean hard
Lean on the everlasting arms
Lean on the everlasting arms
His power has no boundary that's known unto men
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus
He giveth and giveth and giveth again
He giveth and giveth and giveth again
Lean hard
Lean on the everlasting arms
Lean hard
Lean hard
Lean on the everlasting arms
Lean on the everlasting arms
Your goodness restores my soul
I know that you'll never leave me
I know that you won't let go
You lead me beside still waters
Your goodness restores my soul
I know that you'll never leave me
I know that you won't let go
Lean hard
Lean on the everlasting arms
Lean hard
Lean hard
Lean on the everlasting arms
Lean on the everlasting arms
Lean on the everlasting arms
