The Doe’s Latest Stories

I fell in love with martial arts early. I had seen The Karate Kid, Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles and a ton of ninja movies. From age three to 12, if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would have said I wanted to be a ninja. My brother and I started training at a strip-mall karate school. I think my dad got us into it just to appease us. I don’t think he cared about most of the stuff that parents try to put their kids in martial arts for discipline or self-defense. “These kids love karate, let’s do it.” It wasn’t like a totally legit school, but we trained there and competed until we were probably about eight. Then my dad had a work friend who ended up being a super-legit martial artist. He took us into the little training group he had that centered around a style of martial arts called Jeet Kune Do, which is what Bruce Lee pioneered. It was the first pragmatic martial art, trying to take a bit of the others and making one that was more effective and realistic. We started training there, and when we went back to these strip-mall karate tournaments, we were just blasting through: smoking everybody.

My Thrill-Seeking Behavior Started at a Young Age

Our coach took us to the first Ultimate Fighting Championship in 1993 at McNichols Arena in Denver. I was ten and my brother was 12, so we didn’t know what we were seeing. Our coach had taken a couple of seminars from Royce Gracie, and he was like, “This Brazilian guy is gonna beat everybody.” My brother and I were like, “No fuckin’ way.” This guy Ken Shamrock, who did a little bit of WWF was there. We thought he was gonna smoke everybody. Then Royce Gracie won the whole tournament, and we were like: holy shit. It blew our minds. I remember our coach saying back then, “If you guys ever see a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or Gracie Jiu-Jitsu school, you need to take advantage of that.” And back then those didn’t really exist anywhere except for California.We did that until we were probably in like seventh or eighth grade, until it wasn’t cool to be doing karate anymore. Then we started playing lacrosse and football, because when you're 13 you want to play football and not chop boards in half, you know? So we took our hiatus from martial arts. I took a little interest in boxing in high school. Then, when I was at college, I went grocery shopping and saw a big sign that said “Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu,” and I remembered coach saying I should jump into that. So I walked in and asked, “What’s up with this? Is this the same shit that Royce Gracie does?” So I signed up and started going there once a week. Then it quickly turned into two times a week. Then it was every day, and then I was skipping college classes to go. I was good at it and I loved it.

It was too late to turn around.

UFC Fighter Should Be at the Top of the List of Jobs for Adrenaline Junkies

I had my first fight in 2005, in North Platte, Nebraska. It was the Wild West back then. The athletic commission kind of sanctioned matches, but not really. Nationally, they sort of delineated between pro and amateur. Usually, pro fights were five-minute rounds, and amateurs were three-minute rounds. In pro fights, you could knee to the head, or elbow to the head, but you weren’t supposed to in amateur matches. But, in reality, there weren’t a whole lot of rules, and there was no real delineation between amateur and pro. My first fight there were three three-minute rounds. I asked, “Can I knee to the head?” And they were like, “Yeah sure, fuck it.” I got paid a little bit. I figured, “Fuck it, I’m pretty good at this. I’m having fun with it, I want to compete.” I did it once and I won, and I loved it, so I was like fuck it: I’m gonna do it again. The promoter invited me back, and I won that one too. Then my third fight was the first time I had to step-up. “This guy’s done a bunch of fights, he’s good.” The dude had all these tattoos, and he looked gnarly, so I was super intimidated. Then I knocked him out in 22 seconds, so I just kept riding it. By then I was teaching, so I basically lived at the gym. It was my life, and I loved it.My sixth fight was the first one I lost. It was a boring fight, and I spent the whole time on my back, so I knew I had lost before the judge’s decision. But in my head, I told myself: “I gotta come back and get another win. I gotta get this back.” I was all-in at that point. It was too late to turn around.

My Best Adrenaline Rush Story Is When I Fought in Japan

I fought for ten or 11 years as a pro. I fought for a company called Strikeforce. They got bought by the UFC. Then I fought for the WEC, which at the time was like UFC Light. Those were awesome fights; I loved that organization. It was the same company as UFC, it just had a little bit different management. I fought for them twice, and then they got absorbed by the UFC. I fought for UFC once and lost the decision. At one point, I ended up fighting in Japan. Japan has its own hybrid thing called shoot boxing. They have a big tournament every two years called the S-Cup. It’s mostly Japanese and Dutch fighters, and they have a couple of American kickboxers come over. It’s basically Muay Thai rules, but you can do standing throws or standing submissions. You can hip-toss somebody, or suplex them or whatever. It’s kind of its own thing. And it’s huge in Japan.That fight happened on short notice because my kickboxing coach, who is probably the best American-born kickboxer, had a ton of international success. He called me after I fought this guy at 1STBANK Center in Broomfield, Colorado. He asked, “Hey how’s your weight?” I was like, “I’m fine, why?” He was like, “Do you want to do a kickboxing match in Japan in two weeks?” I said sure, and he said the promoter would send details. The guy I was supposed to fight was the 2006 world champion. The promoter texted me his name, and YouTube wasn’t that big back then in 2009, but I searched him on YouTube, and there was a laundry list of fights all against dudes that I idolized—Andy Souwer, Gilbert Ballentine, Ramon Dekkers, Andy Souwer again. I was like, “Oh fuck, what did I just get myself into?” And my MMA coaches said, “Don’t do this.” But in my head, I knew that if I went to Japan and I lost a kickboxing match, it wouldn’t matter. Nobody would have to know. And if I can beat this world champion at his sport, I could make a big deal out of it. So once again I said: Fuck it.

The Whole Experience Was an Adrenaline Rush

Combat sports are huge in Japan. Kickboxers were like pop stars. Big fighters would get mobbed in the street like Backstreet Boys. But it was all run by the yakuza. It’s different there because it’s pretty open. They have like, office spaces: “That’s a yakuza office space.” It’s not underground. You’ll know yakuza dudes because they have the tattoos. It's all wrist to neck, like the movies. If you catch anybody from flak from anyone, they’ll take care of it. If you lose your luggage, just tell them you’re with K1 kickboxing, and they’ll get your luggage to you real fast. We got picked up at the airport, and about 20 minutes into the drive, my wife was like, “Where are they taking us?” I specifically remember pulling up to the hotel. The driver got on the phone and talked, in Japanese, for two or three minutes, then put the car back in drive. My wife was like, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, here we go, they’re gonna kill us.” I said, “Chill out. They’re not gonna kill us. Yet.” They took us straight to the office of the yakuza guy in charge so he could meet me. It was probably how before you bet on a horse, you want to examine them. We go to his office and it was the most balling-ass office I’ve ever seen. He's there in his badass suit, and you see tattoos peeking out. I was overwhelmed—in way over my head—I don’t know what I got myself into. So, I upset him. I won. I kicked him in the head and knocked him out. It was a huge upset.I don’t even think they raised my hand after the fight. Everybody was silent. It was a weird scene. They canceled the afterparty. The day after the fight, I was on cloud nine, but we couldn’t really leave the hotel, because we were terrified. Then we got a phone call in the hotel saying that Mr. Takeshi would like to see you in the lobby. I was like, “Nope.” My wife was like, “Nope.” But the Australian guys who were coordinating things took us down and the yakuza guys gave me an envelope full of uncirculated U.S, bills, serial numbers in order. That night they took us out and we had a fucking blast hanging out with them. Things felt better after that, but I was still scared as shit spending the money, which is what I bought my wife’s engagement ring with. I was handing over an envelope full of cash at the Shane Company, waiting for bars to slam down and the cops to come in. It was like slo-mo, then she marked the first bill and was like, “OK thank you, sir.” Inside, I was like, “Oh fuck, oh thank god.” But still, as far as experiences go, that was definitely the highlight of my career.

I was overwhelmed—in way over my head—I don’t know what I got myself into.

All Things Considered, I Was Very Fortunate When It Came to My Health

I went my whole career with no real injuries. I broke my nose plenty of times. I broke my hand once, and had to have surgery on that. But I mean, my knees are fine, my hips, my shoulders. I never really had any serious injuries until my last fight. I was 30, and I got elbowed in the face hard enough to break my orbital all the way back. I remember talking to the surgeon, and he said, “The layman’s way to describe it is: Your eye is sinking into your face.” So I had to have surgery on that, which scared the shit out of my wife. She thought I was gonna be blind in one eye. She got pregnant pretty shortly afterward, and said, “You gotta find a real job. You can’t do this shit anymore.” Which is kinda funny, because she was pretty much managing me at the time. Then that injury happened and she went from all-in to all-out, which I get. But it was very abrupt.I knew it wasn’t gonna last forever. You can’t fight people forever. I was winning and losing, I wasn’t smoking everybody like I was at the beginning of the career. I didn’t really have an exit plan. I’m okay with computers, but I didn’t go to school for it. I had a criminology degree, which my college doesn’t even offer anymore, but what the fuck was I gonna do with that?

Careers for Thrill-Seekers Are Challenging

I don't really know when the idea to become a firefighter first popped into my head, but I thought it seemed like a cool gig. I had a buddy I trained with who’s a firefighter, and he’d told me a couple of times, “Dude it’s a sweet job for fighters. You get a good amount of time off. You can work out on shift. It’s steady pay, the benefits are good, you're not hoping you get a fight for a big paycheck a couple of times a year.” I entertained the idea in my head, but didn't really pursue it for years.I actually applied in 2014, but I failed the psych exam. The lady said, “So tell me about this MMA stuff.” I said, “Oh, have you ever watched the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or ever heard of it?” She’s like, “No,” in a disgusted voice. I kept trying to give her what I thought was a decent overview of MMA. “So the idea is they take all these different styles of martial arts and have them compete against each other in an organized fashion to see which martial art is the most effective.” And she’s like, “Okay,” and just stared at me. I kept trying, “It’s a legit sport,” and trying to compare it to other sports. I got to the point where I was like, “Have you ever heard of Peyton Manning.” And she’s like, “No.” And I was like, “I am fucked. I am so fucked.” And so I failed that. She was like, “You fight people in a cage for money?”The second time I took the psych exam, it was the same lady, but this was two years later. I walked in like, ah fuck, hopefully she doesn’t remember me. When I walked in she said, “Good to see you again.” I could tell I was getting tanked already. But the second time around, I don’t know if I piqued her interest, but she talked about MMA a little more openly, and it seemed like she knew a little about it. We had a pleasant conversation, and I moved on in the process, and that was it.

So once again I said: Fuck it.

I’ve Accepted That I’m an Adrenaline Junkie

It's a lot of EMS calls. I see some crazy shit. I work in a pretty dangerous city. We see a lot of overdoses; I've seen a lot of people die. They have a bunch of weird synthetic drugs these days. They have one called Black Mamba that’s real fucking bad. It’s some sort of synthetic psychotic. It’s like the stories you hear of people with superhuman strength fighting off like ten cops: zombie type shit. I’ve seen some situations where it's like, “We need to call a fucking priest.” We need an exorcist. Straight up. I remember one of the things they asked me is why did I want this job? And part of it is probably an adrenaline thing. It’s exciting! Running into a fire that sounds rad! But I think also part of it was I love not doing the same thing every day. That is most of the appeal of everything I’ve done in my life. I love to fight and change it up. I really like the idea of going to work and not knowing what I am getting into. I think that was a lot of it. The schedule’s great, I like the pay. Doing exciting shit, that might be the biggest part of it. But also I love that there's no monotony to it. I never know what the fuck I’m doing. It’s always unexpected.

Outside of the top rung, the sports, music and entertainment industries are well-known for their long hours and low pay. The great majority of those who work in those fields are doing it out of passion. A mid-level marketing professional for a sports team could easily transfer skills to another industry and enjoy better pay and better hours—no question. The same goes for an operations manager at a stadium or arena with extensive organizational skills and the 60-to-80-hour per week work ethic that the job demands. But they don’t: They love what they do too much.Even getting a full-time, salaried job in the industry is a steep uphill battle. This was one of the first things that I learned as I got my start working game days for my local MLB team in college. I worked there for three seasons while simultaneously picking up a number of other part-time and internship positions with multiple other professional sports teams and facilities. After graduating with my business degree, I made a thousand-mile move to take another internship that I thought would help me reach my professional goal of a full-time position in sports. At one point during my internship, I was working four other part-time jobs, all within the world of sports and entertainment, to bolster my resume. I was spending far too much time at work, but I was absolutely loving it. Shortly after my internship concluded, I was finally offered what I had been working so incredibly hard for: a full-time position with the sports arena in my hometown. My part-time experience with two MLB teams, two NHL teams, one NBA team, two arenas, one professional sports league, a sports museum and more had finally paid off.

An incomprehensibly large number of people had just lost their ability to work for the foreseeable future.

Breaking Into the Live Events Business Was Already Challenging—Then Came the Pandemic

My first full-time opportunity wasn’t in a department that I wanted to be in long-term, but I knew that if I worked hard and impressed my superiors, I’d have a chance to be promoted to my dream position within the organization. For ten months, I worked an average of 50-60 hours per week without overtime pay, just to build up my good reputation and learn about the operations of the arena. Once my dream position opened up, I excitedly applied, interviewed and got the job.My first three months in the new position—which required a ton of specialized experience that I was incredibly excited to learn—was mostly training and figuring out what the heck to do. As it turns out, there are a lot of steps to be taken to turn an arena from a hockey rink to a concert in under 12 hours! I started with limited responsibility that quickly ramped up as I gained more experience, and I started to really enjoy it as much as I dreamt I would. That was at the beginning of 2020. My next five months of work were spent on Zoom, making up tasks to do for an events job without events. Then I was laid off, along with over 230 other full-time staff from the same organization. We are all now jobless. From vice presidents to coordinators, no one was safe. When I think about the negative effects of the pandemic on the industry that I love, I mostly think about the part-time workers and the students. Besides the full-time staff at my facility getting laid off, over 1,000 part-time workers—ushers, ticket takers, concessions workers, suite attendants, operations employees, box office staff, security staff, stagehands—were now without their usual event gigs. Part-time staff typically have the opportunity to work 300-plus events every year, and while it's supplemental income for some of them, for others the part-time grind is their main source of income. Overall, an incomprehensibly large number of people had just lost their ability to work for the foreseeable future.

The Industry’s Future Is Not Looking Bright

Put yourself in the shoes of a sports management student in the current landscape. You are studying an industry that is currently dead, where there are virtually zero jobs. You have almost no ability to get hands-on experience in the industry, even part-time, and there are no full-time jobs available. Once large groups can gather again and positions in the industry slowly become available, your application will be up against those with full-time experience who were laid off during the pandemic. Many of the connections you made during your internships are now useless, since your previous employers are also unemployed, or working in a totally different industry. All of the knowledge that you previously gained in your part-time positions has significantly lessened in value, as post-pandemic operations will be vastly different from what you experienced. You dedicated your money and a good portion of your young life to a career that is virtually unattainable for the foreseeable future. That, ladies and gentlemen, sucks.

We were the first to go and we will be one of the last to come back.

It's Not Just the Stars Who Are Out of Work

Now think of all of the sports facilities, arenas, stadiums, theaters and other venues across the country that were forced into a similar position. Not only was your favorite artist’s world tour canceled, but the thousands of laborers, truck drivers, business partners and road staff who make their events possible are without work. Not only can you not go to your favorite team’s home games, but the thousands of employees who make a living out of coordinating the events for you to enjoy are not there either. Many careers have ended, many dreams have been crushed and many great people have been left lost due to the effects of this awful pandemic on the sports and entertainment industry. We were the first to go and we will be one of the last to come back.

“Your team,” my friend Diego told me, giving his head a sad little shake. “It’s just not any good.”Diego wasn’t being cruel. He was simply stating an unfortunate truth. My son’s third-grade soccer team was pitiful. The neighborhood league was supposed to try to balance teams, but something had gone horribly awry in our case. My son was one of the better players, in that he would mostly stay in position and if you rolled a ball right at him, he could kick it generally forward. Most of his teammates wandered around in an abstracted daze, fitfully dashing toward the ball and then running away if it headed toward them. Diego’s son dribbled around them like they were particularly ineffectual shrubs and scored at will. We, on the other hand, never scored a single goal all season. It didn’t help that the coach of this sad sack team was equally useless. That coach would be me.

Most of his teammates wandered around in an abstracted daze, fitfully dashing toward the ball and then running away if it headed toward them.

I Wasn’t Exactly Destined to Be a Great Coach

My dismal and brief foray into coaching was the dead-end of a lackluster career in athletics that had begun before I was even born. My father was obsessed with basketball as a kid and had wanted to play professionally. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, he tried to be a coach, until he discovered that he couldn’t take the stress. Rather than yelling fitfully at college players, he turned that neurosis gently toward his children. Many of my earliest memories are of him demanding to know why my brother and I were sitting around the house reading when we could be out there playing ball.“When I was your age, I’d be out there shooting hoops! Go on, get out of the house and shoot some hoops!”To be fair, we weren’t completely averse to the game. I liked sports OK, though never as much as reading about, among other things, sports. I remember getting Wilt Chamberlain’s extremely R-rated autobiography out of the library when I was around eight. I thought the fact that he had scored 100 points in a single game was awesome, but all the stuff about how he had a giant mirror over his bed left me confused. (Despite my dad’s occasional crankiness, my parents pretty much let me read anything I wanted, bless them.)

I Was Never Good at Sports, but at Least I Enjoyed Them

My actual forays into sports were considerably less precocious. I played youth basketball indifferently, despite being tall for my age. My clearest memory from that time is of being assigned to guard an innocuous, dull-eyed, much shorter kid who didn’t look like he could find the basket with a road map and GPS technology. I mostly left him open, because what was he going to do? Someone passed him the ball, and I remember his face clearing, like some sort of basketball Buddhist awakening. Up the ball went, down through the hoop and swoosh, right into my gray matter, so I could watch it even 40 years later, whenever my brain decides it’s time to remind me that I suck.I also swam and played soccer. I enjoyed them both a lot—it’s exhilarating to have your body strain at its limits and almost miraculously do what you tell it to do. But alas, the limits of my body’s miraculousness were always extremely circumscribed; as a swimmer and a soccer player, I was skinny, asthmatic, poorly coordinated and mediocre at best. I played soccer in youth leagues and through high school, but after eight years I still couldn’t really kick with my left foot. Coaches kept moving me from position to position, trying to find some place where I wouldn’t do much damage. Even as a senior on our crappy high school team, I never played varsity. My brother—a much better player— claimed I was robbed and that my coach didn’t know my full potential because my brother is a sweet guy who loves his sibling. But the bench is where I belonged. I just was not very good.

The high point of the season, if you want to call it that, was when I realized I scheduled my vasectomy on the day of a game.

Coaching Your Own Kid Is Especially Hard When Their Team Is Bad

Like my father, I had some vague hopes that my own son would somehow have more athletic prowess than his dad. I wasn’t dreaming of professional or even Division I level talent. I just thought it would be nice if he was good enough to score a winning goal a time or two. So, with fingers crossed, we pushed him out there onto the field with all the other cute little soccer strivers. Go play ball!And he did. And he was fine. But the experience was not. He got put on dreadful team after dreadful team; he didn’t win a game in three years. The last of those was the year I coached. It was painful enough that I’ve repressed most of the details. I know that my carefully planned drills all disintegrated into kids running after balls they’d missed, or staring glassy-eyed, or wandering off to do something more fun like roll in the mud. The team soon realized that they were helpless and that I could not help them, so kids very reasonably stopped coming to practice or checked out while they were there. When it became clear that every game was going to be an exercise in humiliation and misery, I started suggesting to other coaches that maybe we should just acknowledge that my team was going to lose from the beginning and shuffle players around so that the kids on my team got a chance to maybe experience a competitive game once or twice. The problem was that our team was so bad from front to back that there generally wasn’t a way to make two equal teams. The games were always lopsided blowouts anyway.The high point of the season, if you want to call it that, was when I realized I scheduled my vasectomy on the day of a game. I went for the procedure and then headed for the field, wearing sweatpants because, with the gauze and padding around my bits, I couldn’t fit into jeans. When I got to the game, I learned that my son had apparently told everyone exactly why I was late, so there was lots of good-natured snickering as I limped back and forth on the sidelines. All in good fun!And, oh right, we lost.

My Son’s Not Interested in Sports, and I Can’t Help but Blame Myself

That was the last year of soccer for us. My son has had no interest in continuing, and neither have I. These days, at 17, he’s an artsy theater kid who sneers at “sportsball” and reads Shakespeare and Edward Said, not Wilt Chamberlain’s autobiography. He lifts weights, and before the pandemic, he enjoyed PE units on swing dancing and even volleyball. But while he is better at most things than I am, or was, or ever will be, his experience with sports is even more lackluster than my own.I read somewhere that it can take multiple generations to achieve a career dream; when you don’t quite reach your goal of being a writer or an actor or a great mathematician, you pass the dream and the connections and the expertise down to your kid, who may make a better run at it. By the same token, it can take a few generations to give up on a goal completely. My dad wanted to be a professional basketball player; his kids just wanted to maybe do OK in high school or Division III sports. My son has given up on even that. And if he has kids, he’s not going to be urging them to go play hoops. I wish I’d managed to instill more of my love of athletics and soccer in him, and maybe if I’d been more passionate or a better coach I could have. But that’s the thing about sports. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose.

At first, I had no idea how I’d managed to land the job as the most senior on-site manager of COVID-19 testing for all of the student-athletes and athletic staff at a major SEC school. But nothing is more familiar to the wayfaring millennial generalist than taking wild shots on LinkedIn and applying to jobs for which we are massively unqualified. Occasionally, those shots land, and because it is late-stage capitalism, they leave us with a further disillusioned and shredded worldview.This is one such story. I had no experience in the medical field, but with a somewhat plausible background managing teams and projects across industries, I figured I could do my part and join the war effort. I’d been working from home since March completely solo, losing my mind from isolation, so putting myself on the frontlines of a raging pandemic felt like just the thing to shake things up. I could have never anticipated the gaslit psychosis, the unbridled exploitation and profound sense of powerlessness that lay ahead.

The blind were truly leading the blind on every level of the medical testing side.

Turns Out, Administering COVID Tests for Athletes Isn’t as Simple as It Seems

On its face, the job was simple enough: Test every athlete three times a week to detect the virus early and separate the infected. The reality turned out to be much grimmer, and I left with major doubts that these efforts were for anything but the optics and a fat payday for a few well-positioned companies. We worked 80-plus hour weeks without overtime pay, didn't succeed in preventing the spread in any significant way, and, ultimately, I got chewed up and spit out by one of the USA’s largest COVID-19 testing companies as it raked in major money in this new virus-industrial gold rush without having any real clue what it was doing. I’ll delve further into the root cause of those feelings—a healthy mixture of unmasked idiots and unprecedented public health responsibilities thrust onto an extraordinarily unprepared (and possibly criminally negligent) medical startup—but the deeper impact of this story is the plight of the athletes and the athletic staff pushed to similar breaking points. Considering the way I felt as a very minor cog in this million-dollar athletic program, one can only imagine their burden. Cases were spiking, the world was in chaos, but rather than just taking some time off to regroup and get through the worst of it all, the powers that be mandated that, in addition to regularly scheduled practices and games (oh, and classes, of course), players also had to get tested three times a week—or, in the event of a player testing positive, every single day. We had stretches of more than 30 days in a row of testing entire teams and even this wasn’t enough motivation for certain players to think they needed to wear masks as they walked through campus.

Who Knew the NCAA Could Be Even Worse?

It’s well-known that the “powers that be” (ahem, NCAA) has come under fire for raking in huge profits while at the same time prohibiting the athletes that provide its foundation from receiving compensation. My short time inside the machine made me realize this culture of casual exploitation didn’t end with the athletes, but was predictably passed down the line to the overworked coaching and training staffs; to armies of interns more than likely paying the academic institution for the credit to be there; and to the contractors who kept the whole production on the rails. When such an unprecedented challenge as COVID-19 erupts into a system that’s already failing to address glaring inequities, there’s an exponential compounding of problematic oversight that translates to human suffering, and not just the emotional or financial kind.I saw a number of infected staff members sidelined for weeks fighting serious symptoms but forced to return to work (in my unprofessional medical opinion) way too soon. I saw interns getting paid a flat salary of $1,200 per month working 80-plus hour weeks and bearing the full burden of making sure every player hit their required testing numbers.

To Make Matters Worse, We Didn’t Even Follow NCAA COVID Protocol

In addition to uncapped exploitation on the athletic side, the blind were truly leading the blind on every level of the medical testing side. We were stretched extremely thin and, as a result, tons of mistakes happened in plain sight. People’s samples got switched or just lost entirely. Non-medically-licensed staff members were forced to swab players after medical techs had been sent home. The main rule we broke on a continual basis was using rapid antigen testing in place of PCR tests when we were crunched for time because the team was set to travel. Antigen tests are a lot less sensitive, but since the lab was in a constantly overwhelmed state, this was the easiest way of obtaining a negative result in time to participate. I was sure my company would send a higher-up to help sort this out, but apparently, that person just didn’t exist within our organization or wasn’t deemed a high enough priority. All we got was a stream of middle managers who would come to observe for a single day, make toothless suggestions and offer platitudes before jetting off to the next school to continue being ineffectual. It was infuriating that these problems didn’t seem to matter and it became evident that we were only going through these motions so that the NCAA could say, “Look, we’re doing everything we possibly can!”

The main rule we broke on a continual basis was using rapid antigen testing in place of PCR tests.

My Experience Raises Questions About COVID Testing in Sports, in General

There was also some shady nepotism. The primary contract holder for all of the SEC’s testing was a prime government contractor with no history of medical testing. Hence they subcontracted this job to my employer—an accredited medical company, sure, but also lacking substantive experience testing at this scale. I don’t know how they obtained the initial contract, or how my company wound up subcontracting, but something really didn’t add up in the equation. I know that we conducted millions or tens of millions of dollars worth of tests in the span of a few months, and all I can say is that I, and better people than myself, got kicked to the curb when we rocked the boat about our horrible labor conditions.I suppose my experience is pretty typical for the American workforce. Labor rights have continually eroded since the Reagan era and my employment was “at will,” meaning I could be excused at any time without any reason. Coincidentally, it was. I was let go without any warnings or reason given, with a piddling one-week severance. In a way, it was relieving not to be gaslit into thinking I was somehow not a good enough leader because of so many things beyond my control. I just feel a bit shattered and lost for hope having seen the efforts being made to curb this pandemic.But, hey. Football! Tailgating! The show must go on.

One thing you should know about me is I have always been righteous, almost to a fault. You might think my parents instilled this in me. It would make sense to learn a sense of fairness from my family.I didn’t learn it through their example: My gaslighting family modeled the exact opposite. With substance abuse issues, untreated mental illness and serious anger management problems, my family reeks of dysfunction and emotional abuse. Their belief system, imparted by my father, is lacking in terms of right and wrong.

What It’s Like to Have Gaslighting Parents

My father is conservative in the worst way. He has deeply rooted, antiquated ideas about everything, including gender and anyone who is different from him. My father views women as lesser than men, not as worthy of respect or jobs outside of a home (or traditional woman’s job like teaching). He asserted those ideas over and over as I grew up both through his actions, like favoring my brothers, and his words.“Women shouldn’t earn as much as men. They call out when they’re on the rag.”“A woman shouldn’t be in politics. She’d be too busy running her mouth and gossiping, not leading.”“Leave the big decisions to the men. They think logically. Women are always blaming their hormones.”“Have you ever heard a hormone? It sounds like this, ‘Ohhhhhh,’” he’d say as he rolled his eyes back in his head and crudely imitated a woman enjoying sex in front of me when I was a young girl, snickering at my discomfort.My mother and siblings went along with his beliefs. Sometimes they’d egg him on, encouraging him with their own remarks. Other times, they’d just laugh.The unspoken family motto is, “Toe the line and talk the talk or else.” No one acknowledges the “or else” but me, the only one who always goes against the family grain.“You take everything too personally. Just like a woman,” my father would sneer whenever I voiced my opposition to his words or actions. “Well, I am a woman,” I would think, not understanding why my chromosomes made me less than in his eyes.

Gaslighting Signs Were There. I Just Didn’t Realize It.

From the beginning, I was different from my parents and siblings. Instead of conservative thoughts and values, I’ve always been a progressive and quick to champion the underdog. Rather than aspiring to be a teacher or secretary or something else traditional, I dreamed of being an artist or writer and making my ideas seen and heard.While my dad was the one with the loudest voice and most hurtful, biased opinions, everyone else was always quick to fall in line. Except me. Always the outlier. This made me, a person with a vagina, the perfect scapegoat and a second-class citizen within my own family unit.An article in a 2019 edition of the American Sociological Review argues that gaslighting is a sociological problem. They state that it is a type of abuse rooted "in social inequalities, including gender, and executed in power-laden intimate relationships."Now I understand that this is what my family did to me to keep me in my place. Growing up, I had no idea whether or not I should trust what they were trying to teach me. On the one hand, they were my family. Family is supposed to care for you and have your best interests at heart. On the other hand, it just felt deeply unsettling and wrong. None of it made logical sense.I was constantly belittled and demeaned. Still, my father looked to me, the oldest daughter, to step in and be a parental figure to my younger siblings when my mother’s addiction and mental illness left her unable to safely parent us.I took years of psychological manipulation from them. My mother would stand in the kitchen holding a bottle of narcotics after I’d voice my opinions. She’d shake them into her hand, never taking out fewer than three. "If you didn't do this, I wouldn't need these pills," she'd say. "I wouldn't drink."My dad would yell and throw things and hold me responsible for her benders. If only I wasn’t so strong-minded, they tried to make me think, if only I’d stay in my place and keep my mouth shut, my mother wouldn’t drink or use pills. She wouldn’t make my father angry."If you could be this way, it'd be easier," they all would say in their own words as if I could fundamentally change myself and end the drama within the family.It was all my fault.

I’m Still Getting Over My Family Gaslighting Me

I have since set very firm boundaries with my parents, much to the dismay of the rest of my family. My mother is not in my life. I limit my time with my dad so my children don’t absorb his toxic worldview—particularly my daughters. I want them to grow up knowing that they can be and do whatever they want, and they aren’t limited by what someone with a penis says they can and can’t do.Tensions run high over my decision to enforce boundaries. A few times a year, one of my siblings tries to convince me I'm overreacting and being cruel simply by protecting myself and my children from the vitriol and dysfunction—that things weren’t as bad as I remember and I’m just giving in to my weak feminine sensitivity.Occasionally, I receive an unexpected package for my kids or have a quick, pleasant text exchange with my father. Then I wonder: Am I being too harsh? Should I give them another chance? Is it wrong to keep their grandchildren away?I voice those thoughts to my husband, my close friends. "No," they tell me and then they rattle off a list of things my family has done that justifies my decision to break the cycle. And I remember that I'm not the one in the wrong. I'm not the one that committed atrocities against myself. I did nothing wrong to warrant the gaslighting other than just being born the way I was.After my doubt wanes, the anger inevitably creeps in. I’ve spent an entire lifetime fighting to be valued and heard. It’s weary and unfair and it makes me so mad not just for me, but for everyone else who is fighting a longer fight for value and respect just because of the way they were born. And it doesn’t have to be this way for anyone.To other women out there that feel silenced, I hear you. I’m listening.

No, I don’t own a pitchfork. Or a stake upon which to burn people.And, yes, I am pro-life.Often, that statement is enough to make people turn away and stop listening. Unfortunately, many who claim to be pro-life also seem to care very little for the other lives they are, figuratively, burning at the stake—the mothers and fathers. They think that yelling and shaming is the way to change someone’s mind. I couldn’t disagree more.

Both Sides Could Do Better

I have looked into the eyes of so many women who have experienced abortion (some multiple times) and have seen the shame, the grief, the huge burden that has been placed on them. The pro-lifers have judged them, calling them murderers. The pro-choicers have told them they shouldn’t grieve the baby because it wasn’t yet a person. Lost in the fray, we end up carrying our banner of what is "right" and trampling the mother in the middle of the experience.Often, the pro-life side is labeled women-haters, coming across as caring more for the choice of not aborting, rather than supporting the mother in whatever decision she makes. I wish that our camp could step up and help the mothers through the pregnancy, the hard choices, the fear, the rejection.There is so much more to this decision than just walking through the doors of an abortion clinic or not.On the other side, I wish that more pro-choice supporters would stand with women in their grief following the choice to abort, recognizing that this impacts their mental and emotional well-being. These women are told it's the best choice and better for everyone, but in my work as a pastoral counselor, I have seen the pain in the eyes of those trying their best to heal from something they never really understood. My job is to provide a safe place for healing and hope, and many women tell me they have never told another human about their abortions or felt the safety to do so. This breaks my heart as the pain of loss goes beyond political, religious or moral arguments with an ache that unites so many.I don’t, for one minute, believe the decision to abort or not out to be an easy one. There are enormous implications for both choices and feel that these should be acknowledged. There is serious life change if the decision is made to keep the baby to term (even if the child is adopted after), and quite a disruption in everything that was normal for the mother.I think that often, though, we minimize the life change in the women who choose to abort. We pretend that there is no impact on their emotional health. But after talking with many women who have chosen to end their pregnancies, I have witnessed that pain played out in their lives. I believe the woman needs to be supported regardless of her decision, not used as a playing card for a statistic one way or the other.

There is so much more to this decision than just walking through the doors of an abortion clinic or not.

We Women Are Strong, No Matter the Decision

I have met several women who have chosen to carry a child to full-term and then given it up for adoption. This dramatically affects them as they wrestle through giving a baby away that has grown within them and is, indeed, part of their genetic makeup. They say goodbye, sometimes forever, and mourn their loss while acknowledging they are not ready to raise a baby. The strength these women exhibit is overwhelming and, after carrying two babies myself, I can’t imagine the pain of giving one up to someone else to raise. The logical process is there, telling you it might be for the best, but it still comes at a cost. That sacrificial love blows me away.The women who decide to raise their child, even when still attending high school, trying to get through college or starting their careers amaze me as well. It is a battle to continue on with the life they are hoping to establish, and some don’t make it to the desired goal as they had planned.Others fight through and are able to raise a child while working so hard to achieve all they had hoped. Either way, these women are warriors. They fight for their children, for their lives and for their new roles as mothers. It is not an easy path, and yet some choose it because they want to continue to be involved in raising their children, regardless of the perspectives of others or their own feelings of missing out.

These are the women that my heart goes out to the most.

I Feel for Those Who Choose Abortion

And finally, there are the women who go ahead with the abortion and terminate their pregnancies. I think these are the women that my heart goes out to the most. I don't see them as terrible people, deserving of shame and guilt. I see them as people who have made a choice that will affect them for the rest of their lives, and often don't even realize it.Many I have talked with as friends and as those with whom I work can remember how old their babies would be today. They wrestle with grief again when they start to have children later in life with a stable relationship and career, recognizing what they are missing. These women battle hard as well, and often, I feel, are treated as if they shouldn’t have any feelings about the baby they lost because it was the “right” thing to do.I am greatly saddened that so many fellow Christians tend to bash these women, rather than walking with them through the hardships of life. Jesus called his followers to love and lift others, loving them as they love themselves. I can't stand in agreement with the choice to abort, but I can definitely provide a safe place for these women to feel what they feel without further punishment or judgment.As a woman standing on the side of pro-life, I beg for compassion for all of these women. I would ask that we think through what we are putting on the women in front of us, whether we are trying to push them away from the abortion clinic or demanding that they move on with their lives. Let’s be gentle with them, for many of us are them. And we could all use a little more compassion.

There’s an acute pinching and strain that starts deep in my hip flexor and runs down the back of my leg. Gently, I rotate in and out of a side lunge stretch that’s probably doing more harm than good. I sit in the discomfort a few more seconds before awkwardly releasing my body from the stance, and I make a mental note of yet another permanent physical limitation.The whole time, part of me wonders why, at age 30, I still can’t seem to accept that I won’t ever be a ballet dancer.There’s a common, if rarely discussed, understanding among adult ballet students that we aren’t taken seriously by the ballet world. And why would we be? After a certain age we’re simply not going to get any better, no matter how much passion, determination and hard work we put into it. That point usually comes in your 20s, when you’re still sprightly and resilient enough to become any number of other impressive things, but too old to choose ballet as anything more than a difficult, perilous and emotionally draining personal uphill battle that we disguise as exercise.It wasn’t always like that for me. Like so many girls, ballet began as something my mother enrolled me in at a young age. As cheap sparkly tutus and girlish routines started making way for technique, discipline and the foundations of proper training, many of my peers dropped out and took up more traditional sports, never to look back. I don’t know if it was love for dance or just the challenge of it that drove me, but as ballet became harder I became more deeply invested.By my early teens, I'd had years of intensive training and was well on my way to mastering the classical technique. I was doted on by peers and praised by instructors, who urged me to attend Boston Ballet School. I could easily have had a professional career, but when I was 18 I chose college instead and left ballet behind for almost eight years.

I still can’t seem to accept that I won’t ever be a ballet dancer.

When I Started Using Alcohol as a Coping Mechanism

After I stopped dancing, I ran headfirst into a new set of passions. I moved to the woods of New Hampshire, enrolled in a rigorous English program at a small university and became fiercely involved in my academic community. At the same time, I was working as a lead line cook at an established restaurant in my small town, which is where I developed an alcohol problem.We would drink. Oh, would we drink.Sometimes, seated at the restaurant bar after the dinner rush, I would mention my dancing past. I’d talk about the talent and promise I had, the obsession ballet had been for me, the world I could have been a part of—and every time I’d feel a muted twinge of longing for that past life of mine.Looking back, I’m shocked by how much ballet ceased being a part of my identity after high school, vaporizing out of my existence until it only occupied a faint space in my mind—like the memory of a recurring dream. For a long time I filled the void it left behind with friends, work and books. And lots of alcohol.I rediscovered ballet when I moved to Denver. After living hard and fast in classrooms and kitchens for eight years, I went west seeking change. I changed professions, scenery, people and habits. Everything felt bright and new. One afternoon, high on pride for my new life, I dug out an old pair of leather ballet slippers, got in my car and went to class.

We would drink. Oh, would we drink.

Returning to Ballet Wasn’t the Homecoming I Expected

From the moment I put on my slippers and approached the barre, I felt home. Even after eight years, the physical memories of ballet were still alive in my body like so many phantom limbs. In returning to class, I expected that dance would flow out of me naturally, that technique would greet me like an old friend and that after my time away to gain life experience, I would reassume my familiar role of class prima.It did not. It wasn’t even close. I fumbled through exercises I’d once done with ease and aplomb. I sensed that I was being judged. I felt ashamed and disappointed in myself. I went back to my apartment that evening, soaked in the bitterness of my bruised ego, and headed straight for my other home: wine.That first class was almost five years ago. I dragged (and I mean dragged) my ass back to class the following week. And the next, and the next. For a year, I took the same class with the same instructor, noticing minor improvements but feeling overall like I was wasn’t making any progress. I tried to be meticulous with my every movement, praying certain joints and muscles would wake up and remember old techniques, but they didn’t. While that year of ballet was anything but joyful, it felt like the self-imposed punishment I deserved for having abandoned it years before without a second thought.And then about a year into this adventure, I showed up to class with a different strategy. Just dance for yourself, I thought. Dance to feel good. Don’t dance to impress. I let my body steer and gave my mind a rest, and that natural, easy feeling started to come back. Movements felt jubilant again.A few weeks later, at the end of class, my instructor shot me a quick wink. “Good job,” he said.

Coming to Terms With My Body’s Limitations

Sometimes I wonder if I should’ve let that be enough.Over the past five years, my once-a-week class on Thursday evenings has grown to two, then three, and now six classes a week, each an hour and a half long. I’m back in the top ranks of my classes now, and that matters to me. Prior to quarantine, I’d rotate between three different studios, frequently taking blended classes with professionals and hobbyists alike, and on multiple occasions, some of the class pros mistook me for one of their own.As good as it feels to have accomplished something as truly challenging as relearning ballet—and as good as it feels to be known and recognized for it—it’s strangely not enough. There’s still that new pinching in my hip flexor. My splits hurt. My knees ache. My turnout is dangerously forced and awkward.I know none of these ailments will ever go away. On the contrary, they're only destined to get worse. And rather than working with me to improve these things as they once did, my instructors now resort to offering pointers on how to forego lost techniques in order to avoid injury. I’m not worth it anymore—the attention, coaching, and conditioning I once deserved are now better spent on today’s young prodigies, with their supple joints, their pliable limbs and their best years still to come.

I Use Ballet as an Excuse for My Alcoholism

When I say that ballet is a hobby I take too seriously, I refer to a tragic passion for a sport, a form of expression, a community that does not take me seriously. I drink heavily in part because I know that in dancing today, I make a vaudeville of myself and my past self. I drink in rebellion, I tell myself—a vice that I’m free to indulge in as long as the ballet world won’t have me as one of its precious own.While I know I can’t fault the dance world for my alcohol problems, like most addicts, I know I use it as an excuse to drink. Truly, I think both my alcoholism and my complex relationship with ballet are a reflection of something more essential about me that wants to be everything, that won’t let any of it go.Knowing the beautiful life I’ve had, do I still wish I could go back and pursue a professional career? Yes, sometimes. Do I wonder “what if” too often? Definitely. Do I relish the physical self-destruction? I think so. In fact, part of me tells myself I deserve it—and so four, five, six days a week I squeeze myself into a leotard and soft Capezios, hate on myself in varying degrees through every combination and hurl myself like a fool towards now-unattainable ideals.And afterward, I drink it off.

Being a gay woman in software sales is challenging, to say the least. I’ve been doing it for almost ten years—first in Silicon Valley and now in New York City’s Silicon Alley—at top-performing “software as a service” (SaaS) companies, and I still require constant pep talks that things will get better. After a decade of interactions in male-dominated tech culture, I’m starting to doubt they ever will.

I’ve Heard “Girls Can’t” My Whole Life

As a gay woman from the Midwest—with two older brothers, a breadwinning (now Trump-supporting) father, and stay-at-home mother—the image I grew up with of who or what a woman could be was very limited. My brothers were given opportunities that I had to work twice as hard for, ones as simple as the space to have an opinion at family dinner, or as trivial as being allowed to go with them to a DMX concert in Cleveland or play the same sports. I wanted so badly to join my brothers’ football team, and the answer I was given—that “girls can’t play football”—was the first of many times I would be told that girls “can’t do” something I knew innately that I could. Anytime this happened I walked away feeling frustrated and lost, a feeling that would stay with me for all of my childhood and adolescence (and most of my adult life). Any time I experience or witness a microaggression or small injustice in the workplace, I’m immediately struck with that same childhood feeling of frustration and vulnerability. I wish that this was about all of the tools and tactics I now use to combat sexism, how empowered I feel as a gay woman in tech, how it’s gotten so much better as I’ve grown older—but it's not. The white men leading my companies aren’t telling me I can’t go to the DMX concert or play football, but their words and actions are just as harmful, and a constant reminder of all of the “can’ts” in my childhood that persist decades later even as a talented, successful, high-performing sales executive who just happens to be a woman.

Any time I experience or witness a microaggression or small injustice in the workplace, I’m immediately struck with that same childhood feeling of frustration and vulnerability.

Bro Culture in Tech is Real, and It’s Bad

From my experience, the tech world is aggressive as it gets when it comes to gender inequalities. The software company I started working for in San Francisco prided itself on the bro-ishness of its corporate culture. I often watched my male coworkers on client calls, in their wireless headsets, swing baseball bats while they built a rapport around sports. I remember the moment I decided I’d had enough bro culture. I confided in my boss, a white male in his early 60s, that it was time for me to move on to my next chapter and leave the company to start something new. “No,” he replied. “I need you to wait to tell me this in two weeks. Until then, this conversation never happened.” I was shocked.For the next two weeks, I drove myself crazy trying to understand. Why wouldn’t he let me quit? Two weeks later I found out when he pulled me into a room and told me he was being laid off for poor performance. He wanted me to put in my two weeks that day and tell his leadership it was because they were getting rid of him. At the moment I couldn’t even comprehend all the feelings I was experiencing. I had worked at this company for over four years and grew the team from 100 employees to over 400. I’d opened the company’s new office in New York City, and I was one of its top performers. Now, he wanted me to define my moment of departure as being all about him and protecting his image and ego. I resigned that day and told his leadership that it wasn’t because of his departure, but I couldn’t escape the optics. At this moment I was met with the same childhood feeling of vulnerability and frustration. A career-defining juncture had been taken away from me, and my accomplishments at this company had been given to someone else.

I Thought Things Would Be Better Outside Silicon Valley. They Weren’t.

I’ve since moved on to a startup to take a chance in shaping the inclusive culture I’ve always desired as a queer woman in SaaS. I was the first employee hired to join the white male co-founders and was promised the opportunity to influence hiring decisions and company culture. For the first time in four years, I was hopeful that real change might be possible, and that bro culture and tech culture weren’t permanently intertwined. My hopes were short-lived. As the company grew, so did the layers of straight white male leaders that were established between me and the founders, and I watched the culture slip back into a familiar pattern. The company claimed to focus on diversity and inclusion, but it quickly became clear that there was a lot of hiring bias. When my team opened up a vice president of sales position, we interviewed female candidates at the top of their field who were met with internal feedback like, “She’s great, but will she be able to command a room?” All I heard is, “She’s great, but will people respect her as a woman? Because I don’t.”

My hopes were short-lived.

Equality for Women Leaders in Tech Exists Only in My Dreams

Most recently, the company made the comfortable decision of bringing on a middle-aged white man to lead the sales force, despite the team already being 75 percent white men. Within two months of my new boss joining, he wasn’t afraid to tell us that, “This is my team and you’re going to do what I want.” The tipping point came in June 2019. I hid who I am for the majority of my life before I finally came out in my mid-20s. For this reason, Pride month has come to mean a lot to me, and my sense of place in the community. With my company's claim to focus on diversity and inclusion, I sat down with my CEO in to eagerly discuss my ideas for how we can support the LGBTQIA community and honor Pride month as a brand—after all, their top-performing employee (me) was a part of this community. To my surprise, I was met with immediate resistance, as my CEO didn’t want to take a “political stance” because he was concerned that it could prevent prospective clients from working with our company. I knew he loved Chick-Fil-A, but I wasn’t expecting this. It hurt me down to my core. Here I was on the frontline of his brand, building relationships, hosting dinners and meeting with prospects every day, yet he was concerned about people knowing that the company supports the LGBTQIA community? I felt frustrated and vulnerable again, like bro culture and talking about sports are acceptable in tech, but to be your authentic self as a gay woman is not. My identity is somehow political.After years of red-eye flights, nights away from my wife and working on weekends, here I am again, realizing that there’s no amount of persistence or contribution I can make that will cancel out the sexist culture that is so deeply ingrained in SaaS, Silicon Valley and tech. The culture I had so badly wanted to distance myself from was seamlessly coming together right in front of my eyes with each new (white, male) employee we hired. Here I am again, watching a male counterpart in a meeting repeat a point I just made, and the (predominantly white, male) room reacting as if they’re hearing it for the first time. Or having my boss interrupt me while I’m making a succinct argument or explaining something important. Despite my years of experience and expertise, here I am again experiencing first hand the things that women “can’t” do—like command a room. Unfortunately here I am again, feeling stuck under these white men who need power, and somehow I’m the person who’s made to feel like I should leave. I used to dream of one day joining a company early enough to have a hand in building it up into somewhere a queer woman—or really anyone who wasn’t a straight white man—could feel like a valued part of the team. All these years later, I’m still dreaming.

When my husband and I said our vows on a sunny day seven years ago—"I do, for better for worse, in sickness and in health, until death do us part”—neither of us had any idea what that would actually look like.I guess we expected challenges along the way, but we still naively thought we would grow old together, sitting on a park bench reminiscing about our long lives, surrounded by scores of giggling grandchildren.Yet in the summer of 2018, it all seemed to be crashing down around us. We struggled to communicate, sat in counseling and couldn't see sticking to our vows long enough to finish out the year. We could barely remember why we wanted to marry each other in the first place, let alone muster the connection to honor the vows that seemed so important the day we said them.That all changed the day my husband got diagnosed with terminal cancer.

The Diagnosis Paralyzed Me

I always thought he would get cancer. His family history, poor diet and lack of exercise predisposed him to it and, to be honest, I always thought I would feel resentful if he did—frustrated that he hadn't taken any steps to prevent it or change his life's course.But when those fateful words came tumbling out, when he told me the tumor was too large to operate on and the cancer had already spread around his body, I didn't feel that at all.At first, I felt completely paralyzed. You can't divorce someone with terminal cancer, can you? Is this what my life was going to look like now—married to someone I wasn't sure I even liked anymore, bound by duty to do the right thing?

When you are suddenly faced with losing someone, so many things seem trivial, laughable almost.

Then I Felt Love

But after the initial wave of shock, denial and fear passed, I suddenly felt consumed with a completely different emotion: love. All I wanted to do was hold him close, protect him and honor those words we spoke to each other with such hope, in more innocent times.It wasn't out of a sense of duty or guilt, despite the rocky state of our marriage and my initial internal conflict. It was because, in that moment as the news settled, none of those things that had seen our relationship unravel mattered anymore. When you are suddenly faced with losing someone, so many things seem trivial, laughable almost. I saw the man I chose to marry and the qualities I had so adored were still there, shining through all the new talk of scans and survival rates.I grieved for our lost future, and for our past—the simplicity that we had wasted away while we didn't realize what lay ahead. But as my mind raced through the “what ifs” and “should have beens,” it eventually crept back to the right now and everything we had to be grateful for.Unfortunately, this isn't a magical tale of how we saw the light, conquered cancer and lived happily ever after. The reality is that his cancer will be terminal. It's currently being controlled by very strong medication, but it's already spread to multiple organs and there's nothing the doctors can do to give this story a happy ending.

Much Good Has Come of His Illness

Yet, although I would never wish this on my husband, or anyone else, there is a part of me that is glad he got cancer. I realize that is a shocking thing to admit, especially for someone who has never been through the rollercoaster of emotions a cancer diagnosis brings. And yes, I know, it's also entirely selfish. It's not me that is enduring the grueling treatment or having to face up to my own mortality.But, you see, this devastating diagnosis means that, at least temporarily, I've got him back. We've got each other back. We have been given a second chance that many people never get, to focus on what is important, rediscover the little things in life and appreciate each other in a new lightSo would I write the story differently? The power of hindsight is a beautiful thing, isn't it? It would be lovely to think we would have had an epiphany and worked to make our marriage stronger. But I doubt that is the case. By now we would probably be divorced, forging new lives apart. Perhaps they would have been lovely lives, but when our story got a twist in its tale it led us to a place that I couldn't foresee.It's a happy, loving, mindful place, where we make the most of right now, as we know it's all we might have. Perhaps, you might say, that's because I have a way out now, I know it's not forever. I can see why you would think that, and I've considered it myself too. But I know that's not the case.I'm immensely sad that we can't rewrite the future and the thought of losing him makes my heart ache. When you suddenly realize what you want has been right there in front of you all along, it's even more soul-destroying to know it's going to be taken away.So, am I glad he's going to die? Of course not. Am I glad it took a terminal diagnosis to make us come to our senses? No. But am I glad my husband got terminal cancer? Selfishly, knowingly and for better or worse: Yes, I am.

When I decided, as a social experiment, to stop dating white men, there were several reasons why: I was exhausted from doing too much emotional labor. I was resentful that my white partners weren’t the allies that I wanted. I was fed up feeling tired for the majority of the time we were together. At first, I misunderstood the source of our issues and in doing so, misdiagnosed all kinds of problems on my partners. It took halfway through my last relationship with a white man to realize that there was a line between his problems and his social conditioning. It wasn’t until six months after the relationship ended that lines started to become clearer to me.

The Importance of Verbalizing Emotions

I’ve dated mainly white men for most of my life. I’ve yet to unpack whether that’s because of my own social conditioning, my socioeconomic standing, purely personal preference or a matter of location and population density. Whatever the reasons, it came to a point where I needed to self-analyze what I was doing. There was a consistency to my behavioral patterns in these choices that I needed to understand. Why did I keep leaving those relationships feeling so hurt and tired? And why did it feel different when I was seeing another person of color? Let’s recognize this: access to language is a sign of privilege. The language that came to me during my last relationship with a white man changed my life. Toward the end, I was able to start vocalizing critical distinctions of what I was experiencing emotionally. Terms like “emotional labor” and “gaslighting” were succinct ways to define the overwhelming feelings I was carrying with me. I used them as shields against the onslaught of my own confusion. Unburdening myself through these words were powerful releases that would come to save me a lot of pain and explaining. I feel like “access to language is a sign of privilege” is the type of phrase that should be stamped on a coin.

Why did I keep leaving those relationships feeling so hurt and tired? And why did it feel different when I was seeing another person of color?

Intersectional Allyship Is Instinctive for a POC

Part of the reason for my dating experiment was to draw a line in the sand on how much of my love and labors were divided between social conditioning and myself. This was crucial, and it took time: The process of unlearning takes longer than learning. I needed to give myself a break from the emotional labor of having to generally explain my trauma or defend my racial POV as a woman of color. I wanted to be able to have my intentional choices be accepted, not questioned for reasons that I knew to be racial, and would need to point out as such.I dated actively for two years, intentionally avoiding white males. Some white men who became aware of my experiment were upset by my choices. They didn’t understand why this might be something I needed to do for myself, even going so far as demanding an explanation. It was great to know that I didn’t owe them one. Dating strictly people of color was incredible. Peer acceptance within repression is a beautiful thing to experience. I felt my defenses relax and begin to take up less space. I felt the nonverbal language between my POC partners and me become easier—nonverbal communication is something that I consider to be crucial within relationships. I shared more of my trauma and it was seen with a different perspective, which made me feel more secure. I quickly got a better idea of how I needed a partner to step up for me. When I was dating persons of color, they naturally found the moments where I needed support or camaraderie, without me having to explain why to them. Not having to do as much emotional labor—or sometimes not at all—was a relief. The experience of my existence felt validated in a whole new way.

Men Have to Learn How to Be a Good Ally

After a couple of years of dating, my friends and family challenged me to ask myself if the rules I’d put in place were really serving me anymore. And during that time I’d noticed that some of the issues I’d had in relationships were more about gender than race. So I decided to open the playing field back up. So what did the experience teach me?First of all, most men need to go to therapy and stop expecting their partners to help them work through trauma. Full stop. Moms and/or dads, please teach your boys to have healthy emotional boundaries. Women in hetero relationships are not here to be the carriers of their partner’s emotional burdens. Women—especially women of color—are already coming into the relationship marginalized on a social level, and we don’t need to be unnecessarily encumbered by our partners’ emotional immaturity. Men need to be responsible and mature about the work that they need to be doing for themselves and their partners. But the most important lesson I learned during my experiment was to ask anyone I’m dating to do the work that’s necessary for them to be a proper ally to people of color. Looking back, I realized I’d never learned how to ask for allyship. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know how to differentiate those particular needs from the other ones I had. POC aren’t taught to ask for allyship, and white people aren’t taught to provide it. When I wasn’t dating white people, I found that support readily available. Interracial dating will always require more emotional labor from the person of color, no matter what, and those commitments have to be set up right away. Communicate those needs first, especially if you are in a relationship with a white person.

Dating strictly people of color was incredible.

I Know My Partner—White or Not—Must Be a Social Justice Ally

It’s been such a relief to be able to define what allyship means to me when I enter into a relationship and to know that no matter what–even if the romance dies out–I’ll still have this person as an ally. Let your white partner know that the responsibility of protecting and dismantling systemic racism is on them, and do not choose to move further with that individual unless they can genuinely agree to be there for you in that way. If not, you’ll be entering a space that you may find all too familiar, including feelings of burnout, resentment and overbearing emotional labor. White partners need to recognize that by entering a relationship with a person of color, they’ll need to not only be there romantically, but also to provide allyship, or the relationship will become much more challenging, taxing and unpleasant for their partner.

“Good afternoon, ma’am!”I’d just stepped inside the store when I felt the words hurled at me. I tried to shape my lips into a smile but I’m sure I just looked constipated and confused—which, to be fair, isn’t far from what I was actually feeling. Instead of unleashing all of the gender-related thoughts and emotions seething inside me on my lovely greeter, I turned inward to process.

When Will Gender Fluid Pronouns Catch On?

For much of my life, I’ve skated between the masculine and feminine, male and female, boy and girl, sir and ma’am. I’ve never felt entirely at home within my body, but I also never felt that transitioning would help with that ache within me. It comes and goes, usually in concert with periods of hopefulness, like the hope that I have that people will stop using gender-specific greetings when engaging with others. Or the hope that I have that they’ll embrace more of the in-between-ness that exists in the world, and has for centuries. The ache exposes my desire for fluidity, openness, curiosity and welcoming that the world does not often provide.“Need help looking for anything, sir?”“No, thank you,” I quickly replied, and turned the corner to escape this box the whole store seemed to be trying to close around me. As I passed by the clothing section, I felt rage well up in me. Boy clothes, girl clothes—but where are the anyone-and-everybody clothes? I’ve spent years trying without luck to find pants that don’t hug my waist too tightly but don’t drag on the ground beneath my sneakers. I’d often end up berating my body instead of the clothes that can’t even begin to contain or express the real me. I think, if I could only get smaller here, bigger here, longer here, then those clothes will fit me in the right way.“Excuse me, ma’am,” another voice offered from out of nowhere. I lunged for some ramen and ran out of the aisle quickly.My god, they come at you fast.

For much of my life, I’ve skated between the masculine and feminine, male and female, boy and girl.

Why Gender Pronouns Matter

I think that when people say “ma’am” or “sir” that they genuinely mean it to be kind and respectful, and in wanting to be both kind and courteous, they use the only terms they were taught to describe others. This is why I try to be kind, even through my seething inner fury, because the unrest I feel is less about them and more about the world that surrounds us—and the ways we’ve been conditioned to behave and speak.I wonder what it would look like to embody a language of freedom, filled with curiosity, wondering and kindness. A sort of language that beckons us out of the binaries we live in and asks us to imagine other words, other people, other worlds. This sort of language has already been created, utilized and passed on among many indigenous peoples. For those of us who have been raised in an incubator where there is only man and woman, and nothing else, we have much work to do. There are people among you who feel this same angst, this same “in-between-ness,” this same feeling of not fitting in but not knowing where else to go.Some of you may be thinking, “Hey, this is a little heavy for a story about a shopping trip.” Maybe. Maybe not. For many transgender and non-binary folk, it’s in the day-to-day, the mundane running of errands where we often experience micro-aggressions. To you, “ma’am” and “sir” may just be words. To another person, they could be proof of their invisibility in this world—evidence that they’re not being seen for who they truly are. This is not an offering of judgment, but one of welcoming you to envision how you could create a more inclusive language within yourself—and how that might make life better for people you don’t even know.

It’s 5:30 a.m. I sluggishly get out of bed, not wanting to do work out but I gotta work out if I’m going to keep eating only pizza. The bathroom lights are too much. Squinting, I pull down my boyfriend’s boxers I am wearing to take the ol’ morning pee. Gap boxers: orange and green striped, to be specific. But, now, there is also a nice little red period stain—that first day, bright, stop sign-red. Ladies, you know what I’m talking about. I am a 29-year-old woman, on birth control, with a regular period, and I still don’t prepare well enough for said period. It’s like, “Oh, I should be getting my period soon. Should probably take some precaution, but to hell with it. Let’s wait until I bleed all over everything.” What can I say? I like living on the edge. So here I am, all the grogginess immediately dissipating because now I am freaking awake. Shit. What the hell do I do? “Oh, hey, honey I decided to bleed all over your clothes, sorry ’bout it.” Yeah right! Water—cold water—quick! Rinse it. Or vinegar. Doesn’t vinegar get out red stains? Well, for wine, but blood? Plus what 20-something man is going to have vinegar? Not this one. Cripes. Oh, wait, pretty sure there is a Tide to Go pen in here somewhere. Where the heck is it? Why is there so much shit everywhere? “Shit!” I whisper-scream as I knock down everything in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Oh, praise be, here it is. Frantically, I apply the pen to the bloodstain. Thank the heavens—the stain is lightening up and coming out. Okay, I am going to wad these boxers up and stick them in the bottom of my gym bag—as if my boyfriend is magically going to know I bled on his boxers and go searching through my gym bag at 5:30 a.m. to find the proof he needs to lock me up. I go home, wash the boxers, and thank Mother Earth: not a stain in sight. I fold them up and once back at his place, throw them on the floor with all the other clothes he leaves everywhere. Mission-freaking-accomplished.

Should Your Boyfriend Know About Your Period? Of Course He Should.

Months later, I’m changing and my boyfriend sees my comfy, slightly-large, rainbow booty short underwear. He looks at me and says, “Honey, you’re wearing your period underwear.” Again, ladies, you know what he’s talking about. And when he says this, I think, “Little do you know, your underwear is my period underwear too.” Now looking back, I think to myself, “Woman, why are you such a nut?” My boyfriend has seen me at my worst. He has been there with me through anxiety, depression and many of life’s ups and downs. He has seen me cry over the fact that our order of cheese bread was messed up and we got fried mozzarella sticks instead. He has been supportive of me at my worst and doesn’t make me feel crazy even when I’m not myself. So why? Why would I think that me accidentally bleeding on his boxers might be some detrimental event to our relationship, necessitating me to go all covert ops?

Why would I think that me accidentally bleeding on his boxers might be some detrimental event to our relationship, necessitating me to go all covert ops?

The Fact That No One Explains Menstruation to Boys Is the Problem

I really thought about where this fear came from. Yes, fear. It is absurd that a normal bodily function—one that is literally part of the reason we can give life—would be a topic of fear. It could have been from middle school sex ed, when all the boys and girls were put in separate rooms because boys “don’t need to know about that sort of thing.” And then it clicked. One of my—and many others’—first period discussions taught me that the conversation is only for females. It’s no wonder the boys in school made grossed-out faces and complained they didn’t “need to hear that.” Why would they think any differently if they weren’t taught to? When a girl would bleed through her pants—as we all know happens, even in one’s late 20s—the reaction of most classmates(boys and girls)was one of judgment and ridicule. Instead of the teacher talking to the class about the normalcy of the situation and educating us, she was rushed out of the classroom and everyone was told to calm down—to pretend it didn’t happen. Even past boyfriends—men in their 20s—have given me the “I am grossed out. Stop talking about your period” face when I simply talked about tampons. Calm down, I just said I need to change my tampon; I didn’t say I wanted to bleed on your face. If our youth are not educated on how to handle these experiences with compassion and understanding, if they are taught to not talk about it, or to pretend unconformable situations don’t happen, how can we expect there not to be a stigma around menstruation?

Bleed on my beautiful women, bleed on.

It’s Up to Women to Teach Men About Periods

Now, here I am, taking a step toward changing the conversation. It’s me, your secret agent, hider of bloody boxers: the Boxer Bleeder. I am a grown woman who finally realizes that I need to stop contributing to this part of society that doesn’t want to talk about the p-word. Not only do women bleed from their vaginas, but there are also intense hormones and, for some of us, crippling period pain that comes with having a uterus. Society would do well to change this idea that the topic of periods “aren’t meant for male ears” or “a woman shouldn’t talk about that except with her girlfriends.” Women shouldn’t feel shame or like we have to hide any part of ourselves. We should be able to talk openly about the uncomfortable, sometimes painful and traumatic experiences we have had with our bodies, and not be worried we will be shut down or told to be quiet. We deserve our voices to be heard. So, cheers to you, my ladies. If you bleed on your boyfriends’ boxers, sheets, etc. it is absolutely okay. Just get a Tide pen and you’ll be fine. (And no, this is not a paid advertisement for Tide.) Bleed on my beautiful women, bleed on.

You know that feeling: the tingling on the back of your neck; the burning sensation on the tips of your ears; the butterflies rising in your gut. You’re being watched. Or worse—you’re being followed. Your body prepares for your next move: Shoulders stiffen. Jaw locks. Heart pounds. You clench your fists and get ready for flight or fight—you’re not sure which. The eyes shift away when you’ve spotted them; the trail ends when you turn around to confront their tail. Other times, though, you don’t see it coming. Other times, the engagement isn’t just with eyes. Maybe you’re walking down the same sidewalk and there it is.Hey, sweetie.You’re looking fine.You’re gorgeous.Hey, baby girl.(I’m not your fucking baby.)

Maybe You Asked for It

Whatever they say, it pisses you off. It sets your day on a downward spiral, fucks it right up, makes you disgusted with the weight of the world, the stench of the world, the shit of the world, the goddamn price and the privilege of going outside.Or maybe…it’s your fault.Maybe you asked for it. Maybe, you looked available. Maybe, you had the audacity to look like you’re having a good time. Maybe you’re off the sidewalk and—heaven forbid—ordered a drink for yourself and are laughing—laughing!—then, boom, there it is.“Hey, gorgeous,” they say, leaning in way too close on the same square foot of bar you’ve been leaning on. “What’re you doing here all by yourself.” It’s not a question: It’s an accusation. You smell on their breath the bottom-shelf grain mixed with some noxious energy drink that gives them the liquid courage they need to approach you. Part of you feels disgust, another pity, the other outrage—but mostly, you just feel shame. Shame because you were smiling. Shame because you looked available. Shame because maybe in some dark cavern of your mind…you wanted it. Maybe, for some fucked up reason, you needed it.What the fuck.

Now the Fear Is on You

You thought that shit was never going to end, that it was the inevitability of being female, that you’d never know what it was like to wear a dress or heels or walk out in public without being told how much you looked like you were asking for it. But, now…Now, you’re in your thirties. Now, you wear a wedding ring. Now… Hey! Look at that! The attention stopped! You’re free! Right? Because now the eyes flick from your ass to the glint of your diamond on your hand and they turn away. Now, you’re safe! You’re free! But now: the emptiness. The fear. That fear. Where’d that come from?Before, that fear had been toward the perpetrator. Now, that fear’s on you. (Now, that fear’s on you.)Because as much as you wanted to believe you were above needing to be fueled by pejorative and objectifying male attention based on a patriarchal lens that was designed to suit a heteronormative male gaze (you minored in gender studies, for Christ’s sake), the abject howling of testosterone-charged desire and approach of booze-fueled socially normalized entitlement somehow helped you to feel accepted, somehow helped you feel validated. It somehow legitimized your femininity, your virginity, your sexuality, your desire. Before, you didn’t doubt your worth because you couldn’t escape it. Now, there is a humiliating yet insidious desire to get back that cheap affirmation. Now that the emptiness is here. What now?

You Are Enough

Because something bigger than upperclassmen liberal arts courses has been written inside of you, a social code so ingrained it’s scratching at your DNA festering and waiting for that moment you thought you were free. You thought you were free?Tonight, you’re out with a girlfriend enjoying some happy hour wine and it’s a warm night and you both have your sundresses on to catch the breeze on your legs out on the patio and actually she’s a couple of years older than you and it’s like they can smell it—she’s single. She’s free. There’s a crowd of them trailing you, hovering around you like mosquitoes closing in as you move from rosé to gin and tonics, just waiting for you to get just buzzed enough to say “yes” or whatever version of yes they need.“Hey girls. Can I sit here?” He interrupts your conversation and pulls up a chair, ice clinking in his sweating glass filled with the familiar golden glint of liquid courage. You snarl. She recoils. And in an instant, you see that familiar burn on her cheeks as her wide eyes fly to you in a panic and you remember that sensation—you recognize that humiliation—you remember the Oh-God-please-tell-me-she-doesn’t-think-I’m-asking-for-it and the Oh-God-do-I-look-like-I’m-asking-for-it? The humiliation. The shame. Now, you feel something new: Outrage. Understanding. Determination. In an instant you want to protect her, to shelter her, to tell her you understand, to take away the humiliation, the fear. And you look at her and you look at you both and you realize you know the fuck what? She doesn’t deserve this shit. I don’t deserve this shit. I never deserved this shit. And I don’t need it.Because:You shouldn’t have to feel like you were asking for something or that you don’t have the right to be alone or that the shit you wear on your ass or your hand conveys some language of availability or property and you shouldn’t have to feel embarrassed or afraid to be out in public or that if this bullshit ever fucking stops it’s somehow a failure on your part as a woman as an object of desire that you’re worth so much more than this. Because you, you have the right to be out in public. You have the right to feel safe. You’re enough, you know that? (You’re enough, you know that.) And this time, it’s not a question.

Remote work was done by millions of Americans, even prior to COVID-19. Some people may choose remote work because they feel it suits their introversion more. Some people may choose remote work so they can travel the world. Some people may choose to work remotely so that they can be safe from past work experiences that they may have encountered—like sexual harassment. Here’s a story about a remote company, not unlike other current remote companies out there. It began as a smaller start-up when I was hired, there was lots of work to be done, the team was close and the service was projected to do well. In typical start-up style, founders had big dreams, there was lots of excitement and long hours from the team. And there was no HR. One of the reasons I chose to join was because this tech company had a larger than average percentage of women working there. I’d say that about a third of the company were female at the time and I was friends with some of them. As the company grew, it was noticeable that they did continue to hire women and I saw that (from my remote view) as a definite positive. This was also seen as a point of pride to the employer and a welcoming fact to employees and potential hires. At the time, the company was still small and the CEO had a hand in every hiring decision.He also had a hand on a lot of women.The company met twice a year for our all-hands, where we would share how we’d grown for the year and what we wanted to achieve the following year. There was also a large group of employees who lived in the city the company was founded in, and they’d often meet up to work together (drinking coffee) or socialize (drinking alcohol). This was a wellness company that was quickly growing: There’s nothing like the growing success of a small tech company to bring out the ugliest tendencies of a CEO.

He also had a hand on a lot of women.

The CEO Had Antisocial Personality Disorder

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the following are included in antisocial personality disorder: violation of the physical or emotional rights of others; lack of stability in job and home life; irritability and aggression; lack of remorse; consistent irresponsibility; recklessness, impulsivity; deceitfulness; and a childhood diagnosis (or symptoms consistent with) conduct disorder.Now out of these nine, I’d say the CEO clearly showcased five—that’s just my opinion. In a “professional” setting, he would be impulsive but those impulses could be stalled or thwarted by a department manager. He was in constant violation of physical and/or emotional boundaries of employees, especially women or those not drinking the Kool-Aid. Once, at a gathering—while we were slated to win a “company culture” award—I overheard him at the bar, commenting on two female employees' physiques, and how they looked exactly like sisters. Sometimes, he would invite people over to his high-rise apartment. My female coworkers and I were alarmed upon seeing his private bathroom filled from floor to ceiling with Disney memorabilia. His bedroom was filled with Transformers memorabilia on the wall. Now this by no means is a certain sign of sociopathy or childhood trauma, but it was somewhat concerning to us considering this man was in his thirties. At first, the then-co-founder (who would later become CEO) had to spend more time away, raising capital for the company, he gradually became more involved internally. When it came to women, his process was systematic. New hires were trained and brought to a city where there was the largest number of employees. He’d do an initial check-in of sorts during their training. Afterward, there would be a social initiation, which would include a hard workout and then drinking. Lots of drinking.Oftentimes, the CEO would check sobriety by coming into a female employee’s physical space. If it didn’t happen on the first night, then maybe you were invited along for work drinks later on down the line and find yourself alone with him facing endless free drinks. One night, while the company was out bar-hopping, it was getting late and people were getting ready to leave. I witnessed him go in for an unwarranted kiss on the mouth with one of my female coworkers. On a few occasions, I was told by other female coworkers that he had taken them out alone to meet at bars where they got so drunk and had vague memories of the end of their night. I was also told that he’d confessed attraction to two female employees (one married), although neither had a desire to be with him. During a short period, several women had been simultaneously affected by his sexual misconduct, unable to work without experiencing emotional trauma, and he would still request their presence at certain social or work events.

Afterward, there would be a social initiation, which would include a hard workout and then drinking. Lots of drinking.

Employees Spoke Up and Nothing Was Done

After several women spoke about his behavior to a newly-hired CTO, he was somehow responsible for dealing with the complaints (again no HR department). Nothing was done outside of some horrifically mishandled communications between he and the victims and some updates to the codes of conduct that we all had to sign. It wasn’t long until an HR rep was finally hired. It eventually came to light that the HR rep was also aware of his misconduct after an employee complained about his behavior. The employee was eventually let go. Add into the mix the strange twist in which it was shared that the CEO was all of a sudden in a relationship with the VP of one of the major departments. She was also aware of his misconduct and yet it didn’t seem to phase her. We know most of the time, sexual harassment charges tend not to show up until several occurrences have passed. We know men in power tend to view women in the workplace with a sense of ownership and entitlement. Oftentimes, sexual harassment is an abuse of power situation. The behavior is neither right nor unique, but if you are a victim, your biggest hope is that the company you support with your time and efforts will reciprocate. Companies are rarely there for victimized women.The assumption is that in remote jobs, people are distanced and safe from predatory behavior. In fact, it may be even more challenging to capture some of the instances of harassment since individuals are isolated, are limited in their ability to gather evidence and left to the devices of a very unreliable “he said she said” scenario.

The Company Did Well, Despite the Harassment

While this was all happening, our company took home a slew of awards, including “best company happiness” as well as being selected one of its city’s “best places to work.” As you can imagine, the CEO was incredibly proud of these accolades and took every chance he could to tout them. These awards were won sheerly by consistent applications from the marketing team and incessant requests from employees to fill out forms with glowing reviews. Not unlike other industries that try to silence, threaten, scare or pay women into not sharing their experiences, tech rolls up the risk of talking into their NDAs and at-will employment agreements. If you say anything internally, you are at risk of being fired. If you share externally, you are at risk of being sued. If you act out of line after the act of harassment has occurred, you are at risk of being fired. Which, after a certain amount of time at the company, I witnessed this happening almost as if in chronological order. Women who had first been harassed were starting to be let go due to “strategic department changes.” Other women left because they could not endure the situation. Sadly, most women stayed because, in terms of pay and growth and stability, it was a good place to be. Women stayed because: “consent is a function of power.” Eventually, due to COVID-19, 40 percent of the company was let go. There are still no charges against the CEO. At this point, I’ve spoken to several of the women who have been harassed by him. Their choice to speak or not speak is their and theirs only. There is a good chance that there probably never will be charges against him. But he’s not one in a million. So many stories of harassment occur mostly within physical walls. But don’t underestimate a predator’s desire to reach its prey. Remote companies deal with harassment too. Over the screen, in meetings, on calls, during work trips: It can be just as bad if not worse harassment than what is occurring within a physical office. To find more on sexual harassment in the workplace, here are a few resources:Time's UpEqual Rights AdvocatesNew AmericaRAINN

As a female artist working a world where men profit off of the female form, I thought it was time to turn the tables. At first, I focused on empowering womxn in any way I could. I drew them, took photos of them, painted them and gave them a platform to share their stories. But men creating art out of womxn’s bodies still irritated me. How do womxn profit off of men profiting off of their images? They don’t.What do womxn gain from being portrayed in a piece of art that comes from the male gaze? Are men giving them a platform to speak? Are these male artists lobbying for gender equality? What’s the point of them using the female form in their art? The fact that they think we are nice to look at? I mean, they're not wrong, but that doesn't give them a right to profit off of us, especially when the gender wage gap in art, and in general, is unequivocally engorged.

I Now Make Art Out of Dick Pics

I don’t have all the answers to all these questions, but I do have a way of generating conversation around a topic that’s still only barely penetrated the surface: by making art out of dick pics.In the Art Market 2019 report commissioned by Art Basel and UBS, sociologist Taylor Whitton Brown writes, “The statistics of the past few decades confirm that the art world is not one of gender parity. Women’s artworks sell for a significant discount compared with men’s. Only two works by women have ever broken into the top 100 auction sales for paintings, despite women being the subject matter for approximately half of the top 25.” In one of the most prominent museums of the world, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, less than four percent of the artists in the modern art section are womxn, but 76 percent of the nudes are female. As the feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls once infamously asked, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?”Now, if this sliver of information doesn’t start to get your blood boiling, maybe it will, knowing that out of the 18 most prominent art museums in the U.S., which hold the work of over ten thousand artists, 87 percent of those artists are male, and 85 percent are white. These proportions are discouraging, to say the least. Womxn's bodies are consistently used and sold.

Womxn Get Fucked by Men in the Art World; Now Is the Time to Flip the Script

We’re getting fucked by the art world for men to reach their career climax, while we’re not even on the brink of our full potential.And so while I was isolated in my New York apartment during quarantine, thinking about all of this, when I started to wonder what would happen if I started drawing dicks instead of boobs. To my surprise, people were initially into it. At first, there was definitely a noticeable shock factor that quickly wore off as I kept posting dick art—contrary to my drawings of womxn, which on average got the same amount of engagement every time. The thing was, people didn’t really want to see dicks on their feed, no matter how stimulating they looked. Lots of people unfollowed me, I even received some hate DMs about how I was objectifying men (LOL), how these images were supposed to be private (even though I had consent from every dick pic drawn), or just from people who were “disgusted” and “offended.” In all honesty, I felt that all the hate mail was a good thing. If I didn’t want to be controversial, I’d be posting pictures of food. I wanted to make people angry, the way I was angry. I wanted to make people see something different than what was already out there. And if they saw dick pics in another light, that was part of the goal. Turning something that to some is triggering and even hostile into something digestible. So, how is soliciting dick pics going to do that?

I started to wonder what would happen if I started drawing dicks instead of boobs.

Behold the Parade of Penises

It was my way of taking back the reins. If men weren’t going to change their behavior, if there was still going to be inequality in the art world, why should I confine myself to creating something the art world already had too much of? Enter my parade of penises. Let’s say outright that unsolicited dick pics are foul. Men should never send a picture of their penis without explicit consent. Being forced to see an explicit image is violating. After years of being cyberflashed, a lot of womxn are triggered by them and even experience trauma. The digital age has allowed men to be more anonymous about it, but this behavior has existed forever. Off the top of my head, I could tell you at least five stories about men masturbating in front of someone I personally know—in the subway, at a grocery store, in a parking lot—without consent. If you think these behaviors are anything less than offensive or disagree in any way, you’re wrong. At the bottom, they’re the same thing: someone forcing themselves onto you when you have nowhere else to escape. Even if womxn send a nude first, the favor does not need to be reciprocated in the same way! (Ordering us food on Postmates is always encouraged, though.)The first dick pic of my series came from a guy who I’d been sexting with over quarantine. It felt like a challenge. Was I capable of turning something which people considered unappealing into a digestible piece of art? Yup. I sent it to the guy and he was impressed. I posted it on social media, and my audience was also impressed. I knew that I was onto something, so I solicited more. To my surprise, guys were interested. Some believed in my project, some wanted to be immortalized and some just liked the thrill of sending me their dicks. I wasn’t here to challenge why I was getting them. That wasn’t the point. The point is to dismantle the power that was held in a dick pic, converting the overbearing visuals that an unsolicited dick pic forces upon its receiver, the assault that it proves to be onto an unsuspecting victim. Even though I can’t prevent men from sending dick pics to those who don’t want them, what I can do is reconstruct what a dick pic is. Womxn have significantly less recognition in the art world, even though we are roughly 45 percent of the artists in the U.S., and earn a fraction of what men do. That won’t change unless we disrupt it. In my mind, disruption looks like something that you can’t unsee, something that creates a strong conversation about the underlying issues in our industry. Drawing dick pics seems like the most uninhibited tool I have to smash the patriarchy.

I’ve had this memory for as long as I can remember: I’m around eight years old, at home, sitting in the middle of a staircase landing, sobbing. The 1970s mirrored wall along the stairs reflects my mom and sister back to me. I watch my mom slap my oldest sister—the “difficult one”—and I do nothing. I feel terrified as I watch what I thought of as my one good parent hit my sister, and my world feels like it’s tearing apart.Being scared was common in my home. My dad was known for his daily yelling and nonstop threats. He was so loud and threatening that he managed to get child protective services called to the house, even though we lived on a 20-acre plot of land a 20-minute drive from town. I’m still not sure who put in that call. As an adult, friends have told me that they didn’t want to be around my dad because they didn’t feel safe. (One aunt wouldn’t leave her kids with us unattended.) It was strangely gratifying to hear—to get a confirmation that the way we grew up wasn’t normal, that Dad wasn’t the good guy so many other family friends and relatives still tell me he is. When I told my oldest sister, though, she got angry. “If they knew it was so bad,” she demanded, “Then why didn’t they do anything?”

Being scared was common in my home.

My Siblings Isolated Me, but I Always Had Mom

I grew up the youngest of four. My three older siblings were close, but I wasn’t part of their group. I spent my childhood tagging along, trying to belong, only to end up on the receiving end of pranks and bullying. I believed them when they cheated during our games of penny poker, and they laughed at how gullible I was. But with Mom, I felt like I belonged—that I was worthy of love. When I couldn’t sleep at night, I’d find Mom awake in the kitchen, reading a book or talking on the phone, the little black-and-white TV keeping her company. She’d smile and make me tea and we’d talk until my eyelids became too heavy to worry about bad dreams. Dad yelled, threatened and insulted us every day, but as I got older, he became more of a noise machine—loud, but at such a steady volume that I could tune it out. Mom was calm, but when her anger did rise up it was so big and surprising that it felt like anything could happen.I tried not to think anything negative about my mom. I couldn’t. She was my life preserver. She grew up as the oldest of seven, with an alcoholic stepmother in a loving but abusive household. From her sisters—not my mom—I learned that she’d taken the brunt of the abuse when they were kids. In letters to her parents, Mom always wrote “Dearest Mother and Daddy,” and sounded like she was begging for love.

I tried not to think anything negative about my mom.

Learning My Mom May Have Been as Bad as My Dad

Years after Mom died in a car crash, I was visiting my sister. When we were out alone on a drive, I told her about my memory on the stairs, hoping that she could fill it out. Although she was driving, my sister turned to me so she could see my face. She was surprised I didn’t remember, she said. We were supposed to clean the house. My sister was mad because I wasn’t vacuuming like I was supposed to. I was being bratty and unhelpful, so my sister, who’s six and a half years older than me, picked up our heavy old metal vacuum cleaner and threw it at me. It hit me. Hard. I fell down and cried, then got up and ran screaming to Mom. “It was natural for you to get Mom,” my sister admitted. “I hurt you.” That surprised me. My sister is strong, smart and powerful, but not normally empathetic. Mom came and yelled at her, she remembered. Then Mom picked up the vacuum and threw it at my sister. It hit her in her stomach and knocked her down too.When she told me that, the memory clicked. I was fascinated by my confabulation—a thrown vacuum transformed into a slap. My brain had held onto the terror but reshaped the action into something that it found more manageable. I felt guilty. I’d caused my sister to be hurt, even if I hadn’t meant any harm. Instead of learning from the moment, I’d forgotten the details. Part of me had hung on, though.After my mom died, I hated all the people who insisted on telling me what a saint she’d been. Remembering her as all good and loving took away the edges that made her unique. It made it harder for me to remember her as she really was.When we were kids and child protective services came, my oldest sister joked that they were worried about the wrong parent. I grew up thinking my sister was difficult, always pushing buttons, and that’s why she and my mom constantly battled. Part of me knew that I shouldn’t think that way, but another part wondered why she couldn’t just calm down and make all our lives easier. I never wondered why my sister was angry or what pushed her to fight. When they clashed, I leaned into Mom’s love and certainty. Mom called me her baby girl, her helper—and I was. I didn’t stop to think that I was only making my sister feel more isolated, making her feel unloved and unprotected, adding to the anger she carried. I just wanted to be loved. I didn’t think about the cost.

I Didn’t Want to Accept That Becoming Your Parents Is Normal

As the youngest, I often feel like I spend my life reacting to others and their moods. Even with my husband and two children, I’m not always sure how I feel about something until I write it. I’m normally too busy helping everyone else to engage with my own emotions. When my son was seven months old he had the flu. He’d only sleep if I held him, so I held him for three days straight. When he was a year old, he fell off the growth chart. His adenoids and tonsils were severely oversized, and he had a difficult time eating or sleeping. He vomited all the time, even when I brushed his teeth. I muddled through his baby and toddler years on little sleep, desperately looking for ways to get calories into him. He was a sweet and happy kid, but he had brutal tantrums and meltdowns. I took him to visit my sister in Switzerland when he was two and I was pregnant with my second child. When the flight attendants turned off the lights to help passengers sleep, my son wailed and screamed. I held him in my lap, trying to calm him down enough to sleep. His eyes were scrunched in pain and his coloring was off. I could tell he was hurting and couldn’t get comfortable. Suddenly he stopped fussing. He glared up at me while he pulled out a tiny handful of my hair. He cut my cheeks with his fingernails. He beat me up, and I took it silently because I didn’t want to disrupt the plane. I only wanted him to sleep. What shocked me the most wasn’t that he was hurting me, but the intense expression on his face while he did it. He was only two but I could see the anger in his eyes, and I could tell that it was making him feel better to hurt me. I didn’t feel an urge to hit back. I only held him tight, trying to help him calm down until he finally fell asleep.

How One Decision Turned Me Into My Mom

A year later, I took both kids to a shopping mall on a frantic mission to buy my son shoes. He was overtired and my five-month-old daughter was cranky. We were in the middle of the mall, surrounded by people, with my daughter attached to my front in a Babybjörn, when my son melted down. I kneeled in front of him, trying to calm him. He slapped his baby sister, hard, right in front of me. I slapped him right back. He wailed harder. So did she. I was too stunned to do anything, frightened that I’d just done something I’d sworn never to do: hit my child. And I’d done it in front of a lot of witnesses. It’s become a story I tell a select few people, including my children, because of what happened next. An elderly woman with a thick European accent approached the three of us and said to my son, “What’s wrong? You don’t love your mama anymore? You want to come live with me?” She looked like the evil witch in children’s fairy tales—small, hunched and gnarled. She motioned with her hand, “Come. Come live with me.” My son immediately stopped crying and grabbed my waist. Even my daughter quieted down. After the woman walked away, I realized what she’d done. She’d scared and distracted my son. Out of instinct, he’d clung to me because I was his safe person, even though I had just shown him that wasn’t always the case.I tell my children this story because it’s funny, but also because it’s the moment of my greatest shame as a parent. I’m clear about it: I lost control and hit my child, something I should have never done. No hazy half-memories. Nothing for them to confuse or repress. The facts are as clear as I can make them.

After I slapped my son, I was shocked and depressed.

I’ve Become My Mother, but That’s Okay, Too

The few times I have lost my temper and yelled at my kids, I’ve let them know that I yelled because I lost control, that I’m not perfect, but I should never yell at them. Unlike my dad, I don’t tell them that they’re worthless or stupid, or that they’ll never accomplish anything. Even in my moments of greatest anger, I try not to say anything bad about who they are or who they might become. I know how easy it is to become so lost in a moment that feels like it will go on forever. After I slapped my son, I was shocked and depressed. I kept going over the scene in my head, wondering why I’d had such an instant reaction. I’d made it through years of sleep deprivation and tantrums and never wanted to hit him before. Then it clicked: It was because he hit his sister. If he’d hit me yet again I would have ignored it. But knowing and seeing that he would hit a baby, the other child that I loved, made me choose sides. It made me see him not as my child, but as a threatening other. I don’t know what my mom was thinking the day she threw that vacuum at my sister. Maybe she didn’t even remember doing it. I do know that she was a loving mother and that despite everything, I was lucky to have her. None of us can be good all the time. When we’re wrong we need to be honest about it and forgive ourselves, so that next time we can do better.

We met at my first music festival when I was 17 years old. I accepted a can of mixer from him to chase down my vodka. I noted his singsong accent. He was 23, a firefighter and we soon realized we lived only two hours away from each other. I asked if he had a girlfriend, to which he responded, “No.” We danced ‘til dawn at the camp DJ setup, breaths frozen in the summer air.In his tent, I asked if he was positive that he didn’t have a girlfriend. He smiled, reassuring me that no, he didn’t have a girlfriend. We did what young people do and I fell asleep in his arms.

He smiled, reassuring me that no, he didn’t have a girlfriend.

He Didn't Have a Girlfriend Because He Had a Wife

I’m not sure I believed that he would text once we parted ways. But he did. After telling me that he missed me, he admitted he was married with a three-year-old son. I racked my brain. Had he worn a ring? Firefighters don’t wear rings, he explained. Metal is a heat conductor. As he told it, the girl had fallen pregnant and he’d married her, thinking it the right thing to do.According to him, the relationship had crumbled. I asked him why he didn’t leave if he was unhappy. He had suggested that he would move out of the family home and cover the bill for separate places, but she’d threatened to move out of the country with his son.He was trapped.Messaging while he was at the fire station made sense, but I was curious how he got away with it otherwise. Did he text me in plain sight or hide in the bathroom? I asked him to tell me a secret, and he told me he cried the morning of his wedding day.I wasn’t the first person with whom he cheated. He’d regularly go out partying on the weekend; I wondered whether I was one in a line of many, but he insisted that I was different. I told myself she deserved everything she got. I wanted to add him on social media, but he told me he didn’t use it, preferring to remain uncontactable.I don’t recall feeling guilty when he picked me up from my parents’ home in a blue BMW. We drove to a resort town half an hour away, along the coast. Wrapped up in each other while waiting in the cable car queue (those baby blue eyes), neither of us noticed when it was our turn to board. Noticing the operator’s smirk, I thought, You have no idea.Riding down the mountain, the cable car became our bubble. I was proud, knowing that I had tempted this handsome older guy away from his boring old life, his boring old wife. I shamelessly posted photos of us on social media. He joked about us pulling up on the side of the road later to get dirty; it made me feel strange. When I arrived home that evening my mother asked whether I thought he was still having sex with his wife. I had never asked.There was an unspoken agreement that we would only meet once. He sent me a photo of him and his son riding the teacups at a fairground, and for the first time, it dawned on me that his family was real. He lamented that he wouldn’t be free until his son turned 18.

He was trapped.

I Wonder Where He Is Now

Our conversations petered out as I left for university. Over the years, I’d Google his name, not because of lingering feelings—just curiosity. Social media profiles never materialized.At the time, I forgave him for tricking me into intimacy, telling myself he hadn’t really lied—he really hadn’t had a girlfriend, after all. Looking back, I resent being put in that position, and it amazes me how I took his story for granted. I wish I could tell my 17-year-old self not to give her heart to someone she can’t have.But I also have to take responsibility for what I did. At the time, I didn’t comprehend the gravity of what I was doing, the damage I could do to three lives. Today I’m a passionate feminist who champions women’s rights, and I’m ashamed that I was so flippant about the pain I could cause another woman.Now that my peers are beginning to marry, I make a point of checking a man’s ring finger when he flirts. As far as I know, I’ve never been cheated on, though if it happens, I’ll consider it karma. The experience doesn’t seem to have affected my sense of trust, but maybe that’s something that will only become evident if I myself get married.I still wonder what became of him. I hope that he found peace. I also think of his wife. Are they still together? I hope she found someone who appreciates her.More than anything, the experience taught me that morality is nuanced— that none of us are all good or all bad.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you women and men are equal. Women are consistently subjected to the indirect sexism that the world throws at them. As a young woman, I have experienced more snide comments about my gender and its relation to my intellect, my athleticism, my passions and my beauty. Don’t believe me? Believe women are equal to men?I come from a town close to New York City, where, typically, the father’s work takes him to Wall Street, while the mother stays at home and raises the children. Being a stay-at-home mother is a time-consuming task: In my town, being a stay-at-home mother is the only position a wife can hold.Unless you’re like my mother.

Unless you’re like my mother.

My Mom Is a Badass Doctor; My Dad Raised Us

She is a first-generation immigrant who works as a trauma surgeon. My father stays at home. Growing up in a family that has a “mixed” or “opposite” structure exposed me to an underlying sexism others dismiss. Throughout elementary school, the administration would address PTA letters only to the mothers. Or when parents came to pick up their children after school, teachers would say, “Let me know when your mother picks you up.” Not once was it mentioned that a father could be the one doing the household tasks. And when my father would wait outside to pick up my sister and me from school, none of the other mothers wanted to talk to him—about organizing simple things like playdates, because it would look unfavorable to the fathers that these women (the other mothers) had talked to another man (my father).My father would always say that we were so fortunate to have him around because none of the other fathers were around for their children, but he also would say things like, “I’m doing a woman’s job by raising you girls” or “Why do I have to do laundry when I am the man of the house?” Or after my mother, Jane, came home from work he would say, “Cook for the family: I am tired after a long day and never learned how to cook.” He said, back then, that he was just frustrated when he said those things. Or that he was joking half the time.Fast-forward to high school when I worked as an assistant preschool teacher. The rooms were as you’d imagine: Boys and girls learning together, but not necessarily playing together. There were clear and distinct boys sections and girls sections that no one from the opposite gender dared pass beyond. Children learn through playing at the preschool age, and the difference between gendered play was shocking. The boys were secured with blue and red race cars and dinosaurs. They were indirectly learning about animals, speed and control. When I tried to join, the young, preschool boys would say, to me, an 18-year-old at the time: “This is not for girls. These are for the boys!” Though they didn’t understand the severity of those words, if that same sentence was told to one of the preschool girls in the room, that girl may forever have been changed. Nonetheless, the girls' side had a quaint kitchenette, dolls and paints. They were learning to be calm, to be pretty, to love the house and learn to be a caring mother.But, for me at that age—who grew up with a breadwinner mother and dad at home—the concept of a homemaker was absurd because my mother is a trauma surgeon. Why would she stay at home? Don’t all mothers work?

it is genuinely confusing to me that someone would utilize their higher education for the goal of becoming a stay-at-home mother.

I Don't Understand Why Educated Women Stay Home

Because of the strong, independent mother I am blessed to have as my role model, it is genuinely confusing to me that someone would utilize their higher education for the goal of becoming a stay-at-home mother. Though there is nothing wrong with it, there is also nothing wrong with being a stay-at-home father.Stay-at-home fathers have higher blood pressure, higher cholesterol rates and increased health risks. At first, the health community thought this was a natural response to raising children. Then, it was later found out, that with two working parents, if the father was generating less money for the family, the same side effects could be seen. Men have evolved to be unsettled by bringing home less cash than women, and women have evolutionarily and culturally been told that if they are not at home with their children. Something is wrong.Now, in college, I see the concept of a Mrs. Degree titleholder: There are women who seriously pursue meeting a man in college and marrying him. Especially in the South, I, personally, have met multiple women who are simply going to school to possess an undergraduate education, work for a few years, and then become a stay-at-home mother. Girls are told that we can marry rich if we make ourselves prettier, eat like a lady, workout, be thin and impress—whenever possible.In the workforce, the theme is doubled-down upon. The healthcare field—especially the surgery department—is male-dominated. In 2017, my mother took us all to San Diego for a national surgery conference. We went for vacation, while she attended for the conference itself. At this conference, other events were scheduled for “family fun.” and we enrolled in the exercise boot camp. I was certainly the youngest in the mix—the rest were different types of surgeons. A cardiovascular surgeon approached me while we were waiting in line. He asked how we liked the conference and what type of surgeon my father was. It did not occur to him that my mother could be the surgeon in the family.Was it the way she looked? We were all in exercise apparel. Was it because she was a woman? He proceeded to say, “Oh. Wow. Sorry. Your mother is a badass then.” I wish I could say this happened just the one time, but that’s just one example out of many, many instances.I believe it’s this societal concept—that women generally stay at home—that stagnates a woman’s ability to succeed in the workplace. The Equal Rights Amendment is still not constitutional. This toxic mentality will only push my generation of females to be as inert as the one before. If women my age and younger do not realize their full potential, we will not become equals.It’s time to normalize women who work and are mothers. There should be fewer comments about a woman’s outfit or appearance at work—and a focus on her accomplishments. If we don’t break out of the current mindset for teenage women, it will only perpetuate a concept that a woman will eventually always remain in the kitchen—no matter the decade.

I got married when I was forty-two and became pregnant three months later. My miscarriage happened early in my pregnancy. I told myself it was my fault. I never knew how much I wanted a child until then. I got pregnant a second time. I had a routine appointment with my obstetrician. The technician was giving me an ultrasound when she suddenly stopped and walked out without any explanation. I realized there was no heartbeat. The doctor entered and confirmed what I knew. I tearfully told my husband. We held each other and cried. It was clear our only chance for a successful pregnancy was to use an egg donor.We stared at the papers spread out on the kitchen table. It was a neat pile of donor application forms with information that would determine the direction our lives would go. I was overwhelmed. Reading the top page I saw the following information: height, weight, hair color, eye color, education level, work, hobbies, family medical and psychiatric history, and reason for donation.

Choosing an Egg Donor Is Difficult, to Put It Lightly

How do you make a life-changing decision about which donor to select with such little information? Was I a bad person if I wanted someone with a college degree as opposed to a high school one? We struggled with questions that hit at the fundamental core of our beliefs and values. It didn’t feel right to be making judgments about people who voluntarily helped people build families.We made our decision. I chose an anonymous donor. My body had failed me. I didn’t trust it. It was a time of deep insecurity and vulnerability for me. After going through failed pregnancies, my mind was fragile. I didn’t want to be making comparisons between our donor and myself.We chose a woman with my eye and hair color. She was about my size. The perfect match.The call finally came. It was not what we expected. “I am so sorry,” she told me. I could hear it in her voice. Our nurse really did feel bad for us. The donor we selected had gotten pregnant. We would have to begin again.It took nine months for us to get another donor. We found a woman that had similar features to me. She had written, “I just want to give someone the chance to have a child.” She was healthy, had a good heart, and a generous spirit. That was all I needed to know.

The donor we selected had gotten pregnant. We would have to begin again.

It's Nearly Impossible to Escape Thoughts of Failure

I wavered between being hopeful and preparing for the possibility of yet another failure. I asked myself how much more could I tolerate. How badly did I want to be a parent? What was I willing to risk to get there? Anything and everything. No goddamn guarantees. People in the infertility world call it “a journey.” That felt false, like it romanticized what was happening. I needed to know I had done everything possible before I stopped.We had a wonderful fertility doctor at a clinic that was rated one of the best in our area. He showed compassion in answering all of our questions. He had our complete trust. I began my regular injections and taking medications to prepare my body for in vitro fertilization (IVF). Our donor had produced nine eggs. They were combined with my husband’s sperm to create embryos. We anxiously waited to see how they developed.We were days away from having the embryos implanted when the clinic called. We would not be allowed to work with our doctor. He was no longer permitted to see patients. We were forbidden to have any contact with him.I knew that they were hiding something. I learned that there had been an uprising at the clinic causing a split between the doctors. The director of the clinic was more concerned about money. Infertility was a business for him. Our doctor and some of his colleagues strongly disagreed and felt quality patient care was most important.The clinic chaos couldn’t have happened at a worse time. The retrieval where the embryos were implanted had to be done in a timely way. We couldn’t take our embryos and go somewhere else to begin again. It felt terrible not being able to speak with our doctor. We could only imagine the anger and frustration he felt was much like ours. Having no choice but to proceed, we arranged for the embryos to be implanted by the newly assigned doctor. I hoped the healthcare system would not fail us again.The embryologist came in and coldly said there were three usable embryos. He gave us five minutes to decide what to do and walked out. When he returned, I asked for specifics on the conditions of our embryos. He explained, “One was marginal, one was okay and one looked really good.” We implanted the last two placing our hopes on the one that “looked really good.”They gave me medicine to calm down. The doctor walked in with a mask on his face and slapped me on my back saying, “It’s a good day to get pregnant.” I called him the Lone Ranger because I never saw his face. I confirmed with my husband that he had implanted the embryos because he said nothing. I couldn’t feel anything.Infertility treatment costs a lot of money. We had good insurance, but I was concerned about the bills. I repeatedly asked the clinic for my billing information. They stalled for months. I was persistent. Eventually, they gave me dozens of pages of detailed bills. I had experience with medical records. It was apparent they had been double billing me and our insurance company. I confronted them and alerted my insurance company. I was afraid to take it further, uncertain how the stress would impact my treatment and condition.

Spoiler Alert: I Finally Got Pregnant

We finally got good news. I was pregnant and my baby looked healthy. Ask anyone who gets pregnant through infertility treatment: They will tell you they do not believe they will have a healthy baby until they hold it in their arms. I was no different.I got a call at work from my obstetrician telling me to leave my desk and go home. I had preeclampsia. It was high blood pressure with other potential complications. I remained in bed for three months. A doctor covering for my obstetrician later accidentally pierced my amniotic sac, breaking my water. The nurse came in telling me the doctor was too embarrassed to admit it. I nervously drove myself to the hospital knowing my labor had begun.I was laying on my back, my arms outstretched on a piece of wood with multiple tubes protruding from me. I was disoriented by a mixture of labor pains and medications. Tilting my head back, I saw a doctor on the phone paging another physician arguing that he must “get here stat because a patient is in trouble.” Through my hazy fog I realized that patient was me. I heard the voices of many doctors and nurses. An elevated, curtained device surrounded my hips so I could not see what was happening. I later learned my placenta had ruptured, putting me at great risk. My husband held my hand, looking terrified. The nurse asked him if he wanted to hold our baby or check on me. I saw the nurse carry our daughter for her exam. My husband assured me our baby was perfect and healthy. It was only much later in recovery that I held her. I was flooded with intense feelings of love, gratitude and relief.

I never really believed we would get here.

My Daughter Wanted to Meet the Donor

From the time she was two, we read to my daughter from a disclosure book I made explaining to her how we became a family. We have a loving relationship. When she was thirteen she began to ask about our donor, expressing a desire to find out why she has the color eyes she does. She questioned certain aspects of her personality. I intuitively understood it was not because she was unhappy with me as her mother, but rather she needed to better understand herself. I felt compelled to find her donor. I wanted to fill in those missing pieces for her. We consulted a private investigator who told me not to waste my time or money. I tracked down our closed clinic to its location in another state. They refused to reveal anything.I went to a donor-sibling registry designed for people like us searching for family. We received no replies. I realize our only remaining option was Ancestry.com. My daughter spat in the tube. I carefully explained that the odds of this working were very limited. She reluctantly nodded.Nine weeks later, we get a hit from Ancestry. A woman who lived where we are had a close DNA relationship to my daughter and asked to meet. The three of us nervously met her at a restaurant. We sat with a neatly dressed woman older than I am. After some initial conversation, we realized she misunderstood the purpose of our meeting. She mistakenly believed I was the relative. I carefully explained we were there for my daughter. My daughter explained why she wanted to find her donor. The woman listened without any change of expression. Her face revealed nothing. I thanked her for her time. We left and quickly did the DNA math. My daughter spoke first and said what we are all thinking: The woman's daughter was our donor. We agreed there was no doubt about it. What happened next was up to this stranger.Hours later, the woman called me to confirm her daughter was our donor. The clinic had lied to her daughter, telling her nothing had come from her egg donation. My heart felt like it had stopped beating. She told her daughter about our meeting. I asked about her reaction.“Her heart is full of joy,” she responded. I wondered aloud: What was the next step? We had unexpectedly intruded into their lives. “She needs a couple of weeks to just absorb all of this,” she said. Our call ended with her saying they will be in touch.I never really believed we would get here. All I know is my daughter was thrilled. I was concerned about breaching our donor’s anonymity. Yet, I was willing to risk that to give my daughter the answers she needed. There were a million ways this could’ve gone wrong.We arranged a meeting with our donor in neutral territory. My anxiety and fear were only matched by my daughter’s excitement. It did not occur to her that anything could go wrong. Our donor walked in with a big smile and hugged my daughter and me. The similarity in the way she and my daughter look and dress was striking. Her mother warmly smiled. In a short time, the donor’s husband and two children joined us. It felt natural and loving. Right. I later learned her husband and mother knew she had been a donor.Years have passed. All of these relationships and bonds have grown richer in their depth and strength. There has been nothing but mutual love and acceptance shared between us. I could not be happier. We miraculously have gotten to a place I never could have imagined when we began our complicated rollercoaster ride to parenthood.

Since before I remember, I’ve known that I was a little different.Growing up, my brother, our dad and I had this funny custom that reinforced the distinction. My father would ask us, “Who’s a man?” And we would bring a fist to our chest with a thud, like a gorilla, and Dad would say, “Damn right.”Then we would do the same saying, “Who's a woman?” Our mother would respond by slowly pressing an open palm to her heart to symbolize gentleness.However, the older I got, the more I noticed shades of gray between the black and white of these gender roles played by my parents. My father expressed emotional sensitivity, for example, making it very clear to us that when his contributions to the household were not acknowledged, it hurt his feelings.Also, Pops wasn't the only practical one in the house. My mother would get on my dad’s case for bringing home art and furniture that was out of our family budget, arguing that we had to be frugal with our money.These gendered characteristics had perennial expressions, but which parent they appeared in was dynamic and unpredictable. It was just as likely that my mom take a dominant position in any given scenario as it was that my father would be kind and nurturing.

The older I got, the more I noticed shades of gray between the black and white of gender roles played by my parents.

Should Gender Constructs Be Eliminated?

This makes me wonder if gender constructs are necessary at all. For so many of us, the rules we were given for how we view our bodies were unhelpful, even harmful. We had to do the work of coming to terms with that and defining new rules that were beneficial and healthy. This is really what we talk about when we refer to our inalienable right to freedom, to live and express ourselves in authentic healthy ways. When it comes to gender, the roles we have been assigned could simply be inadequate or inappropriate for who we are as people, like a suit we were passed down but doesn’t quite fit.In fact, if there is one thing that epitomizes manhood for me, it is the two-piece suit. Every day, my father would wake up, put on a suit and go to work. The suit is a man’s modern-day armor. As for her fashion statement, my mother was not big on heels, but she did wear red lipstick. Something about it made her feel complete and, I think, a little powerful.So, I wondered if I could harness the power of my mother’s feminine performative armor the same way that I was able, and encouraged, to harness the power of my father’s business suit. But there is no vernacular for both at once. If I wanted to retain a masculine presentation and wear lipstick, I would have to author that vernacular myself.To reimagine oneself means to detach from centuries of tradition and ritual long held as absolute. Even when it isn’t intended to offend anyone, taking on a new gender and completely redefining one’s personal likeness are among the boldest acts a person can take.We must see them, however, as we view those daring acts of creativity adored in both art and science.

Exploration Is Key

Lipstick on a black man could be read as minstrel; it could be read as homosexual. But there is room for exploration of black masculinity and an opportunity to claim social agency. Social pressure can be confining. Yet there is hope. I think back to the suits that my father wore and how he never wore them the way they came home from the store. He needed to customize his suit to fit his own body, the way he moved, the way he wanted to be seen.On the one hand, I did not want to abandon completely the construct of manhood. But, on the other, I wanted to alleviate some of that feeling of suffocation. So, I took shears to my clothes, self-tailoring them to fit the way I moved and wanted to be seen. The result was still something immediately recognizable as “man,” but was also inconsistent with conventional masculinity. Thus, I gained the agency to make my manhood more flexible and less fragile.I permitted myself to be more self-determined.My resistance to hetero-normativity and conventional gender roles asks, “Is it possible to pioneer new ways of being in society that disrupt what we think we know, yet maintain both some kind of social order as well as a sense of self?” If I wear a skirt, nail polish, or lipstick, it isn’t necessarily meant to be a political statement, to shatter gender boxes for the sake of doing so.In my life, these statements are personal declarations meant to reclaim a sense of self that has been stripped or suppressed by a rigid, inhibiting and therefore oppressive social paradigm.

If there is one thing that epitomizes manhood for me, it is the two-piece suit.

What Could We Lose If We Lost Gender Constructs?

Skeptics reasonably might focus on what we stand to lose by accepting gender fluidity. It certainly destabilizes the control and perceived safety of having clearly defined social expectations. Whom might we encounter in a bathroom? Who best to nurture an infant? Who wears the literal and metaphorical pants in a relationship?It is assumed that these rules are pillars in our social agreement and upsetting them could lead to some sort of chaos. But if these pillars are myths, then we must ask ourselves if it is ethical to sustain them.Those of us who have experienced the failure of these pillars understand that chaos is actually caused by grounding our faith in such fragile supports themselves. When we look closely, no one actually fits neatly into gender confines. All of us are asked to shed or expand some element of our personhood to fit womanhood or manhood, without regard to how much of our character is comprised. Gender roles demand that men lean into masculinity and fulfill their gender expectations. Womanhood asks that women default to femininity, whether or not that is fundamental to their identity.Alone, the constructs of masculinity and femininity point only to polarities, once to identify mating partners, but which have since shed their utility with the advent of language.If we seek balance in our personalities, strict compliance with either of these two pillars of our society becomes less reliable. As we see in queer communities, a dynamic social environment can emerge that has a basis in expectations that are more fundamental and reliable than what we have come to settle for thus far.By taking ownership of our gender identities, and doing the work of unpacking, understanding, expanding (or even abandoning) them, we rid ourselves of a system that asks us to fit everything about how we love and live in a tiny box.We owe ourselves the chance to embody more than gender binary would suggest we can become.