Maybe I don't remember who I was
I told that man to stop emailing me. But did I?
I generally think I have a pretty good memory. A certain set of stories from childhood are crisp, clear, I could even tell you the weather that day. So when I logged into an old email address to search for some old emails for a piece I was writing, I was confident what I would find.
I had uncomfortable correspondence with a few separate men during my college years and early twenties. They wanted to hit on me or date me, and I didn’t want to date them. I searched in my email, under my old name, for the messages I sent and received fifteen years ago, expecting to see the discomfort, the requests to stop, the overtly inappropriate replies.
But they weren’t there. I mean, I found the email threads, full of long messages which I had written. I chatted about my life in kind and generous paragraphs. I couldn’t find one line where I expressed discomfort of any kind.
I felt betrayed, not by these men, but by my past and present self. I questioned my memory. Had I imagined what they had done? Or had I simply never acknowledged it in writing?
I think it’s hard to express discomfort because that’s showing vulnerability, and the person you’re sharing with may not care.
As a young child, I was told, “Use your words. You need to say ‘no’ or ‘stop.’”
I laughed when peers threatened me, an uncontrollable spasm of smiling and chuckling. Like some people laugh when they are tickled even though they hate it. When I said “stop” while laughing, it looked like I wasn’t serious.
“You need to say ‘stop’ in a serious voice,” they said. “You have to say ‘no, don’t do that, without laughing.’”
The thing was, it didn’t matter if I said “no” or “stop” or if I was laughing or not laughing. Kids generally don’t care.
When I did put on a serious face, and said “stop,” the kids didn’t stop, of course. However, the adults didn’t have a plan B to suggest if “stop” didn’t work. They had no idea what to tell kids for self-defense. They didn’t really talk to the kids who didn’t stop, either.
And then I suspect some of those kids who didn’t change their behavior when someone said “stop” grew up into adults who are enthusiastic about continuing a correspondence with young women who doesn’t want a relationship.
So when I was eighteen, I didn’t say “stop” to these emails. I expected that I would have, I even thought I remembered I did, but I was thinking about what I would do now, at age 33. I was a different person back then.
It really disturbed me when I went back to look at the emails, to see my sweet, pleasant email replies, going out of my way to be personable and gift my time and energy to these people who made me uncomfortable.
I am absolutely sure I am not imagining my discomfort. It was real at the time, and it is still real now.
What I didn’t do is express my discomfort. Those feelings lived inside my head and settled into my body. And to be clear, I’m not talking about serious abuse here. I’m talking about feeling like I had to put on a persona, someone who is unbothered by mens’ unreasonable expectations, someone who always responds to emails (because if you don’t respond to emails, it hurts your career), someone who spends hours thinking of the nicest, gentlest, most innocuous way to say ‘no,’ so gentle that I don’t even see the ‘no’ written out anywhere, fifteen years later.
I talked to a writer friend about my experience of seeing these emails, complaining that I had no written evidence of the emotions I remembered and was feeling all over again. “I’m sorry that happened to you,” my friend said. I felt supported and heard.
That’s what I need to say to my younger self who couldn’t voice discomfort or objections. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
(And although this interaction was helpful, I don’t really want to read “I’m sorry,” in the comments. Thanks for understanding.)
They say when you read your old writing and it’s bad, you know you’ve improved. Well, I’m happy to report that I’ve improved.
If I could go back and rewrite some of those emails, I might say:
“I do not want to go to dinner or anywhere else with you. Your comments made me deeply uncomfortable. I am not interested in flirting or a relationship with you. I am really disturbed that you drove home intoxicated. You could have killed someone. I do not approve of you trying to cheat on your wife especially since you have two young children. Trying to pretend you wanted to mentor me was deceitful and has eroded my trust in mentors to this day. ”
And then I would have blocked his email (as I eventually did, after a video clip I didn’t watch that he emailed me on Valentine’s day.)
My eighteen year old self wasn't able to respond with my true thoughts, and wasn't aware of how to feel powerful in that situation. I was pretty much a kid myself, and my interactions as a kid did not prepare me for this.
From a writing perspective, I found it really interesting (once I got past the raw emotion) to report on the difference between what I remembered and what I did. I'm glad I read those emails again because I understand myself and where I came from better now.
Thanks so much for reading! Let me know what you think in the comments.
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One thing that has helped me as I process my past is to learn about threat responses like the fawn response--it is actually a way our bodies/brains keep us safe from predators! Your emotions/memories are real, and your emails sound like a really good example of what fawning looks like. Patriarchal and hierarchal societies really love the fawn response so many people (especially those socialized as female) are trained to have this type of response (instead of fight/flight/freeze). The older I get the less I am able to fawn and the more I can engage with other responses like fight (and it feels pretty good!)
I second the recognition of this as a fawn response. As someone who spent my life engaging in the (heavily socially conditioned into me) fawn response, and then was blamed for my own abuses because I didn't fight back soon enough or hard enough, I am hit hard when I see a fawn response and see someone in any way feeling bad about it. I am still struggling so hard with the messaging--from people who were supposed to help and protect me no less--that I brought it on myself by being an easy target and I must have liked or wanted it, that I have mostly withdrawn from human interaction entirely, for years now. The only people I even still speak to--or have spoken to--are a very small handful of humans that have lived in the same house as me at one point or another since I have been an adult. I avoid talking to new people at all costs beyond required interactions in a workplace or for services. A couple of attempts at dating fizzled out quickly and I have abandoned that entirely.
Funny story, though: many of the same people who said I was a willing participant, complicit in, asking for, or made myself an easy target for abuse, got really upset when I engaged a fight response instead. Really upset. I am AFAB nonbinary, and I went from being so infantilized that I was told I deserved the all boundary violations that traumatized me and they were warranted because of my too soft fawning, to being called the bully for fighting because I was tired of being blamed for my own abuse. I was changing my appearance from more socially recognized feminine to more masculine around the time of the changing from fawning to fighting back, and I wonder how that played a role in how neither response was acceptable and no matter what I did in response to abuse was wrong and my fault and me being the problem.