A departure from my normal format:
Today, while ordering a blueberry scone an extremely tall
stranger came around the corner of the
Starbucks counter. He was coming from the wrong direction from the rest of line and the movement caught my eye. I swung around, and his arm reached around my waist. I love arms around my waist, I love a side squeeze from a good friend, walking this way with a man I’m dating, I even love to tighten a sash super tight for the warm cozy feeling it brings. But this arm was not expected, wanted or prompted. I moved away, and found only counter behind me. The arm reached again and this time was completely around me and squeezed. A strong smell of alcohol entered my nostrils. An officer who was walking the man out the door before this incident, yanked the man hard, he fell over on to the floor. He didn’t get up again during my time there. I moved to the pick-up end of the counter. The poor barista asked me if I was okay. Repeatedly. Which was sweet, and so I assured him I was, but truly I was full of adrenaline and unsure of how best to respond. Physically nothing was taken from me, no irreparable damage was done. There are worse breaches of conduct in my history, and in other women’s histories. And there will be worse things in the future. But for a moment something I love was forced upon me by someone I didn’t know. And that sort of action brings an awareness of how fragile boundaries are.
Starbucks counter. He was coming from the wrong direction from the rest of line and the movement caught my eye. I swung around, and his arm reached around my waist. I love arms around my waist, I love a side squeeze from a good friend, walking this way with a man I’m dating, I even love to tighten a sash super tight for the warm cozy feeling it brings. But this arm was not expected, wanted or prompted. I moved away, and found only counter behind me. The arm reached again and this time was completely around me and squeezed. A strong smell of alcohol entered my nostrils. An officer who was walking the man out the door before this incident, yanked the man hard, he fell over on to the floor. He didn’t get up again during my time there. I moved to the pick-up end of the counter. The poor barista asked me if I was okay. Repeatedly. Which was sweet, and so I assured him I was, but truly I was full of adrenaline and unsure of how best to respond. Physically nothing was taken from me, no irreparable damage was done. There are worse breaches of conduct in my history, and in other women’s histories. And there will be worse things in the future. But for a moment something I love was forced upon me by someone I didn’t know. And that sort of action brings an awareness of how fragile boundaries are.
The shock started to
wear off and an onslaught of feelings came. I tried to tell them to go away, I
was fine, it wasn’t a big deal, there are worse things. But such thinking was useless. There are worse things, but that was irrelevant.
Burying this would not help me. Ignoring
my response to such actions only excuses the inappropriate behaviors as normal,
and seeing my own genuine emotional response as a sign of weakness wasn’t
actually a healthy way to process it. This was an invasion of my space, I can
feel shaken, I can feel upset, and I can feel a little sad. It is okay to talk about it, to write about it, to process.
We as women are allowed to say this is not okay, that physically
unwanted contact has consequences, and evokes negative emotional responses. We as a
gender are stronger for actually acknowledging and calling out what went wrong.
So, something went wrong today. Something that shouldn’t have happened. And I’m
going to be okay, but more so, because I acknowledged it.
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