Being harassed at work made me feel dirty in a place where I used to feel competent

Dear Delyara, That is the part I haven’t known how to shake. Not only fear. Contamination. The comments. The tone. The way he stood too close and made every ordinary professional interaction carry an extra layer that had nothing to do with work. I began thinking about clothing in defensive terms, timing in defensive terms, walking down corridors in defensive terms. My body stopped experiencing work as a place of function and started experiencing it as terrain. That changed me. Because harassment doesn’t only interrupt the moment. It rewrites how a person occupies space. How she moves through doors, meetings, lifts, corridors, email threads, even her own posture. It makes self-consciousness feel like part of survival. I hate that he got that much access to my nervous system. I hate even more that I still carry some of that posture with me.