I Made the Complaint About the Harassment Before I Felt Ready

Dear Delyara, Readiness is not something I can wait for forever. I know that now. If I had waited until I felt calm, certain, completely justified, emotionally detached, and immune to possible consequences, I would still be silent. Fear would have kept winning because it always knows how to disguise itself as timing. So I acted while I was still afraid. I made the complaint. I put the facts in writing. I let another person hold some of what had been living too long only in my body. I was shaking. I still spoke. That is what courage looked like here. Not fearlessness. Movement before fear had been fully satisfied. And afterward, even before the process had gone anywhere, I felt something change in me. I was no longer only the person harm was happening to. I had become the person naming it. That mattered deeply.