"I've learned that people will forget what you said: people
will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
-Maya Anjelou
Um.
So last Tuesday afternoon when the whole world was going off on the Harvey Weinstein controversy, once again, I was bullied by a woman.
This has been a major pattern all my life.
What my raging bully said: "She is a nobody, here,"
What I heard: "She is a nobody."
What has rented space in my brain for the last week, what has put me into a depression, what has given my body the most foul odor is that one, single, solitary word: NOBODY.
I am well aware of my "NOBODYNESS."
I do not have to be reminded of it.
I see its reflection in my mirror everyday.
Even more, I do not have to be reminded by a young woman half my age.
When you have been in the workforce for 45 years and when you are the second oldest person in your current workplace ..... and when you have lived your NOBODYNESS since the day when employers used to take a goddamn measuring stick to your miniskirt to see if it was an acceptable length....
#METOO
As I write this, my facebook page is swelling with the hashtag, #METOO meaning that sometime during thier lives my female friends have dealt with some kind of sexual harassment from a man.
The number of women who have been harassed by men is truly heartbreaking.
And what has shocked me the most is the fact that these women are all so different, every race, religion, all ages, all sizes.....rich, poor, educated, they appear to come from all walks of life.
Men and their sense of entitlement.
Men and their stupidity.
Woody Allen talking about witch hunts in the workplace if men just wink at women co-workers,
WTF, Woody.
I can honestly say that men have never harassed me in the workplace. However, I can also honestly say that in my long, colorful career, I have either worked for myself or worked in a mostly female environment.
Karen Long
Brenda Niedswitz
Trudy Ross
Yes, I call you out by name.
My bullies on the playground while attending Green Acres middle school in Stoney Creek, Ontario.
Some women haven't left behind the childish games they learned on the playground in elementary school. (Dr. Cheryl Dellasega, PhD.)
Betty Gallagher.
Ms. Gallagher was my immediate superior during my tenure as a shop girl employed by Coles The Book People. Ms Gallagher hated and bullied me because I was an expert on The American Musical Theater. This was the late seventies and pre- GLEE (the television series.) so it was entirely acceptable to harass theater nerds.
Little has changed as they've gotten older, except they've become much better at bullying others, under the radar. They've become masters at creating chaos without tipping anyone off, except the unfortunate victim who's still pinching herself to see if this really happened, and wondering if anyone else would believe what she's just experienced.
Now we get to the epic Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trumpish part of my career where women who have a little bit of power and what seems to be an unlimited amount of ......
Women with Credit Cards.
Women with a shopping addiction.
In the nineties, I owned a women's fashion consignment shop dealing in mostly designer labels This was back in the day, sigh, back in the day when Donna Karan, sigh, was giving us the cold shoulder, sigh, and when she spoke she appeared to be lucid.
Yes, Donna Karan was on the right side of history.
Some women don't play by the rules. Many times, though, we realize this only in hindsight. We assume her warm overtures are genuine, so we extend our friendship and trust. However, instead, she betrays us, often at great personal and professional cost. We may wonder what happened and why we didn't see it coming.
My clientele includes lawyers, judges, doctors....
These women had power and these women owned the clothes I needed in order to pay my rent, feed my teenage son, keep the power on etc.
I was the shop girl or the fledgling actress and they were Harvey Weinstein dangling the fucking Oscar in my face.
Their greed, their sense of entitlement, their constant emotional and verbal abuse destroyed me.
Most of these women are dead now.
So I shall not call them out my name.
I died too.
Especially, when two women went to the police even after my business went bankrupt and the police came banging down my door to charge me.
The judge threw my case out deeming it ridiculous since my business was incorporated and the court was not not a collection agency for used clothing.
The judge was a man.
The Crown (prosecutor) was a man.
I was not convicted, however I became the not so proud owner of a criminal record.
I was officially a NOBODY.
I found myself unemployed until my record was expunged.
It is not gender that makes you a bully.
Bullying, at its core, is a learned behavior . Bullying is an attempt to gain superiority or control over another .(KevinMD.com)
It has been a week since my raging bully sent me reeling back to a place of shame, loneliness, blame and disgrace.
I will not call her out by name, she knows who she is.
But I will call out somebody else by name: Martin Theodore Carey Bowles also known as Marty Teddy, born on July 29th, 2017.
His birth made me a grandmother.
So I am no longer, a Nobody.
I am a somebody.
I am: Marty Teddy's Granny B.
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