Fleeting thoughts

“Are you up?” I texted my best friend as soon as I got home. It was 1 am for me which meant it was 5 pm for her in Taiwan and really she should be wondering why I was up but I was so flustered I couldn’t think of another way to get her attention. I had just returned home from the gathering I was at for Thanksgiving and I needed to debrief. Within seconds she responded “yes, what’s up?” which I took as an invitation to divulge all the thoughts racing in my head.

I set the scene for her, explaining that I had been at my sister’s fiance’s house with his family for Thanksgiving and we had all stayed up late into the night playing beer pong. As the night came to a close I was one of the few sober people driving and my sister and I were checking in to make sure that everyone else had a safe ride home. As a group of us were cleaning up after the evening’s festivities, one of the guys there who was roughly my age, a friend of someone’s friend, announced that he was heading out. We hadn’t talked much that night – my sister and her fiance had spent the night shuffling me around to various members of his family whom I had to meet – but I decided I would check in anyways to make sure he was okay.

“Are you good to drive?” I asked.

“Unless you want to make sure I get home safe,” he replied with eyebrows raised, eyeing me suggestively.

I immediately felt all the eyes in the room land on me. My sister, her fiance, his parents, his cousins, all looking at me with pity, waiting for me to respond. I felt blood rush to my ears as my mind struggled to comprehend what had been said. He probably meant it as a joke. He probably didn’t really mean that I should go home with him even though that’s exactly what he was suggesting in front of my future brother-in-law’s family.

“You know I didn’t mean it like that,” I weakly replied as I looked down and continued to clean whatever I was cleaning. My response was so lame I knew I would lie in bed at night for weeks thinking about better things I could have said.

I didn’t look back up until he left.

“He means well but he can be a dick,” my sister said. “He just thought you were pretty, but he shouldn’t have said that.”

I didn’t feel pretty though. I actually felt pretty bad. And then I felt confused because maybe it wasn’t worth feeling upset about and I didn’t deserve to feel bad. Maybe I was being sensitive about something that actually wasn’t a big deal.

I continued cleaning and stewing in silence as my sister’s fiance’s dad joined me. “Guys must say shit like that all the time,” he said as I looked up. I didn’t hesitate.

“They do. They’re all assholes.”

He looked at me apologetically. I didn’t need to ask to know what he was trying to say. That he understood that boys would continue to say shitty things and I would have to continue to put up with it for years to come. That this wasn’t the first or the last time that something like this would happen.

I quickly said my goodbyes and thanked everyone for a good night before I got in the car. As I drove home, a familiar guilt crept in. I regretted calling the guy an asshole because it made it clear that what he said bothered me. And if his misguided comment was coming from a place of admiration, why did it bother me so much?

I texted it all to my best friend, ending with, “I hate when ppl make me feel like shit and then I say shitty things.” Then I put my phone down and got in bed, realizing I felt more tired than I had in weeks.

But tired was a nice way of putting it, because I wasn’t tired really. I was actually angry and sad and embarrassed and ashamed and all of the ugly emotions that people don’t really like to see women feel. And in a year where it has felt very heavy and discouraging to be a woman, I have learned it’s easier to say “I’m tired” than to explain how I really feel. When my male patients ask for a massage or tell me the color of my scrubs looks good on me, I feel tired. When a guy at the bar purposely spilled his drink all over me so that it looked like I peed myself so he had an excuse to hit on me, I went home because I was tired. And when I watched the second female presidential candidate in eight years lose to the same misogynistic man, I called my mom sobbing, screaming that I was exhausted. And when men told me that she lost because she wasn’t a good candidate, not because she was a woman, I told them I was tired too.

I’ve been tired for a long time, but I don’t want to be. I want to be angry. I want to have the confidence that men have, to believe that these ugly feelings that I have are valid without questioning them. I want to be angry enough to tell this guy to his face that he’s an asshole and that making sexual innuendos to women in front of their families can’t be an effective flirting strategy. I want to be angry and confident enough to demand respect from my patients and from shitty guys at bars and from politicians who try to take our rights away. And I think I’m getting close because with each passing incident, as these tiny grievances accumulate and feel heavier and heavier, I’m running out of energy to pretend that these ugly feelings aren’t what they are, all so that other people will think I’m nice. Being nice has gotten me nothing except for wet pants and pity stares. They say people don’t like angry women, but maybe then I’ll finally like myself.

This shit will happen again, and maybe I’ll be tired, or maybe I’ll be angry. Until then, I’ll do what we all do, which is lie awake in bed thinking about all the things I wish I had said.