For the Girls :)
It’s a beautiful day in Madrid, and I’ve been itching to be outside all morning. I have an hour break between work and Spanish class, so I walk Cinder as soon as I get home, excited to soak in the sun. I bring my book to the river, get distracted reading, and am rushing back to my apartment before class - if you know me, you know I’m a perpetually late individual - when a rock flies out of nowhere and ricochets off my skull. The sixty seconds that I pause, trying to figure out what the hell just happened, slows to a crawl. I look at the ground, where the broken rock now sits at my feet, and take a 360 degree turn, looking for where it fell from. As I twist, in my peripheral, I see a man duck down, from where he’s facing me on the ledge. I see a dad and his son playing soccer on the other side of the street, and take a step in their direction to ask if they saw what happened, before remembering that they won’t speak English. I put my hand to my head, and instantly feel a knot forming. Then I turn, and continue home. As I cross through the park, I see the man from the ledge, walking off the overlook, staring a hole into the ground as he goes. He looks to be my parents' age, a little unkempt, but not dangerous. Then I notice the tent set up on the ledge, the tarp covering a huge pile of belongings, and peg him as being homeless. A homeless man just chucked a rock at my head. I get home, release Cinder from her harness, and immediately burst into tears.
I wasn’t crying because it hurt, or because it was scary. Or even because this is now the second time a stranger has attacked me while on the streets of Madrid - although an eighty year old man and his chosen weapon of his own cane was a lot less intimidating than a flying rock. I was crying because I had spent most of my morning discussing my safety at work, and was absolutely exhausted from this theme. I have a student - who's significantly older than me - who likes to push boundaries. My set up at school for “office hours” consists of me sitting in a classroom, off of an empty workshop, waiting to see which students show up. Some days, it’s more than fifteen, and I’m running an entire class. Other days, only one student will show. And as a twenty two year old girl, one student, in an empty classroom, is a scary scenario. Especially when said student has taken immense interest in asking about my personal life. The other English teaching assistant had been having the same issues, if not worse, with the same student. So said student had been asked to stop attending our private hours. And yet, that morning, there he was, back in my classroom.
He made a strong case for why he shouldn’t be banned from English practice hours, both to my boss and to me. He apologised for having made my coworker and I uncomfortable, and said he would actively work on filtering himself. My boss left the choice of if he was allowed back in office hours to me.
My boss took our complaints about this student seriously, and for that I’m grateful. I’ve had management in the past blow off similar conversations. However, that doesn’t negate the frustration I feel for being in this position in the first place. Am I taking a learning opportunity away from someone over a few off hand comments? Or are my instincts telling me that he’s a threat to my safety? Because it’s not the words he says, it’s how he says them, and how am I supposed to explain that to a boss, much less when he asks why I don’t want him in my classroom?
I’m tired of dedicating space in my head to these topics, and even more so knowing this is a shared experience among all women. I’ve spent the last twenty years being taught methods to protect myself, and narrowly avoiding close calls. The cab driver that wouldn’t let my sister and I out of the car, the man following my friend and I home, the coworker that incessantly asked me to come back to his house with him; and in each of these scenarios I can rattle off a list of ten reasons of why I blamed myself. What was I doing that made someone throw a rock at me? Logically, this should not have been my first thought, and yet in each of these instances, I convince myself that I’m responsible. I should have set firmer boundaries with the coworker, I shouldn’t have asked a stranger for a cigarette, I shouldn’t have flagged a cab on the street.
All of this to say that this subject has been on my heart this past week. All of the friends out there that have confided in me their own experiences, I’ve been thinking of you. Because we’re conditioned to feel solely responsible for our safety. We’re presented with “decisions”, what to wear, who to talk to, what job to take, as if we have any control over the outcome. I wanted to write a reminder that it’s not your fault. Our choices don’t dictate others actions, and I needed to be told that this week. Sometimes, people throw rocks, and it has nothing to do with us. We are not to blame.