It was a Friday morning in my small, fourth-floor walkup apartment in Wicker Park, and I had rolled out of bed and walked five inches to my desk to start work for the day. In our morning catch-up call, the managing director sent out an email copying the entire team on it.
Almost, the entire team.
He got Chris, Grahm, Josh, even Santhosh. But, instead of copying me on the email, he instead copied Natasha, the only other female analyst in our group. Natasha - a second year analyst that hasn't been working with this director for the past 4 months. Natasha - a girl with blond hair and an entirely different demeanor than me. She forwarded the email to me, with the note "Unfortunately, I'm not surprised that he got us confused".
I immediately felt gutted. Was it my fault? In my one month on the desk, had I not proved myself invaluable? Was I forgettable? Was I not making myself known? I racked my mind thinking of how he could have forgotten who I was, how I had let myself get into this position. This sadness quickly became anger. How disrespectful could a person be? How careless? Without any apology as well?
Later that day, as I was sitting on my couch working on some work documents, my cell phone buzzed. An alert from Wall Street Journal: Ruth Bader Ginsberg has died at the age of 87. The breathe left my chest for a moment. Sadness overcame me, and then fear. I had only grieved the life of this trailblazer of a woman for a moment before I saw a future with another Trump Supreme Court nominee flash through my head: an end of Roe v Wade, an end to DACA, an end to the Affordable Care Act... the end to the reasons that I consider America a first world country. RBG's passing felt like not only the passing of a feminist icon, but also the passing of feminism all together.
Obviously, as I sit back over a week from that night, I know now that isn't true. In the 10 odd days since my boss confused me for another woman, RBG passed away, Breonna Taylor's murderer was not convicted of any charges, much less manslaughter or murder, and Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court. For 2020, this disastrous week feels par for the course.
Women, since the beginning of time, have been treated as second class citizens to our male counterparts. Even today, the sound of a glass ceiling breaking is followed closely by the sound of a new one being built, and at an even higher altitude. A woman becomes the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange while heartbeat bills are passed in state senates. Medical schools become overwhelmingly female and in the same breath media personalities talk about what our congresswomen were wearing rather than how they voted. The whiplash is overwhelming.
There is no optimistic note for this to end on. For now, we mourn. Maybe tomorrow, we will rise up to fight. But for now, I accept my need to set aside the weight of the world and lay down. Drink a glass of wine. Pick up a good book. And pretend that this isn't the world we live in. For hundreds of years, women were given no rest, so today I only ask for one thing: a break.
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