flash of light

Today was filled with highs and lows. Learning to sit in my feelings turned out to be an interesting test today. What I had thought would be a spontaneous, casual and quick dinner last Friday has manifested into something akin to the recent turmoils with Uber and the Google manifest. It has been a true test, having me struggle between being supportive, being vulnerable and sharing my stories, hoping that it would empower other ladies and feeling guilty for not formally reporting my situations earlier, not keeping my eye out while I disengaged in my own personal growth, coupled with sensitivities as to the perception that any of this is my agenda.

It was very hard to listen to their individual experiences, and in a surreal way, it mirrored what was going on with our nation. The perception of progress was a mask that we all put on. Discrimination has adapted in the modern world - survival of the fittest so to speak. It's subtleties and being taught to "toughen up" has almost allowed us all to enable the supremacists and misogynists to rise to the point that in a herd mentality, they no longer feel the need to be ashamed or hide behind masks, as is the situation with the men in Silicon Valley and software engineers all over the world. When one of our young protégées told her story from two years ago when she was bright eyed and bushy tail from college, it broke my heart. She is as tough and smart as they come. I have never seen her so vulnerable and hearing her say that she regretted not saying anything earlier as it is clear from her emotional discourse that it still effected her to this day.

It was with a heavy heart when I had my final technical interview for my pairing coding challenge. Part of letting go and trusting the universe entails also being receptive to whatever comes. Perhaps my curiosity from an earlier interview asking about pseudocode for the game of tic tac toe, which resulted in my coding a program of the game, tipped me over. A friend had just asked how it went and when I would hear, which I had thought would be another week or two, by the time I come back from my vacation. I was surprised to see on my way home that I had been accepted into the program.

As the saying goes, one door opens while another door closes. I would like to think that I had set the stage for these ladies by informally putting leadership on notice of the various discriminations that I had witnessed at the senior level. But the bravery of these ladies who are speaking up at the junior levels has me wondering if I had been as brave when I was that level, if their lives and others would have been better for the butterfly effect from the ripples that could have started over a decade before. I may not be able to change the past, but they have empowered me to make a mark in the future.