Truth Eventually Catches Up with the Lie
HAVANA TIMES – Every November 25th, the world stops for a short moment to recognize something that many of us experience every day: violence against women.
The day was born from memory and resistance, chosen in honor of the Mirabal sisters, three Dominican women who were assassinated in 1960 for having dared oppose the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Years later, the United Nations recognized this day, November 25th, as a global call to make visible and eradicate the different forms of violence that pierce our lives: physical, sexual, psychological, economic and symbolic.
The text that follows is rooted in that memory but also stems from a very intimate place – that of having experienced a sustained and subtly violent form of harassment.
This isn’t a denunciation, but rather an open conversation with whoever reads it with empathy. It’s an attempt to speak calmly about something that many of us have suffered in silence, and to proclaim: “Harassment is also violence!” as one more step towards personal healing, that hopefully also grows to envelop the larger collective.
Harassment is much more than “a little uncomfortable”
According to the definition, harassment is any undesired behavior of a sexual, physical, verbal, or non-verbal nature that attacks the dignity of a person and creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, or humiliating environment.
But beyond the technical definition, harassment can be recognized in the body and in the skin as you go about your everyday life.
- It may begin with an insistent message; a “joke” that isn’t funny; an invasive stare; repeated invitations, even though you refuse; gifts you didn’t request.
- It may appear where you work, in cultural spaces, in the university, in social organizations or merely on your phone or digital spaces.
- It can occur among people who never had any intimate contacts, or among people who did once share an emotional tie. But even when the latter is true, this fact never justifies harassment.
- It can be accompanied by threats, smears, an abusive use of institutional powers, persecution on social media, or contacts with your family and colleagues aimed at damaging your reputation.
Harassment has many faces:
- Sexual harassment, when your body is the invaded terrain
- Work or psychological harassment, when a person pesters you, diminishes you, humiliates you, or seeks to isolate you in an insistent manner.
- Digital harassment: using fake profiles, disclosing your personal data, waging smear campaigns in the social networks, or intitiating e-mail chains that twist reality and disparage you.
- Institutional harassment: when the government or organizational structures are used to tire you out, intimidate you, expose you, or silence you.
In practice, these almost never occur in isolation: they intertwine, they feed each other, especially when the one doing the harassment knows these tools and the psychological impact they can cause.
Harassment violates human rights. It crosses social classes, educational levels, social strata. It can be perpetrated by a person who enjoys great prestige, or even someone involved in progressive movements, who then takes advantage of their professional knowledge and/or institutional tools to control, intimidate or harm.
Above all, harassment is a masked form of violence.
25 things I’ve come to understand about harassment
The different campaigns often portray harassment as a single scene: a one-time occurrence. But the real effect goes far deeper, with long-lasting consequences. These are 25 consequences of harassment I’ve come to recognize.
1. It robs you of sleep
First, it steals your peace of mind. You wonder if it’s really worth worrying about, and you conclude: “maybe it’s best to ignore it.” But little by little, sleep becomes harder and harder to reconcile. (I now understand the luxury of a deep, uninterrupted sleep.)
2. It causes you to doubt your memory
“Am I exaggerating?” “Could I have misunderstood?” You begin to doubt your own perceptions, even as your body screams that something’s not right.
3. Without realizing it, you begin to isolate yourself
You stop sharing certain things, going out, trusting. You feel that no one will understand you. Your silence becomes a cage.
4. It turns trust to fear
What previously felt like a secure space now becomes a tension-charged terrain. Where there was trust, now you’re on alert. Where there was harmony, now there’s fear.
5. It makes you apologize for existing.
You begin ceding space, measuring your words, lowering your voice. You apologize for being tired, for being sad, for not being able to pretend that everything’s okay. Until one day you find yourself apologizing for existing at all. A permanent sense of guilt sets in.
6. It extinguishes your creativity
When you live with the fear of sustained harassment, your ideas go into hiding. What previously flowed freely stops completely. Your mind fills with noise and warning sirens. You can’t create anymore: only survive day to day.
7. You begin severing ties it took you years to build
Harassment not only damages you, it casts a shadow over everything and everyone around you: friendships, projects, places and spaces you loved. It leaves you with a sense of loss.
8. It obliges you to explain the obvious, over and over
You repeat your story to exhaustion, so they’ll believe you. And with every attempt, something in you wears thinner. There’s no worse violence than having to convince the world that what you’re experiencing is real.
9. It leaves you hypervigilant, even when everything’s peaceful
When everything seems calm outside, your body continues its vigilance. A word, a noise, the ping of a notification…and your pulse accelerates. Harassment doesn’t end when contact ceases it remains in your body and your breathing.
10. It makes you tremble at an e-mail or a phone call
It’s not only fear, it’s memory. Your body holds more memory than your mind. A sound, a name, a phrase… and something in you shrinks.
11. It makes you believe that talking endangers you.
It convinces you that it’s better to be quiet, that no one will believe you, that speaking out will only make things worse. Fear disguises itself as prudence, and silence becomes your way of surviving. But silence also hurts.
12. It takes away opportunities you had earned
It erases you from spaces you helped build, forcing you to retreat in order to feel safe. Being the object of a smear campaign changes people’s perceptions: suddenly, some doors close and some silences weigh more than words.
13. It reveals how difficult it is for women to support each other amid our fears
Fear also infects those who accompany us: fear of what people will say, of being caught in the middle, of losing spaces. Accompaniment is tiring; it takes time, energy, and emotional health. And sometimes we’re not ready to face the monster. Still, there are many ways to accompany, and some involve little risk: an “I believe you,” an “I am here,” sharing a campaign, not letting go of the victim’s hand.
14. It wears you down physically
With every act of harassment, every time you remember it or talk about it, your body goes on alert. You get headaches, stomachaches, nausea, insomnia, exhaustion. You get sick more easily, because your body also tires of resisting.
15. It steals your time
It steals your time – trying to understand it, process it, and later, to seek help. Time becomes something that’s dense, long, wearing. Days are consumed with thinking, resisting, explaining, defending yourself.
16. You become the story others are telling about you
Your name appears in others’ mouths, in conversations you never participate in. Your story takes on different versions, becomes the object of commentaries, rumors. They label you someone who exaggerates, who’s conflictive, “the one who looked for trouble.”
17. It makes you doubt your professional worth.
Everything you have built up over years of hard work begins to crumble in your mind: ideas, skills, achievements. You start to believe that one person can destroy everything you have worked so hard to achieve. But your worth does not depend on the slander of others.
18. It forces you to survive while others sleep peacefully.
While some people sleep peacefully with no notion of what harassment is, you learn that a body on alert cannot rest. You continue trying to function on little sleep, amid enormous fatigue. The world goes on as usual, while you must concentrate on not falling apart.
19. It confronts you with the injustice of being discredited
You speak up and they question you. You name the harm and they doubt you. They say you’re exaggerating, that you misinterpreted, that “it wasn’t that bad” or that you should just “ignore it.” Having to prove a truth that has already pierced your flesh is another face of the violence.
20. It teaches you the power of silence and the need to break it.
At first, silence is a refuge, but soon it becomes a noose that tightens around you, hurting, and imprisoning you. To remain silent is to carry alone a burden that doesn’t belong to you. Breaking the silence, even if it hurts, is honoring and caring for yourself.
21. It makes you understand that accompanying someone is also tiring, and that caring hurts.
Accompanying someone who is experiencing harassment isn’t easy. It causes you to touch your own fears and limits. Caring can hurt and wear you down, and yet we do it anyway. Accompanying someone is not about perfection: it’s about presence. However, sometimes it also means saying: “I can’t do this anymore,” and coming back when you can.
22. It reveals those who are really with you, even if quietly
Amid the fear and the confusion, you discover that there are people who remain with you. They’re there in a message, in a: “How are you feeling this morning?” in an: “I’m here if you need me.” It’s an invisible network, but it sustains you.
23. It reminds you that harassment can come from either gender
It can come from a man, from a woman, from someone close to you or someone who claims to defend others’ rights. Violence doesn’t change its face because its body is different. It hurts the same, it wounds the same, it leaves deep scars. Denouncing it – legally, socially, symbolically and in intimacy – is an act of rupture and of beginning.
24. It teaches you that healing is also a form of resistance
Healing isn’t about forgetting and minimizing what happened. It’s refusing to live trapped in your wound. Get therapy if you can; write, cry about all the things you didn’t cry about before; ask for help without feeling guilty; rest, recover your laughter and your creativity – all of that is also political.
25. It teaches you that, sooner or later, the truth will out.
Denouncing abuse doesn’t always bring immediate justice. Sometimes the system fails, it tires you out, it exposes you. But when you decide to speak out, something moves: the lie no longer fills the entire space. Fear stops ruling over your life, and truth begins to find its path.
Things I’ve learned, and continue learning
I consider myself a feminist, an advocate and an activist, things I’ve declared with pride in many spaces. From that perspective, I’ve learned some things along the way, for example:
- We women can also be aggressors
- Feminist spaces that call themselves “safe” aren’t always
- There are women who back the aggressor and participate in silencing the victim.
I’ve learned that violence can sometimes even penetrate feminist circles, disguised as sisterhood, and using the feminist discourse to silence other women or invalidate their experiences. Recognizing this doesn’t make us less feminists, it simply makes us more honest.
To speak of harassment when it comes from a woman in the feminist movement towards another woman makes us uncomfortable. It shakes up structures, knocks down pedestals, forces us to go back over our practices and silences.
In a number of Central American countries including the one I reside in, the laws and public policies on violence were conceived on the model of “male aggressor / female victim.” That focus was – and still is – fundamental in making machista violence visible, but it has left certain experiences out on a limb: women victims of harassment at the hands of other women; members of the LGBTQ+ community who are stalked or abused by their current or former partners, harassment where the perpetrator doesn’t fit into the figure of “male partner,” but does impose control, surveillance and harm.
I learned that healing is also resistance. Going to therapy if you can, writing, talking to people you trust, resting, getting back in touch with your body, regaining your creativity, setting boundaries, and saying “enough is enough” – all of this is also part of the struggle.
My refuge has been my family of friends, my blood family, my partner, the spaces where people know my essence. Thanks to them, I am here, facing this struggle that is mine, but also that of many women.
My mother used to say: “Lies run faster, but the truth always catches up with them.”
Today I believe this more than ever. Lies can fill gossip, screens, files, and WhatsApp groups. But the truth remains in our bodies, in our memories, in the network we weave to support each other.
If you’re experiencing harassment
I don’t have a magic formula – I wish I did – but I”ll share some things that have been helpful to me.
- Don’t blame yourself – Harassment is never the fault of the one on the receiving end. Never.
- Give it a name – Even if the law doesn’t classify it the way you’d like, even if those around you minimize it, name it:: “This is harassment.” Doing so is an act of dignity.
- Seek help – You won’t always find it on the first try. It could be a friend, a therapist, a collective, a human rights organization, or a trusted group. Taking a break along the way is not giving up.
- Preserve the evidence you can – Messages, emails, dates, screenshots, notes. If you decide to report the harassment, these will help. If not, they will also serve to help organize your memory.
- Take care of your body – Sleep, eat, move, breathe deeply, let the small joys back in. Laughing or feeling pleasure in the middle of the process doesn’t make you “less serious”: it reminds you that you’re still alive.
Finally, if all this has taught me anything, it’s that naming violence is the first step to transforming it. Choosing the truth, over and over again, is resistance too.