The recent conversation around sexual assault, harassment, and the powerful #MeToo mentions has had me creating this blog entry in my head for weeks. I wasn’t really sure what my angle was going to be, but I knew I had something to say.

When I first saw that celebrities were the focus of this dialogue, while I felt for their plight and understood that they had to sort of open the proverbial Pandora’s Box on this topic, my initial reaction was “What woman hasn’t experienced this to some degree…way more than just once in their lifetime?” So I was glad to see Alyssa Milano raise this on Twitter a few weeks ago by asking ALL women (or people, really) to stand in solidarity with Harvey Weinstein’s accusers and share whether or not they have also been a victim of either sexual harassment or assault. She said, "My hope is people will get the idea of the magnitude, of just how many people have been affected by this in the world, in our lifetimes, in this country.”

On 10/16, I tweeted “I was thinking about this the other day. Why should the focus merely be on actresses and other famous women? #MeToo.” I didn’t share any details about my experience with this topic and I don’t plan to on here, either. That isn’t the point for me. But it’s clear from the sheer volume of “#MeToo’s” that we needed this out in the open and that we have an incredibly long way to go as a society.

I’ve been reading so many of these victims’ accounts and wonder when it was decided that we no longer needed to treat each other with respect or empathy. Obviously the behavior has been going on—and accepted—for years, decades…centuries, even. Which makes me shake my head in disgust. To me, the most fulfilling and rewarding part of being human is just that: making real human connections based on the mutual respect between yourself and another person. This brazen disregard for the victims’ boundaries, feelings, and needs is something that I will never understand or accept.

And so I come to the second theme in this piece: empathy. Which I write about often because it is embedded in who I am. But I’ve never truly written about this experience. I have talked to friends and family about it during the course of the past 17 years, but I’ve never put pen to paper until now. When I was thinking about human connection, respect and blatant disregard for someone’s feelings these past few weeks, this experience kept forcing itself back into my mind. It’s a different kind of harassment, but it still counts and I think that it’s finally time to speak out.

I spent the semester in London the fall of my senior year. For some reason, the majority of my flatmates (all 12 of us were from UConn) decided that they had no use for me. A few of them (and by that, I really do mean about 3 out of 12) were friendly enough, but for the most part I was ostracized for the entire three and a half months that I was there. My hair was frizzy at that time, I didn’t have the same fashion sense that I have now, I was a little overweight and I wasn’t confident in myself at all. I was quiet, reserved. I didn’t go to London merely to drink and party—I wanted to experience the culture and see shows at the theatre, go to museums and just LIVE.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when or how it started happening, but my flatmates started branching off into groups, usually leaving me alone (with the exception of our classes). They left me at a bar alone when I had had too much to drink and laughed at me when I came crying back into the flat because I didn’t even have enough money to pay the cab driver (He let me out anyway, clearly seeing that I was a wreck). One time when we were all heading out for the night, one of the guys uttered, “Ever think about who we would vote off if this were an episode of Survivor?” Lots of laughing followed. I ignored it. Another time, we were out dancing and having drinks at Cheers and two of the guys bought a round of drinks for all of the girls except for me. Then one of them looked at me, saw a half-empty mug of beer sitting on the bar, abandoned, and said “Here, you can have that one.” Then he laughed and walked away, leaving me alone.

I heard one of the girls talking to her sister on the phone about me in a whisper. I would sometimes get home from a day of walking around the city and go straight up to the roof where you could see the city. I’d be freezing but at least they couldn’t hurt me up there. I wouldn’t come down until everyone was settled in and watching TV. Writing this now is making me teary, not for what I feel now, but for the poor girl who didn’t know how to handle any of this at the time. I didn’t speak up for myself, not once. I tried to confide in the three friendlier flatmates, but they didn’t believe me—they thought that I was embellishing everything and that the perception was in my head. It wasn’t. And I wonder now if my experience could have been more positive if one of them had.

I’m speaking up to give that more vulnerable girl a voice. To defend her when I should have defended her at that time. I have 17 more years of life experience at this point. I am confident. (Side note: it took a LONG way to get here, but I honestly think that this experience was the first step in getting me there, ironically enough. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?) I am successful. And I still have empathy and would never even dream of making someone feel like they weren’t worthwhile of my time or energy. We all are until proven otherwise.