I’m one of the lucky ones.

There have been unwanted hands on my body, but only over my clothes. Often, the hands belonged to strangers and snaked around my waist, in crowded places where I could easily put distance and people between myself and the hands.

Once, the unwanted hands belonged to my dentist. I was ten or eleven. I couldn’t be sure that the bad feeling I had about him was justified, but I told my mom anyway. She did not interrogate or doubt me, she just found us a new dentist. I’m lucky.

I stumbled home from a few parties in college, but the men who stumbled alongside me always took “good night” for an answer. Or if they didn’t, they took “no, really, good night” for an answer. Or if they didn’t, when I physically shoved them away from me, they took that for an answer.

I have been alone in rooms with men whose power over me was towering: pastors I trusted, educators I worshipped, bosses and managers on whose good opinion I depended to pay my rent. I have walked out of every one of those rooms unhurt, unrattled, unchanged.

I’m lucky. For thirteen years now, I’ve shared my life with a man who has never harmed me, who has never challenged my sovereignty over my body.

In 2015, I backpacked around Europe on my own for six weeks. I stayed in hostels, usually in co-ed dorm rooms, and most of the people I spent time with were men — probably because there were simply more of them around. I journaled a lot on that trip, and ended up writing a piece that I submitted (unsuccessfully) to a few magazines afterwards. It followed an extended metaphor in which sometimes I was a woman — comfortable, easygoing, operating at the top level of my hierarchy of needs — and at other times I was a wolf — wary, reactive, ready to bite if someone got too close to my teeth. I dug it up from among my old files recently and read it, and was surprised at how many times I had become the wolf on that trip. I’d forgotten about so many of those moments: the arms slung over my shoulders, the constant questions about my relationship status, a guy who fully sat in my lap without asking. These minor violations of my space were, I guess, not remarkable enough to commit to memory.

One scene I hadn’t forgotten: On a train from Regensburg to Munich, crowded with Oktoberfest tourists, a young man was taking upskirt photos of girls with his phone. One of these girls called him out, boldly confronting him through their language barrier. He pretended not to understand her, but in the reflection in the window, I saw him delete the photo he had just taken of her. I also saw him swipe through at least a dozen other photos of other girls’ skirts and thighs. None of them were mine. I was lucky.

During my master’s program, I wrote a short story in which every incident of sexual harassment or sexual violence the main character experiences leaves a permanent mark on her body. Only the very first incident, the very first mark she gets in the story, is based off my own experiences. I’m lucky.

It exhausts me to take even a cursory inventory of just how long and how often I’ve had to think about this. The fear I have carried, the anger I have buried. The constant vigilance for myself, for my friends, for strangers in bars. I know that we all sustain damage in all kinds of ways, all the time. The soft skin on my son’s legs is now roughened and chapped from the carpet that he has recently begun crawling on. To live in the world is to be marked by it.

But there are certain marks it feels like we just shouldn’t have to deal with anymore. Like dysentery and smallpox scars and the insidious trauma of systemic gender-based violence.

I’m lucky. And I’m angry that being relatively unscathed this way is what makes me lucky. And I’m tired from being so angry all the time.

good links

• I think about Rebecca Solnit’s essay “The Longest War,” which is included in her 2014 book Men Explain Things to Me, all the time. An early version of it exists here.

• “I am sure if we explain one more time that we are people / They will finally understand why this needs to stop / Oh! They will say, their eyes widening / Oh! How terrible!” Alexandra Petri’s poem in The Atlantic is good. Here’s a gift link.

• Something a little lighter, perhaps? How about this harrowing tale of the deadliest highway in the U.S.? (Sorry The New Yorker doesn’t do gift links.)