I have never had a lot of self- confidence. I especially have lacked self-esteem when it came to appearance and relationships. I have encountered my fair share of the wind stealers, there’s no doubt about it (and if you get that reference, you are as sad a television watcher as I am). However, the one thing I always did pride myself on was my intelligence. Lately, though, I’ve been feeling like a consummate dumbass. And I can trace that feeling right back to an even more hideous grouping of wind stealers than the shallow boys I’ve dated and been dumped by.

I have worked in a male-dominated environment for over seven years and only recently have I encountered rampant, blatant, overt, soul sucking, demoralizing sexism and discrimination. And the constant onslaught is making me question who I am, what I know, and even some of my values.

I mentioned a while back that I was looking for another job and had an interview at the library (duh. I didn’t get that job). What I didn’t mention was why I was so het up about getting away from my current job. It’s a long sordid story, but I’ll encapsulate it by saying the following:

My supervisor had a stroke. Before the stroke, he was a nasty, racist, homophobic, sexist hypocritical monster, but kept his true proclivities on the down low. After the stroke? He was the male equivalent of Sophia from the Golden Girls. He lost control of his bladder functions (he was constantly walking around with a giant wet spot on the front of his uniform pants), his memory (he left his firearm in the bathroom, the one used by suspects brought into the building for interviews, not to mention all the times we had to play fucking Marco Polo to find the keys which he was constantly losing), and his verbal filter (the comment that broke this camel’s back? When he said and I quote, “I wish I could microchip all the blacks the way we do the pit bulls in our city. At least that way we could know where they are all the time. And we could use it to hand out their welfare checks and food stamps.” That comment is just the tip of the iceberg; he loved to comment on "the gooks" and the stuff he said about Muslims and Arabs and Jews makes me cringe, too. He’s a charming fuckwit, no?)

So, I had the audacity to file a complaint and I nearly lost my job over it, because man oh man, you have never seen the Blue Wall of Silence go up so goddamned quickly. Because I dared to question an authority figure at work, because I dared to utter the phrase “hostile work environment,” and because I dared to call a racist a racist, I became persona non grata. I got hateful phone calls at home. I got nasty notes left on my desk and computer. And I was basically told that if I wanted to keep my job, I needed to learn to keep my mouth shut (I, of course, kept that particular memo). Colleagues who I had heretofore considered to be amongst my closest friends left me twisting in the breeze while they lined up behind that wall of silence. It was hellish.

Until that moment, I had no compunction in speaking my mind, standing up for what I believed in, in fighting the good fight, in championing what was right. Believe me when I say that I detest the following statement, though it is all too true in my life right now: Those fuckers broke me.

How do I know? Because that same stroke-addled fuck wit comes into my office three times a week (though he was forced to retire last December) to visit his cronies. On his latest visit he was jabbering loudly in my office to one of his boys about a television show he had watched. He described someone on the show as, “a big ole fat black girl who had that gorilla face,” as he chortled merrily.

His comments made me sick to my stomach. But before I could process how I was feeling, before I could even verbalize how damaging his comments were, I had to check with another colleague (who happens to be my best friend, was the matron of honor at our wedding and is black) to make certain that I wasn’t being overly sensitive. That is what these people have done to me; I constantly question my ability to discern who I am and what I believe. My friend told me to trust my gut, but to write the comment off to the ignorance of the person who said it, and she told me to believe in the notion of people giving off evil will reap the return in spades.

I wish I could be as patient as she is. I’m more of an instant gratification kind of gal. Mostly, I wish my former supervisor would stroke the fuck out and die (not very Christian of me, I know). Then I wish I could find another job, one that doesn’t make me accept racism and homophobia as the norm to keep my job (and thus, my house and my car), and one that doesn’t treat me like I’m an idiot because I have breasts.