I am still here
I haven’t posted a blog post in two months. I usually try to post these monthly, but October tried me, so I couldn’t find the energy or motivation to write something to share publicly here.
On October 6th, 2025, I started a five-week break from my PhD program. I was at my limit mentally, emotionally, spiritually, even physically. There was a moment a couple weeks prior that terrified me, where I felt faint on the Michigan Flyer bus back to Ann Arbor. I had just gone to Detroit to renew and update my passport, but on my way back, I felt myself struggling to keep myself up in my seat. As the bus stopped at Blake Transit Center, and I picked up my things to make the short walk home, I kept fighting that feeling to just let my legs give out from under me and fall.
Thankfully, I made it home, but almost fainting during the middle of the day really woke me up to the fact that my current way of life, my current relationship to work, was unhealthy and killing me.
I remember sitting in my shared office after a meeting and just feeling it all hit me. I’ve always been a perfectionist and an overachiever, but combine that with pursuing a PhD and hustling to pump out research in high impact venues, with managing multiple organizations I started or contribute to, with the experience of living in our current world as a trans woman of color going through a divorce and family health concerns…it wasn’t sustainable.
I cried with my advisor about this decision. It came to me so quickly in that moment, and I started to make the moves to make it a reality. Why does it feel so hard to stop the gears from turning? Why was I so afraid that if I let them stop, everything I worked for would come to a halting stop as well? Advisors, close friends, family, everyone told me I was making a good decision for myself and my health. I was making a brave decision, a wise one. This couldn’t go on forever. Either I would stop myself, or my body would.
And then it happened pretty quickly, all things considered. Before I knew it, I was using five of my six weeks of sick time allotted to us by our contract as Graduate Student Instructors. I had such big ideas for the sick time - I was gonna finish this thing that I hadn’t had the chance to work on, and I was gonna read for my prelims, and I’d feel so much less stress not working. However, when I told someone about this, they told me that I shouldn’t try to optimize my rest. And I sat back and thought to myself, they’re right. Working while on a break from working is not rest.
So I took the break fully, I relaxed day by day, played more video games than I have in years, and felt good about my decision to fully stop the gears while on break. That is, until October 16th, 2025.
Before I proceed, here is a content warning.
CONTENT WARNING: mentions of SA
On October 16th, 2025, I was sexually assaulted by an Uber Driver while on my way to the airport to fly out to Bergen, Norway, for the 2025 annual meeting of the Conference on Computer-Suppported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). The full details of what happened remain in my report to Uber and my eventual report to the police, but the gist of it is:
He asked me if I was a boy or a girl and told me he had started watching trans porn. He asked me uncomfortable questions about my identity, my body, and who I date. He made a sexual advance at me, and I refused. When we got to the airport, he made this advance again, and despite me refusing multiple times, continued. To get out of that situation, I complied, and he sexually assaulted me in his car outside the McNamara Terminal, before letting me out to leave with my bag.
Thank you to SafeHouse Center, the University of Michigan’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center (SAPAC), and all the friends and family I leaned on during this terrible time of my life. For a week or so, I was scared to leave my house, thinking his car might be waiting outside for me. For weeks, I didn’t cry, until I spoke to Russ about it all and just let it all out. I bawled, I shouted, I screamed, I told myself and Russ that that man should’ve never touched me, and he should’ve never done all of that to me.
I screamed about how I will never be given womanhood by society, and that I shouldn’t rely on society’s perception of me as a woman to validate my own. However, even in instances like this, where I was violated and harmed by a man because he saw my transness, my womanhood, and decided to take it for himself, society will still call me sir. People will still pause when they see me and land on they/them pronouns when they refer to me, or even worse, call me a man. Not even violence can validate your gender identity as a trans person. Isn’t that fucked?
So I claim that womanhood for my own. For years I discounted it, I invalidated myself, I told myself that I was a man in women’s spaces. That even though I felt one way, others saw me another way. But a man like him, the one who sexually assaulted me, didn’t care how I saw myself. All he saw was someone to take advantage of, to use, to find pleasure in.
For weeks I was afraid of writing these words. I know the statistics about survivors of sexual assault. I know how dire it looks, I know how important words and accounts of what happened are. I know that I will continue to have to recount the story over and over, and that any legal action I take will go on for not even just a year, maybe years.
I was afraid to let the public know what happened to me, because it might be used against me. But in that way, I was silencing myself, and I am not a woman who stays silent. Writing these words have also helped me process this even further, and I hope these words can reach anyone else who is unfortunate enough to go through something similar:
To the trans person who happens upon this and can relate, I am so sorry. You are beautiful, handsome, pretty, attractive, any words that make you feel affirmed. You did not deserve that, and I love you. The world is cruel to us, but we always survive. I am sorry we have to keep fighting to do so, but I am here to fight alongside you and for you, if you need someone to hold you up while you sit down to rest, recover, and just cope with life.
With all of that said, I have not had the fully restful break I wanted when I started this five weeks of sick time. I extended it to six after the sexual assault, and as I write this, I am a week out from returning to work. I have gone through so many depressive episodes and spirals and cycles in the past few weeks, but I feel like I am finally back in my body, in my mind. I am angry, I am happy, I am doing my best, and I am here. I am still here.
