Harvey Weinstein is an American film producer and executive who gained fame producing independent films as co-founder of Miramax Films and The Weinstein Company. In October 2017, The New York Times and The New Yorker reported that dozens of women accused Weinstein of sexual abuse over a period of at least 30 years. More than 80 women in the film industry subsequently accused Weinstein of such acts. The scandal triggered many similar allegations against powerful men around the world, and led to the ousting of many of them from their positions. It also led a great number of women to share their own experiences of sexual assault, harassment, or rape on social media under the hashtag #MeToo. (source-Wikipedia)
One story on abuse gave courage to many women to come out in open and talk about their hardships.
Stories are nothing but conversations, or sentences sown together to tell what happened. Since time immemorial, people have used the medium of stories to pass on knowledge and information from one to the other. Ramayana, Mahabharat, Gulliver’s Travels, Aesop’s Fables, Cinderella, James Bond are all stories we like reading or watching time and again.
So, what happens when you share your story with someone else?
A couple of years back, I was in the market. It was a busy festive time and most commuters were running out of patience with the insane traffic. Amid this chaos, I found myself entering a fight scene. Just as I was about to sit in my chauffeur driven car, I saw two guys rushing towards my driver to beat him. Suddenly, there were abuses and slaps flowing. With the rage, we women save for such special occasions, I shouted at the top of my voice to get their attention to me. I needed to know what’s happening. Why is my poor driver subjected to such treatment? Apparently, some shop owner saw him mis-behaving with some women. What followed were the most tensed moments of my life- I knew I had to save my driver from the physical attack, but I also knew I was probably saving a potential woman molester. I couldn’t believe my driver was capable of such acts, but they all seem innocent, don’t they? The driver kept saying there’s been some misunderstanding and he hasn’t done anything. I kind of believed him, I was just around the corner, and had left him for merely five minutes. Anyway, the slaps kept getting harder and after a brief phase of blank mind, I threatened to get these guys arrested for molesting a person. I was about to dial 100 and call the police, when some sane voice in the big crowd said let them go home. The driver’s collar was loosened, and I instructed my driver, rather commanded my driver to sit in the car and take me home. What happened next is a matter of another post, but why I shared this little story was because, in the middle of the crowd, when I didn’t know how to react in that situation, I remembered a story.
One of my friends was in the similar state a few months back when her husband had gotten into a street fight. She had told me what she did, how she felt and the aftermath of that incident. I didn’t do exactly what she had done, but for that moment when I didn’t know what I am supposed to do, I got the strength from her story- that there has been a girl, in a similar situation, before me. I am not the only one who has ever been in this situation, and hence there’s a solution possible. And solution I found. And that’s when curbing my embarrassment of being stuck in an unwanted environment, I acted. Right or wrong, I acted.
That’s the power of sharing.
We invite our readers, throughout this month, to share their stories of personal or professional journey. We all have dreams or aspirations of being something when we are in school. Some of us achieve them, some go in other direction. Ultimately, we all learn lessons, which if shared, can give hope to someone else. #MyDreamsMyLife is about collecting all those stories and sharing it with our readers, who are based across the globe.
You need not be a writer for this, just grab your keyboard and share what is it that you wanted to be when you were in school and what are you doing now. Why or why not did you do what you thought you would do? What are the lessons learnt? Don’t worry about word lengths or even choice of words, we’ll help you edit them before we publish.
Send in your experiences to admin@storysideup.com and trust us, you won’t regret sharing it!
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
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