Every time I wake up in the morning, a shivering nervous me, grabs the cellphone and quickly prays to God for no new missed calls again. But today was different. There was no missed call. Instead a Whatsapp message displaying 'All the best' was at the top of the notification. It was from an unknown number. It was send 4 minutes ago. Should I view the message now? Or will the unknown person check my 'last seen' and come to know about my activity? I decided to check the number in the truecaller app. It was someone named Raja. My heart ached. Is that same person who is trying to blackmail me? I felt my back sweat profusely which made the bedsheet totally wet. Oh crap! Without wasting any second, in an instant, I viewed the whatsapp message and zoomed in on to the profile picture. It was my friend. I felt like my back dried at an instant. What a relief! He had wished me for the job entrance exam that I had that day in the afternoon. I tried to focus on the man's words whom I talked over the phone the night before. I didn't care a bit or had any nervous breakdown for the job test. I was more worried if I would be stalked anymore. I was worried if I am forced to do some things which I shouldn't. Nevertheless, I tried to strengthen my inner me. I focused and remembered what the Cyber crime expert had told me- 'If that lunatic calls you from a thousand different numbers for forcefully loving him and getting physical, then without any second thought, do not cut or block his number. Just take up the call and threaten him with all your might. Nobody in this world can force someone to love someone, and getting physical is a far off thing, it's a crime. And if you cannot stand up to face such dirty mind freaks then in no way, you can ever grow up to be a brave woman. Face him, speak up and lash it out whatever is keeping you up from spitting it. Show him who you are.' Yes, and I did it. The night before when this friend of mine was chatting, I felt like there is a connection between us. I felt like love is blossoming. I knew he too had the same feelings as mine. My happy moment was abruptly disturbed by that monster again. It was from another new number. I was shaking unimaginably. But be it God's grace or maybe some super energetic charge that popped up in me, I took up the call and spoke with such enigma alongwith some unimaginable dirty words that hardly gave him any chance to speak. It was the moment when he was the rat and I was the lion, no actually, I was more of a dinosaur. Never have I ever spoke so badly in my life. I would kill him if I were ever to see him. The torturing sick guy vanished! Although I didn't get selected in that job test, yet I could pass the test of testing myself- my inner strength and my defense capability. I was weak at first. Weak because that person was a mutual friend of mine. I had trusted him blindly, believing that helping people specially friends, is a virtue. Yes it is. But, what I had misjudged was that people don't take it the same way. There are some who feel that if someone helps them or supports, then they might support them in their 'other' needs also. Nevertheless, always help the poor, the needy, the other creatures etc but be fearful when some sick mentality tries to take advantage of it.

It happened to me as a child. I felt no grievance on it until I reached the age when I learned about sex and the cultures that revolved around it. Not just that, really. I discovered how sacred it was in my culture and I had my innocence stripped out from me just like that. My childhood consisted of crying myself to sleep with my mouth pressed against the pillow to contain the wail. Filipinos practice respect through taking an elder's hand to our forehead, and whenever I took my mother's hand every time I came home from school, I kept my head as low as like gluing my chin to my collar bone so that she would not see the breaking of my eyes. My mother saw through me. I could not tell her how it went because I was ashamed—I did not even know how to be ashamed of anything yet but I knew that I was. My mind spun like a dying moth. My mother could not save me because she did not know what was going on in the first place. There was no council nor therapy—we knew nothing about it then. I was a really happy kid so she assumed that perhaps it was only a phase. The one thing that I could remember her telling me was, "keep yourself busy." It was supposed to distract me from recurring thoughts and episodes. So I did. I graduated valedictorian. I got into a prestigious high school that taught me adaptability. I made many friends yet I did not let them in too close to my past. I was welcoming but resistive. I knew there was a mask I carried through which I hid almost all of my childhood away from the world. The person I created myself as was a hustler. I got into college, maintained good grades, and I was everywhere. I directed plays and films, danced, wrote music and performed poetry. All that happened within freshman and sophomore years alone. Yet some days, I found myself sinking in my own stomach. I kept myself busy for the sake of it and the wounds nevertheless persisted. Underneath the victories, I developed all sorts of behaviours and mechanisms. I was easily angered at myself, distracted, and I was impatient and insecure. People did not see my hurt and anxiety because I invested in them. I put my happiness in them. I wanted to cultivate love in relationships because I could not do it to myself. I was aware of how I had become and how tired I was getting yet I also knew that I had to do something about it. But I was in the race and stopping only meant plunging back to the darkest corners of my mind. It took a pandemic to pin me down to my seat. I was once again alone with myself. I tried to recall how that one single incident had led me to so much distress in all the years. He was only a boy, a playmate, who knew enough to sway me into something I did not understand. Its ripples had thrown me as far as the ocean could go and everything good about my life disintegrated in the water. During the quarantine, the topic on sexual harassment trended on Twitter. Experiences of women in my country, including my own friends, surfaced and created a chain of upsetting stories. It broke me to pieces. It broke me because I realised that I was not alone. A lot of them had even gone through worse situations. Some cases happened more recently—by strangers, friends, boyfriends or even their own teachers. Some experienced it when they were still kids as well but with cousins, uncles or family friends. It was horrific to realise that a large number of women had bottled up their trauma while their perpetrators roamed freely and perhaps had not even fully recognised their actions and the impact they made to the victims. I was angry at why we normalise not telling. I was angry about people's refusal to communicate these problems—especially to kids who cannot fully understand their own actions. Why do institutions turn their faces away and neglect narratives of women that were sexually assaulted, harassed or raped? Why do people continue to try to point the blame on how women dress or behave? It happened to me as a child. No little girl deserves a life lived inside a shell because she fears what people could do. She does not deserve to experience such terrible events in her childhood that could damage her mental stability. No woman deserves to carry wounds for the rest of her life just because men want to pleasure themselves in such a way that results to thieving women's sanity and peace. No teenager deserves the weariness of feeling guilty, ashamed and insecure. Toxic patriarchal cultures still continue. No woman has to repeat herself over and over again about consent and respect. Women had gone too far off the edge and it will always be a valid reason to speak up. This problem exists all over the world and if we do not address issues on women; teenagers; little girls or anybody who falls into the pits of sexual predation, we allow the world to believe it's okay. I have a baby sister. She is three years old. My justice begins with her.