I hear this casually thrown remark quite often. Does the fact that you're not worked up about what I'm worked up about stem from my "oversensitivity" that you dare not voice aloud? Or is it because what fills me with rage simply doesn't matter to you? My anger over the plight of someone whose face and name I don't even know doesn't come from a desire to appear smart or virtuous. Rather, it's a selfish solidarity born from the anxiety that what happened to them could happen to me. The reason my anxiety doesn't bother you is the gap between the world you live in and the world I live in. The belief that we know is often a fiction. How arrogant it is to claim you know something that has never made your heart race. If you want to speak about what you don't know, you must first listen. You must listen until you truly understand, even if those stories shake your peaceful world and make the depths of your heart uncomfortable. It's your choice whether to live in your world of unknowing or in our world of knowing. But when countless people who have never had the choices given to you cry out in anguish, do not try to cut off the fingers pointing at the problem.

When I joined my first company at 26, I learned a great deal from a senior colleague who was seven years older than me. He taught me the ropes kindly when I knew nothing, and he seemed like a warm person in how he expressed affection toward his girlfriend — so I trusted and looked up to him. But after he left the company, he sexually molested me at a drinking gathering with former coworkers. I couldn't shake the suspicion that while he was still at the company, he had held back out of fear that I might report him — and had deliberately waited until after he resigned to target me. In the end, I couldn't even bring myself to go to the police. He still had close ties with people at my current workplace, and I was afraid of being labeled a "honeytrap". I believe this incident was not just one person's moral failing — it stemmed from a gaze that sees women not as colleagues but as sexual objects. I was a dedicated junior employee, but in his eyes, I was ultimately someone who could be sexually violated — simply because I was a woman. Since then, I've instinctively kept my distance from male superiors, no matter how good the relationship seems. This experience still stays with me as a trauma. And above all, the deepest wound is the fact that what happened to me happened simply because I was a woman.