01/12/2025
Trigger warning ⚠️:
On my flight home from a beautiful 🤩 vacation,(I flew from Sicily via Frankfurt to Hamburg) something happened that I’m still processing.
No, it wasn’t “sexual assault”
BUT❗️ it was a form of boundary violation that left me frozen, confused, and questioning myself in a way I haven’t felt in a long time.
I was pushed into the window seat while the man next to me gradually took up more and more space — scratching his leg while scratching my leg, leaning his whole body into mine so he could stare out the window, pretending the view was endlessly fascinating. Every time I shifted away, he shifted closer. It was subtle enough to seem “unintentional,” yet constant enough that my body knew: something wasn’t right.
Then he told me he was married. With two daughters.
And in that moment, something flipped in my 🧠 :
“Oh, so he must be harmless.”
“Oh, this must just be me overreacting.”
“Oh, he’s a family man… so this can’t be what it feels like.”
This is what so many women are conditioned to do:
gaslight ourselves into silence because the behaviour isn’t “bad enough” to name.
But here’s the truth”:
It doesn’t have to be assault for it to be wrong.
It doesn’t have to be dramatic for it to violate your space.
It doesn’t have to look like a headline for your nervous system to freeze.
What happened was uncomfortable, invasive, and disrespectful.
And saying that out loud is important ,because minimising it is how women end up doubting their intuition again and again.
I share this not for sympathy, but because so many of us have lived through these “small” moments that don’t make sense logically, but our bodies register them instantly.
If you’ve ever dismissed your own discomfort because “it wasn’t technically abuse”…
You’re not alone.
And you’re not overreacting.
Your boundaries deserve to exist even when someone pretends they don’t see them.
