This has been heavy on my heart.
I work from home a few days a week but the days that I go into the office I like to use my lunch time to get a quick workout in (finding time to workout with 2 kiddos at home and a hubby that works 2nd shift is hard!). We have a nice little gym with a shower, weight machines, treadmills, and ellipticals. Often when I go in there is a group doing a workout with a personal training and maybe 1-2 other people doing a variety of things.
Typically there are more men than women but this day in particular there were more woman than men. Now this seems like such a trivial thing to even point out but I promise, it isn't so trivial.
I was on the treadmill and another woman was doing a workout with a female personal trainer when a man walked in. This man comes in all the time, runs on the treadmill, and goes about his day.
Now let's rewind before I go any further. This man typically comes in in his work clothes and changes but here is the catch, if a bathroom is unavailable he changes out in the open... takes his clothes off down to his boxers and puts on his workout clothes .... and then when he is all done .... he changes back .... again, not in a bathroom. As some can imagine, this makes me super uncomfortable but I have never had the courage to say anything because typically I am outnumbered in the gym.
Okay, so back to this week. The man comes in, 3 woman are working out, and both bathrooms are taken. He begins to take his clothes off and this is when I glance over to the other two woman and I notice the one making this face like "what the h***!" She notices that we aren't going to say something and she gets up and does THIS--
"Hey, you can't do that, you know? Change in front of us."
The man stares blankly at her
"It's not safe for woman for you to walk in here and change in front of us. You need to do that in a bathroom"
The man - "okay"
Those words began resignating inside of me.
"It's not safe for woman"
Wow. An incredibly powerful statement. And I never thought about exactly WHY I never said anything to him prior to this, but she put into words what I could not. It made me realize, that a woman would not come into the gym, strip down and change in front of everyone .... there would be some words associated with this because she is a woman... YET a man came in and did just that, not just once... but often. Why did he feel this was okay for him to do?
So thank you to the woman in the gym who wasn't intimated, you see, what you did today was courageous. Thank you for making me feel safe again when I go to the gym. Thank you for saying what I wanted to SO many times before but felt like I couldn't.
