Hurtful Things

A couple of significant incidents happened in my life that have made long lasting impressions on me. In the last couple of months, my perceptions of these incidents has changed.

#1 - When I was younger my older brother used to call me Amazon Woman. I took that to be a very negative thing - that I was large.

Now when I was 18, I was 5'10" tall and about 145 pounds, I wore a size 12 pants and a size 10 shoe. If pictures are seen of me, I'm slim, fit and looking pretty good. I played basketball in high school and skied every winter from 11 years old on. Since that time I'm still active, working out between 4-6 days a week. But I've also put on weight. From the time I had my son at 27 I've gained and lost the same weight until now I weigh between 190 and 195.

After lots of soul searching, I'm ok with my weight.

Back to my original thought. I guess I've always been sensitive about my size, I'm the tallest woman in my family. Plus my family used to call me "big boned". True I have a large frame, but when I was a teenager... I was not overweight. And I've always been quite the klutz, running into things, I bruise easily, I'm always in a rush and miscalculate where the door frame is apparently.

So when my brother called me Amazon Woman it hurt tremendously and has lasted in my mind for 44 years. I can correlate so many instances of feeling low self-esteem to those comments.

But now I'm starting to see those comments in a different light. The phrase Amazon refers to women warriors in the Roman Empire. Fierce, courageous,fighting women. Attached is a link to the Wikipedia definition... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazons.

I've started to think of myself in a totally different way. What a relief.

The second incident happened at my last job. I worked in a male dominated industry. I was the 4th female project manager at my company, all the rest were men. I worked there for nearly 5 years. I loved my job, all the field guys treated me great, I got along well with our engineers and other co-workers. The problem I ran into was the higher ups. They treated the female PM's as if they were not worth nearly as much as the men. And my perception of my immediate boss... well, he wasn't the best. When my employment was terminated in July, 2003 I was devastated. I enjoyed my job and I was very good at it. All my jobs came in on time and I made the company plenty of money. I thought my immediate boss had torpedoed me.

About a month before I was terminated one of the other PM's in my group had taken over from my immediate boss - and I now realize it was his controlling attitude and my independent streak that got me canned.

It is amazing to me how your perceptions can be "off" and until you know the whole story... you could be wrong. I was.