This document is pretty impressive, and includes texts from someone who attended Chua’s dinner parties and admits that Amy Chua was lying about her characterization of those dinner parties. https://twitter.com/LeahLitman/status/1387132799006748680

In situations like this, it often feels like you’re feeling around the room in the dark, and you know there’s an elephant in there but you describe what you saw at one point in time and people are like “what’s the big deal with a big round column.”

Getting people to see the size and the shape of the elephant is always really, really hard, particularly when the elephant has tenure and builds up institutional prestige.

It’s particularly hard when the person you’re opposing has the platform and the spotlight and the voice can just write a letter to her colleagues and say, “Honestly, elephants? What elephants? There are no elephants.”

And so my eternal solidarity to everyone who is working their hardest to illuminate the elephant, head to tail. https://twitter.com/ninaleaoishi/status/1387099789238706176?s=20

It is not easy work, because you are working against fear, and fear throws up cognitive dissonance that gives you reasons why you should stop, reasons why you should downplay, reasons why you should give someone an out because you’re scared.

If anyone is reading this and is thinking of writing up their own narrative, I have some thoughts that I developed while writing mine.

I had the benefit of taking over a year to write my statement, and I was able to iterate enough that I could get a hold of my fear and explain the shape of it, because the fear that tries to divert you is part of the narrative.

Here are things I learned in the course of that year.

1) Stick to the things you know to be true. What happened. What you saw. How you felt at the time.

You don’t need to tell the story of what the other person was thinking because—here’s the thing—you don’t actually know.

And here’s the other thing—centering yourself in your narrative is a radical act.

2) Ground the reader in your experience.

If you remember senses—smell, touch, sight, taste, sound—convey those to the reader. The more you do, the more you can put them in your shoes, and the more you center yourself.

Details are grounding. To the extent you remember them, include them.

(Don’t make up anything just to ground your reader—you must be radically honest.)

3) Write down a list of your biggest fears, your biggest shames, and do not avoid them.

Fear and shame are the tools of silence, and you must confront them.

People will tell you that you have nothing to be ashamed of, and eventually you will believe that.

But the mind doesn’t usually care about that rational assessment, and you have been conditioned to having them used as a weapon against you.

At the heart of a lot of silence is shame: shame that you allowed it (you didn’t allow it), shame that when it first happened, you went into shock and didn’t immediately disavow it (this is a human reaction, and abusers use it to their advantage).

When the mind starts to hit pressure, it fractures weirdly. Sometimes you play along in the moment (and that is your shame). Sometimes you fall apart (and that is your shame).

The thing to understand is that your shame will never lessen with compounding.

For me, the shame at the heart of the Kozinski clerkship was that when all of this happened to me, I completely fell apart. I could not handle it. I had trouble performing basic tasks.

Telling people about what happened to me meant giving up a very confident, rock-solid, I’m always okay, hyper-competent image. Permanently.

I was deeply ashamed at how much I fell apart in the clerkship. Deeply.

I was afraid that if I said anything about him, he would tell people that I was just an envious, shitty clerk.

It took me a long time to breathe through that. To understand that my shame was a part of the story, and that I could not ground people in my narrative without openly admitting something I didn’t want anyone to know.

When something like this surfaces, and people start to understand the shape of the elephant, they will not understand the fear or the terror or the shame.

But the shame does not belong to you.

It belongs to the abuser in the situation. Acknowledging the thing that you’re ashamed of and attaching it to the situation takes power back from someone who stole it from you.

The truth is a radical tool.

Thank you to everyone who has spoken up.

And to everyone who is afraid? Who is terrified? Who is ashamed?

That is a part of the process. You can, and will, get beyond it.

And once you learn how to do it, you will have understand a lot about power.

I will say one last thing. Sometimes people in law tell me they think it is sad that I walked away from law to write romance. And I get where they’re coming from.

But I am joyful in my life, and that means that I want to fight for others to have the right to that same joy, wherever they stand.

You can, in fact, go through whatever it is you have gone through and come out the other end into joy. It is there for you, and you deserve it.

You can get to a point where you will see when people try to push their emotions on to you.

They are angry, they are ashamed, they want to be exonerated, etc. They push you because socially, we are conditioned to respond to other people’s emotions.

The higher up someone is in the hierarchy, the more we have been conditioned to accept the emotions they push on us.

Getting to the point where you can reject that conditioning and refuse emotions that do not belong to you is a form of power.