You’ve seen the #metoo movement?

You’ve posted Me too?

In case you’ve been disengaged, let me quickly catch you up. Millions of women, all over the world, are posting Me too as their Facebook update, with the additional copy/paste of these words:

If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote "Me too" as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem. Please copy/paste.

This is my copy/paste, because I need to say more. I believe we all need to say more. I believe this is the beginning of a conversation most of us have never had.

For all the times I’ve been out for a run in the summer’s heat, in running shorts and a sports bra, I say, me too. I wasn’t inviting your whistles and whoops. It was 90 degrees at 6 p.m. and I was logging 8 miles. I was training my body to be ready for many a 12.1 and a couple of 26.2’s. I was training my mind to believe I could. You didn’t take me out of my zone. I noticed, for sure, but I didn’t respond.

For all the times, after my divorce, I moved my right-hand ring to my left hand before I sat down at a hotel bar, I say, me too, surprised by how many married men said, “that’s a beautiful ring.” I never intended it to be a conversation starter; I intended it to be my personal symbol of transformation, a symbol of beauty that came out of my darkest days. In those conversations, I heard, “let me buy you a drink.” I was curious to see where this man’s mind was going. I was curious to understand how this new game was played. Me too, for all the business cards I received, followed by, “Travel here often? Keep in touch.”

For that time a senior acted really interested in me, a freshman, and I wore his scarf around in school. And then, he tried to unzip my pants in the backseat, while we were parked on a double date, I say, me too. I resisted. He lost interest. He never spoke to me again.

For the way I was asked, when I was eight, to put my mouth on him, a child himself, no more than eleven, I say, me too.  My little mind was curious and confused. He, a playmate whom I named in my nightly prayers, told the other boys, who teased me from the back row of the school bus. For that merciless teasing, I say, me too.

And now this conversation is open, this me too, invites looking inward, because that’s where the answers always rest.

I felt hesitant to claim, me too, at first, because I wasn’t raped by the senior boy, and so many women have been violated much more severely.

Yet, I want to honor that I felt diminished.

Diminished in my silence. I was afraid to be seen as a bad girl. I’d felt the shaming and blaming on the school bus. Why didn’t those boys shame and blame him? Was I the bad one?

Yes, I felt diminished.

Diminished that my smiling, curious way of being would be read as an opening into my body.

Maybe that’s the first lesson from me too. We can no longer accept as taboo what’s been hushed. We all, now, have an invitation to speak what’s true in our experience. As a wife, I invited a conversation with my husband about me too, and we shared with honesty about what we each have experienced. As a mother, I will speak more earnestly with my grown children about me too, and be a listener for my daughter and my son.

Now is the perfect time for all of us to speak, me too, and reject the discomfort of talking about our bodies and our experience, about abuse and power and force and consent and the sacred temple that we all are.

Now is the perfect time for each of us to claim a new relationship with our bodies, one that is steeped in self-love, self-care, and a deep, abiding gratitude for its strength and its resilience and its messages to us.

Now is the perfect time to embody the new knowledge that is this century’s greatest scientific gift from the field of quantum physics, and described this way by writer Dianne Collins:

Scientists began to prove in the laboratory what sacred texts have revealed and what many of us have felt in our hearts and souls—that the universe is a multidimensional unified whole, and that all of us and everything are intricately interconnected.

Now, then, is the perfect time to learn that when we harm another, we also harm ourselves, and its corollary of truth: when we harm our divine, sacred self, we harm each other.

Now is the perfect time for a new conversation.