I woke up this morning pretty sore. My calves and thighs had been put to work the last few days. I spent the last three mornings at the gym doing pretty rigorous interval runs and pairing them with full-body strength workouts from my Aaptiv workout app. There really wasn’t a single part of my body that was not sore other than my face, neck, hands, and feet. But it was a good kind of sore, the kind of sore that says, “hey! I’m working out, and my body is changing as a result of all my effort! Yay!”

So this morning, I decided to go “easier” and choose a 30-minute intermediate-level yoga routine. I stretched and strengthened, and while lying on my mat at the end, I thought, hey, I could use a burst of something high energy. Why don’t I choose this 12-minute kettle-bell challenge?

That was a mistake I didn’t foresee. The last time I did any kettle bell exercises was probably over two months ago. I was used to the motions and the general form your body is supposed to take. On the 6th kettle bell swing, I immediately felt a twinge on the right side of my lower back that yelped, “danger!” and I slowly put the kettle bell down and laid down on the floor. Oh, crap. It hurt when I put the kettle bell down. It’s hurting now as I’m rolling over from my butt to my back. I just hurt myself working out for the third time in the last four months. This is not good. Why does this keep happening to me…?

As I lay on my stomach, identifying where exactly my back was hurt, I thought, well, at least I am alive and can actually get injured. I should be grateful for that, too, right? 

This is what getting older feels like, huh?

We are certainly not feeling like we are on the winning side today after seeing the news alert on our phones that Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as the next Supreme Court justice, but we ended up seeing a show today called The Winning Side, a play about the true story of Wernher von Braun, the chief rocket engineer of the Third Reich and one of the founders of the U.S. space program. He was technically a Nazi working for the Nazis, but through Operation Paperclip, a secret program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, were recruited and granted U.S. citizenship, he gained citizenship and thus became an American. The play is probably one of my favorites that we have seen lately, and it does a very compelling job in asking its audience to question our views about science, technology, politics, and ethics. Was it really okay to bring someone like von Braun into the U.S. so that the U.S. could benefit from his great intellect and experience in rocket science despite the fact that he was a Nazi and basically overlooked what Hitler was doing to exterminate all non-German people? Can you truly remove yourself from politics when you are a rocket scientist on the Nazi side, trying to help future humankind while at the same time saying that you don’t really identify as a Nazi?

In the play, von Braun has an affair with a French woman who (fictionally) is an actress. While he was able to continue his life and move on to the U.S. and become a citizen, one who was quite respected, on the other hand, she got caught for this illicit affair and was called out for “collaboration horizontale” — French women who were involved in some way with any Germans during WWII. Along with countless other French women, she was publicly shamed, her head shaven, her body beaten, stripped naked, and spit on constantly by the crowds. She was then ostracized by her country and forced to flee to French Morocco, where she ended up destitute.

What is this, an ongoing theme of white men getting away with and even getting rewarded for all the crap they do, and women just having to suffer all the consequences of what the men did? It’s almost uncanny that we watched this just hours after hearing the Kavanagh confirmation news.

It’s like pain on top of pain. This was the case then. This is the case now. The unfairness goes on.

Within an hour yesterday of arriving at our company’s headquarters in San Francisco, I was chatting with a few of my local colleagues when one of my Amsterdam colleagues walked up to me to hug me, and he said, “I just saw you three weeks ago, and we meet yet again!”

I was so confused. I hadn’t been in the SF office since February when we had our annual sales kickoff. What was he referring to? “No, I haven’t been here since February,” I responded, unsure of what he was referring to.

“Yes, you were here three weeks ago!” this Dutch colleague insisted. “We were working on our side project together.”

And that’s when it hit me. Damnit. He’s mistaking me for another colleague… who is very likely another Asian female.

Our colleague visiting from London knew immediately who he was mistaking me for. He pulled me aside later and said, “(Insert Dutch colleague’s name) thought you were Diana,” he said in a hushed voice.

So, that’s when I decided to post on our company’s Diversity Inclusion Slack channel this message:

“So @jess asked me to be more vocal on this channel given my experiences in general, and so I think now that it’s my first day back at Optimizely SF since February…maybe I can ask this question: Should I be getting used to the fact that as an Asian American woman at this company that I should be confused for other Asian women repeatedly?”

It received a lot of reactions, many of which were other people of color getting mistaken for other people of a similar color. It was just so stupid and senseless. No response from HR was seen, just more outrage from other employees who were not white.

We have a diversity inclusion group at work, which frankly, is more for show and venting than it is for actually solving issues around diversity in the workplace. To make matters worse, it’s only in San Francisco, which is our headquarters. As one of my colleagues said to me when I shared this repeated experience of getting mistaken for other Asian female employees, our company fails to handle diversity management in a productive way that actually effects change. This Slack channel is mainly a steam valve to let people complain together. If our Human Resources team were serious about doing something, they would hire outside professionals to not only come in and do these trainings, but also advise HR on how to handle these issues, as they will constantly come up.

But, that isn’t happening. So, I will continue to be mistaken for other Asian females, and other Asian females will get mistaken for me. Because in a white people world, all people of color look the same to them. We’re not individuals. We’re just a single race duplicated into multiple bodies.

Tonight, we went with some friends to see a show at the Women’s Project Theater called What We’re Up Against, which is about the blatant sexism faced by the two women at a small architectural firm in the 1990s. The most enraging part of it is the “bro culture” and the blatant sexism that gets swept under the rug. The most disturbing part of it is that today, that’s still tolerated, and the most passive and subtle forms of sexism are so hard to define, but we just know it when we experience it. Like the sexism I faced at my last company, when you write it down on paper, it doesn’t seem so glaring. It’s very subtle. It’s like the time when my ex company’s former female legal counsel left (because of sexism), and she got replaced by a male friend and lawyer of the company’s president, my (male) colleague said to me that our ex-female legal counsel “just didn’t get it. She just didn’t know what she was doing. But (new male legal counsel) just gets it. He’s a dude (I kid you not — there was real emphasis on this word in his speech)! He just knows how to do this!” Oh, really? She just didn’t get it? But this man does, not only because he’s “bros” with the president, but also because… he’s a “dude“?

You try proving in a court of law that that was an example of sexism. You’d probably lose. But we both know that was sexism. This is one of many problems we face today even when we have it so much better than the many generations of women before us who got us to this “privileged” state.

Today, I had a video chat with a new colleague of mine who will be based remotely in Minneapolis to service our customers in the Midwest. We do these random one-on-one sessions with new hires on our team to get them acquainted with the rest of us and to make everyone feel welcome. I actually really like that we do this. The intention is quite good here.

One sad thing I learned about my new colleague is that she is a former opera singer who finally got disillusioned by the industry when she was told she could move forward with the San Diego opera only if she was willing to “give a certain amount of sex” to the director and ultimate decision maker of the opera. “Well, what can you do for me — I mean, sexually?” he propositioned her. “You’re not very good looking, definitely not the prettiest person we could put on stage, so you’ll need to provide for me sexually to get anywhere with us.” She was floored and immediately declined and walked out. And she left California, never to consider opera as a career ever again.

These stories are so prominent everywhere for women. We’re treated and looked at as objects by men who have too much power and are driven by money, power, and the desire to ravage any sexual object they want. And they make excuses they can do this because of their money and power, or because of the “time” that they grew up in as Harvey Weinstein did. Just look — President Dipshit does the same thing and is now commander-in-chief of this incompetent country that willingly and happily elected him. I shouldn’t be surprised, but it only makes me sad because sometimes when I hear these things, I feel as though progress is being halted.

My colleague whose father died from suicide the same year Ed did asked me about my walk this morning when I came into the office. He was originally planning to come and take his three kids and wife, but his mom had some melt down the weekend before and had to come over unexpectedly yesterday. His younger brother recently got married, and part of the agreement is that their mom would live with this younger brother and his new wife. Unfortunately, the adjustment in living with her new daughter-in-law wasn’t going very smoothly, and a lot of drama was ensuing.

“Why does she live with your brother?” I asked my colleague.

“Dude, she can’t live alone,” he said to me seriously, shaking his head. “She’s just not in a mental or emotional state where any of us can trust her living alone. She doesn’t trust herself living alone.” He said that she’s physically capable and moves around on her own, even is a teacher to first-grade children, but when it comes to actually running a house and leading her own life, she’s incapable of doing it, especially in light of being a widow.

I asked him why his younger brother has to live with his mom, and why don’t he and his wife and children? He shot me the look.

Oh, shit, I thought to myself. That sounds like my own mother. If God forbid anything happened to my dad, my mom would be 100 percent incapable of living on her own. Even when my dad was told he needed to get bypass surgery three years ago, she sobbed endlessly and said she wanted to die, too, if he died.