[Original post and excerpts on Instagram]

Dear ones!

In 2017, as the #MeToo movement finally broke silence around the topic for decades coated in the slime of shame, secrecy, and judgment, we started hearing thousands of stories of women who suffered abuse at the hands of men in position of power – from their households to their workplaces to their religious communities. And, when we look at those stories in a larger context of intersecting systems of inequality and oppression, we can see that #MeToo isn't a story with gender-specific roles. In fact, as its founder Tarana Burke said, “#MeToo is not a movement for women. It’s a movement for survivors.”

In 2018, I firsthand experienced a very painful evidence of that. Many of you DMed me during the past year and asked about my health and why I didn’t post anything. I’m grateful for your care. And today, it’s the time to share what was happening to me and what bullied me into silence over this time.

#MenToo. I am a man who got abused by a woman in position of power and privilege. The most devastating thing is, she used my religion – the cornerstone of my life – to earn my trust and then perpetrate and rationalize what she did.

That was an offense to God in the first place, and I will remain an accomplice to it if I stay silent about it. There are thousands of people out there going through the same trauma for no fault of their own, and they need to hear this story so they can know that, first, they’re not alone and, second, denial and shirking responsibility on the part of the abuser won’t be accepted. The particulars and events in my story may not be relatable to everyone, but the feelings and emotions underlying my experience will surely be.

I’m not going to mention her real name. I have no intention to “name and shame” her, because that won’t create any added value. The reason why I’m sharing this story in the first place is not because I want to damage someone’s reputation, but because I’m a Christian. I do my best to live by the values that Jesus modeled for the humankind in His world-changing journey. Jesus was a person who spoke truth to power, chose courage over comfort, and unapologetically practiced the values he preached. Jesus called bullshit on double standards, hypocrisy, and sanctimony of people in positions of power and privilege. In fact, they killed him for it.

I love Brené Brown for her super clear, evidence-based, no-bullshit definitions. She defines integrity as practicing the values we profess even when it takes discomfort (and most times it fucking does). That couldn’t be more true.

Putting comfort before everything else in your life is a dealbreaker for integrity. Prioritizing comfort also sabotages empathy, accountability, generosity – everything God calls us to practice. We can’t choose comfort and God at the same time, just like we can’t choose comfort and courage at the same time. Because after all, God IS courage.

There are people who pledge allegiance to God and then choose comfort instead. Perhaps they are doing the best that they can with the tools they have, but it doesn’t make what they’re doing okay. Neither to God, nor to their fellow human beings. Their privilege, resources, power, or celebrity don’t give them a discount on integrity. Integrity never comes at discounts.

This story began three years ago – at the moment when it didn’t occur to me, not in my wildest fantasy, that I and she would ever have a conversation. She was a successful woman working in the fashion industry in the U.S., and I discovered her page through a tag on the page of an internationally famous musician with whom she happened to be friends. You know, technically I saw a lot of people mentioned by celebrities on their pages, but it never constituted a reason for me to start following them. I’ve never been a fan of any celibrity. The very idea of being a fan and blindly following whoever a celebrity follows never made sense to me. Even growing up, unlike most of my teenage peers, I was skeptical of the fandom culture as such. Perhaps it’s because I already saw myself as a creative and knew how to draw the line between the artist as a person and the work they create. I may totally love the work, but unless I know the artist personally, I can’t be their fan. I can be a fan of my friends, but not celebrities.

This woman’s page, however, struck me back then in 2016 with its own inherent worth. She appeared an outlier – in the most positive sense of this word. Her content was so different from what you would expect from a “fashion girl”. Her own pictures were unfiltered, down-to-earth, and real. She posted a lot of thought-provoking, profound quotes. Most importantly, she posted prolifically about spirituality in the context of Christianity, our shared religion. Her words exhibited amazing vulnerabilty, courage, and understanding of compassion and love as religious values. She had no apparent reason to put out it all for impressing and posturing – her career had been already accomplished and not dependent on public image. She appeared so genuine in her uniqueness.

I started following her page because I believed it would bring a lot of valuable content to my feed. And I was right. Over two years, she posted things that resonated with my heart deeply and brought hope and healing to my mind. Whenever I had relevant thoughts to share, I commented on her posts. She didn’t seem to mind it, and it never occurred to me that my actions could be interpreted in a negative way – like I was seeking for her attention or ingratiating myself with her. I just practiced my authenticity by speaking out what I thought.

Things took an unexpected turn in November 2017. She started following me back on the day when I, among tens of other people, wrote her a congratulation on her birthday picture. Again, following my authenticity, in that congratulation I wrote about how glad I was for having discovered her, a profound, spiritual, open-minded, and multitalented person controverting so many different stereotypes – stereotypes about fashion folks and stereotypes about Catholics among others.

In response, she said: “The greatness you see in me is a reflection of the greatness you know in yourself!”

I don’t know if she fully understood the meaning of that phrase, but it is very symbolic and ironic in the light of what happened after.

We didn’t have any substantial conversation after she started following me. I thanked her for it; in a while I sent her a Christmas text and in January I sent her a video of Brené Brown speaking at Washington National Cathedral. So many times she said that she loved Brené Brown and her work, and it made sense given what she posted on her own page – authenticity and vulnerability was everywhere.

In that video, Brené and Bishop Mariann Budde talked about how difficult leading conversations about social justice is at church. And Brené had the balls to say that it boils down to choosing between comfort and God. Staying away from social justice just because it’s a tough topic is choosing comfort over God, and it’s a function of privilege.

This was a burning topic for me given my own work in the area of intersectional social justice. I’m an artist leveraging the power of creative storytelling in my work to address tough social issues – because what better than art can call bullshit on everything that’s happening in the world that is untrue and unkind? Here’s the rub, though. Over three years of my networking efforts, as I’ve been looking for and connecting with people who could help create a platform for it – the platform I couldn’t create myself coming from a disadvantaged background in Russia – their comfort and privilege inevitably got in the way. This is what was happening to me again this New Year, when another American partner, a self-proclaimed social justice advocate, had made big promises to help, then made me wait for four months, and then flaked out in a very ugly way, irreversibly screwing up my U.S. visa record among other things. It’s not that he was a bad person. He just chose comfort over practicing the values he had professed.

One month later, in mid-February, all of a sudden, this woman DMed me. She asked me to let her know when I was available because she needed to talk. I had no idea what she wanted, but of course I agreed. All of you who have ever DMed or emailed me know that I am open to conversations with anyone, no matter their money, class, country, religion or any other random circumstance. This is how I practice my values. I may not be able to respond right away, but I reply as soon as I get a chance.

Without hesitation, I gave her my WhatsApp number. Given the time difference between Moscow and the U.S., she called me the next evening.

Right off the bat, she started talking to me in what felt like a friendly, warm, down-to-earth way. Despite her class privilege and her celebrity background, there was no air of superiority on her part. It was so perfectly in line with the impression her page had always given that I suspected no danger. Not for a second did it occur to me that it could not be genuine.

She told me she came up with the idea of a project that would use the platform of fashion to empower girls and women against body shame. Quite groundbreaking, right? Provided that fashion is one of the industries that fuels body shame in women and cashes in on it? I was awestruck with her understanding of the damage her industry was creating and her desire to contribute to mending it. For me, it was a proof of her intelligence and social awareness.

Then, it went further. She told me that for many years she couldn’t make sense of why she was so successful and why circumstances invariably played out for her in a favorable way. She said she had wanted to serve God and make a positive impact in the world but she hadn’t been able to see a way to do that. Only recently did she have a moment of enlightenment where God gave her that new creative idea. She described that experience in a very vulnerable and personal way that I can’t reveal here, and when she did it I felt like my awe was overwhelming. My respect for her grew a million times bigger – right now, she was walking her vulnerability and spirituality talk.

I felt honored by her trust and authenticity. I consciously choose to assume good in other people by default and stick to that choice in the absence of evidence of the opposite. And that’s not naiveté. That’s generosity. For a moment, I wondered to myself why she trusted me that much given that we hadn’t had much previous communication. Was it possible that she was using vulnerability instead of being vulnerable? Was it possible that she was trying to manipulate me? Well, I was aware it was possible, but I chose to believe in her goodness instead. For now, I chose to believe that this was how gloriously she practiced her authenticity. For now, I had no reason to believe the opposite.

She went on to say she wanted me as a collaborator on her project. She was now creating the team and she loved the way I wrote and would appreciate my contribution as a copywriter to her project’s blog, articles, Website, etc. Without any hesitation, I agreed. It wasn’t as much about her being the person offering it as it was about the fact that I cared deeply about the cause and had enough critical awareness about body image from my research and my own struggle with it. I knew I could bring a lot of value to the table and get an opportunity to live my most fundamental value – making a difference for people out there. Importantly, it wasn’t about money, at least not in short term. Her project was nothing concrete at that point, and commercialization was only possible in remote future, so for now I agreed to work pro bono. I didn’t commit to making it the primary focus in my life, but I promised to work to the best of my ability.

I thanked her for reaching out and honoring me with this opportunity and we finished the conversation on a very positive note. The next day, I emailed her my initial thoughts on where we could start. I also asked her to send me some plans, outlines, assignments or other materials she might have already created for the project. Quite soon, she replied with a message of gratitude and said she was busy now but would send me stuff in a few days. In the meantime, she encouraged me to “feel free to develop topics for the project on my own.”

And I started doing so. I started thinking and writing content for her, even though she never sent me anything. I had no hard feelings about it – I assumed she was busy with her main jobs and just didn’t have the time. We all have hectic days where we forget many commitments we have made.

We cannot neglect commitments made to God, though.

Here’s the thing, dear ones. Her reaching out and talking about her project and about using her power to make a positive impact in the world got me thinking whether she was one of the few people out there who in fact – not in theory – were willing to put their privilege to good use. For those two years of me following her on Instagram, she had been putting out her own prayers to God where she wrote about love, empathy, embracing discomfort, and overcoming ego. She had been expressing her outrage at the abuse of power happening around the world. Well, I could’ve thought it was all posturing but her recent reaching out and talking to me in person about the same values and God as their source earned her my trust.

So I thought, “If she had trusted me with her project and her ideas, maybe I could trust her with mine? Because our shared mission is to bring about empowerment, empathy, and social justice?”

I didn’t know for sure if she had the power to help me with building a platform for my project, but she might have it through her connections. Having a conversation made sense in the light of our shared human values. I genuinely believed we had those.

Mind you, I realized that there was an abysmal imbalance of class, resource, and privilege between me and her. She might not have known it from my Instagram page, but I knew it. It couldn’t be lost on me that she was an upper-middle class American with a perfectly bleached smile, flying business class to luxury resorts all over the world, working in fashion and rubbing shoulders with celebrities on a regular basis, and I was an underprivileged person living in Russia, barely making ends meet in the tanking economy of his country despite a university degree, living in food insecurity, having cancer at the age of 30 and no access to adequate healthcare despite being a healthcare worker myself, fearing that all the work I’d created over the last years would go to waste after my death instead of being put out there and making the difference it had the power to make. To her, a life like mine would feel unlivable. That I knew.

But I believed that our Christianity, our shared values, and our shared mission would be more important to her. I trusted in it, just I like trusted in God. Firmly and unapologetically.

So I dared greatly. In the beginning of March, I sent her an email asking for a conversation about my project and the story behind it. I made it clear that she might have the power to help me with it.

I couldn’t know that my message would catch her traveling as she was visiting her husband’s family in Brazil. In two days, she emailed back saying she didn’t have good Internet connectivity to have a FaceTime. And then, things started to get really interesting. In the same email, she said she had no idea what I needed, but there had been many people who had approached her in the past because of her celebrity connections. She added that she had the same impression about me when she saw my comments on her page. She said she didn’t need to know any details about my project and my story but just wanted me to tell her what I needed. Like, in one paragraph. Nothing more.

This was humiliating enough. Shame was lurking around the corner, and it sent my critical awareness completely offline. It didn’t occur to me to wonder: if she had seen me in this negative way for so long, why did she invite me for collaboration on her project? It didn’t occur to me that the very fact of me communicating my need for help that made her so uncomfortable and defensive.

Instead, I saw there was an obvious and dangerous misunderstanding on her part. So I replied saying that I empathized with her negative experiences of being taken advantage of in the past, and it’s common fo us to make up stories about new people based on such past experiences. But, I said, we have to reality-check those stories before allowing them to sabotage our relationships. I gave her a summary of my intentions, the real story of how I discovered her and started following her, the reasons why I chose to trust her and why I believed she might help me.

I emphasized that my decision to open up was motivated by our shared values in the first place, not her privilege or connections. I explained that my project was big enough, broached a multitude of topical social issues from mental health stigma to corruption to homophobia to medical malpractice to bullying, and it wasn’t something I could tell her in one paragraph or even one email. We needed a conversation. A normal human-to-human conversation. Like the one she had with me about her project. Privacy is non-negotiable, I said, so I asked her to not think about it during her family visit and get back with me once she got back home in Miami.

Her response was, “Your email is way too long LOL. I couldn’t read it. I have an attention deficit disorder)))”

Bullshit?

I asked her to take her time and read my email when she got back home. She said, “Okay, I will read it)))”.

No, at that point I couldn’t anticipate the epic bullshit that was coming. There wasn’t enough evidence yet. I believed my message just came to her at an inopportune moment. In the meantime, I continued writing articles for her project and emailing her. Sometimes, she replied nothing. Other times, she replied saying “how awesome” it was and how much it empowered her when she needed it the most and how much we had to share with the world. In April, she came home to Miami and I waited for her to get back with our conversation about my project, but it never happened. I decided to not put pressure on her, again assuming she was busy with her fashion jobs. See, dear ones, vulnerability and empathy are not the things that can be forced.

Then Easter came. Again, I sent her a congratulation message, and she replied with hers. In our WhatsApp chat, she sounded perfectly civil. No, it’s not that she ignored me altogether. She kept me hooked. It’s just that she ignored a couple of very gentle reminders I sent her about our pending conversation. And she ignored them in a way enabling me to assume she was just busy. You know, the “no hard feelings” way.

As it all was unfolding, she continued posting about God and spirituality. She posted mind-blowing, vulnerable, awe-inspiring prayers about how much she loved God and was committed to being His warrior. One day in May, she posted the picture of a Syrian girl standing amidst the ruins in her war-stricken reality and wrote another prayer literally containing these lines, “God, please never let my heart to fall into the indifference of a person who only thinks of herself and her small world. Show me where my heart, my love, and my compassion are needed and teach me to give those with full dignity.”

I wondered, how can a person asking God for such opportunity ignore the opportunity standing right before her? Maybe she just forgot about me and my request and what I shared with her? Maybe she just forgot about my health situation and the pressure I was feeling from it and the fact that my project not only could bring about more empathy and justice in the world but right now was my only chance to get access to the life-saving treatment I needed? Or was her empathy reserved for people she knew she had no power to change things for, like that five-year-old girl in Syria? Had all this talk about God, love, and compassion ever been real?

By the end of May, I could no longer tolerate the silence. I’d waited for almost three months, and when you have cancer on the verge of going metastatic, three months is a big deal. Because of focusing on her and her project, I had to suspend networking with other prospective collaborators. In the last week of May, I sent her an email summarizing my situation, my project, and the kind of conversation I needed to have with her. Just to make sure the message made it to her mailbox, I texted her on WhatsApp the next day. She confirmed she got it and promised she’d reply during the week. As always, she finished her text with “God bless you”.

It never even occurred to me that in her speech “God bless you” was an expression of pity. It was a version of “Bless your heart” abusing the name of God. God never called us for pity. He called us for empathy.

She didn’t reply as she promised, of course. After eleven days of waiting in full vulnerability and emotional exposure, I texted her again. I wasn’t aggressive or resentful or pushy. I just said, “God bless you dear. You apparently forgot about my email.”

“No I haven’t,” she texted back. “It’s way too long. I haven’t been able to read it. What do you want? Tell me in concrete. It will not make any difference if I read it.”

Just so you understand, guys, “too long” was an eight minutes’ read. Eight freaking minutes. Over eleven days. And from her Instagram, it was obvious that those weren’t eleven days of 14-hour-long, hectic work schedule. There were lots of fun pictures on her Instagram Stories. Parties. Restaurants. Strolls. A beautiful life, in which reading my email just wasn’t a priority because she knew it was uncomfortable.

Just so you understand, guys, I wasn’t a stranger stalking her. I was the person she herself had invited to collaborate. The person whose creative work she said she admired. I was the person who made good on his commitment to her project and invested his time and energy in creating and sending her content over months independently of the conversation about my situation. I never asked her for money, handouts or guarantees. I didn’t give a shit about her celebrity friendships. I kept my boundaries in place and respected hers. I was just asking for a conversation.

Finally, things got downright abusive. She told me I was being “disrespectful” with her and “demanding” of her and she “felt” like I was being dishonest with her because she “didn’t believe” that I actually liked her page from the start but instead had an agenda. Most offensive, she said that she didn’t know about my need when she invited me to her project (because if she’d known, she wouldn’t have). She wished me all the best and finished the message with “God bless you” and “No hard feelings”.

Here’s the thing, dear ones. I have zero tolerance for bullshit. Our world is awash in bullshit, from politics to social media to religion, and I don’t tolerate it sent my way. In her last book, Brené Brown gloriously shows how to speak truth to bullshit and stay civil. The amount of energy that speaking truth requires is an order of magnitude bigger than producing bullshit, but here I’m willing to invest. Of course, I told her the truth in our WhatsApp chat. Without any expectation of her replying.

I don’t know if her painful past experiences made her so unwilling to believe that people could like her page and appreciate her as a person without having an agenda about her celebrity connections, but it’s her issue to deal with. My job here was to not accept what she did to me. She made up a negative narrative about me based on no fact and denied me any chance to reality-check it. Not reading my emails. Refusing to have a conversation. Treating me like garbage. All the while knowing that I needed help, and it wasn’t a fancy.

It may be privilege, obsession with comfort, or insecurity, but it’s certainly not Christianity. My wild, brave heart was wounded but it didn’t accept her sympathy, even sugarcoated in the phrase “God bless you”. My cancer didn’t accept her “No hard feelings” chickenshit rhetotic. The choice she made goes against God in the first place, and that’s especially devastating in the light of her prayers and words about compassion and love that were said, as it turns out, with no real intention behind them. She chose comfort over God. She spit in the face of the opportunity God sent her way – the opportunity she publicly asked for in the first place.

I had a hard time processing this traumatic experience. I had invested a big dream in that relationship – the dream that, after three years of networking and so many failures, I finally found the right person who’d give me understanding and empathy, recognize the value of my work, help me get it out there and as a consequence help me get the long-needed breakthrough in my life and make it to the future where, after more than a decade of stagnation and silence, I could finally start actualizing my gifts — and in short term, get access to the life-saving treatment, available and affordable in Europe. Now it all was smoking ruins. The day I got her messages full of dismissiveness and pity, I felt the way I hadn’t felt since 2015 when I healed from my last clinical depression episode.

I couldn’t cry, but I felt crushed inside. My sleep was broken. There was a heaviness in my chest, which is a typical symptom of major depressive disorder. I was afraid that a relapse was coming in the wake of this trauma – you know, clinical depression is not something you can control, and my other life circumstances were themselves traumatic enough to keep me clinically depressed all the time. But thank God, and thank Brené Brown. The next day, I remembered #RisingStrong skills and went full-throttle into the “reckoning, rumble, and revolution” process. I identified what I was feeling – powerlessness, shame, and betrayal. I rumbled with the first bullshit draft that my brain concocted in the wake of this experience – the story saying that 1) I’m an unworthy person because of my need; 2) people with power and privilege will invariably turn away from me and never recognize the value of my work; 3) I am the one to blame for placing too much expectation on her and putting myself at her mercy; 4) she had the right to treat me like shit because she was a rich person working in the American celebrity world and I was a poor person from a third-world country. Well, it all was bullshit. In truth, my expectations were informed by her actions and her words and her apparently vulnerable behavior. Her lack of integrity couldn’t be rationalized with her privilege, resources, or celebrity. What she saw in me was obviously a reflection of her own fear and judgment, and maybe, just maybe, her own practice of ingratiating with people when she needed help instead of asking for it in a courageous, straightforward way. The crucial part of the rumble happened when I realized this: our relationship dynamics changed abruptly after I communicated that I needed help. She didn’t bother to learn what I had to offer, what my struggle was, and what kind of help I needed, but she instantly judged me for the very fact of needing it. Could she be the right leader to collaborate with on anything? She judged me for what was a normal part of the human condition, and this happens when a person themselves feels shame about needing help when they need it.

The fact she chose fear and judgment over compassion and love went against who she was – at least, who she claimed to be as a Christian and who I had believed she was. Now, I had to let go of that vision and accept who she really was – that’s the first step to forgiveness. Difficult as it is for me, I do believe she was doing the best she could with the tools that she had. And I hope that one day she gets to upgrade her toolbox.

The final part of the #RisingStrong process is the revolution. So thankfully, dear ones, I got back up from under the rock much quicker than I would, I think, a couple years before. Just a week after, here I was, back in the arena. Fighting, with my soft, vulnerable front, my strong, resilient back, and my brave, wild heart. Despite my increasingly challenging health situation, I started looking for new opportunities. I didn’t start shaming myself for having believed a person who didn’t show integrity despite what she preached. I didn’t accept sympathy and gaslighting. Instead, I was crystal clear about who I was, my story, and my worth, and I was not going to negotiate that with anyone, including people who had the power to change things for me.

Now, you might be wondering why I shared this story in so much detail, especially after almost a year. First, as a creative, I’m a huge believer in the power of storytelling. The story I just told you is not a fun, fast, and easy kind of story, but it’s truthful. As in the quote Glennon Doyle once posted on her Instagram page, my heart is heavy because it’s full of truth. And given the culture we live in, the culture dominated by fear, scarcity, hypocrisy, and judgment, abuse like the one I suffered happens everywhere and gets rountinely normalized. It’s in telling these stories and sharing them that the power to change the status quo lies. Speaking up requires courage and vulnerability, and this leads me to my next point. Courage is the value I do my best to live. I risk my intentions being misunderstood and misjudged by anyone reading this. I risk people thinking that I’m seeking sympathy or attention or playing a victim. But God demands me to call bullshit on everything that I come across that is untrue and unkind, just like He courageously did in His earthly journey. So I do what is right despite it being scary. Third, so many of you DMed me on Instagram over those months of silence and asked about what was happening in my life. I thank you for your care and loyalty, and although I was feeling vulnerable and didn’t have the emotional resources to share the details back then, now here’s your response. Fourth, I want this story to stay part of this blog. I’m not in good health, and I’m not sure that I’ll get the chance to get necessary treatment before it’s too late. I do want to leave a legacy anyway, and stories happening to me in my journey with Souls Of Silence, my first book and my biggest project so far, constitute part of it. When you have an open mind and an open heart, there are constructive lessons to be made from uncomfortable yet truthful narratives like this.

Lastly, if you can relate to what happened to me, I encourage you to leave a comment and share it with your friends. I encourage you to be angry, not just sad, along with me. In order to be resilient in the face of abuse, we must allow anger be the catalyst enhancing our courage. That’s the only way to overthrow systems of power-over and oppression that some people carefully protect using the name of God. God doesn’t accept that. God is courage, and He calls us to come forward and speak up. So if you’re a person who has been abused like that, tell your story with your whole heart despite the shame they made you feel. Silence is a consequence of shame and it enables abuse to continue happening. Share it however you can, with as many people as you can. Sure, you’ll have to brave the wilderness of misunderstanding, cynicism, and judgment. The price of courage is high, but the reward is fucking great. Because courage comes from God. Because courage IS God.

Much love to y’all, Jorge