April 15, 2023
My journey to healing begins with telling my story—a tale perhaps too horrifying for some to comprehend. As I recount this experience, I am still entrenched with feelings of fear and anguish. On the cobblestone streets of Dublin, a city renowned for its literary history and majestic castles, a relentless darkness overshadowed my life with menacing persistence. Here, in the heart of Ireland, where poets found their muse and battles were braved for centuries, I faced my own personal war against harassment at the hands of Lisa Graham.
Initially, it started innocuously enough; everyone assumes that working in an office is safe from the harrowing claws of danger. However, subtly, like a sinister whisper brushing against your consciousness at twilight, it emerged. I began to receive uncomfortable compliments about my appearance from Lisa, comments that seemed playful at first until they weren’t.
Then she touched me. It was a brush of her fingertips across my back as she passed by my desk—a gesture unnervingly intimate and entirely uninvited. And gradually, insidiously, the incidental touches became more frequent and more invasive. A hand lingering on my shoulder just a tad too long, her breath against my ear under the pretense of discussing work matters…
A shiver runs down my spine now as I think back to how trapped I felt each passing day. Dublin’s usually quaint streets morphed into a daunting labyrinth; every turn I took seemed to bring me face-to-face with Lisa: at the coffee shop near our office, on the adjacent treadmill at the gym, even outside the market where I did my weekly grocery shopping. Like the haunting specter in Irish folklore, she was inexplicably present wherever I went.
A Tear in the Fabric of My Reality
The harrowing spectacle only escalated as time trickled onward. Her messages flooded my phone at all hours—each beep slicing through the quiet like a knife—filled with unwelcome propositions and explicit imagery that soured my stomach. Despite efforts to change my number and block her on all platforms, inevitably, she found ways to reach me.
The first time she cornered me alone in the deserted office parking lot late one evening sent raw panic pulsating through my veins. Her eyes emitted a predatory glint as she stepped closer than comfort allowed, spewing vile suggestions of what she wanted to do to me.
“You know you want it,” L