I Broke A Woman’s Heart Today
I broke a woman’s heart. I didn’t mean to. She was a student doctor.
I got up earlier than usual. I took the overground to the hospital rather than the underground to work. I hate getting up early but I didn’t want to tell anyone in the office about why I was late in. I thank the gods for the NHS for their eight a.m. appointments.
I worked in a office for a small company that could be considered part of the wellbeing industry. If I arrived late, said my good mornings, my apologies (sorry! doctor’s appointment!) a well-meaning well-being woman dunking a herbal tea bag in and out of mug would corner me in the kitchen at lunch and ask: are you OK, hun?
And before I could answer, she would give me a leaflet – her face on the front and a 10% discount code on the back. The leaflet would advertise her side hustle, or rather, her ‘calling’. We all had side hustles here. We all believed we had a higher purpose than sending emails and scheduling meetings. Her side hustle would cure me, she was sure of it, even though I had not had a chance to tell her the specifics of my ailments. So, again, thank the gods for eight a.m. appointments.
In the hospital a student doctor led me to a small room with very little in it. We sat on the edge of two giant sofas opposite each other. She had a clipboard and quickly took my medical history. She looked at her watch. She looked at me and smiled.
‘I think the appointments are running late even though you’re one of the first in today’.
There was more silence. I don’t mind silence. But it must have bothered her.
She asked, ‘so what do you do’?
I said, ‘I’m a yoga teacher. But I work in an office too.’
Her eyes lit up. ‘Oh I love yoga. I’ve just started doing it.’
‘Great.’
She continued. ‘Yeh, I’ve started doing this specific kind of yoga. It’s totally saved me, you know, being a student doctor is so stressful but I go to yoga and sweat it all out and now I’m so addicted I don’t go out drinking as much because I want to get up early and do yoga! I’m like a new person! My family, they say they don’t even know who I am any more.’
I nodded. I tried to smile as she carried on talking.
‘So I signed up because it was like, this amazing deal for the first month, like thirty quid for unlimited classes. And it’s in this hot room – it’s so hot, I sweat so much. It was invented by this guy Bikram. Have you heard of it?
I maintained eye contact.
‘Bikram.’
‘Yeh’.
‘Have you Googled him?’
‘Yes… that’s how I found the class’.
‘I mean – have you Googled, X, the man, not the yoga.’
‘Oh right, no, what’s the difference?’
I thought about the headlines I’d read: Bikram Feels the Heat (Vanity Fair, December 2013); Hot Yoga Guru Slapped with Sexual Harrassment Lawsuit’ (HuffPost, March 2013); The scandal that rocked Bikram Yoga (The Guardian, February 2017). I could go on.
‘Well, Bikram – the man – has been accused of sexual assault, like, serious sexual assault, sexual harassment, rape, of being verbally abusive, using homophobic and racist language, sexual discrimination, of asking students to massage him and brush his hair, and withholding wages and forcing people to work with no pay’.
I thought about the individuals who had brought cases against him: Sarah Baughn, March 2013; Jane Doe 1, May 1st 2013; Jane Doe 2, May 6th 2013. And I thought about the time I spent in the library printing out documents from the Superior Court of the State of California, Los Angeles County. Minakshi Jafa Bodden, June 2013. Jane Doe 3, November 2013.
In the 2010’s, every time a case was brought against [X], yoga bloggers would write about it and provide links to the legal case files. I trawled through and downloaded them all as soon as I could. Sometimes the blogs would get taken down within days and now, ten years later, the majority of them no longer exist. Jill Lawler, February 2015. But I still had the PDFs.
In the library, the year I started my PhD, I stood, sweating, printing them all out as I thought: is the air con is broken, or is this panic? Is printing these documents, having them in my possession, legal? Petra Starke, August 2015. Sharon Clerkin, November 2015.
I looked back at the student doctor who was at the start of her workday. Her smile had dropped. She struggled to hide a look of horror.
‘Sexual assault?’ she repeated back to me.
This was before October 2017 and I had no vernacular shorthand. I couldn’t say – yes, you know the kind of thing I’m talking about, the hashtag-me-too movement but for yoga – because I’d not heard of this hashtag, or this movement, yet. I tried to hold her gaze but she looked away. She looked hurt, like I’d hurt her. She went for a polite laugh and said ‘well maybe I should try a different kind of yoga then. Or Pilates.’
I had nothing to say.
She looked at her phone. I could see her searching ‘Birkam – yoga – sexual – assault’ and I could see the articles that came up. She tried to read them, as if I wasn’t sitting opposite her, in this small makeshift, windowless medical office. I wanted to say: I wasn’t lying! I didn’t tell you to hurt you. But I couldn’t.
I think about her still, what I said, and how I said it. In all of this, I am not the problem but if I’m the one who wants to talk about it, and encourage others to talk about it then I have to find a different way of speaking these words so they will be heard.
