I took an amazing seminar called the B.L.A.S.T. (Basic Ladies Assault Survival Training) and it changed my entire perspective. The course gives you the skills, knowledge and most importantly the CONFIDENCE you need to live your life, free of fear.

Of course, that doesn’t mean throwing common sense out the window (i.e. you still shouldn’t walk in a dark alley alone at night) but your life doesn’t need to be "overlayed" by the fact that you are a woman.

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It brought up how precarious life is, how fragile.

Ultimately, what Lucinda said rings so true. There is an overlay to everything when you are a woman. I try not to stay in anger about this… or fear around the general truth of it in our society and about my friend in particular, but it does bring up a lot of rage. We have come a long way in healing this, in not blaming the woman for being a target, with education. Realizing that it is not so much a crime about sex, but about brutal terror and domination…but we still have a long way to go.

Thank you for sharing this. Hopefully, it will prevent it from happening to someone else.

And I second what Lucinda said. It is a different way of living.

Sometimes I think about how essentially different is it to live as a woman: to know that, in general, you can be overpowered and hurt, or killed, should someone take it into their head to do so. Granted this could happen to a man too, but it’s not a condition of living. I am vulnerable and I know it. It informs many decisions, from not going certain places alone at certain hours of the day, even of the way I carry on conversations with strangers…I’m not some paranoid mess, but it’s there. It is. It lurks deep behind every male-female interaction. It’s primeval. And it’s a bummer.