Thread by @AlexandraErin

I don't care that Warren told a version of her teaching career in the past that elided being pushed out for being pregnant. Today, in 2019, sharing stories of discrimination gets you a backlash and cries of "prove it" and risks making your whole life story about that one thing.

Prior to a couple of years ago, when I told people why I dropped out of college, "nervous breakdown due to undiagnosed sleep paralysis that made me believe I was either being stalked by demons or losing my mind" was *not* what I said.

Usually, it was "It wasn't really for me."

Before I decided to talk about sleep paralysis in case anyone else went through the same thing and didn't know what it was, I would say -- and this was true! -- that I'd had doubts about going to college and my mother convinced me to try it for at least a year.

"And I went a little longer than a year, even. I gave it until Thanksgiving break of my second year, just in case the second year changed things," I would say, like a normal person who left college as a rational decision not brought about by a possibly demonic breakdown.

So Warren said she decided it wasn't going to work out, while considering the classes she'd need to take to continue her career.

I mean.

If you knew you almost certainly *couldn't* keep your career, would you think the classes worth it?

"I decided it wasn't going to work out" re: continuing education to keep going is the version of the story where she made her decision for her own reasons. It doesn't tell the whole world her business. It doesn't make her relive anything she might still have feelings about.

And if you think she was silly to be protective of her past and her feelings in 2007... look at what's happening now.

"Why didn't she come forward sooner?"

I wasn't even 20 when I dropped out of college.

I was well into my 30s before "It wasn't for me." became "Yeah, I had sleep paralysis and didn't know what it was so I dropped out on account of demons."

And here's the thing - the criterion of embarrassment is not enough to prove a thing happened, but it's a good benchmark to consider.

Coming forward about being fired due to pregnancy discrimination *does not help Warren*. Doesn't make her life better. Doesn't bolster her case.

Like everybody else who comes forward about sexism or discrimination, the backlash against her is predicated on the idea that it's so self-serving, we have to punish her for being self-serving to take away the gains from it.

But that backlash always happens.

Statistically no one ever gets ahead by coming forward about sexism. Statistically the backlash is always there, the punishment is always waiting.

I'm not going to argue with anybody individually who can't get past this. I'm not going to tell you that if you already had substantial doubts about her honesty that this *can't* be the last straw for you. Your mind is your own and I'm not in charge of it.

But I will say - I don't find it incredible at all, that she has these two different versions of the story she's told. I don't see a conflict between them. I don't see a reason to doubt her intentions in telling the one version first and the other version later.

Lots of us have left things of our own free will, over the years.

Lots of us have had situations that just... didn't work out.

Sometimes the story we tell isn't the whole story.

That shouldn't disqualify us from politics or leadership.