You (Weren't) Supposed To Be The Secretary

A Story of sexism and resilience from a silicon Valley CEO

By Rachel Major

Edited in part by Alexa Josaphouich, Julia Casciato, & Alyssa Walker

-Part 3-

…“Hi, I’m Rachel, CEO of NuLeaf Tech” I practice in front of the mirror for hours and hours trying to make it sound natural. Until I realized it wasn’t me. People were going to do double-takes no matter what. If they were even paying attention to me in the first place.

Stupid, stupid girl.

You were never supposed to be here.

You were supposed to be the Secretary.

My team can’t save me this time, either. The feeling of iron in my bones from earlier has given away to a hot, molten shame that I was never good enough to begin with. Hedged your bets wrong from the start. A failure from conception.

Popped out into the world with two X chromosomes and my fate was sealed. Doomed to be a second class citizen. Any belief otherwise was fooling myself. Failure was inevitable, not even because of my own capabilities, but because of other people’s perceptions. The perceptions of people in power who don’t see me for me, just a husk of flesh.

Everything hurts. I’m ashamed, embarrassed, spiraling and sobbing. Terrified. For a dying, bleeding world that we made. Because I will never get to see the Great Barrier reef, will I get to see glaciers? The rainforest before it burns down? Will I be alive to see California’s last rainstorm? Why is it so hard to appreciate the beauty of this world if I’m so afraid of how long it’s going to last?

I cry for people I haven’t met, entire countries I haven’t been to, ravaged by pollution and greed. Families and children on the street running from bombs, freezing to death in the streets. I cry for Parkland, for Trayvon Martin, for Flint, for children who don’t know what it’s like to have full bellies. For the sheer audacity of humankind to say we’re advanced in any way other than our cruelty. I cry for my gender and for a dying world.

Breathe.

I try to think of something to take me away, to remind me that I’m not worthless.

Focus. When was the last time you did something you were proud of?

I try to think of the last time I was trail running.

Remember you can climb mountains.

I close my eyes tightly. Try to imagine what it felt like coming over the crest of the foothills, the valley before me barely visible as the sun sets. But the adrenaline is too close to my pounding heart, it doesn’t help.

Something else. Focus. Come on. You don’t have time for this.

I gulp for air. Is it possible to die of a heart attack when you’re 26?

I think of a photo on my bedroom wall. A 1927 international physics convention. 17 of the 29 people pictured have nobel prizes - Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Planck - it’s considered a turning point in the physics world.

When I originally hung it up, it was just general nerdiness. But the more I’ve walked the path of Women in STEM, of leadership, the more I only have eyes for one person, front row and to the left. One seat away from Einstein. The only person in the photo with two Nobel Prizes - and the only woman. Madame Marie Curie. What would she say right now?

The thought calms me down. Her death glare for whatever fool told her women just aren’t smart enough makes me chuckle. It causes me to blow a gross snot bubble and spittle everywhere, but wiping up feels cathartic. Did she have some clever retort? Or would she not even waste her time?

If she can do it, I have a chance too. And isn’t that the story of many women, those that history remembered and those that history forgot? Goodness knows that things may have changed over the centuries, but not that much, as the idiot man in the plumbing store proved.

But it has changed, slowly but undeniably. There are the paths of women behind me and a pack of women beside me. That, at least, is an encouraging thought. Even if it is unfair. Even if it still hurts.

My stomach still aches, but I push myself away from the hunched-over position above the steering wheel and look up at my car ceiling. I read somewhere once that looking up boosts your mood and, placebo effect or not, I feel a little better. I count my fingers, one by one, tell myself that the interior of my car is brown, that I left a snickers candy wrapper in the cupholder, and run my fingers over the cloth interior noting all the small bumps and inseams. Count to ten and hold my breath for a moment between each count to really feel the exhale.

When I feel ready I open up the mirror above the driver's seat. I look like hell. I check my phone, careful to only check the time - it’s 9:10 am. How has it only been 10 minutes? As I look back in the mirror I feel like I’ve aged ten years. I half expect to find gray hairs at my temples.

Still me, bags under my eyes, blotchy cheeks, cracked lips. I stare into my bloodshot eyes. Round like my father’s, blue like my mother’s. Blue like the man’s inside. What a fucked up world we live in.

Why do I even bother? I ask myself. What’s the point when the chips are all stacked against you?

I don’t know. But I feel the flicker of the flame of defiance. The kindling starting to catch. Some may call it being obnoxiously stubborn, being a crusader, that it’s a slightly stupid kind of love that’s made me blind. I call it unrelenting determination. The spark that oppressors always underestimate.

I feel a glimmer of gratefulness. Even if I always feel like I’m swimming upstream, the “Captain will go down with the ship” as they say. I promised myself from the beginning that no matter what happened I’d see NuLeaf through to whatever end. And that’s what I’ll do.

The hard truth is whether or not NuLeaf fails is irrelevant. I’ve stood up when people said I should be invisible, persisted when others told me to not even try, gone farther than they (or even myself) ever would’ve thought.

At least through this experience I’ve learned what it’s like to have a voice. To lead. To be brave enough to be different. Just with my presence I’m knocking down doors so that others can walk through them later.

Whatever the outcome, if NuLeaf fails I’ll probably never know if it’s my own failings or the skewed society that we live in. A startup society that looks at men and sees potential and looks at women and sees risk. But no matter what, it has made me look hard at who I am. Why I’m here and the deep pain of the world that I would’ve been sheltered from otherwise. Or at least would’ve learned about much slower if I hadn’t made this startup journey.

At least this is the accelerated version.

At least I got here faster so I can spend the rest of my life raging against it. Slowly learning to give as few fucks as possible to the people who want to put my gender in a comfortable box to mask their own feelings of inadequacies. My skin starts to tingle not with rage, but with a yearning that goes back generations. From all of those women that have had the courage to make space for themselves in an unforgiving world.

You can shoot me with your words

You can cut me with your eyes

You can kill me with your hatefulness

But still, like air, I’ll rise

I will rise. I will rise. I feel some comfort as Maya Angelou’s words float before my consciousness. I know it’s meant to show the deep resilience of the black community held down by generations of systematic racisim, but I feel like it resonates with anyone who has experienced discrimination. Because even if I can’t explain it, even if I feel terrible, something inside me won’t give up. Hope is frail, but it is hard to kill.

They can make me feel like I don’t belong. They can make me feel like this isn’t my space. Like it’s impossible to succeed because I’m just not “biologically programmed” to have a place of importance in this world.

But I’m still gonna show up.

I won’t always know what success will look like, I’ll no doubt fail more times than I can count, but I will rise. We will rise. Future generations will rise. We have to.