With much relief we finish birthday season. Glad to be done with late night crafts and panics about how early invitations have to go out. Still, richer in the little memories.

If my life is a mosaic, these are the shiniest stones. More trouble to place, just so! But, you know… gleaming.

I struggle to make birthdays special without surrendering to gendering. But children soak up their conditioning and they know their place. The girls can’t feel special until categorized as something the boys would sneer at.

I dig in my heels and try to redirect, not to be a dam in the river, but a stone. I can’t stop the currents, would not want to be the force that tried. But I can stir it up.

Meanwhile at work I retell vibrator jokes that were once told at my expense.

I’m trying to illustrate points about sexual harassment, but my audience doesn’t get it. In fact, because I have framed the discussion as addressing sexual harassment, they think they should be shocked on my behalf, when, in fact, my point is that the joke is funny. My point is a lesson about valuing banter, and the finer points of knowing when you’re bantering and when you’re harassing.

But maybe a workplace of 50+ people cannot be expected to conform to policies with finer points.

In my workplace review, I bring up workplace sexism, and first it is suggested to me that the women have to be more assertive about drawing the line and letting people know when joking crosses the line.

I do not make the “blaming victims” point. I mildly lament that, already doing this, I suppose myself to have been branded as the office-angry-feminist. Then, (this is the BEST part,) THEN, they go over the feedback about me and an anonymous feedbacker helpfully informs us that I may be perceived as a party-pooper.

I can guarantee the only party I’ve ever intentionally pooped was a misogynist one.

With another comment from (presumably a different person) that I can be condescending and overly critical, I left feeling very raw. I spent a long time analyzing every interaction, looking for where I am unnecessarily critical without seeing it. So difficult because my job requires me to correct things; how do I do that without making anyone feel criticized, given that some people are so hard on themselves there is no way to deliver a correction that won’t sting a little. And I am SO careful with people when I’m correcting them. Which doesn’t mean I’ve never been misunderstood or had wrinkles to smooth out. But I’ve requested a lot of process changes to change the tone of my involvement from “oversight” to “collaboration”. And I try to sit down with someone who’s been asked to do Quality Assurance tasks for me so I can explain to them that, although the process looks inflexible and exacting, if there are extenuating circumstances, they should tell me because I’ll take their side over the process.

In retrospect, I decide the feedback about my being critical is ironic because whenever I have been asked to provide feedback for others’ reviews I have not given any negative feedback. I once went so far as to reply to the “negative” questions on one of them with a passionate answer (then email followup, then conversation followup) about how inappropriate a venue a review was for casual observers to dredge up one’s character flaws.

So I trust whoever felt I was unnecessarily critical feels suitably revenged. I am, as they probably are, very hard on myself. And I spent a lot of time picking everything about me apart and wondering what I could have done to avoid getting any critical feedback.

But I’m done now. As a generalization, they missed the mark. I am not a critical person, I do not come into work thinking I need to tear someone down to prove my intellect. In specific situations, I probably miss areas where I can improve – but I can’t know how to address them from anonymous generalizations.

A friend in the office makes it all better with this feedback: “It is good to know what your coworkers think of you. Not because it says something about you, but because it says something about them.” And I take satisfaction in reflecting on my own moments of compassion for others being reviewed. So until I know specific ways that I can take better care of my coworkers, I dismiss the anonymous feedbacker’s comments on the grounds that it was never intended to be constructive.