When I was in middle school, I "worked" at a skating rink teaching roller skating classes to little kids. I was in middle school, so the rink didn't pay me; I got free drink coupons for every class I helped with. I loved teaching those kids to skate and fall and get up again.

Right after the kids' skate class, there was a roller hockey class. I thought it might be fun to learn something new, so I stayed after my kids left one night to check it out. The class was all guys; I didn't really think anything about that. After all, I was just there to learn something new and fun. I don't think I even paid for the class.

The class was one hour long. By the end of the class, I was so uncomfortable. The boys in the class were so mean to me; the teacher let it slide. The guys hated that I had tried to join their boy's only group and they let me know. Note, this was not an all-guys class by design; anyone could join. But by the end of my first hour, I knew why I was the only female person participating.

I let it sit for a week. I decided I would let it roll off me and I would try again the following week. After all, we were all equally poor at roller hockey. We were there to learn, right? Maybe they would come around, and we could be bad together as friends. That wasn't what happened. The guys got meaner and meaner, tripping me during drills, whispering nasty things to me, just being generally entitled assholes.

That was my last class. I lasted two hours before I walked away.

But here's what I think is the worst part: I also stopped helping with the kids' classes. Because for a few weeks after, those guys heckled me when I was doing that job too. So even though I was good at it, and I enjoyed it, I walked away from the class too. Because I was brazen enough to think I could hang out for roller hockey class, apparently it was acceptable for those boys to keep punishing me every time they saw me. Even after I gave up.

This is why watching women like Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Condoleeza Rice means so much to me. These are women who also got a lot of flack for going into male only spaces, for daring to think that their ideas held merit and they could do good work for this country. These are women who went back, time and again, to those male only spaces and stuck it out and in doing so, made those spaces safer for all of us. They were persecuted, mocked, and blocked over and over again. But they didn't walk away.

I've been successful in my life so far and I'm proud of my accomplishments. But my successes have overwhelmingly happened in arenas that are far from male-only or even male-dominated.  I have chosen a path of lesser male resistance to get my good work done. I am so enormously thankful to the women who have gone before me and made safer places to land.

Although this story isn't terribly traumatic, I'm not sure I've ever told anyone the full extent of it, or really even fully unpacked it for myself. Mostly because I've felt embarrassed for all these years for letting them get the best of me like that. But it's been over 20 years, and I still feel it viscerally. When I heard DT talk about grabbing pussies and calling HRC "nasty" I was taken right back to that roller rink and that space of male entitlement and intimidation. I admire HRC for not walking away, for standing up to him and calling him out.

This election makes me feel worried, for the women I know and for our sons and daughters. Because one of the people running in this election is straight out of that stupid roller hockey club for bullies. And the other has broken barrier after barrier, with kindness and gumption and intelligence.

I'm with her. For myself, for my daughter, for America. I'm with her to the end.