In september of 1988, richard and louise gardner welcomed their only child, a daughter, into the world. named after her grandmother, rebecca favored her mother in looks and in intelligence. from an early age, she idolized louise and wanted to be successful like her. Growing up without siblings put a lot of pressure on becky to make her parents proud, but it was apparent early on that she was a determined soul. She was motivated, bright, and very much looked up to her parents. She didn’t want to follow in their footsteps – her father was a police officer and her mother a lawyer – but she wanted to do something equally amazing.

Without siblings, one might have expected becky to become self-centered, but she was far too introverted for that. The pressure she put on herself to succeed in school brought on a lot of self-doubt and thoughts of not being good enough. She kept to herself and struggled to make friends, as she was more focused on good grades. As a result, she was picked on, and it was difficult to keep it from getting to her. Her parents picked up on their daughter’s troubles rather quickly and sent her to therapy in hopes that it would help her cope.

And it did. Eventually, becky realized that she needed social connections for a happy life. She came out of her shell and fell into the clique of nerds in her high school. It was through them that she discovered the world of programming. She learned that there were people out there that were paid to write code for video games. She learned about video games and found that she had a passion for them. She didn’t know that a career as a game programmer was in the cards, but she could see herself coding other software or even working on websites. At the time, it was the fastest growing career (and competitive at that), but that only encouraged her further.

She applied to colleges all around the nation (and some overseas) and was accepted to quite a few, but she decided to attend columbia university in new york. It wasn’t too far from her parents, but it in a new and exciting location. Columbia’s computer science program also offered a track that was in line with her passion for visual programming. It would open the door for her to work in games but not limit her to that field if it didn’t work out.

She devoted most of her energy to her studies but kept her therapist’s advice in mind and didn’t socially isolate herself in favor of grades. She found that having friends to bounce ideas of only benefitted her. Her grades were close to perfect, and her parents were proud. Their daughter might not have been on a career path to directly help people, but there was no question that she was following her dream and that someone out there would benefit from that.

Though she had friends, her awkward nature made dating a little more difficult. That wasn’t to say becky didn’t go on dates, but they often blew up in her face (usually because she didn’t know how to act or what to say). And so she swore off actively seeking out relationships before she had even finished her sophomore year of college. If something came her way, she would give it a shot, but she did not want to devote that much energy to something so stressful. Her future was in her career, not in being romantically attached to someone, and she didn’t have time to stress out about it.

She graduated with her b.s. In computer science in 2010, but because she did so at the height of the recession, finding a job was difficult. She bounced from unpaid internship to unpaid internship while working at a coffee shop. The income wasn’t enough to survive while she sought out real jobs, so she was forced to accept aid from her parents. It was a blow to her ego and her motivation, and it was easy to fall into a state of depression. She started to believe that she would never bounce back and that she would be stuck paying off her debts working as a barista. She even stopped applying for jobs after about a year, but eventually her parents stepped in and snapped her out of it. “This isn’t the kind of person we raised you to be,” her mother had said. “Where’s that gardner determination?” it was enough to make becky realize that she was stuck in a self-fulfilling prophecy and put herself back out there.

It took some time, but she eventually received a job offer. It was for a software firm in new york, and it almost seemed too good to be true. The job itself turned out to be great, but it was her coworkers that ruined it. Being a female in a male-dominated field was worse than she had anticipated. She had known it would be a struggle, and she could handle the assumptions that she wasn’t as smart as her colleagues. Those people were easy to prove wrong. It was the harassment that eventually pushed her out. It had started off as the occasional remark, but it had evolved into something far worse. When one of them made a pass at her, becky tried to fend them off, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer. She was too weak to fight back, too weak to fight back against a lanky programmer. Even reporting him had done nothing; no one had believed her, save for her parents. And so she did the only thing she could do: she applied for other jobs and eventually left but not before suffering months of torment at the hands of her rapist.

Becky found that she could no longer trust men. She wanted to swear them off entirely, but she knew that was as sexist as her former colleagues had been. Instead, she decided to take matters into her own hands and prepare herself for any future assaults. In her mind, it was a matter of when. So after she had landed her new job in boston, she signed up for an array of classes, from self-defense to martial arts to firearms training. She started carrying pepper spray and bought a handgun to keep in her nightstand. She grew up in the blink of an eye and started standing up for herself. What happened to her in new york is never going to happen to her again.