Fresh out of college, I’d moved into an apartment and landed a job at The Houston Post in the want ads department. I wore a headset and sat in front of a conveyer belt answering a rapid succession of phone calls under the assigned name of “Miss Ames.” Our training supervisor, Mrs. Taylor, spent most days walking quietly throughout the windowless room listening to our conversations and offering helpful suggestions.

She was a kind individual, but clearly I tried her patience by never meeting the desired number of sales at the end of each day. “You obviously make a good impression in communication,” Mrs. Taylor told me, “but you have a tendency to make conversations too lengthy and sometimes more personalized than they should be.”

Sometime later, she gave me a negative review, but her closing line was encouraging and soon proved to be prophetic. She said I had an “active force” about me, which she found “compelling.”

Shortly after my review, I stopped at a grocery store near my apartment after work one night. It was cold and raining and the Christmas lights strung across the street made me want a bowl of hot vegetable soup.

I was walking back to my car carrying two sacks of groceries when a short man approached wearing paint-splattered pants and a white shirt, speaking very broken English. My “protect” alarm went off, and I quickly picked up the pace. But as the man continued to try and communicate, I started believing he didn’t know where he was and was earnestly asking for directions.

By the time we reached my car, I was feeling sorry for him. I placed the groceries on the hood and began digging in my purse for a pen and paper, thinking that I could at least draw our location for him.

As I was drawing the map, the man asked calmly in perfect English, “Lady, are you married?” Stunned and terrified, I stepped back away immediately, but the position of his hands caused me to glance down and see that he’d unzipped his pants and exposed himself.

You can think about what you would do in a situation, you can talk about it with family and friends, plan it, visualize the whole thing in your mind and walk through it a million times, but until you’re in it, you can’t know. I take no credit for what happened next.

I don’t remember even thinking, but a force inside of me ignited like a Roman candle. I grabbed him by the collar and slammed him against the car door. For one split second, I held him there, feeling my teeth grind and something inside I’d never known. A voice came forth, void of the terror I’d felt seconds before.

“You son-of-a-bitch,” I growled, “you get the hell outta here.”

The man stepped backward, holding his hands up as if I held a gun. “OK, lady, OK,” he said. Then he turned and ran from the parking lot, dissolving into the rain.

So, too, the force receded back into me.