HR Emails are Forever a Nightmare
We've all made them.
Someone said something absolutely out of left field to you that you just can't stop being upset about, and you dread seeing them again.
So you draft up an email, laying out everything that happened, what was said, how it made you feel. But then the length of it is waaay longer than you intended.
So you try editing it down.
You ask trusted people in your life if it looks okay, and they point out a misspelling here and there, but say it needs to be shortened, "But keep most of it, what you've written is good!"
Now it's been almost your entire weekend thinking about and editing One email.
You don't even know how to end it, because all you can think of for concrete action is wanting this person straight up fired for demeaning you and your sexuality. But that's "harsh."
You don't know what the HR process even is, so you opt to "soften" it by changing the wording from "I think this should be a fireable offense" to "I strongly think retraining is needed, or harsher."
And then you're roping in the coworker who overheard the same shit, but he says you should CC him into the email chain, since he's gonna add stuff too, but once you finally send the email after looking it over 900 times, management calls you in, and it's like a low-grade interrogation about what exactly happened, in your own words, when you tried your damndest to cover everything in writing so you barely had to do much talking if you could help it.
You just wish it was all gone.
And they also chide you about avoiding CCing anyone who isn't a supervisor in the future, and you sigh because you knew that was probably a bad idea, but you allowed a guy's overconfidence about a thing being ok cloud your typically keen judgement once again.
Womp womp.
Anyway, now your new job isn't what you've been casually doing for a couple years now, now your new job is to avoid the guy who said out-of-pocket nonsense like he's the plague.
Forget feeling "normal" at work now, because it's just not gonna happen.
Enjoy your upcoming month full of anxiety!
We're not even going to talk about if corrective action actually happens, or what might happen if this guy tries retaliating in some way. That's all bundled up with the month-long anxiety.
Fucking duh.
Good luck.