I think the Cat Woman analogy yesterday was a bit harsh.
She is not like the leather ladies who want weak men to suck their toes.
She likes strong men over whom she has power to control, not with a whip and chain, but with just a look.
I suspect everything she does seems to be about control, the control she wants, control she can’t have, control over others, and perhaps even the lack of control she has over aspects of her own life.
None of this is as bad as it sounds, even though early on it shocked me, because I knew less about how the real world worked than she obviously does.
She has an amazing presence, even she sometimes doesn’t seem aware of. People gravitate towards her, often unaware that they are doing so.
This may explain why there is such a black hole at the meeting table where she used to sit, some of her cosmic energy still lingering there and people – especially men (including myself) keep looking there as if expecting to see her still seated in that spot.
While she might not be completely conscious of all this, I’m sure she is aware that most men in any room would want her attention. I suspect she has relied on this cosmic attraction as a survival tool, and has long become instinct, turning it on and off on some subconscious level.
It would be dishonest to call this manipulation or compare her to a spider spinning webs (as some unkind people have). She just does what comes naturally, right and wrong play not part in it.
That’s why it was unfair to call her Cat Woman. You don’t criticize a cat in its dealings with mice.
Yet all that said, she seemed to understand better than most just how awful a world we live in where people might act kind and noble on the surface, but can’t get passed their most primitive urges, and it is easy to fall prey and become a victim. She seems to understand that she needs to stay one step ahead of the pack or fall prey to it.
Instinct!
Until, she arrived at our office, I lived in a bubble, unaware of the primal forces engaged around me. Even in our tiny universe, people sought tooth and nail for their piece of the power puzzle.
When she arrived, she apparently instinctively recognized that all too familiar landscape from having been involved in similar micro universes. She had already honed the skills she needed to survive, perhaps even thrive in this environment, and certainly, to avoid becoming a victim.
Instinctively she recognized and reacted to the mechanisms of power that I was so blind to, and soon adapted herself.
She needs to be in control and to do that, she needs to be important, and so, we see her making her way up the power grid as quickly as possible in each place she works, including our place.
Yet, it must have become pretty apparent early on that there was very little room at the top for her, so she seems to have used it – as she told the office gossip – as a stepping stone.
In fact, she was much more powerful with people outside our office, than inside our power grid, power she lost when she resigned, and her embracing D may well be a way of regaining some of this, controlling the content of what he covers, giving her importance in her new microcosm where “they” (whomever the power brokers are) expect her to control the press.
Again, it is difficult to know if she is the one in charge, or RR, or Joey D or someone else.
But it is clear, she needs to feel important inside that organization, which means she needs to maintain control.
I have been critical of her in the past, and perhaps unfairly so.
She is doing what it takes to survive, and calling her Cat Woman may be an insult, even if she seems to have more than nine lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment