These are the concluding pages to my second hand-written journal volume concerned with this particular subject, and I’m trying to find a way to sum up everything that has transpired so far (with the hope the next volume will contain far less emotional testimony.)
Writing these volumes has been challenging in a number of ways, but also therapy, a way to clear my head and to put things down on paper (accurate or not) to examine and evaluate. At the worst of times, I wrote some pages while I drove the 90 minutes to work each day and on the return trip, stopping at stop lights to jot down things I contemplated while I drove, needing to get it all out of me before I drove myself crazy.
No one else was ever meant to see these pages – or some of the alternative journals such as my poetry journal—but rather as a place to store images, feelings, conclusions and at times attempting to set the record straight, even at the risk of being proven wrong later.
As it turns out happened several times.
How do I sum up something I still don’t completely comprehend?
Perhaps if I sum up her as a person, a multi-talented human being with a sometimes exaggerated sense of her own importance, assuming she is destined for greatness, and crushed when real world factors get in the way of her achieving it.
She assumes – perhaps rightly so – that she must take what she wants or never get it, and concludes that concepts like right and wrong, good and bad, are things that get in the way and must be discarded.
But she’s paid a heavy price for this, doing what she needs to do, while at the same time dealing with the guilt associated with her actions – guilt that eats her up because she has not fully shed the moral restraints, we all get imposed upon us while growing up.
Fiercely independent, she tries to hide her personal ambition by acting (even pretending) she is part of a team. Yet ultimately, in every situation, she works her way up the ladder (trickling up) into a position of power, and inevitably (as pointe out in my journal yesterday) causes resentment among others she by passes and threatens those whose power she would unseat.
As her 2003 change of priority poem indicated, she herself always resented those people who got escorted to the front of the line, the privileged people who seem to be part of some unspoken elite, and yet, this may be envy, and she apparently did the same when she had the opportunity.
Her distain for elitism and her insistence she is a member of a group in some ways is merely a cover for her ambition to get ahead, allowing her to trickle up without acute opposition until she has or nearly has achieved her objectives. She is often tied romantically to the powerful people she needs to propel her upward – a necessary evil in a world where nothing is fair, and where you need to use whatever tools you have to achieve your objectives.
This last offended me early on. I’m still not comfortable with it, even though I understand the logic behind it and perhaps even the necessity of it.
She seems to use the same routine in each new setting, coming in as a humble initiate who begs to learn at the feet of the master, until she reaches a point where she feels she can then trickle up, eventually ending up as the protégé of the most powerful person in the organization, at which point she seems to become a bit arrogant.
She never really get to be the most powerful person, and eventually, the whole affair crumbles in on itself, when the person she is attached to proves unworthy or incapable, and she must somehow move on to some new venture.
She doesn’t’ always abandon these one-time mentors completely. Some continue to have use for her. But few of them give her up willingly. The wisest accept their reduced role in her life and serve as somewhat remote friends. Those who refuse to step back become enemies and stalkers, who she casts out of the garden, never to share in her fruits again.
One of the reasons she is capable of rising so fast within an organization is her ability to work on several levels at the same time, having multiple mentors, each of whom is unaware of the other, and which she purposely keeps ignorant until she is ready to move on at which point she no longer needs them.
Some people like RR, she keeps close as protection, or for some other use that she still requires, although in some cases, she keeps some of these at arm’s length, even when early on they may also have been more romantically engaged.
Although she constantly complains about lack of money, she seems to know how to acquire it at need, even relying on the generosity of her father (a dependency she resents).
All this is something of an over simplification and makes her sound more ruthless than she really is – although ruthless she needs to be to survive in a world where she would get nothing if she wasn’t.
In each case, the environment becomes toxic and she can no longer sustain upper mobility.
It is unfair to say that she is a static character like those unchanging lead in Raging Bull. She is smart enough and strong enough to change, to grow, although I suspect it will take a much more significant trauma in her life to force her to do so.
People get comfortable with routine, even when they always lead to the same self-destruction.
But I suspect, there will come a tipping point, where she is on the roof and has to decide to leap or to change, and ultimately – despite my worst fears last year – she will opt for change.
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