It was my birthday yesterday - which brought back a lot of the pain from a year ago, and put an end to the craziness that had led up to it.
Again, as pointed out in another journal entry, all that happened back then wasn’t entirely her fault, and most likely, it was mine.
What I saw back then (she later called trickling up) I then thought of as cheating, and in the year since I’ve come to understand that in a world of clawing to survive, sometimes that’s the only thing you can do – fair and unfair, as she points out, are just words.
It is a difficult lesson for someone like me to learn, as is the fact that the owner and others take part in the game, and if there is guilt to be had, they must share in it, and blame cannot be put on the shoulders of one person, as pretty or seductive as she might be.
When you swim with sharks, you have to learn how to manipulate the powerful fish and get what you want if you are to survive.
This is hard to digest even now, even though I understand it better.
I relive that birthday celebration over and over again in my head, what I could have done or said differently, and debate whether anyone would have changed if I had.
I was too much a fish out of water, and had stepped into her environment, where she had all the power, where she knew just what games to play, where she understood how to keep people off guard.
As I pointed out, I’ve always been insulated from the ugly truth, and never had to fight tooth and nail to survive. I’ve been homeless, I’ve gone hungry, but I’ve always managed to somehow slide by without being forced to compromise those illusions of morality by which I pretend to live.
As I see things now, I got caught up in the middle of other people’s ambitions, some assuming I had more power than I actually had, or mistook what power I had for something transferable.
Power is an illusion. Usually, it’s based on a pyramid and to get to the top, you have to depend on others to keep you there.
This fallacy of being powerful alone drives people crazy. You become a target if you’re on top in that way, seen as a tyrant, and people spend a good portion of their time attempting to unseat you, partly because they see you as too independent.
In this county, power is obtained by getting other powerful people to owe you. The more favors you can dish out to such people above and below you, the more powerful you become. But you don’t stand alone, or at least very few people do, and generally, they do not last long if they manage to get the power they crave.
I’ve never hungered to be powerful in that way, or even famous. My sole ambition has always been to be a great writer – even unrecognized.
This is also dangerous to others because you also stand apart from the crowd, and give no favors nor ask for any, and those who owe nobody anything are truly terrifying.
My feeling is that she hungered for unrestrained power – in each case (as her 2003 change of priorities poem points out) being the one let in at the fancy disco or being part of an entourage, those she hated and envied when younger, by passing all the in between steps, the system of patronage, the owing and being owed, and thus ultimately becoming the target of underlings who resent her.
A year later, it is difficult for me to understand what she expected to get in our office when there are better, players at the game than she, and ultimately, no place of power she could attain without putting somebody else out – such as the boss in her corner office, who is as ruthless as anybody in keeping her position.
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