Soft Offering

There are days that begin as a tempest, her cracked and trembling ego casting off the shrapnel of a million years bereft of insight, halfway drunken summer nights spent clinging to the hope that really this is all there is and the effort it must require to push down that gnawing desperation of how wrong you are, and have been. On those days I play limbo under the shallow stick of her insufferable conceit and eight hours later collapse into a thousand questions, my own sense of self trying to patch up the elephant gun sized holes she has left in her wake. I am trying to climb up, out of this hole, and the ascent began yesterday at lunch. It has been harder and harder to hide my disgust and I've never had much of a poker face. Eight years of her vitriol and finally a light at the end of the tunnel -- pending job interviews -- and there is little internal motivation to remain in the prostrate position that I have maintained in order to finish what I need to finish here.

She said, "I can't believe that she is still on leave, can you? I mean, that's kind of crazy." She was referring to a woman younger than me who had worked in the school cafeteria up until mid-December, when her husband was murdered in Elyria. They are (were) both hard working people but in low wage jobs. He had taken a pizza delivery driving job in addition to the two other jobs he was working in order to provide a good Christmas for their two young children. He was shot and killed while making a delivery by a drug addict in Elyria looking to rob him for some quick drug money. It was still his first week at this new and temporary job. How does it even begin to enter the equation to start such a conversation about how long it's appropriate for someone in that situation to return to work? To return to a job that pays probably $8 an hour and your whole entire life has been cleaved in two? There is no end to the depth of her depravity, I realized, and I sat there looking at her for a moment, mouth agape. "No," I finally offered. "I don't think it's crazy. You can't possibly know what it's like to suffer that kind of loss." And I got up, ten minutes into lunch, and I threw my lunch away, and I went back to my work, back to my kids. It felt like a small victory. I felt so small and fragile last night at home, because of the interactions with her all day (of course she had to redouble her nastiness after the incident at lunch because how could you not feel shameful? And lacking insight, how could you do anything but turn that shame into fury?) and after curling up under the covers for awhile didn't assuage the feeling, I opened up the pages of a journal that I kept over the summer. And I read.

"It feels so powerful to be able to get up in front of a group of people and speak without anxiety. And I'm so good at it! I love my vocabulary, and how eloquent I can be. Seriously, it's a feeling of such power. The main difference from before has to do with my level of confidence in myself. I no longer feel like I need to apologize for my existence. It really doesn't matter what people think of me. Most of them will like me, and those that don't -- what do they matter? There is so much strength in feeling fully how smart, powerful, and intuitive I am. I want to spread myself out widely and commandingly, not withdraw into myself.

I have to be careful at work because A and L are such unsupportive/toxic people. I need to continue to represent myself authentically and remain on this level of power and self-love.

It turns out that the Emily behind the walls is not soft or vulnerable at all. She is immensely strong and powerful and does not need approval or permission to be here."

Thank you for the timely reminder.