Clawing her way to the top May 9, 2013

 

 

 

Her fairness poem makes me realize just how out of touch with reality I am, something pervious poems of hers suggested, but none hit me so hard in the gut as this one did.

Except for when I was young, I lived by all the rules she has come to reject in her last few poems.

This may well explain my reaction to her when she began to trickle up at our office a year ago. I saw it as unfair.

Maybe I even feared she would wind up my boss, forced to comply with whatever dictates she gave, chained to my desk to wait my next order.

I’m not completely clear about my mind set back then, only that I sensed how powerful she was becoming and how it seemed unfair as to how she was obtaining that power.

But I did not realize until reading her last few poems just how high a cost she paid in her attempt to achieve power or status, the intense guilt she felt over what she had to do to thrive or even survive in a man’s world.

Her liberation poem shocks me because it rings so utterly true, and rocks me out of my own comfort zone – this belief that if I worked hard enough I would get my just rewards.

As she pointed out, it is simply not true.

And any observation of any of the other players around me – in or out of the office – show how little I know about how the real world operates.

When she arrived in our little part of the world, I lived in a bubble, not her.

But she did prick the bubble I lived in, and I could not accept it.

I saw what she did as “cheating” as she used all those things I didn’t have to advance her career.

I felt bound by rules that ultimately were chains enslaving me, chains she refused to allow to chain her. She understood how enslaved people could get.

And it is clear that if she was going to have to play the game of master and slave, she fully intended to end up as master.

She got ahead the only way people can in this ruthless world.

At least, that’s how I seem to read all this.

But her philosophy came at a great cost: guilt and self-accusation, not at all helped by judgmental people like me.

Guilt as it turns out can be just as binding a chain as obeying rules, something she only apparently realized recently when she met this woman who taught her to reject the guilt trip, and this liberation appears to have brought her great joy with her liberation.

Oddly enough, I’ve never had to compete the way she has tooth and nail, clawing for every inch.

Regardless of where I worked, I usually ended up in a unique position, somewhat remote from the power structure, aloof enough to be able to watch others fight for position, while holding a position immune to the shake up of power most businesses underwent: I was night manager in a warehouse, baker, and other such jobs that management needed, but I did not have to fight for position each time a business got sold or a new manger brought on, while other people scrambled to keep their place in the pecking order.

As her poems seem to indicate, as her history has shown, she did what it took to get power and fought like hell to keep it once she obtained it, often ruthlessly.

Her last few poems, however, opened my eyes to the price she had to pay for this kind of competition, the guilt she suffered and the world she was forced to live in, the real world I have never lived in, and yet I have arrogantly made moral judgments I had no right to make.

Where it all goes from here is anybody’s guess. She has tied her fortunes to a questionable mayor. If he survives, she may be able to retain the power she has accumulated. If he does not, then she’ll have to claw up a new power grid somewhere else.

I don’t envy her – or maybe I do in a strange way, wish I had her courage and her skills, wishing I could claw my way up the way she does, knowing when she reaches the top she has actually accomplished something.

 

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