Not Raging Bull May 2013
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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