Back when she was wrong about herself June 24, 2013

 

As said earlier, the poem she posted on October 4, 2012 about leaving our office, comes almost exactly one year after her posting a poem about her high hopes when first hired.

Even when I first read this poem – telling me before anybody in the office did that she had resigned – I saw all the flaws in logic in contained, and how she took blame for things that just weren’t hers to take blame for.

Or maybe, rather, thinking that she failed herself, even as she was being pressured into resigning by – what I later learned – was the Small Man.

Although oddly, she attributed this to “they,” suggesting others may have been involved in that fateful confrontation.

The man who exposed her relationship with RR was a political operative from elsewhere in the county, who had worked on the campaign for the man the Virgin Mayor defeated, but someone who had been tied to RR in a much earlier congressional campaign in Perth Amboy, and to whom RR had promised to give the political dirt on the Congressman, but never delivered, making him think RR didn’t have the information she would have needed for any story she did for us.

While the Small Man (and maybe the congressman and even our owner) said it was the right thing for her to resign, she had her doubts, blaming herself, thinking she had given up, and was too weak to carry through.

“I was too weak’ I won’t make it; It’s impossible,” she wrote.

Contrasted with her poem of high hope posted a year earlier, this poem depicts herself as “the bringer of bad luck.” And the harbinger of closed downness,” as if she somehow let other people down, an odd sentiment for someone who was largely being used by other people for their own ends.

She might blame herself for being naïve, but takes off from the poem she wrote a year earlier to bring in her past exploits as proof.

A year earlier, she expressed hope that this venture would break the pattern, and now, a year later, the old pattern reemerges, and she calls herself “the predictor and embracer of what’s old and done and over.”

And yet, she also takes a strange stance is saying that she has the strength to abandon yet another venture.

Can she rise above this the way she has so many times before?

This is more than a little unexpected (though it shouldn’t be) since in her poem a year earlier, she had expressed such high hopes that this finally was the time she would succeed.

She raises the question about her ability to “rise above” when she is so insecure that it becomes a defense against “total arrogance.”

There is a certain sense in this idea since almost all of her boasting – to her family, friends and the office gossips – comes off as something not quite real – painting her assignment to a political fundraiser for her mother as a hot date, and her job with us as a stepping stone, when even she knows the truth

“And that’s why I say the world is not right because I don’t fit into it,” she says, but then goes on to claim her efforts are not recognized “because I don’t have what it takes.”

Something far from true, although in the depth of her despair at that moment, she is blinded to all else – even though she is one of the most talented people I have ever met, a natural singer, a phenomenal artist, an amazing writer, and (though I have not witness this myself) perhaps even a gifted actress.

Her lack of faith in herself seems to have condemned her to failing.

“That’s why I find myself in this endless cycle, because I have built this defense against myself, against you, and against all of you who think you should give me anything at all.”

I am most likely the “you” in this, or at least one of them, and she steps off this stage with bitterness at having failed, yet refusing to let any of us aid her (since some of us may well be partly to blame for her failing, and perhaps more culpable than she is.)

At some point in the future, she will “rise above” it all, and get recognized, if not for what she thinks she deserves, then for something else she has earned.

But at current time (June 2013) she still hasn’t quite achieved it, which may well explain some of her more recent bitter poems. At some point, she will write another poem like the one she wrote when she first came to our office, and all her hopes will come true. But not yet, maybe not even too soon, but someday.

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