Milkwhite Malevolence

There is a literary tradition - and, of course, an actual history - of a kind of purity perverted. A purity of festered piety, a purity of bigoted and/or self-righteous entitlement, a purity of lily-white and trembling vessels, not of the milk of human kindness, but of the venom of terrified xenophobia. I talked with someone like this recently; it was, itself, a kind of terrifying moment.

The literary characters often seem to have wide, clear eyes, clear, pallid skin, and a hermetic life experience which renders them inflexible either to the point of brittleness, or disastrous cruelty. The reality might be many things, but it seems, unscientifically, as if these days, it manifests oftenest in self-righteousness.

How the conversation turned to teenage mothers, I don't know, but I stumbled upon this purity of hatred when I said that no thirteen-year-old girl can be held responsible for this. The wide, pale eyes alit, and I was told, "You would be surprised" and flatly contradicted. Apparently, this person had been acquainted at some point with a real slut of a thirteen year old girl; and she was not to be told that that does not occur naturally.

No, there are thirteen year old girls, it seems, who must be held to task for THEIR behavior.

The point that, perhaps, the girl this person had known might not have had the advantages her passionate (and creepy) judge had had was not one to make with much hope. The resentment and rigidity could not be released.

I don't know if this person was cheated on with a thirteen year old girl, or if their experience was so fundamentalist growing up that the legal and moral attitudes of generations long gone by survived intact somehow. There was no clarity on how this purity of anger had become what I saw before me. Opaque ... as milk.


I was a coward, and didn't push for a conversion. It seemed to me useless to mention that legally no child is held so bitterly responsible as this person had presumed to impose culpability. Sometimes, running into a wall, I suppose I shatter - a brittleness of my own, thrown against the implacability of ignorant superiority. I don't even know what to do with it, thinking of it.

Only this - as a writer, I will fight against anger of this kind. With those I can hope to speak with, I will. In myself, I'll set what example I can ...


Milk or venom ... I can hope for nourishment, not poison. I can spill one, and serve the other.

People are so fascinating.

It's a pity that's so often so sad.

Balance

The recent past has brought me to the realization that I have a funny war within me - and one nobody who's known me long probably could have predicted, but some who know me well might go "ahh - huh" and nod at before going on with their own attritions.

The years of my childhood were not marked by the shining light of my ambition. I came to professional - and even, in a certain way, personal - ambition over the course of a long period, which is a strange way to be "ambitious" in the first place; and at relatively advanced age, which indicates the war for you. Growing up, and even still, my contrarian nature was resistant to all. To effort, to learning, to self-expectation, to material "reward" for concentrating and *doing*. For years, even after leaving college and entering the workforce, I was happy just to set my goal at "make a living" and stop there. I had embarked on my career as a secretary (back when it was still called that without squicking) not with interest nor consideration, but, at first, because that's what women were still, even in the 1980s, allowed to choose to expect of themselves and be done with it and, eventually, because enough years' exposure to actors taught my quite well that my early ideas of being one myself would be insufferable to me. I had "always" thought I would be a great actor - and, of course, the only reason for this was an interest in excesses of fame and finance with what I felt would be minimum requirements of me. In a world where The Dating Game launched the careers of a serial killer, multiple Hollywood starlets, and one Austrian governor of California, it seemed obvious somehow that Being Famous was the way to go.

I thank Christ nearly daily for withholding this fantasy from me.

Anyway, so I worked for a living and shifted my "ambition", for a while, to Beloved Ex - who was, you see, going to be a Huge Rock Star, and could (a) do all the work for me and (b) propel me to my own goals, in some amorphous way - when The Right person saw my face and was seduced by its glory.

Aherem.

My typing got better, my attitude was a little deeper subsumed, I figured I was paying my dues, and - in the way that I have - I didn't consider things more deeply, nor allow non-stellar aspects of life to mean very much to me.

Except that they did. They always do, of course.

So it is no accident that the period of time when I finally set a task for myself - spiritual growth of SOME kind, I didn't know what - coincided with the period in which I finally became an ambitious worker.

In the space of something like 36 months, if I remember the stats I used to brag to my mother, I something-like doubled my salary. I moved from a menial admin spot nowhere in particular to a job where I took on actual responsibilities. My manager in that role was about the best I've ever known: she spotted her team's strengths AND iterests, and played to them in our jobs. She had me writing a newsletter. She put me togehter with our IT guy, and I became the person to turn to when he wasn't available. She put me in front of clients.

I was putting out 72 issues at top circulation, keeping everyone on deadline, writing and editing for our president, and filling eight pages every single month. I learned thirteen softwares in the space of a single year. I was customer service for our orphan clients, those without agents for whatever reason.

And somehow - I still genuinely have no idea how it happened - for the first time in my life, I Got Seen. It wasn't by a Hollywood agent (it was, unfortunately, actually by a guy with the worst managerial record I have ever encountered), but it may have been the most important thing that ever happened in my career. I heard the famous code, "Do you know anyone who would be interested in such-and-such-fancy-well-paid-position" and ended up taking the job.

That I stayed in it less than six months - and the employer was making the cover of the WSJ in the worst possible manner the MONTH I left the place - goes beside the point. I found a way to move up. I discovered how much I enjoyed making a great professional impression. I took a job I fully, outright OWNED, and learned more sophisticated relationship management and higher-level administrative skills. I still completely adore the boss I had then, and his totally delightful wife. He will never, ever know how grateful I am to this day for having come to work for him.

September 11 came, and I went eight months without a job. Finally, I got one - temping. And moved up. And moved up again. And moved up AGAIN.

In the seven or so years after my separation from Beloved Ex, I poured on the coal. I pushed my income from $12 an hour, to $34k a year, to $40 in just one year. For my next trick, I nabbed a boss in the position to give bonuses. And he did. This, after I stepped on his FOOT walking out of the interview. Another man whose willingness to hire me was such a blessing, and one I've advertised without stint to his next assistant as the finest stripe of human she could ever hope to work for.

The next job was, for me, the first time since 1994 I encountered absolute frustration professionally. The company who last employed me still maintains a culture in which it is not merely inconceiveable, but very much discouraged, to be simultaneously intelligent and an admin. I was wrong for them, and boy were they wrong for me.

And these days - as we know - I have to force myself to grow smarter every day, to keep up with my position. I love it, and am fulfilled and stupidly fortunate, exceedingly happy.

Ambition is a growing thing.


***


And that brings me to the war I have roiling.

I say it was no accident this part of myself developed and thrived just as I was seeking spiritual growth ...

And yet.

The later lesson has been the reverse of all those my career has been at pains to teach me.

As I matured as an administrator, I learned how important it is to control and to play and plan for variables. I have taken pride in ... taking pride. I have fought hard to become the competent and CONFIDENT woman who, just today, threw out one brilliant innovation for our process flow this morning, then topped it off with a luncheon in which I threw in my two cents or so in a group meeting with a Senior VP.

These things are important.

And so I have lost the value of a more Taoist side of life - an outlook not actually at odds with my work and my strength of personality, but one which is, at least apparently - and certainly in its practice - antithetical to it.

It would be poor plotting to return to the underachiever I was when I was younger.

But that girl did have a few things, mentally, going for her. And those things are spiritual. That aspect of my self which doesn't pay the mortgage, but pets the dog and reassures her. The surrender to wei wu wei - "do not do" - the priority which uses the power of acceptance and peace, not to push through life, but to love what it IS in its most important essence, and to recognize how what IS is a blessing, and how striving for what ISN'T can be such a curse.

Big brother ... I can't remember which of us learned the concept as wu wei, and which as wei wu wei. My memory is that I learned it two-word, and you and I discussed the implications and importance of making it three ...

The short blah-dee-blah here is: my life of late has been a lesson in "leave it in the laps of the gods" - as Freddie Mercury has put it. Or, as my current boss has written on my whiteboard (have I mentioned I need to get smarter EVERY day? it's because I work for this genius - ugh!), introito ad altare dei.

Love that guy. Heh.

LET GO.

With my heart four thousand miles away, with the novel in a state of indecision, with comfort all around me but uncertainties abounding - as life likes to offer them - with, frankly, my overweening pride in myself and expectations of What I Deserve, it ain't easy shutting up and not trying to manipulate certain things to suit my preferences.

To just shut up.

To *trust*.

To put anything before myself.

To look at what is missing, and realize what it IS, and feel blessed and grateful, instead of seeing only what is not ...


***


It feels as if the war is abating.



Peace be with you, too. With or without cutthroat ambition!

Strength

I've been musing much, this year, on the relative virtues of strength. Many people go on, as if enshrining someone, about "he is so strong" or "she is a strong woman, nothing breaks her."

Mostly, though, strength is just the only option.

I endured a period of years when people marveled at my strength. Waiting for E, who lives four thousand miles away, seemed to many - particularly women, of course - some sort of personal feat. I believe it got romanticized somewhat. Then, of course, he lived too far away for too long - and he ended up demonized. But that's a different post.

The point is, "waiting" was not an active pursuit for me. I wasn't building up some sort of moral muscle in myself. I wasn't pining particularly (still not, really). It's just: E is the man I love. He's four thousand miles away. The only option was this "strength" people were once so impressed by. The only other was to buckle, and why would anyone do that?

Strength is easy to come by. Frankly, it'd be harder to fail to develop some. Life is a daily exercise in building toleration, ability, even a bit of personal power. Strength is the inevitable result of getting up every day, and not choosing to be defeated.



It is COURAGE I admire. That is a virtue worth reaching for - and one you do have to reach for, after all. It isn't the clear end of ordinary action, and it takes more thought than strength (which can so often be negative; how many people whose strength of conviction do you know, whose convictions terrify you??). Courage is what you get after three years have gone by, your love is still half a planet away, and people begin abandoning you as a madwoman or a stubborn old biddy. Courage is what you have to learn when, having begged G-d for years to relieve you of an attachment so many think is unhealthy, G-d says, "abide; stay more" ...

One of the best authors in the world, Donald Harington, has much to say on the subject of staying more. On the subject of love. Go find him, I'll wait.

Courage is what you have to have when you're past forty and looking for fellowship. Courage is what you have to have as a woman without a family. Courage is what you have to have to suffer the disease of vanity, and to age contentedly with it. I am prideful, I am shallow, I am many embarrassing things. But I give myself credit for courage, for something more than strength.

I'm grateful G-d gave me even the small portion of it I do have. I wonder, often, whether the people who think they know me best realize how big my supposedly empty heart really is. I wonder whether contentment is the only reward, really - contentment only, without ever reaching satisfaction.

(Contentment is another one of those half-measures - like strength to courage, contentment's got nothing on satisfaction ... But, again, another post perhaps; if that sentence doesn't say it all, simply.)

With age, I have shed fear. With the absence of so much "everyone" things is necessity, in my life, I've been forced to the ambition of my own necessities. With the strange priorities I set for myself, I have learned how to reach, for myself, what most people never even want. I am so strong.

And I'm a little bit brave, to boot. Imagine it.



Daddy asked me, that day when I was four years old and in the hospital for stitches: "Who is my big, brave girl?"

I am, dad.

I am.