Nightmares

Had quite a nightmare last night that woke me up, which was tangentially about how I am being bullied by the narcissist, but was much deeper in content and meaning. I am extremely proud of my brain which fully processed my reflections before gently waking me up so I could write them down. I was able to take a big leap forward. 

The confusion and dissonance members are feeling is part of the intention. You are not supposed to have clear emotions and reactions to the subtle and manipulative words and behaviors. That takes strength and a lot of experience which I am glad for you if you don't have, complete with a list of narcissistic tactics you have undergone. 

But a lot of us do have that list. Mine is now four pages long. Some keep repeating. Being publicly trolled by someone who is supposed to be a professional, using the public record archival publications of your organization is just beyond the pale. It has happened so many times now that it will not be able to be hidden by tactics like not providing enough copies for everyone to see or not provideing it electronically. . History does not lie, and truth is always waiting in the wings.

And as an additional fun experience, we got to see another narcissist throw a fit when she was outbid on an auction item. She called it mean, whined a lot, and said she was leaving, though sadly she did not. This is the first time in maybe 20 years that we have seen such childish behavior at a fundraiser. Wow. Not her first fit, but the first one I had to sit through. 

Fortunately everything else that happened in two big hard days of retail was warming, fulfilling, and restored any faith I had lost in our community. We are strong, thoughtful and smart, and we are well loved. I had so many people tell me they came especially to see me. Two more days until the end of my 50th season of Saturday Market, a lifetime of learning, serving, working hard for the common good, learning about group process, and keeping myself sustained and joyous through thick and thin. So many wonderful people, and so few people from hell. I will be so glad to restore this offseason. 

And I will be ready for my 51st, if the creek don't rise.  

The Annual Meeting

I made myself laugh yesterday when I realized that the State of the Market address had to be written by Chat GPT. It bears little resemblance to our collective reality. The whole meeting was a glossy and fluffy overlay on what actually has happened in the last year and where we are now. If you know, you knew...if you don't, everything is fine. Glossy and fluffy shiny fine. 

About 50 people attended, but no attendance sheet went around, and no minutes were kept as far as I know. There wasn't an electronic version of the packet, or anyway I didn't get one. The Board Chair rewrote his report to add taking responsibility and apologizing again for the "dark chaos" as they are spinning the attempted legal corrections suggested at the beginning of last year for the things they were doing or not doing like not posting the meeting dates, gatekeeping the info members were getting, and the technical errors that pointed out the inability of the organization to keep track of itself. They drove out their scapegoats and congratulated themselves for how hard they worked. They do seem to be uniting into a real Board, working together, which is hopeful, but that glosses over the fact that no one who disagrees with things is welcome in the room. There is only "One Right Way," which incidentally is a feature of WSC. Check those fifteen characteristics lists and you will see a few things that tell you we are not being a progressive, open organization. Maybe we'll get back there someday. 

There was a blank page in place of a financial report. One exists, but even the 50 dedicated and interested members at the legally required Annual Meeting were not to be trusted with a financial report. My memory tells me that although the Chair's written report mentions last year's deficit, his oral report didn't, but I don't have a copy of the revisions. The Budget Committee Chair would have been happy to give a full report, but he was not permitted to prepare one. He gave a few veiled bullet points but as they were not written down I can't tell you what they were. The one I remember was a repeat of the concept that we need someone in the paid staff who can do the financial management, currently being done by volunteers, or not being done at all. We need an audit. We are being blocked from knowing how we are doing, which is the biggest, loudest Red Flag possible. 

And anecdotally, we members are struggling. I have not talked to one person who is doing better at HM than last year. I'm at about 2/3 of last year's sales, though there are lots of factors no doubt. I'm cutting my own spending in response, of course, and I usually try to spread a lot of cash around the market. It's not easy to manage 3 months of no sales over the winter. Selling in March at the Farmers is not possible for me and I don't sell online. Promises of riches from the new website are ludicrous. 

 I'm not going to bother going through the misleading reports. I still hold that volunteers are doing their best to participate in responsible group process and I am hesitant to fault any of them. I know exactly how hard it is to steer the big ship of Market. I know more than I want to know about it. I wish I could never think about it again.

But we have challenges that must be addressed. The farmers will be closing at 2:00 next season, so we have two hours of irrelevance if we don't program it well to keep the event going. Just having good bands won't help either. We need a lot of changes to our presentation and a huge shift in how we spend our money. All indications are that we are in a decline of income, headed straight to another loss year, and a pattern of doing little or nothing to change. 

This is not the fault of the membership. Another fee increase (no one seems to know what it will be, exactly, which suggests that there could be more than one) on top of our struggles to stay afloat will jettison some of us and harassment and distrust will drive away some others. 

Community building is hard...community destruction is easy. Just lie, manipulate, award your friends and kick out your "enemies." If someone questions things, love bomb them back into the cult, grant them some special favors, and take them out for "the three hour lunch" indoctrination. If that fails, destroy their credibility, keep them from getting real information, and sail around them using their suggestions as if you thought of them yourself. 

Call them a complainer spewing negativity. Works great.  

 

After the third weekend

In many ways, Holiday Market brings out the best of our members. In general, we are not competitive, each of us wishing for the success of all of us, the positive experiences of our visitors, the warmth of whatever season each of us is experiencing. We are mostly a beautiful group of generous, creative artisans and people who embrace the joy and ease we all want in life. We delight in each other. We truly work for a mutual benefit as our legal status describes us. I'm not just being ridiculously positive...I am in my 50th season of being a market member and I have known this week after week, in all of the random conversations and friendships developed over the years.  

At Holiday Market, the greater ease of not being impacted minute by minute by the weather allows us to visit more with our booth neighbors and share more of who we are in our larger lives. We talk about our families, our health, our discoveries of what has worked to solve our problems, our hopes, dreams and what we like to eat. We are having fairly intimate relationships all day every day, and sharing those with our customers too, who respond with their own amazing stories and reflections. I used to write about this a lot when things were better internally with the market. It's about life, loss, building and taking apart the lovely silk of our tapestry. 

But now the false narratives being spread by those in power who don't love us are causing rifts and damage that will take a long time to repair. We are told our members are "mean" and all of our staff who have left have gone because of that. We are told to praise staff and support them but nothing is said about our support for our fellow members, our mutual appreciation network that is so important. The latest false narrative I heard this weekend was that our financial troubles are caused by members who abuse the honor system by not paying their fair fees. So anyone who reports low earnings is dishonest and a liar and cheat. Confidential information is being shared about some who are suspected of this. Well, honor is personal and everyone does get a choice about how honorable and honest they are, but we have definitely seen in that area and in all areas, people support the market in direct relation to how they feel they are being supported.

I'm a goody-goody and I can afford to pay honest fees, and always have. If I sell after I pay, I make it up the following week. However, I have pulled all of my extra support, such as the donations I have regularly made, my at-cost deals for printing services, my secretarial duties which at times amounted to doing the work of staff as a volunteer. Sometimes it was an insane amount of time invested, like during the last two staffing crises when I was essentially the unpaid assistant manager and my job of overseeing the organization became the hands-on doing of the tasks. When I felt supportive of what was being done, I made those sacrifices of my time (which amounted to not working on my own business and life) because my skills were needed and I enjoyed being part of things, making my contributions. 

At times I was trapped into it, but set aside my reluctance and did my duty. My real Duty of Loyalty and Care is to the organization, regardless of my official title or lack of one, as I have the real need to make a living and the emotional need to make sure the legacy of what has come before is protected and shepherded into the future. So many thousands of people need the market, not just the artisans and musicians, but the greater community and the city itself. We are an important tourist destination and gathering place for every kind of human activity that happens in a society. We are each an essential part of the fabric.

So to have the message go out that we don't care about honor and honesty is rough. What I see is that people have to go home with something for their long day and if they have to make a choice about life costs and fair fees, they sometimes rationalize. Maybe they'll make it up in better times. Maybe they'll do some labor instead of giving money. Maybe they are in survival mode or are staving off suicidal ideation and just have to pay that electric bill, and are out of options. We have always said that is why we are open on days that are not necessarily profitable for the market. We know there are people who need that $30 they make or that encouragement to keep going. We have always been as compassionate as possible about keeping people in the community and helping them survive, even if they might not be as nice and loving about it in return as we want them to be. It's a lot of humans, and not everyone is at their best every Saturday or Sunday. Things are going on we know nothing about for them.

So to have a narcissist in charge is super challenging. Narcissists always put themselves first. Their needs transcend your needs and they must have control to an excessive degree, so they have no problem making things all about them. Every week in the newsletter you can feel the slant, and the absence of all of us. At the committee and other meetings the agendas are driven, sometimes secretly, by the needs and desires of the narcissist. Gaslighting and outright lies are common to frame things in the way the narcissist has strategized to get their short and long-term goals met. You might get what you need, but you will likely have to jump through some at times humiliating hoops. You can ask, but it is clearly the whim of the person in power whether or not your requests will have importance. We've seen that over and over and I hear many reports firsthand about these hoops, many of which I have experienced until I started acting like a grey rock when they came my way. I had to work hard to separate and refuse to engage with the narcissistic demands. I have to avoid a lot of subtle things that are supposed to drag me back into supplying emotional gratification for a person who enjoys running control trips on others and delights in seeing people struggle.

If you haven't interacted with a narcissist you maybe won't recognize the clear habits and tactics of this personality disorder. It seems sadly true that it takes personal experience with manipulation for someone to recognize it, to develop that spidey sense in their bodies when they feel humiliated or lied to or managed in those ways. More and more people are feeling it, but it is hard to admit when you are a victim, and much easier to believe the charm offensives, the pretension and to believe the lies in the  house of cards built by someone acting in their own self-interest. Do some research.

They always have to be right, and if you challenge them, they have ways to reframe, outright lie, or give excuses to what you have questioned. They don't admit mistakes, but cover them up with some effort to fix what they broke and take credit for the triumph. They will extend their self-interest to seem to include others, but it depends on the loyalty and gullibility of those people whether or not they get the benefits of the insiders. There is an inner circle and you feel special when you are invited into it. There are rewards and gifts and what seems like generosity and self-sacrifice, but there is always a motive to it. It took me a long while to identify some of the physical "tells" of the interactions. They will appear to listen as they delve into your personal history and vulnerabilities, and appear to share stories that elevate your compassion for them. They count on your empathy and will cry, appear to suffer, and plead for your help. The thing is, you have to comply. If you refuse, they get demanding, mean, and will retaliate. To be safe with a predator, you either have to get up close and help them attack their prey, protect them from accountability, or disengage completely, at which point they will spread false information about you to undermine whatever personal power you have.

After I withdrew my support and starting working against this power structure, there has been a lot of gossip and effort to portray me and this writing as just complaining, negativity, and the ranting of a disaffected old person who is slipping. I've been warned to stop writing here, something I have been doing for over 15 years and something I have every right to do. The one rule I have with my personal nonfiction writing is to tell the truth. This is what a writer does. This is a sacred activity that the world depends on, a form of communication that takes an important role in uncovering deception and bad will and holds people feet to the fire. 

At the same time, as it is personal, it is my truth. I don't feel compelled to make anyone believe it, though I tried a few times to educate people in the power structure about the ways they were being pushed to do things that were not ethical and were destroying what we have built with the market. They have mostly chosen to kill the messenger and bully me in some cases, so there are a few people I won't engage with now about their roles, or in some cases, at all. But many of them are still friends, and we interact on those levels with our longterm relationships in mind. The narcissist won't be in power forever. I've worked with maybe 20 managers over the five decades. We've had a range. The poor ones drove people to leave in frustration, and some come back when they see the changes of better ones. 

In 1989 when Bill was hired, we had about 350 members as some, like me, had stepped back from participating with the team that ended up unintentionally losing $4500 of our dollars to some really terrible financial procedures. By 1994, with Bill in charge, we had 800 members. There was a time we discovered we were $25,000 in the red and the managers threw up their hands and said they just weren't good with the money. We liked them, but we fired them. We fired people for playing favorites, for just not being skilled enough to do the job, and for stealing from us. It happens. We have some weak systems a good manager fixes and a bad manager takes advantage of. We're pretty easy to manipulate. We operate with a lot of trust.

Our city has seen some shocking mismanagement, like the embezzlements from the Weekly, Homes for Good, and OUR credit union in the past. It happens all the time. Every time there are people who are shocked, who trusted those people, who thought they were nice, good and caring people with the common good at heart. This is the modus operandi. This is how it works. You don't have evidence until you look for it. You have to convince a lot of people, and yourself, that what you are sensing is valid.

People ask me why I don't take what I am saying to The Weekly or somewhere that can help us. I chose when I resigned not to blow things up completely, but I may have made the wrong choice. I didn't think it would take this long for the truth to come out of what we are most likely experiencing, and some of us are absolutely experiencing. Anecdotal evidence is mounting of people whose money has been mishandled, or have not gotten the services they are paying for. One person I know has not been listed as selling for three weeks now, despite repeated efforts to make that happen. The database rebuild is not working as promised, hasn't fixed what was broken, and will not address some of the biggest issues we have in our structure. Our savings are soon going to be more than halved after decades of not touching them. I feel our very mutual benefit nonprofit structure is a target, to take away the power of the members. Membership organizations are messy, sometimes chaotic, and hard to control. This is intolerable to the narcissitic personality. I am chilled by something she said to me when she was taking over: "I can't wait to get my hands on this organization and start making changes." 

I sure wish I had known what that would look like. I've always said one person could not kill the market, and I still believe that, but I failed to realize how one person could convince a lot of people to help them do it. I've always believed in us with my whole heart. I guess I was just too generous in my definition of "us." 

Priorities

Maybe just a short post to point out that we are heading into a second year of overspending because we have a GM who doesn't know how to manage a budget or follow the set priorities of the organization. She will not allow the Budget Committee to even discuss those priorities without going off, screaming at the one person who is doing her job by putting together the facts of the spending and financial ill health of our organization. That's right, if you speak the truth to her, she will have a tantrum to shut you up.

Is this the kind of unprofessional behavior that should be supported? All of the people so adamant about supporting staff are accepting the ultimatums and gaslighting and control techniques that she uses on the volunteers who are trying to keep our organization afloat. It is not that hard to identify control tactics! Google it.

Historically, although it is not ideal, we have had to make cuts to stay solvent, whether those be in advertising, entertainment, security, or staffing. It has to happen. No one wants to lose trained staff, to make them go on unemployment for a couple of months, to make some of them find second jobs to cover their expenses when we simply do not have the income to support the expenditures. However, there are lots of young, smart managers out there, with event management training, nonprofit experience, and the energy and intelligence to make our organization thrive again. 

By the conclusion of this year, if we keep going as she wants to, we will have spent 60% of our equity to cover the overspending. Since we don't have much in actual assets, this means we will have spent 2/3 of the savings we accumulated over the past 3 decades, in two short years. It's about $200,000.

We started trying to save in the late 80s after we had a budget crisis when we found out we were $25,000 in the red. We held fundraising efforts for two years to make that up, get us back on track, and we hired people who could actually manage money. That was our priority, to be solvent. Yes it was hard work, but that is why we have a market today. 

Homeowners...would you spend your equity down to foreclosure? Anyone, would you spend your savings to make fancy hand-drawn personal maps for 600 members to fix something that was not broken? Would you keep pouring money into a website rebuild when it is not even functional enough to support our current Holiday Market event that all of us depend on to get through the winter months?

Are you ready to begin the next season with even higher fees and lower sales? Misspelled and  grammatically embarrassing promotions tell the world we have staff that doesn't know how to proofread or write coherent sentences. Everything is either amazing or unique. I had to apologize to our former employee who always did such a perfect job for us. We agreed it is cringe to be represented as an organization that is hardly even literate. We're not even listed in the Weekly calendar, which takes a few minutes to make happen.

I know our volunteers think everything is all right and don't want to see what the world is seeing. Members are seeing it but those with the power to do anything about it want to kill the messengers, so people are afraid to speak up and become targets. Many people have walked away to do other events where they are welcomed, treated with respect, and supported. We have gone from an org that supports our members to one that supports only top staff, only one person who lies and manipulates and when exposed, gets violent. And her family members, and her friends.

Ask yourself who is the source of what you think you know about our situation. It took me a long time to realize the carefully crafted false narratives put out piece by piece to create division (we have never been a membership that fights with itself) and demonize anyone who asks hard questions or has a different opinion. People might be simply repeating something less than true that came from the liar in charge.  

Say goodbye to the Market because until all of our money is gone, this won't stop. It's a nightmare. That $25 downtown activity permit looks better and better.