Overreach

 One thing about narcissists is they will definitely overreach...they feel so invincible and have so carefully constructed their perimeter and filled their foreground with sycophants. We are seeing this in the macrocosm brutally right now with what will be thousands of lives lost in a mad rush to avoid accountability. It's more than sickening and many of us have levels of fear that can't be tamped down. We know about the warehouses. We are paying attention. 

I took advantage of a sucker hole in the skies this morning to ride my bike downtown for bread and to put up a couple of Jell-O Show posters. I hadn't been on my bike much at all since December and only a time or two in January, and was worried I didn't have the grip strength yet for the brakes. Also I hate to be cold and I really had to just make myself do it. And it went very well, no problems with my body and only a little bit of rain. I didn't dilly-dally so I just made it before it got wet again. Nothing I feared happened. 

I am one who often lets my fears keep me from things, despite all the ways I know how to not do that, and how it always proves that the fears or anxiety were the worst parts of the experience. I remember seeing a general fear in many people older than me and now I do know more of what they were fearful of, but sensible or not, the fear can be a robbery. This will be a constant battle for me for whatever life I have remaining, I am guessing, but I can also try hard not to drag other people into my fear scenarios.

But what if...? Well, it isn't happening now, so let's just take a step. We can always step back to safety. And if we can't, we have skills and we know other people who have skills. 

Safety for some of us took a long time to establish as we just had to keep testing and trying. When I think back on some of the things I did when I was younger, I really wonder about my motivations. They tend to be more clear now, but not always. Fear is just built into a world full of domination and predation. We can do our best at avoidance, with that accompanying loss, but stuff still happens that we do not want to take on. Yet we have to, and we will. 

I so admire people who stride forward with confidence and courage. It's okay with me that it is often just a goal, because at least it is something I can imagine, if not quite enact. It is probably sometimes scary for those people too, but something is an override for them. Protecting the weak or innocent, preserving something irreplaceable, or just seeing injustice and not being able to live with it, are all reasons people act. Seldom are we called to dive into freezing water but sometimes we can imagine cases where we would do that. I remember when we were rafting when my son was little and he fell off. I didn't even think before falling off with him, even though of course that was not what the guide thought was a good idea at all. For him, two people to rescue, but for me, only one. I didn't even have a thought first, as I remember it, but I expect I did. It was I am connected to my child. A simple thought. 

But it is not always that clear, and sometimes we just have to realign with our values and take those small steps forward. I made a lot of rules for myself in the past few years of navigating my organizations and community, that were based in my values but were mostly about protecting my own self, from predation but also from the ways I know that I could serve to be inadequate.

For instance, I am not a good liar. I have intentionally not developed better lying skills...my own level of self-delusional thinking is plenty on that score, and I catch myself rationalizing and in denial as much as anyone. But trying to deceive another person for my own purposes, not interesting to me. So even though I know that to be honest makes me vulnerable, and it's regularly inconvenient and misunderstood, I just adopted being honest as a core value. I remember doing that a few times. There's a haunting page in my autograph book from about age five, from the mom of my best friend, that read "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive." It's haunting because it hit home hard, and immediately, and I could not quote any other page in that little book. I worked on that. 

And not because I was raised Catholic with a side dish of bad boy mischief, though that main dish of guilt and shame I was served repeatedly was what built my bones, but because I did have a wish to be loved, and she was one of the kind adults I needed to love me. She probably did. I've always been loved far more than I believed I deserved to be. Probably hated that way, too...to be honest.

So I do have a sense of justice about the truth, if not the skills to know how to deal with the liars and cheats. I've heard myself say things like "ordinary people can't fix this." I saw what happened in South Korea with the guy who tried to seize power, when so many people just came out and stood there, witnessing, that the situation was decided and proceeded to justice. I read writers every day who want this to happen in this country, and I know many people do, but it isn't happening. All of us ordinary people are too scared. And it will be inconvenient. 

It isn't happening in the microcosm either. Despite the widespread knowledge of insider politics in a couple of my organizations, they keep succeeding in doing their damage. Interestingly, they often use the language and methods of oppressive cultures like white supremacy culture and we fail to put the pieces together and call it out. We are assured that efficiency, common practice, and professionalism are the reasons that things are done, not sense of urgency, power of the few, and only one right way kinds of thinking. Most Americans are so far out of touch with racism and control tactics that it is easy for them to just "assume the best" of the leaders and push down dissent or their own feelings of discomfort when they know something is not quite just or fair. There are always plenty of reasons. But that is being so rapidly destroyed by the insanity of the overreach that it even seems hopeful that the oppression will fall apart. Sometimes evil doesn't win. 

And the situations seldom seem important enough to just stop, call them out, and deal with them in a better way. I read in the FFN a letter from the Secretary of the org saying that something their board was doing was unethical and uncommon, and it disenfranchised the members. It didn't change the outcome and I haven't listened to any discussion at the meeting but I heard that some used justifications that they made up and tried to present them as the thoughts of someone who recently died. It sounded like it was beyond shameless. I wonder how many voices were raised. More to the point, what will they do next time? Probably they will change the policies to put the practice into a firmer space, like the bylaws. That's a common tactic for entrenched power. "Let's just change the rules so we can do what we want to do."

And because things like policy are complex, it takes everyone else awhile to catch on to it, if they even bother. So many qualified volunteers have walked away from unfair power dynamics that some of these organizations are hollow enough to resonate like a fallen rotting tree. 

Alarms are so loud for me that I experience dissonance every day, am numbed a lot of the time, and just resort to work to ease my discomfort, trying hard to limit input and keep trying to operate as the work piles up. I constantly feel like I might be doing things for the last time. I made myself stop climbing the apple tree...someday I will have to make myself stop climbing the ladder to the roof. Someday I will have to give away my bike. And my trailer. And everything in this house, and my shop, for that matter.

But I don't have to do all that today. I planned a course for something knotty I have to do, and took the first couple of steps, and I will keep working on it no matter how scary it gets. I know I am safe writing about it in my journal, even if I'm no longer safe here, and can't call anyone to talk me down. I know I can do the whole task, when I break it up into steps to take one at a time. I've been here before.

And I will go downtown and stand there when the time really comes. Maybe I'll let myself get herded into the warehouse with the rest of my compatriots. We'll have all the good songs.

Hold On