What the Hell is This?

So I fired Beth. In the middle of Week Five.

I couldn’t really fire her, since she was going through the book with me as part of a sort of internship — but I did decide to discontinue our “work” together. (She has one other client, so it won’t interfere with the completion of her practicum.)

Why? For a couple of reasons.

One, she couldn’t seem to keep from bringing up the fact, every week, that I wasn’t paying her. My resultant discomfort (from, perhaps, the tacit accusation of taking advantage) led to a dynamic in which I felt pressured to produce certain results — to “put out,” if you will — in order to compensate her for her gratis time and effort. (Yet giving a stranger intimate access to one’s emotional life, personal difficulties, and vulnerabilities is as much an act of generosity as giving away unlicensed coaching…isn’t it?)

In addition, she would become impatient and interrupt me (not unlike my socially and emotionally obtuse father) while I was in the middle of trying to illustrate (what I thought was) a relevant point with an example. “You go off telling these stories,” she scolded me, “and I’m trying to get you through The Process!” This made me feel badly, triggering that searing chest-wound of shame (Bad child! Don’t speak out of turn!). At the same time, she had no problem using our limited and ticking minutes to tell her own “stories,” and then turn around and claim that “Spirit” was leading her to do so. (Claiming Spirit-led exceptions for one’s obnoxious behavior was something with which I was intimately familiar.) The morning after our fourth session, I woke up furious.

I wearied myself all that week going over and over in my mind what I might say to Beth in order to best communicate my hurt so that we could continue in good faith, using that laborious “I-statement” conflict resolution procedure that is in itself a gesture of openness and generosity.

Then one morning my Facebook friend Patrick (a former senior director at work who was fired for inappropriate canoodling with an underling) posted this quote from a poem by Frank O’Hara:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again…

And it struck me like a Zen master’s whack on the side of the head: I had been dissecting myself to death in the name of perfection again, and largely for someone else’s benefit. I had been giving myself over to this rather careless and self-righteous “expert” in order to be “fixed” so that I could finally be lovable and she could get her coaching certificate.

Lying on my bed staring up at the origami love-cranes I’d hung from the ceiling, I thought about the O’Hara quote, and about how even in our flawed (“catastrophic”) state we can be lovable to someone. Lisa Brown had already given me the answer I‘d been seeking months ago when she told me I had done all the work I could do on my own. You don’t have to feel 100 percent lovable to have a loving relationship. Go out there and start making connections. I didn’t need this fricking “Process,”  which was supposed to serve me, anyway — not the other way around!

As soon as I decided to terminate with Beth, I felt immense relief and a restored peace of mind. I would no longer have to explain or defend myself against her criticism, or excavate old ground so I could proffer up ostensibly new “gems” to make it all worth her while.

Because I wasn’t supposed to eat up her valuable unpaid time with extra phone calls, I sent her a breakup email. I told her that I had decided not to continue, that I felt I was actually going backwards, and I wished her well with her other client.

**

Her response was a lesson in itself.

Her initial and immediate reaction was of course a distraught Why, why? so I explained a little bit of the above to her, including that persistent unpleasant sense of being beholden, as well as Lisa’s insight and my “aha” moment with the O’Hara quote.

That’s when the obsessive behavior began. I guess you could say I finally got a taste of my old medicine.

Beth started emailing me and calling me…first sending out one very long plea late that night (apologizing, defending her actions, and trying to convince me with almost evangelical fervor that I needed The Process) and then another (with more of the same) in the morning (when I discovered both emails). She also left me two extended phone messages that afternoon (while I was on a long bike trip) — calling back as soon as my voice mail cut her off, and going on for another five minutes.

I was still contemplating how I might best respond to this tsunami of verbiage when I arrived home and found yet another long email waiting for me, in which she attempted to “hold me with love and let me go all at the same time” — even while pleading, at length, that I reconsider.

All of this before I had been able to respond once. In less than twenty-four hours.

It didn’t matter how psychologically conversant her prose sounded or how enlightened her concepts appeared: her actions themselves screamed of desperation, if not glaring emotional instability. It brought home to me once and for all just how off-putting and even alarming over-pursuing someone can be. As was the case with my mother’s letter, I recognized myself in Beth’s behavior. I recognized my panicky denial of rejection, as well as my fruitless striving to rewrite (probably unrelated and ancient) history and gain redemption, in Beth’s passionate and overwhelming torrent of psychobabble.

I recalled what Tony the surly music critic once said to me, at the poetry-writing, cookie-baking (don’t ask) height of my intractable three-year obsession with him. “When you chase someone this hard,” he told me, “it’s never about the other person.” At the time I protested: But of course it’s about you, Tony! You’re unlike anyone else in the world! We have an amazing connection! You’re the only one I want! Now suddenly I understood what he meant.

I wrote Beth back, repeating Tony’s words of wisdom, and asked her to please let me go.

She let me go.

**

In the meantime, my dynamic and idealistic young candidate, the Boy Wonder of our state House, our David with a slingshot, lost the primary election to the incumbent Goliath, a DNC-endorsed millionaire with additional millions in corporate and PAC money.

Overnight, all that excitement, all that momentum, all those bright, optimistic, committed people who worked 14-hour days and called strangers and walked precincts and accompanied me across the parking lot daily at four o’clock to get coffee were scattered to the four winds.

It was a shock. Volunteers and campaign workers came staggering out of the rented party venue on election night with dazed, hurt looks on their faces. Some of them were crying. I was one of them.

It was over. But we had been three points ahead! Even with one-fifth of the campaign money of our opponent, the latest poll had shown us ahead. I felt sick to my stomach.

The best man had not won.

I grieved to think of how I had already grown to love working for my friend Danny, the financial team supervisor, a beautiful giant of a gay man in his thirties as genial as he is tall. I also wondered whether I would ever see Mark, the Big Fish, again. If he had ever wanted to ask me out, now there would be no question of impropriety. (I had actually dreamt about him rather innocuously asking me to go to a movie.) I also wondered what the hell I was going to do now.

**

For two weeks I made phone calls to old leads, and sent out “cold” resumes and applications to no avail. In the end, I reluctantly followed Danny to an international market research firm, where for the first time in my life I was hired out of hand — no interview — purely based on the recommendation of someone else. It was affirmative action for the well-connected. I got to experience a little bit of what it’s like to be named Bush.

I was fast-tracked into the “elite” interviewing team, a position which usually requires at least a year of grinding away in the thankless entry-level “mass market” department doing cold call surveys for Coca-Cola. For this reason Danny and I have several coworkers who despise us on principle. (Whatever you may think of me, Danny is probably the least hate-worthy person on the planet. It’s like directing vitriol and bile at Mr. Rogers.) Of course this is stressful for a people-pleaser like me.

Equally stressful is trying to get through to high-level executives all day, from 7 in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon, and attempting to con them (or their executive assistants) into thinking that what we are trying to get them to do is something other than a glorified survey. This is probably my least favorite type of work: massaging the wealthy and powerful while using strategic “spin” to gain their cooperation. I feel anxious all day long, putting on my confident “professional voice” and playing phone actress. Not to say that it doesn’t work: I’ve already had considerable success, scheduling three interviews in my first day where newcomers often go three days without one.

But I don’t like it. At all. Not only is it not enjoyable, I can find no redeeming value in it whatsoever. At least at the call center I could remind myself that I was helping causes I cared about. I could speak honestly and passionately about the issues. Now I’m actually working on behalf of clients I believe are part of the global problem. The whole endeavor is an exercise in internal dissonance.

I keep telling myself, It’s a paycheck. It’s a paycheck. It’s a paycheck. In the meantime I’m devouring library books about career reinvention and how to find creative ways to survive and thrive in any economy.

**

The vanquished campaign had a final party, asking for donations at the door to help retire its debt. I attended, but many of my closest coworkers like Danny didn’t make it. I did see Mark, but as usual he was surrounded by admirers. He made his way over to my part of the room momentarily only to be spirited away. Nevertheless I had plenty of people to talk to.

I must mention that after almost two years of never seeing Jonah, that founder of our local independent media company on whom I once had a fierce crush, I am lately running into him everywhere. Curiously, I’ve only seen him at events to which I’ve RSVP’d on Facebook (which he can see, as my “friend”). He came to the theatre production I mentioned earlier this summer, and then to a mutual friend’s art opening in July. He came to another by-invitation event a few weeks ago, and now here he was at the party.

“Jonah!” I exclaimed. “You’re everywhere!”

Am I making too much of the coincidence? On each occasion, we’ve chatted a bit. This time we both waxed regretful about the misguided negative ad campaign. Nowadays, to tell you the truth, Jonah makes me a little melancholy. When I met him seven years ago, he seemed beautiful from the inside out: he had a certain inner radiance that shone out of his dark eyes and made his already comely exterior irresistible. Now he’s more of a nice-looking shell: the light is gone, and with it, what made him irresistible. It’s a noticeable loss.

I wonder sometimes if this is the work of psychotropic drugs like antidepressants. One of the loveliest young men in my graduating class, a beautiful boy who was similarly radiant, but in a more delicate way, had likewise become a “shell” by the time of our ten-year reunion. He had been medicated for chronic depression ever since his nervous breakdown shortly after graduation. Was it the trauma, I wondered, or the dulling effect of the pharmaceuticals?

Jonah mentioned being hungry (he had missed the party food) and said he was going to go get something to eat. Should I have invited myself along? Well, never mind…I’m no longer going to overcompensate for male ambivalence and/or passivity. I wouldn’t say no to Jonah if he actually were following me around, though. I’d be interested to see if I could kindle a flicker.

**

My best friend from high school, an Ivy-educated Ph.D, made my day. Her Cornell classmate, a successful professional writer, just published an armchair-travel book, and my friend found herself thinking while reading it, “(AlienBaby) would be so much better at this!”

Then my beloved former yoga teacher Lynne, a Doctor of Psychology currently living in England, who publishes in journals, suggested that I write a book about my eclectic work experiences because she would want to read it. “You have a real way with words.”

That these highly intelligent and educated women are encouraging me, at this insecure and downbeat juncture, with such high praise for my writing, has reinforced my growing conviction that I cannot avoid my real passion/calling for much longer. (While writing this post, hours have passed in what felt like minutes; at the market research firm, minutes pass in what feel like hours.)

What I’m grappling with is the what and the how.

**

Speaking of passion…while I was explaining to Jeannie my lifelong soft spot for weirdos, outcasts, the destitute, the homeless, the economically or ethnically disadvantaged, and any otherwise downscale or dubious characters who happen to seek my attention (she had had a little freakout when I gave a five dollar bill to a skinny, toothless, ghoulish-looking man who approached us in a parking lot), I found myself talking with tremendous emotion about Jesus.

Believe it or not. I was actually choking up.

The fact is that this “disreputable, sun-baked Hebrew” (to quote the wonderful James Baldwin) whom I came to love so much as a child created my first experience of internal dissonance. He was fundamentally different from the supposedly  “Christian” fundamentalists around me — mostly comfortable middle-class white people whose behavior consistently betrayed abject terror of The Other.

The Jesus I loved was not comfortable. He had no money and no job, living like a “lily of the field.” He counted among his friends the kind of dirty, scandalous, “sinful” people the adults around me shunned in horror. He certainly wasn’t a WASP. He was all about inclusion, preaching a new Law of Love rather  than the written laws cherished by the more dogmatically minded, and he had no patience for hypocrites who clung to their money, ignored the needy, and prayed out loud. He was my earliest hero. It’s no wonder I couldn’t reconcile my core values with the ostensibly “Christian” church. I loved Jesus. The community around me loved the letter of the law, safety, and being right.

As Gandhi famously said, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

This conversation with Jeannie led to my watching “The Last Temptation of Christ” for the first time. The response this film generated in fundamentalist (and conservative Catholic) circles speaks volumes about why most modern so-called “Christian” art is sentimental crap (see Thomas Kinkade). Truly creative interpretations of the Christ story have been shackled, imprisoned within the immovable walls of sacred dogma. Gifted imaginations can’t seize the powerful symbols and themes therein and take wing with them the way Kazantzakis’ and Scorcese’s could (in their unrepentant blasphemy).

The film’s Gospel reimagining has incredible depth and insight into human spiritual experience and its inherent uncertainty, which is completely lost on its single-minded literalist detractors. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the film. Of all the actors I’ve seen play the role, Willem Dafoe is for me the definitive Christ. His weakness, torment, and doubt make him a figure with whom ordinary human beings can identify. He is not the typical Jesus-dramatization here, commanding and decidedly superior; he seems at least as much a Son of Man as a Son of God. This Jesus confesses to being a liar and full of fear (human frailties) while at the same time being filled with boundless pity for all living things (divine compassion). The controversial “last temptation” itself is a brilliant departure, done in what is really a similar spirit to the three earlier temptations in the desert. But for the fundies, extrapolations like this, which extend well beyond the literal text and contradict their entrenched belief in an omniscient (and perfect) Jesus who is part of the Holy Trinity itself (historically a much later theological concept) are not welcome.

**

As I continue to wrestle with the question of what I might have to contribute to the world, as a person and as a writer, the sort of radical socialist universalism that attracts me to the character of Jesus becomes another significant piece of the puzzle. His name and message seem to have been appropriated and distorted by the most pernicious kind of Pharisees — those who pronounce windy, bombastic prayers in public, declare the kind of communitarianism practiced by the early disciples evil, and live in well-manicured gated communities where the scruffy likes of their precious Savior would be entirely unwelcome.

This week I requested Christopher Moore’s Lamb from the library. I want to see what other contemporary “heretics” and “blasphemers” have done with the story. If you have any other literary or celluloid recommendations, please let me know. (Jesus of Montreal is already on the list, and I’ve seen a local production of Terence McNally’s Corpus Christi.)

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

– T.S. Eliot