Well, not really. But that’s the Manichean black-and-white thinking I grew up with in the Christian church, and the surprisingly similar thinking reflected by certain strains of New Age philosophy. These days, among some yogic types, “negativity” is the new Satan, a shape-shifting, insidious bogeyman to be feared and shunned. And just as with the Bible-believers, this Satan is frequently identified as out there. He’s in the world, and he’s in you, you sinner — but not in me, because I have God’s Holy Truth.

Freud and Jung both called this projection. The undesirable traits are loaded onto the Other, the way the children of Israel tied all their sins to the back of a goat and sent it off into the wilderness. Later Germany would tie its sins to the backs of the children of Israel and send them off to the gas chambers. The idea being that once the offending presence is banished, utopia (or heaven on earth) can ensue.

Well, now I and my “negativity” have been banished. Good luck to my old bosses in their new utopia! The only problem is, of course, that someone always has to carry the disowned energy, the rejected shadow. So eventually someone else will get to be the bad guy…in a long string of bad guys.

**

This bad guy’s story is kind of a long one, but I hope you’ll bear with me. Very few of you know (or care) where I worked, anyway, so telling it all won’t much hurt them. (Those who do know are invited to make up their own minds.)

I won’t even start at the beginning, but somewhere in the middle, when we were told in a staff meeting that the yoga studio was in trouble and that we needed to brainstorm ways to save it.

**

Hearing that the business was in serious jeopardy, and encouraged to come up with solutions, I started to do some online research. No one on staff, after all, was an MBA — we had one former accountant — so I decided to find out what the pros would do in this kind of situation. I borrowed a recent book from the library about small business turnarounds by an author who had helped hundreds of small businesses. I read the whole thing, taking extensive notes, and presented the owner with organized outlines I had created from those notes. The book also helped me refer her to a nonprofit run by former small business owners who could provide both a loan and free business counseling. (I’m not sure she ever took advantage of either.)

I noticed that one of the first things every expert (online and in the book) said to do was to conduct an extensive analysis of costs, sales, and profits: where is the money coming in, and where is it going out? What are your best sellers, and what are your albatrosses? I wasn’t sure anyone was currently doing this. As a former retail buyer, I could easily see at a glance that we were overstocked with thousands of dollars’ worth of inventory that was simply not moving. I volunteered to run some reports, but I didn’t have the computer login that would allow me to access those functions in our system. The owner didn’t know how to give it to me, and referred me to the manager who could.

That’s where the project ground to a halt. The manager didn’t seem to like this idea one bit. Who knows why; perhaps it felt like a challenge to her authority. Instead she came to me — the employee with obviously too much time on her hands! — with some document updates she hadn’t had time to do herself, telling me I would be doing this instead of my project. I completed her tasks, somewhat frustrated, and expressed this frustration to her directly. I remember asking her if anyone was looking at the numbers. She said she hadn’t had a chance to see them yet. (?) I said, I really don’t care who does it, just as long as somebody is going over that stuff!

I didn’t understand why it was such a big deal to let me play with reports and explore. I had worked for them for a couple of years; what did they think I was going to do with the information? Sell it to our competitors? In contrast to the retail buyer (who, the owner told me, was given the job because “she loves to shop”) I had been buyer in a major independent bookstore. I knew what margin and turns were. Looking at sales reports, I might be able to determine — to put it simply — what we needed to have more of, and what we needed to get rid of. But the manager felt very strongly that I would be helping the business more by updating the phone list, and would not budge.

I often walked away from conversations with this manager feeling as if I had been taken by the shoulders and spun around and around until I had completely lost my bearings. I had no idea where I had come from, or where I thought I had been going. I was just dizzy and disoriented, and walking in whatever random direction she had set me. I’m sure George Lakoff would call her a master of conceptual framing. This same manager managed to elicit innumerable complaints from staff and teachers (and even a few students) for being rigid, overcontrolling, and condescending (one person even called her “negative!”) — but it would take the reaching of a critical mass of outcry (and a student’s tears) before she would be finally removed from her position of front desk and personnel management. (She would stay on as the accountant and financial manager.)

Eventually I approached the owner again about my thwarted project, along with some requests and complaints I was hearing directly from students. From my years in customer service I knew how important it was to address their collective feelings and demands and how lucrative it could be to give them what they wanted. If you have no customers, after all, you have no business.

I’m sure I got her on a bad day (a lot of her days, in fact, are bad), but my tentative feedback unleashed a vehement laundry list of grievances about the selfishness of people. The customers were selfish for making these selfish demands, the teachers were selfish for asking for raises…why was everyone so selfish? They should just be grateful for the opportunity to be at her beautiful, incredible studio. Implicitly, I felt she was saying I was selfish too (for bothering her with these self-important ideas, and for challenging her well-intentioned manager). The violence of her aggrieved tirade was like an assault. I felt like a lab rat that had stepped on the wrong lever and gotten a painful electric shock. And she did seem angry that I was even bringing up the reports idea again. As if it were nothing more than a superfluous exercise for my own glory. The whole confrontation was extremely difficult and uncomfortable. I kept saying, “I’m not attacking you. I’m not attacking you.” I tried to reassure her that I had only the best interests of her business at heart. I was shaky and exhausted and weak afterward. Later she emailed me and thanked me for my feedback, but…

The fallout of this conversation was another unpleasant confrontation with the aforementioned manager, in which I was reproached like a naughty child for going over her head. It was just plain wrong to trouble the overburdened, overwhelmed, exhausted owner with such matters. She should not be bothered at all. I decided at that point to just drop the whole thing and to do as I was told. (Months later, the owner would take a look around and decide to put everything in the shop on sale, as the amount of stagnant inventory was overwhelming.)

Shortly thereafter the management team did come up with something for me to do that didn’t offend anybody — the marketing and the maintenance — things which none of them enjoyed or had time for. I had negligible experience in either field, but I accepted the assignments anyway (in an effort to be a team player), while being told by that same manager that I would receive no additional compensation and would have to do everything during my normal working hours.

Readers, do you think I would have even approached the owner about additional compensation after our last exchange??!!

(In the interest of full disclosure, a couple of weeks ago, on a “good” day, I finally did convince her to let me log a few extra hours a week outside of the studio at my $9/hour wage. A few days after that, I showed her how to change my login so I could run those belated reports. I actually thought things were looking up.)

In the meantime we were trying to promote a teacher training program that would ostensibly be our salvation. Staffmembers were told almost scoldingly that it was imperative they be familiar and fluent with the program by reading the content on our Web site — a series of pages one had to click through, with information diffused throughout them, which many students found confusing (and in turn called us). But we were just as confused! I for one found this DIY approach uncommunicative and frustrating, but rather than “complain,” took it upon myself to try to condense the information into a one-page outline for the staff’s easy reference. (In the process I found some significant scheduling contradictions that needed correcting.)

Once upon a time, our dear departed manager Stephanie would have sent everyone an email with all the essential information and details, and offered to answer any questions, but she was long gone.  She would also, I’m sure, have given us at least some satisfactory language to use with students about why certain teachers suddenly disappeared overnight without a word. As it was, we were left to flail — usually as much in the dark as the students were — and to absorb their anger and confusion. We did make great buffers for our superiors. When I insisted (to that same manager) that we had a right as staff to know something, I was told it was basically none of our business, and none of the students’ business.

**

It’s now no mystery to me why a number of once-beloved members of this little community departed so suddenly, carrying all the sin on their backs like the scapegoats of Israel. Someone has to carry all the disowned responsibility and the “negativity.” Someone has to be Wrong so that the owner and her managers can continue to be the Emissaries of Unadulterated Light. And Unadulterated Right.

**

But to return to the story: the additional burden of work (with no additional logged hours) started to take a toll on me physically and emotionally. I was trying to maintain the physical space, interact with students (my favorite part), and complete all my time-consuming daily duties while cramming in all the phone calls and computer work of my new tasks. (One recurrent beef was having to clean up after the buying manager, who didn’t like to do the physical work — but in retrospect that was the least of my worries. I’ve completely omitted my difficulties with her because they’re already fading from memory.) I got really sick for about a month with a viral bug that would not let me go. I knew I couldn’t keep it up.

But I had gotten into a Bad Habit. Which was chronically venting my frustrations to one staffperson in particular, often while possessed of my sarcastic teenager persona. Sometimes I’d compare notes about some of the company madness with another employee — Linda, a fifty-plus spitfire who said whatever the hell she wanted and didn’t take any crap from anyone (and who, for that reason, was regarded with mistrust and censure) but most of the time, Ingrid was my person.

At first she was receptive and supportive, buying me chai and “talking me off the ledge,” as I put it, but things began to sour between us (I believe) after I failed to finish all of an extracurricular assignment I had taken on to help her out in her other job as a teacher. One day soon after, when I was stressed out and feeling overburdened and (as was my habit) leaking those feelings to Ingrid, she told me I was spreading “toxic energy” (New Age shame and guilt!), after which I went silent and withdrew. On the occasion of our next meeting, when I coolly responded that I was fine, she said she didn’t believe me. I actually felt fine (!), but I made a zipping motion with my lips and told her I’d learned to keep my mouth shut and not complain. That snarky-teenager comment, of course, was meant for no one but Ingrid, given our last exchange — but it would turn out to be my proverbial Famous Last Words. Because Ingrid, unbeknownst to me, had been telling (or would soon be telling) the owner about all of my snarky comments. I was distancing from her just as she was becoming the boss’s new best friend. (I had been the new best friend once, too. Many of us had, like the constantly revolving favorite of the Guru, hoping to come back into favor one day. Gotta love politics!)

**

It all came to a head after the new schedules came out. I found out, by looking at the printed schedules when they arrived from Kinkos, that my hours were being cut down and that several teachers I loved were completely gone. I would shortly hear that some of those teachers had received emails or other inadequate notification that their classes were being dropped. This all struck me as pretty disrespectful. As you might imagine, I got a little upset. And to whom do you suppose I leaked my anger? Yes, that was my Bad Habit. Certainly not a wise one.

I had talked with my coach about trying to confront what seemed to me to be a chronic communication problem at the studio (where important things were either not communicated at all, or communicated poorly and avoidantly), but I didn’t feel strong enough yet, especially given my previous disastrous attempts broaching unpopular subjects with management. I was unwilling to face the possibility of shocks and shaming and overall disorientation. I just didn’t feel ready.

Well, I was going to have to be ready quick.

First I got a call from Ingrid, pressing me to say more when I really wasn’t in the mood (I was struggling with the subject of my previous post, actually, having taken the sight of a certain someone showing up with someone else as a body blow). She defended the managerial decisions fiercely, saying that everyone had worked very hard and that everything with the teachers had been resolved and that furthermore it was none of my business. Already feeling beaten, I begged off the phone, but they weren’t done with me yet.

The next morning I was feeling off-center and ill at ease already. A prospective student who sighed heavily and exasperatedly whenever I reiterated our policies to her got on my nerves, and I (oh, so stupidly!) said something about it to Ingrid after the student left. (Another occasion for my undoing! Be sure none of this would not be reported!) An hour or two later, while classes were going on and Ingrid was sitting on the couch reading, I got a phone call from the owner.

Most of that conversation I have not retained, standing as I was in a fog of terror. Yet rather than let my inner three-year-old cower before Mommy, or else turn into that defiant fuck-you teenager, I remained on my feet, breathed deeply, and attempted to hold my own. She did reiterate Ingrid’s scoldings, that what happened between teachers and managers was none of my business, that they had all worked very hard, and that if I had a problem with someone I should go directly to that person. There was no reason to create drama and (here’s the word again!) “negativity.” (As if I were its sole generating font and source.) I should come to them alone, and with constructive suggestions or nothing at all. I remember arguing that by processing things with coworkers we can find out whether we’re imagining something or whether they’ve experienced it too — and affirm that we are, therefore, not just making it up.

One thing I did emphasize was that email was not a good medium for dealing with sensitive issues like canceling a teacher’s classes. “It’s like breaking up with someone over email,” I said. For some reason I don’t recall, she brought up the besmirched name of a formerly worshipped teacher who left in short-order fury, burning bridges behind, and is now regarded as the Great Betrayer. I do remember saying, “Maybe if people actually felt heard, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.”

She didn’t know what I was talking about. I didn’t know how to elaborate.

I had to beg off the phone again because students were coming out of classes and I knew it was definitely not appropriate to continue the conversation then and there. I found that I was shaking from head to toe, and felt as fragile as glass. My divine-mother-figure teacher was standing by, like an angel of mercy, and I fell apart in her arms like the vulnerable three-year-old quaking inside me, safe at last.

But Ingrid was watching.

I sobbed for a short time on my surrogate mother’s shoulder, muttering some of my hurt and pent-up anger to her loving ear (all in front of Ingrid), then pulled myself together to check in the next class. One of the students actually thought I had a cold. For all they knew, my dog had just died. That was something I had always loved about being in this community: public displays of emotion happened all the time, and no one batted an eyelash.

When my shift was over, I left quickly, heading to the theater for a prearranged movie with a friend. It distracted me for a little while, and afterwards I went to another close friend’s house and drank in some tea and sympathy. She was intimately familiar with the climate at the studio, and provided some kindness and validation. (It was she who pointed out that talking so fearfully of “negativity” was indicative of an unenlightened enslavement to dualistic thinking. To reach the highest rung of the yogic ladder is to transcend all duality, all conceptual opposites like “positive” and “negative.”)

I had no idea what awaited me at home. When I finally got back that evening and opened up my Yahoo mail, there was a long, multi-paragraph email from the owner. Yes, it was an email (after what I’d said about email “breakups”), entitled “Our conversation today.” I really wasn’t prepared for what followed.

The tone of it was distinctly Shaming Mommy disguised as the Consummate Professional, and it proceeded to catalog all my sins (as reported by Ingrid), including that greatest and gravest sin of all, “negativity.” I was verbally spanked for behaving as if I thought I were a CPA, trying to usurp the manager’s role, and virtually slapped for my comment to Ingrid about keeping my lips zipped.

The message was, in its essence: We (the managers and grownups) are over here making the hard decisions you will never understand, and you (the misbehaving child over there) are to sit down and shut up, trusting that we are all impeccable intentions and divine wisdom. (Believe me, I’m not changing the language very much at all!) You have been a very, very bad girl. You did not come to us with your concerns, along with your solutions, in a “positive” way. You are so very “negative” (one might say “toxic”) that you are capable of bringing down the entire company with your destructive attitude and your huge public displays of emotion. Therefore, effective immediately, we are placing you on a 6-month probation. If we hear another peep out of you, or see so much as a smidgeon of attitude, you will be terminated immediately.

(As the old joke goes, THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES!)

My three-year-old cried. My teenager screamed FUCK YOU!!! My aware adult stayed awake all night that night pondering my options, decided on the only self-respecting choice, and called the personnel manager to quit in the morning.

**

Can you imagine anything more fearful? I suddenly felt like I was in a family with a secretly addicted or abusive parent. Control that child before she leaks everything to the neighbors! Or perhaps it was more comparable to a religious cult. The owner had recently broken with a guru who, in her own words, used fear, shame and guilt to control, intimidate, and manipulate his followers; apparently he taught her well. What was most amazing is that she had just handed me a first-class example of what I had been trying to communicate and that she wasn’t getting. From the destructive and avoidant use of email for this kind of communication to the shutting-down and thorough shaming of a dissenting voice. It was all there in black and white.

And how black and white it was.

I was going to call her to say my parting piece, but when I got a condescending follow-up phone message saying that she hoped I would “get through my stuff” and “use this time for healing” I realized that I’d be talking to a brick wall.

You see, I am the negativity. I am its source and its home. Now that I’m out, the devil has been routed, and peace, love, and harmony can prevail. “Don’t waste your time,” advised my former Kundalini teacher, a fierce no-nonsense Sikh who resigned abruptly and in disgust several months ago. “They just don’t get it, and they probably never will,” said another recent expatriate, resigned.

Do I think I’m impeccable? Is there not a grain of truth to their accusations? Of course not. Ideally, I would have had the courage and self-possession to present every concern or complaint of mine to the appropriate manager — along with its well-thought-out solution — regardless of how poorly it was received. I would never have griped even one time to Ingrid, or Linda. I would have ingested and digested any and every kind of junk, and still shit sunshine and rainbows. (There’s the sarcastic teenager again!) Then, perhaps, I might have been as blameless and righteous and “positive” as they think they are.

How “positive” do you think they are?

**

This week I‘ve been trying to friend the Great Betrayer on Facebook. Maybe I’ll go look him up at his new studio. I guess I’m in the market for a new one.

Then recently I read these words by Christopher Hyatt, a countercultural experimental psychologist who had clearly steeped himself in Nietzsche:

At a minimum there are two levels of experience which are confused by almost everyone: direct experience — like a brick falling on your head — and the interpretive conclusion of the event. The first experience is wholistic, the second is a combination of past models, attribution needs (?), and anxiety. The feeling components of these two experiences can become indistinguishable. Therefore, a model is difficult to remove because it has become associated with the feeling component.

By model he means a framework of so-called “knowledge” which his book maintains is built with the “building blocks” of parental and societal lies, and given to us when we’re too young to resist. So as soon as something occurs, like the brick falling, we have an ingrained and instantaneous explanation or interpretation of what happened and why it happened. (Criminal negligence! The wrath of God!) When we have models in common with other people, we have a consensus. What we don’t have, necessarily, is the truth. “A society,” Hyatt says, “is really a group of clichés based on selected fictions.”

Which sounds like an epigram written by Holden Caulfield. Then again, Salinger was probably onto something.

Hyatt delves into the “anxiety” component by talking about the ill effects of chronic overstimulation of the fight-or-flight response (which he says is rampant in our culture). It can lead to High Autonomic Reactivity (HAR), an over-readiness to react with unconscious and violent emotion, where “everything is highly charged with potential dangers and rewards” and is usually painful. That chapter of his book read like my unauthorized biography.

What I guess I’m trying to say is that the only truth I believe I can really know is the truth I can get at by unraveling the knotted frameworks that keep me captive within my own fictions, becoming conscious of my unconscious reactivity, and learning to experience directly again. Things that happened thirty-five years ago — my feeling-interpretation of what happened — affect the way I react to what happens today, sometimes to an overwhelming degree. When that brick may just be a brick, after all. Nothing personal.

I can’t say definitively what the truth is for you, but if you find what I say helpful — and I know a few of my visitors have — I’m glad. My ruminations may look hopelessly “self-indulgent” to some, but I think of them as an attempt to treat the macroscopic madness of the world on the most local level. In other words, insanity starts at home!

***

Anyway…

It seems like every time I get a little too self-satisfied, every time I think I’ve finally arrived somewhere where I can rest in anything resembling assurance, something gives me a good swift kick. Maybe it’s the universe just keeping me humble, or maybe that New Age refrain I’m always hearing, that whatever’s left of the old familiar unhappiness fights your transformation, is true. Hell if I know! Two steps forward, one step back…

Only days after writing my last post, I found out that I might be in danger of losing my slender but rewarding livelihood, an occupation far more sustaining to me than a mere “job.” Without going into too much detail, what seemed suddenly imminent was reminiscent of my traumatic and violent separation from what had been my Place of Belonging for the first fifteen years of my life — my church, my community, my home. I went spinning, overcome with vertigo as the ground underneath my feet seemed to buckle.

Later that same day I got the wind knocked out of me by a situation that could be called, in its original (and projected) version, Caitlin Doesn’t Want to Play With You Any More, and She Likes Her New Friend Better. Have you ever gone from being the greatest thing since sliced bread to being the turd in the punch bowl? It happens a lot during that cruel period of childhood they call the “sorting years.” (I’d be disingenous to claim innocence; I was friends with Tracy Johnson until some of my other friends decided to persecute her for being “gay.” And none of us even knew what the damn word meant.)

As if to ice the crapcake, I got a parking ticket for getting back to my meter just two minutes late. Three hours of work down the toilet. Half a week’s groceries on my tight budget. It was like getting the finger from on high. Ha-ha, loser!

Unfortunately, the aftershock didn’t just fade away. I had taken body blows from two different directions, and the soreness lingered in my chest all week, only to be further exacerbated by more happenings. Probably because it wasn’t a new pain at all, but one so seemingly ancient it could make me believe in past lives. It had been pinpointed by an astute friend (and counselor by trade) as a feeling that would overwhelm a child told by an authority figure: You don’t matter.

Which seemed pretty accurate. Much of my inner turmoil at work stemmed from the feeling of not having a voice in the presence of at least one of my bosses, of not being respected despite my contributions and substantial experience. I didn’t know what to do to change that. To make matters worse, I built up enormous expectations for myself about speaking up at an organizational meeting later in the week, and when I failed to meet my own expectations, I wept with fury and told myself No wonder no one thinks you’re worth the air you breathe.

I was in full-on reactive mode, and probably no more than five years old.

***

Why five? There were so many messages at that time to support that damning hypothesis, but what stands out is my relationship with the kids in the neighborhood. My older brother fit in; I was the “useless” little sister. There really weren’t any kids my age on the block, so while he was invited out to play softball and other games, I had to amuse myself in the house, or else stay well out of their way. To them, I really didn’t matter. It was probably that early on that I learned to tell myself I didn’t care, even though I was horribly lonely and felt defective.

Until kindergarten, that is, and Caitlin O’Connor.

Caitlin O’Connor, a beautiful little Irish rose of a girl. Our first meeting, at my brother’s little league game, had been marred by a recurring bully who liked to torment me with impunity while the adults were otherwise occupied (probably just another contribution to that conviction of not mattering). Caitlin had laughed, “turning” on me the way I’d turn on Tracy later — probably to escape brutalization by Donna herself — but at that age all I knew was that I was on my own. So our initial contact was already colored with the stain of my debasement. (The playground: such a theater of sadism and betrayal and drama! I can only wonder now about what miseries Donna’s seven-year-old life might have contained.)

Finding Caitlin again in Mrs. Rossi’s kindergarten class, I promptly forgave all, and we promptly became inseparable. I went over to her house nearly every day after school for fluffernutter sandwiches or chicken noodle soup. Several times we made up our faces like clowns by raiding her very patient mother’s lipstick stash. (In my house, that would have merited an ass-whuppin’; her mother simply wiped our faces gently with a washcloth.) We played “statues” in the back yard, and bounced merrily down the driveway on her hippity-hop. I adored Caitlin, with a passionate intensity beside which my crushes on boys paled in comparison. You could say I was in love with her, in a way Updike seemed to capture in his masterful (if arguably sexist) short story “Lifeguard” when he wrote “It is not true that our biological impulses are tricked out with ribands of chivalry; rather, our chivalric impulses go clanking in encumbering biological armor. Eunuchs love. Children love. I would love.” I knew nothing about biology back then, but everything about devotion.

Still, there remained a fundamental inequity. I would engage in Three-Stooges-style pratfalls (that hurt) to make her laugh. Even then I was a budding masochist! And I was jealous. When Caitlin decided she wanted to play with Laura rather than with me, I was crushed. I had made Caitlin the measure of all things, including whether or not I mattered. This was understandable, of course, as life before her had been lonely, and my worth had already been in serious doubt. You can’t blame a child for finding her loving gods where she could. (My parents’ so-called “loving God” hadn’t been too much in evidence.)

***

It’s up to the adult, however, to debunk the imaginary authority of those childhood gods. Some of the most brilliant words I ever encountered to this effect, as an adult, were staggeringly simple. I found them in Don Miguel Ruiz’s second Agreement:

Don’t take anything personally...Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world…

(If) you make a habit of not taking anything personally, you won’t need to place your trust in what others do or say. You will only need to trust yourself to make responsible choices. You are never responsible for the actions of others; you are only responsible for you. When you truly understand this, and refuse to take things personally, you can hardly be hurt by the careless comments or actions of others.

***

Looking through this corrective lens at everyone — the neighborhood kids, Caitlin, Donna, my boss, my diffident grownup friend — I find it easier to see how none of their behavior had much to do with me. At best, they reacted to an incomplete and projected idea of who I am, and I in turn reacted as if my incomplete and projected idea of their incomplete and projected idea were true! But in truth, none of us are gods or mind-readers. To borrow Ruiz’s metaphor, we assign characters in our own dream. The beginning of waking up is recognizing this.

To a small child, everyone is an authority, when in actuality no one is an authority.

And sometimes a brick is just a brick.