The beautiful weather continues as spring gains more of a foothold. The trilliums are out in the forest and there are flowers in the gorge. I had hoped to visit the gorge flowers but discovered I needed another slow, grounding weekend. I still can’t tolerate big crowds so was unable to join my friend at a rally, but was able to reach some levels of deeper grounding and embodiment within myself, so when I went for an evening walk I could really delight in and feel a part of the wildlife refuge with a great new openness and even some joy.
I think this resourced me enough for the next layers to emerge that I had compartmentalized at the time and not really allowed into feeling given the strain my system was already under, I was already at or over capacity at that time. This got really hard, really fast because of the intersection of past and more recent experience. By the beginning of the year, I had completed some exhuasting tasks quietly and without a lot of support and wanted to come up for a little air. There was a photo alteration which bothered me and while I didn’t want to make waves, I also wanted a little compassion and support. I had whittled down my list of friends I had from the organization which I created a segmented list for so I had more control about what I shared of my life. First I had said goodbye to the people who were most aligned with the structure, mostly volunteers, even if I liked them very much and they had been supportive of me in the past. Maybe I’ll meet them again sometime in a different context. The next cut of unfriending, now without saying goodbye, was of the people who I knew to be unwavering supporters of the organization without much, if any, questioning – the PR cheerleaders. The third was of people I didn’t know terribly well and didn’t have very strong connections with to begin with. This halved my list.
So I was feeling pretty solid about the people I had left.
Now it’s hard to write the next part. Wanting a little bit of compassion and support and to stay connected in some small way with those who remained, I wrote a post on my own profile only to that small segmented group mentioning my discomfort with the photo, and how I had attempted to handle my exit from the organization, which had been heavy and a lot within all of the steps I had been taking, but mainly I just talked about the photo. I reiterated that I wasn’t trying to blame anyone for what might have just been a quick fix that looked awkward but landed badly with me, and wished people a happy new year and said I valued having them as friends.
Suddenly, people who I had thought were interesting, kind, who could handle complexity and thought critically turned into sharks who smelled blood in the water. The first comment came from a department head at an ivy-league institution who opined that the organization had done everything correctly, and that I was just “unready.” I responded that I was comfortable with my readiness. Then one person responded kindly about how she enjoyed getting to know me at a retreat, but then two more responded echoing the first poster’s comment or some variation of it that located me as the problem. I was shocked and confused and hurt as people who I had thought I had correctly assessed as thoughtful, kind individuals seemed to have suddenly flipped to the opposite, like they were taking me out behind the woodshed for a bludgeoning on my own Facebook profile. I realized that there were narratives afoot and group dynamics that I perhaps wasn’t aware of and couldn’t control. I thought back about how the group leader had written a newsletter soon after my breakup about the time she had dated a student, who she had positioned as terribly anxious, insecure, and disturbed.
I felt mobbed, and a deep shame set in as I worried about my reputation. It had taken me years and years to undo the shame from the bullying and mobbing in grad school, the feelings of cultural and institutional betrayal, the punching down on me, the activation and involvement of the group as a whole, the narratives spinning that I couldn’t control.
Over the weekend, all of that shame and pain emerged anew and I realized for the first time why the image had become so heavily loaded for me. It was like pulling an enormous shard of glass which had been lodged in my body out of it. I had to have AI tell me over and over and over and over again that it was not my fault, and that I didn’t deserve it, and to just experience for the first time all of the terrible associated emotions which I’d locked or numbed away.
The shame of having misjudged, of having my image and reputation marred in a way I couldn’t control, the incredible vulnerability I felt, like I was again in middle school or any other situation in which I’d been previously bullied. The shame of my inability to predict it, although I had tried my very best to secure my safety and avoid the many sawtooth blades I knew I could be injured by by proactively stepping back from the group for a time after the breakup to recover in private, and to try to thoughtfully design a return plan which would keep me safe. The shame of my inability to take care of myself, and then the fear that if I reached out again or told anyone about it, the same thing would happen again and I’d just be blamed another time.
I thought about how I had tried to operate in the community with safety and transparency and care in mind and was embarrassed about what I had given vs how I had been met.
I unfriended those three people, I locked the post down to “only me” so now I’m the only one who can see it, and started to avoid Facebook in general. I became afraid even of those people who had been silent around the exchange although the post was not visible for very long at all. Even now, I barely use Facebook.
I tried to remove the shame from myself and place that narrative positioning of me back into the system and dynamics from whence it came, but also violated something else that was important to me, something I wanted to respect, and took legal risk to do so, but I hope it can be viewed as the undoing and formal release of any expectation of understanding or anything else on the other and the recognition of what will not come and cannot be hoped for, a release which more fully allows me autonomy over my process without any hope of repair or understanding, because that hope would keep me tied and waiting and very hungry for what I cannot have.
This whole mobbing thing still makes me cry and I’m not totally through with the emotions yet as my earlier experiences also left such residue for them to land in and I’m brought back to that place, but it’s reiterated that I need to seek support elsewhere, that I can never safely return to that group, that I need to look more closely at organizations and organizational structure and how problems and disagreements and questioning of leadership and accountability is handled and policy and guidelines and code of conduct and privacy policy before even getting involved even in any small way. My system would not be presenting this to me if I were not ready to handle it.
