the veil between sustenance and violence

A short guide to protecting yourself.

I’ve been making notes for this essay now for a week, maybe longer, and certainly before the horrific international embarrassment that occurred in my country last week, the likes of which have never before been witnessed on the public stage, not even in the early days of World War 2, or Watergate, or Vietnam. The dignity of diplomacy — to an ally, to our other longtime allies with whom we fought and prevailed over fascism after the death of millions, and to one man who bears the weight of the free world on his shoulders — is gone. If you reach out to tell me that I need to stick to writing about what I do — personal essay, living a creative life, cooking, nature, teaching, I understand where it’s coming from. But: the world we are now living in requires constant attention, focus, and the visceral understanding that every single one of us, no matter how we vote, is going to be called upon to step up to the humanity plate and engage in ways we never thought we’d have to or want to.

This is a complicated thing to write — a bit out of my wheelhouse, and I still carry enough internalized shame about it that I wear it like a yoke, albeit a mostly invisible one. I’m also currently full-throttle engaged in the upcoming publication of Permission, which has overtaken my work life mostly because I am not what Krista Tippett calls a shouter, or a transactional or extractive person by nature (Katherine May wrote about this brilliantly last week), and I’m spending many hours a day tying various marketing and publicity threads together, which is a job that I loathe doing. Writers write in still and quiet rooms and on hiking paths and in well-lit spaces instead of yelling from the mountaintops for a reason, but many are still comfortable doing the latter; I am not one of them. After four books, I would rather write and be out at events meeting and talking to you all in person or on the radio and on podcasts, and getting everyone to understand that creativity is life, and how it manifests for each of us must be honored, respected, acknowledged, and most of all, engaged in. Especially now.

My intuition has served me well and is in itself a form of sustenance because it protects and allows me to focus on truer relationships and connections that foster my peace and my creativity, and are based on a foundation of decency and humanity rather than competition born of a scarcity mindset.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Cancerian and a Pisces rising, and also, inevitably, an Enneagram 2 (sigh): I do not like emotional, political, physical, or psychological drama. I don’t like family drama or drama between friends or partners. I flee from it. I like it when everyone plays nice in the sandbox together. I used to have a very hard time navigating when someone was dithering with me (see extractive/transactional, above), but I don’t anymore; I’ve come to smell it acutely and immediately, like when you stand downwind of an overflowing outhouse. My wife detests my intuition because I think it unnerves her. But it has served me well and is in itself a form of sustenance because it protects me and allows me to focus on truer relationships and connections that foster my peace, my creativity, and are based on a foundation of decency and humanity rather than competition born of a scarcity mindset.

But, back to the yoke.

Part of why watching what happened last week was so personally horrific was because it was so completely familiar to a lot of women. I grew up in a mostly loving, kind, often hilarious household with two people who, in the blink of an eye, slipped into narcissistic performance mode before they took each other on, which was daily, usually after the sun went down; if you scratched the surface just a tiny bit, it was clear that their engine was powered on the fuel of rage, and they were not going to stop metaphysically mauling each other until no one was left standing. And this is not a good thing for a child to see.

Performance mode: think Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf who, after getting good and juiced up, turns into an absolute monster. Performance mode: think Meryl Streep in August: Osage County, who, as a malignant narcissist, is bent on destroying the lives of her adult children who she has controlled and terrorized for most of their lives. Performance mode: the utterly raging, raving boss I had in the late 1990s at a small publishing house, whose cruelty resulted in my managing editor being taken out of the office on a stretcher because he was having a heart attack. Performance mode: the ex-boyfriend in the late 1980s who, on a seven-hour drive home from Vermont, attacked me out of nowhere on a highway in bumper-to-bumper traffic, screaming at me about the shoes I was wearing because he didn’t approve of them (vintage Gucci loafers, acquired in a shop in London years earlier). Performance mode: the ex-girlfriend in the late 1990s who was so cruel that I broke up with her four times, she begged to come back, I let her, and the attacks — why wasn’t I a vegan; I was a deplorable human because I wasn’t a vegan; I was ugly; I was pathetic — began again. The night after I last saw her, in 1999, I dreamt that I had been shot in the back.

Performance mode: the day I started a new job in 2007, my mother called my cell and because I refused to pay her nine-thousand-dollar credit card bill, screamed at the top of her lungs at me, told me that she knew I’d be a loser just like your father, and I wouldn’t — couldn’t — hang up because I believed her. I thought I deserved it and forced myself to listen to every word she bellowed, as I stood outside my office building in a fur-lined raincoat that she insisted on gifting me a week earlier, and which I neither needed nor wanted. (I’m not a fur person; surprise.)

Performance mode: the man who ran a department I worked in at a company I loved who, the first week I was there in 2011, asked me to try and determine whether a certain literary agent was a lesbian so that he could do her while trying to make a big deal with one of her authors. This person, who shall go nameless, was also famous for ditching his wife at parties and fucking whatever woman he met in conversation that evening, making his weeping wife wait for him in the living room while he and the other woman finished their business in the walk-in closet/bathroom/den/bedroom. And she did.

We all know creeps like this, sadly, but what truly set him apart was my intuition about his propensity for violence. I had never actually seen anything, but my intuition was right. One morning, I was called into his office to be berated because he was convinced I had done something that not only I hadn’t, but didn’t even know about. He was a short man, just a little taller than I, and when he stepped forward into my personal airspace, I could feel his breath on me. His face was beet red, you could see the whites around his enraged eyes, and his hands, hanging by their sides, were clenched in tight fists. His assistant, just outside, heard his screaming and ran down the hallway — to call the police? To get security? Who knows. My heart was racing; if he had been any closer, he would have been behind me. I locked eyes with him, took a deep breath, and expected him to physically strike me, or to grab my throat. During the second before an attack like that happens, time stops, and the air doesn’t move. I know this because my beloved dad — a good man stuck in a terrible situation with my mother — himself the victim of childhood physical violence, was violent many times over my childhood; I write about this in my second book. It took us decades of work to get beyond it, and somehow, unthinkably, miraculously, we did. But long before we did, the day that changed everything was when, in a fit of pique, he lifted a heavy crystal ashtray above his head, intending to bring it down on mine, and I pivoted, and, at fourteen refused to be a victim and said Do it, you fucking bully. His hand hung in the air with the ashtray, he put it down, tears ran down his face, he put his coat on and left the apartment. He didn’t come back for a few days.

So that morning in my boss’s office at the job I loved, I glared at him, and whispered: Do it, you fucking monster. Just do it.

(This was a person who was always, somehow, on Page 6 of the NY Post. Recognizable. At every important party.)

How it ended: he threw me out of his office and appeared back in mine half an hour later to tell me that he had learned he was wrong about the thing he thought I did but didn’t know about. He did not offer an apology. He deflected and simply said that he was angry with me because I always claimed I’d do things that I didn’t wind up doing, like bringing in food for the staff. I reminded him of the charcuterie board I’d brought in a week earlier.

A day later, he invited me out to lunch to talk, off-site. Over the most expensive sushi in Manhattan, he said: Tell me what you want—I’ll give you anything. So I did: the ability to work from home three days a week because I lived so far away. A new office, away from his. Never having to sit in a meeting with him again. Not having to hear his voice again. Never having to set eyes on him again. And keeping his distance from my staff of mostly young women, who would tell me — safely — if he stepped out of line in even the slightest manner. And he whispered Okay.

Until the concept of psychopathy is discussed in relation to what we are facing, we will be in a very bad place for a very long time, and what is happening right now will continue until well after I, and possibly you, are dust.

The company itself was owned by a wonderful and philanthropic family of very strong women. The CEO has become a friend over the years, and someone I respect immensely. I eventually told her this story. And a few years after I left, this boss person was fired by her, by cell, while he was on public transportation. He had nowhere to go and nowhere to vent his rage. She had contained him, brilliantly, and treated him like the overgrown schoolyard bully he was, and likely still is.

Performance mode: what we saw last week. A planned, pre-meditated, orchestrated schoolboy attack on someone with vastly more inherent power, dignity, grace, strength. A planned, pre-meditated, orchestrated schoolboy attack led by someone who is never, ever going to get what he wants because his bucket is unfillable; whose daddy raised him with emotional and physical violence; who was famously known to visit his own son in college and punch him in the face upon entering his room; who carries such wild, uncontrollable rage in his corpuscles that it has morphed into malignant narcissism and psychopathy. He is the jihadist who is not controllable precisely because he doesn’t value life and therefore doesn’t care if he dies; he’ll just take everyone down with him. Yes, T is a rapist and a 34-count indicted felon; he’s a thief. But he is also now a traitor out of every GenXer’s Cold War nightmare. He is Red Dawn come alive.

(Violence warning.)

The problem with malignant narcissists is that the world assumes that reason will work in containing them; it doesn’t. It can’t, because reason means absolutely nothing to them. Malignant narcissists surround themselves with those who will bolster them, who will prop them up, convinced that they will be made stronger themselves if they have his back. This works until they are thrown under the bus by them, which is why the last T administration was riddled with firings.

(Start at 10:18 in this video.)

The greatest danger to anyone — in a relationship, at work, in politics — is the malignant narcissist who is out of options. A greater danger is when the malignant narcissist is also a psychopath who simply will not be contained because: they don’t care. They don’t care if they lie (to colleagues, partners, constituents). They don’t care if they said one thing and are now doing the polar opposite. Do not care. Repeat that to yourself and try to remember it.

So I think that it’s important to understand why he doesn’t respond to threats from allied countries, and from the other party in his own country: he is being treated as though he is a man of reason. But he’s not. Until the concept of psychopathy is discussed and unpacked in relation to what we are facing, we will be in a very bad place for a very long time, and what is happening right now will continue until long after I, and possibly you, are dust.

Every woman who has been threatened, been physically/emotionally/psychologically attacked by malignant narcissists and psychopaths; every person who has lived with abuse and tried to reason with their abuser; every person who has convinced themselves that an abuser could change if only the former were a better wife/partner/colleague/senator/fill in the blank; every work friend with the heavy pancake makeup and the handsome boyfriend who has a small jealousy problem; every parent who beats their school-aged child in front of that child’s class, or at all, ever; every animal abuser; every megalomaniacal chef who tortures his or her line cooks. We know exactly who this person is. Our intuition screams DANGER at the top of its lungs when we experience this person. We just never assumed he would be responsible for the lives of our parents, sick, children, elderly, women, disabled, lgbtq+, poor, veterans, every person of every hue, and all of our allies across the ocean.

How many women watched what happened last week and said I know those men.

Intuition is a form of sustenance; it is one of the things that feeds, nurtures, and protects us. And because it can be applied to both the positive and negative aspects of our lives — the feeling that we get about love, platonic and otherwise; the feeling that we get that someone might be dangerous — that veil between sustenance and potential violence can be very thin. We have to stop long enough to protect ourselves, to honor what we know in our bones to be true, to honor our need for safety in every and any way it comes and however we require it.

And right now: we all require it.