Someone I F**king Hate
Want to hear why a normally Namaste person like me can want to eviscerate someone? Whee! Come on in and grab a seat to my shitshow.
Hey,
So this week, I was really hating on someone. Disgust is really the only appropriate word. And to be clear, it was not undeserved, but you know me…I’m usually traipsing through Central Park with my bestie discussing Buddhist concepts, hanging out with my children and writing to you, my beloved community. I really value peace and joy, and I prioritize it in my life. But this week? Oh girl…I was jaw-clenched, finger pointing, wishing-bad-shit-on-people level FURIOUS. So, after a few days of being in this I’m-gonna-kill-a-bitch trance, I knew I needed to get to work for 3 main reasons:
1-I don’t like vibrating in negative energy. It just doesn’t feel good in my body.
2-Earth School is not about hating your teacher or getting high in class. (My version of getting high would be free-basing sweets – which, tbh, I totally did earlier in the week. I inhaled a Toblerone bar so quickly and unconsciously, I actually wondered where it went. 😬)
3- I’m always cautious when I feel “I am right!” (righteous anger) about anything. That usually means “I am wrong” or at least, “It’s complicated.”
So…I got curious. Why does this woman repulse me so much? As I meditated on it, a phrase was suddenly whispered in my ear: Unworthy opponent. Hmmm….
As I continued my inquiry, I realized the people around me all kinda fit into a certain mold. They may be from different backgrounds, including race and ethnicity. They may be from different countries and parts of this country. They may be super wealthy and some not wealthy at all. But there is a common theme: They are very smooth and easy-to-digest. They are elegant, gracious, palatable people…not provocative. Sure, they are brilliant and have distinct points of view. But any rough edges they may have ever had are so polished and smoothed out, they can navigate any social situation with nary a bump or a clash. As I sat with this I realized, I could’ve been describing my mother. Whether it’s what she says or how she looks, you’re never like WTF was that?? I’ve literally never in my life been embarassed of her. Another part of our family culture was this idea that sex and sexuality should be restrained…anything otherwise was considered obscene…certainly not elegant, gracious, blah-blah, all the attributes I ascribe to my mother.
Now, this person I can’t stand? She is literally all rough edges and provocative…and provocative may be a euphemism. I imagine a gray-haired lady sniffing, “Tawdry.” 👵🏼Hmmm… so despite all my hemming and hawing about my mother on this Substack…it sounds like I’m her daughter, after all…
Ahhh…but it’s never quite so simple, right? Because after my dad died, something very significant happened: I stopped being molested and once I was out out of fight-or-flight mode non-stop, some big things shifted.
For starters, I totally rebelled against her elegant sensibilities. My sexuality was overt, to put it mildly. In fact, my friend, Scott, recently reminded me that once after college, I was literally kicked out of our local hang out (Bear Bar, for my Columbia University loved ones) because of what I was wearing. There was no cleavage or anything (not that that should matter, btw), but I was wearing a super tight football t-shirt (#55). As Scott remembers it, “The animals at the zoo were getting too wound up.” I’m sure it was about more than the shirt. I suspect it had to do with the energy of the girl wearing it. It’s not like they picked me up and threw me out like a drunk, but the bouncer was like, Girl – you gotta go home or shit’s going sideways with the energy I’m feeling with these guys. My point: I was super out there with my sexuality. In some ways, I was taking my power back after the incest, but there was certainly a twist of unprocessed sexual abuse for flavor. As the saying goes, when you point a finger at someone, there are three fingers pointing back at you. What I saw reflected back to me as I sat with this bit of my history was my own exiled feelings of unworthiness. I saw the little kid who was used as some angry guy’s sexual fidget toy every day after school and my misguided and unconscious efforts to regain some of my sexual power.
Oh, and this wasn’t limited to nights out with college friends. Here’s a little candy for my fashion people reading… When I was a Senior Fashion Editor for Bonnie Fuller and Donald Robertson at Cosmopolitan, my team and I would create these folders of Polaroids to get the clothes and accessories approved by Donald for various shoots. I was always the model, and the shots were SUPER provocative. Imagine me wearing chaps (photographed from behind with my torso turning toward the camera), topless covering my breasts with my hands. This was at work, people, this was AT WORK!
But speaking of work, let me tell you what was happening in my life on a parallel track…
While my mother was all those things I described – elegant, gracious, magnanimous to everyone on the outside…she was also those things at home but with one added component: She was super judgey of anyone who didn’t fit that mold. She was highly competitive. She wanted her kids to look good, speak and present well, and be achievement oriented. These expectations were clear without a word. Yes, good ‘ole conditional love. One look from her and we knew if we had done something that was displeasing to her. And nobody wanted to displease her. But I mean, who wants to displease their mother? Not I, sister. Not I. And just to be clear: I’m actually super grateful to my mother. I’ve been able to check so many things off my bucket list because of the work ethic and expectations she imbued on me. But make no mistake, I was raised to be a fierce competitor.
Again, once I stopped being molested and my nervous system calmed down, all the training from my mom kicked in and I kinda started living the luckiest life ever. That combination of magnanimous and competitive psycho turned into Manifestation Secret Sauce for me. Early on, it was things like getting the lead in the school play (Hi, Maria in West Side Story 🙋🏻♀️) or getting into my top choice college. And later…well… you know all about the career trajectory. It was on warp drive. So, I got used to getting a lot of positive feedback… at school, work, and then even afterward in the parent communities (Head of the PTA, y’all 💁🏻♀️). So, it was sort of easy to push those feelings of unworthiness way down, down, down because it just wasn’t being reflected back to me by life.
But it wasn’t entirely absent!
I was projecting it on other people by being a super judgmental person. And by the way – being an Editor-in-Chief is the PERFECT job for a judgmental person. All I did was judge the shit out of everything that came across my desk. I judged and plotted against my competitors. Hey, I was even a judge on my own reality show on MTV (and America’s Next Top Model… even Miss Teen USA!). All that judgement was funneled into competition and this unconscious, exiled, wounded part of me was totally killing it! There were no obvious signs pointing to unworthiness. In fact, I was celebrated. If you (readers) say I’m worthy and he (NYTimes, Charlie Rose, Today Show, GMA, The View, etc.) says I’m worthy and she (Hearst corporate brass) says I’m worthy – then I must be worthy….right? And I just went on with my fabulous life. But there was still the vibration of unworthy buried somewhere deep underneath it all.
So “Unworthy Opponent”….making more sense.
So, what does the universe do when it’s time for us to process some old baggage? It sends us a teacher to sound the alarm. Listen, we can just keep the projections going: To stay with the narrative that this person is the problem. “They’re awful, tawdry, so gross! Like WTF is she thinking?” But the work comes in realizing this person is just there as our sacred partner to reflect back our own feelings that we are awful, tawdry and gross. For me, this is the unworthiness and self judgement that my success made me push way down, down, down.
So today, I sit with this exiled part of myself. The part of me that feels worthless. The part of me that used sex and sexuality to feel powerful. The part of me that cut people down to feel big. The part of me that judges people today who may do the same…I am safe now. I can start sitting with and tenderly loving these parts. I can be grateful for this rough teacher on Earth School. But wait…let me amend that. I can breathe through the lessons this teacher is teaching me and maybe one day when I am ready, I can be grateful. I don’t want to force my younger self into anything. I can just hold that intention. For now, I want to invite this long-buried feeling of unworthiness over for a cup of tea and say, as the spiritual teacher Tara Brach teaches: You, too, belong.
Thank you for sitting with me as I cast some light on my trance of unworthiness. It was uncomfortable to sit in it all week. It’s much easier to cast aside people that trigger us, but when we do, we’re actually casting aside an exiled part of ourselves. We can love ourselves better than that. We can love ourselves even when it’s hard. By not being afraid to explore our darkness, we create more space for light and joy. On that note, I love you and thank you. I’m here to hold that space for you, too, 24/7, as always at atoosa@atoosa.com.
xo, atoosa
The soundtrack of my 🤍🖤❤: