Divided We Fall

Years ago I was dating a man, it doesn’t matter who. What matters is that we were making dinner in his kitchen and his cell phone was on the island between us. I was chopping onions. He was chopping peppers. Suddenly his phone lit up with a text from his ex, and it was a Zillow link. I didn’t mean to see the text, her name, or the fact that it was a link to a house, I just happened to be standing there with eyeballs. These things happen.

He saw the text at the same time, then he looked at me. He looked alarmed. I did what any normal person would do, and asked what was up. We hadn’t been dating long, maybe six months. Long enough that it felt weird he was getting that text, but not long enough that I was troubled. I was curious, not freaked out. Until he reacted. How could you look at my private texts?! I didn’t think you were the kind of person who would look at my phone!

At first I thought he must be joking. He was yelling, so if he was joking then he was busting out a little Pacino Method acting there in the kitchen. I couldn’t imagine he was serious, though. We were on the same side of the island, the phone was facing me, and I’d been looking down chopping onions. It would have been almost impossible not to see. I said something to that effect, but he doubled down. Wow, I’m just stunned. I really didn’t see this coming. That’s a real violation of privacy. By then he’d slammed down the knife and was washing his hands, back to me. I put my knife down, too. My hands were shaking.

I don’t do well with sudden outbursts, or yelling, and I really don’t do well with gaslighting. He stormed out of the kitchen, and I went and washed my hands. Then I got my stuff and walked out the front door. That must have surprised him, because the door flew open when I was halfway down the stairs and he was incredulous. You’re just going to leave? When I said I wasn’t going to stay when he was deflecting and acting like I’d gone into his phone surreptitiously, instead of having an honest conversation about why his ex was sending him house listings, he blew up again. So I took off, and that was that. He did try to call a few times, and at some point I asked if he’d dated women in the past who fell for that crap, but we never had those tacos and I never did find out what the Zillow link was about. He was a therapist, by the way.

It’s all fun and games till someone gets a text. Photo: Becca Tapert on Unsplash

There’s a thing that happens when you’re in an argument with a narcissist. The word narcissist gets thrown around a lot, and there’s a spectrum, so let’s define it for these purposes as people who genuinely lack empathy, and not people who are self-absorbed like all of us can be when we’re acting like asshats. Anyway, there’s a thing that happens when you’re in an argument with a bonafide narcissist and you’ll know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever had the misfortune. The subject at hand is this thing that’s happened between you. Maybe there was an altercation, words were exchanged, feelings were hurt. Maybe it’s less murky than that, and what you’re dealing with is a clearcut example of betrayal by anyone’s standards. You go to have a conversation about the thing that happened. You go in good faith, hoping to have an honest exchange, even if it’s painful, even if you have to make yourself vulnerable to do it.

You open your mouth, you get a sentence out, or half a sentence, and suddenly you are cut off and the person is talking about an entirely different thing. How it is you could have said what you said at a wedding five years ago when everyone was drunk and full of salmon. Some element about your personality that has always bothered them. Why you owe them for something they did, but are just telling you about now. How they haven’t done anything wrong, you’re crazy for feeling the way you do, and everyone thinks so.

Narcissists are never wrong. If you try to object, they will shout you down, or they’ll leave. They didn’t come to talk, they came to watch you twist in the wind, beg for forgiveness, or swallow your pride. They get off on it. The worst case scenario is dealing with a person like this when they have more power than you do. If you have a parent who operates this way, or a teacher or boss, for example. Or if you’re the beleaguered president of a sovereign country invaded by a dictator - and you have to meet with the elected-felon-president of a third country with more power than yours, and his scam-artist, VCbilly, woman-hating sidekick. People who should not get to breathe the same air as you, or sit in the office where you find yourself being attacked, and asked questions far below the value of your time.

There is no winning with people like this, there’s only maneuvering. I grew up with two parents who were on the narcissism spectrum, and on the high end of it, so I have a lot of practice. I never heard the words “I’m sorry” from either of them, and I knew them for a pretty long time, so it’s likely they made a couple of mistakes along the way. If you want to have a narcissist in your life, you’re going to have to learn to do the math on both sides of the equation. You’ll have to write apologies for the other person, and deliver them to yourself in their voice inside your own head. Maybe buy yourself some flowers.

You’ll have to learn to keep your feelings to yourself, or share them with people in your life who know how to listen, but it won’t be them. It’s painful. There may come a point in time where you think you can negotiate with people like this, and you’ll be disappointed. There’s no perfect email you can write, no thing you’re going to say that’s finally going to get through. You can have boundaries, but you’ll be the one erecting them, maintaining them and protecting them. They’ll be the ones testing them.

It’s generally understood that trauma makes a narcissist. Usually it’s an inability to connect to a primary caregiver as a child. Maybe your dad was a dick who only cared about money and accomplishments, and you could never measure up in his eyes, or your own. So you spend your life building towers as high into the sky as they’ll go, even if you have to screw architects and contractors to make it happen. You build them in gold and stamp your fake name across the top, but still, it isn’t enough. You know deep inside you’re soulless and empty, and all the McDonald’s in the world can’t fill the void. You don’t have real friends. Your family fears you or despises you or seeks your approval in needy, pathetic ways - like you did with your own dad. Those are the kids you reject the most, the ones who remind you of yourself. Poor Tiffany.

Or your mom struggled with addiction and you ended up being raised by Mamaw, and grew into a man who hates women and pretends to be from a community that can’t stand you, because you painted them with one brush, and called them lazy, or welfare queens. If they just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps like you did, they’d have better lives. It’s like immigrants who come to this country and want other immigrants to be deported if they didn’t come here the “right way.” Or veterans who voted for Trump, but didn’t expect to lose their federal jobs. It’s okay for other people to get hurt, they still support the president’s policies, just not the way he’s implementing them.

Thing is, when it comes to the men setting our democracy on fire right now, I just don’t care why they are the way they are, because they’re hurting too many people. Sorry Daddy didn’t love you. Sorry your mom struggled with addiction, that really sucks. Normally I’d have a lot of compassion for you, but you know what? We all have our crosses to bear. I know what it’s like to grow up with a mom who struggles with addiction, or with a dad who’s so distracted and self-obsessed he really doesn’t have the capacity to love anyone but himself.

Somehow I haven’t grown up to be a person who wreaks havoc and destruction on every Tom, Dick and Harriet around me. I haven’t decided the only way I’ll feel better is to dominate the world and sell it off for parts. You don’t get a free pass to be a fucking heartless, arrogant prick because you had a tough childhood and have dealt with trauma. Lots of amazing people have dealt with trauma. Don’t come after me. I know there are some things that are so horrific there’s no recovery without a lot of help and time, and even then, the devastation may plague a person forever. Neither of these degenerates falls into that category.

It was nauseating for lots of us to watch that Oval Office debacle last Friday. Any of us who’ve been in a room with a man speaking to us abusively, dismissively, like we should be thankful just to take up space. It made me sick to my stomach. Two men double-teaming you with that disgusting, chest-beating, macho cosplaying lame-ass weak tea? It was embarrassing and enraging. To watch a United States president and vice president do Putin’s bidding from inside the Oval Office was a thing I never thought I’d see. I felt certain some of his supporters would abandon ship, finally, and some did. Not nearly enough, though.

I swear this is the only administration in history where the president of an allied nation could leave a meeting that should have happened behind closed doors and without press - and instead was an ambush and a circus - and find himself dealing with the most victim-blaming question of them all: What was he wearing? No wonder so many of us were triggered af.

Fox News talking points start up almost instantly. They must have a team of DOGE-boy rejects and Karoline Leavitt-wannabes sitting in a room somewhere, sweating and smelling of Drakkar Noir and Taskeen Caramel Cascade, just waiting for this crap. Spin it like Zelenskyy is the problem in his t-shirt. Talk about how he’s a bureaucrat trying to force his way into NATO. Tell people the president is just trying to avoid war, he’s the peace president. Tell them Ukraine started it. Say that it’s just good business for us to have a repayment plan. Tell them Bill Clinton said nice things about Putin, too, they won’t remember it was thirty-five years ago. They get their talking points out into the world, and people you don’t even know start commenting on your posts with this garbage.

It’s hard to have normal days right now. We’ve been talking about the cognitive dissonance required to elect an adjudicated rapist president and then watch him pretend he cares about protecting girls and women. The mental gymnastics you need as a woman to vote for a man who is on tape saying he grabs women by the pussy, and to fill in the black dot for that man, anyway. To listen to a vice presidential candidate who has expressed his beliefs about childless cat ladies ruining the country, about people without children deserving less of a vote, about post-menopausal women having no purpose except to care for their grandkids…and to think he’s charming. It’s fine for him to wear eyeliner. Pictures of him in long blonde wigs are okay. Elon Musk can wear t-shirts and baseball hats in the Oval Office. Oh hey, your racism and bigotry are showing, oops.

It makes you want to tear your hair out. It makes you want to grab people by the shoulders and say Heyyyyyyyy, wake the fuck up in there, are you serious? What are you doing? Why would you vote for people who don’t respect you? People who said they were going to make it harder for you to vote…and are now trying to make it harder for you to vote! Do you know a second woman was escorted out of a town hall in Tennessee the same day the president and vice president soiled the Oval Office and shamed the country? It’s true.

She went to a “Coffee with the Congresswoman” event - a town hall with Diane Harshbarger who came unprepared. At a certain point, Harshbarger said she hadn’t read Project 2025. She also said people are “born male or female” - at which point a woman in the audience asked, “What about intersex people, do they exist?” Harshbarger would not answer, so she asked again. She was polite, she was articulate, she was doing nothing more than exercising her First Amendment rights, and she was escorted out by two big law enforcement members of the new He-Man-Woman-Haters Club. There’s nothing funny about it, it’s terrifying.

It’s not even a news story. People aren’t even talking about it. But these are news stories - the president is selling off federal buildings, pretending millions of dead people are accepting Social Security benefits (they are not, when benefits go out and a person dies days later, excess benefits are automatically withdrawn from the account where they were deposited), and apparently considering whether to pardon Derek Chauvin’s federal charges. The Tate brothers travel restrictions were suddenly lifted, our NATO allies met without us for the first time, the president is selling off our timber, and may or may not have rigged the stock market with his on-again, possibly off-again tariffs. He’s frozen aid to Ukraine which is illegal - money Congress appropriates cannot be impounded by the president - he’s ignoring court orders, and threatening to withhold federal funds like that money belongs to him. So, yeah. It’s hard to get up and have a normal day. Everyone I know is struggling.

I went to Trader Joe’s a few nights ago. I had my own shopping list and I had my neighbor’s list. His list was full of stuff I don’t usually get, so it took me some time to find things. I did his first, then I went back and did my own. I was tired, it was the end of the day. I got to the checkout, and there was a kid who didn’t look a lot older than my son. He was sweet, asked me how my day had been and if I’d just gotten off work. I told him I was as okay as any of us can be right now, and he looked at me the way people do when they’re really seeing you. “Crazy times, huh?” he said, and I felt so embarrassed to be part of a generation that is handing our kids such a nightmare. I could have cried right there, and almost did. I just felt such a wave of sadness.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

When I got to my car, I realized I’d forgotten to pick up anything for dinner, so I went back in. Grabbed a few things and went back to the front. I ended up at a different checkout with a different kid, about the same age. Also kind. He asked if I’d just been there, but at the other register, and I told him I’d forgotten dinner. Made a comment about life right now and he laughed and nodded. Told me another woman had come back three times. There are a lot of us who aren’t okay right now.

There’s the cognitive dissonance of the people who voted for this madness, and the cognitive dissonance some of us are choosing to employ so we can get through the day. So we can work and write and show up for our family and friends, so we can try to save the world and also buy groceries, and also meet friends for lunch, even as democracy is on fire. It isn’t possible to be in a state of rage and/or despair all the time. You also have to feel the sun on your face and remember what it’s like to laugh, to sit by the ocean, to hug a friend.

You have to compartmentalize sometimes so you can function, you have to divide and conquer the to-do list. You have to make sense of the fact that no matter what these people do, their supporters just don’t seem to see it, and maybe they never will. Not even the first time their Social Security check doesn’t show up, or their mom can’t afford her insulin, or their daughter has to choose between getting a mammogram or feeding her kids - their own grandkids. If they won’t see it, we’ll go down with them. I’d rather be us. I hope they see it. I hope we can slow things down until they do. I hope we can keep ourselves and each other together enough until it happens. I hope.

Divided we fall.

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Friends, how are you holding up? I know for many of us it isn’t easy right now. If you want to meet me in real time to talk about it, I’ll be here 3/7/25 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version which goes out Saturdays. I’m leading a yoga retreat in Croatia in June. Maybe you want to meet me there, I’d love that. And I will meet you in the comments section, always one of my favorite places to be. Sending you love and hugs.