Rogue Burocrazy

Rogue Burocrazy
How did it happen, step by step that we, it, became a rogue burocrazy? Last night I lay away the way I lay awake as a girl; now plotting revenges against X who browbeat me and humiliated me in a meeting; then plotting revenges against my mother who physically beat me. Obsessing about work...writing about work...Can't stop thinking about work.
First P calls me yesterday, desperate. Her program is being targeted again for annihilation by X' empire building machinations. Last year she gave the program a bad review that was overruled by X' superiors at the Poverty Management Agency. She managed to close down the evening component of the program but PMA didn't let us run it after all and the losers in the end were the students who either ended up with no evening classes at all or traveling all the way to Southcity from Northcity. This time P is being challenged on her hiring, the number of classrooms...It is a campaign,a vendetta.
I go into a meeting on the auditing of educational gain assessment. For years vendors have been paid piecework for employment; now that they are paid piecework for education X who has no education credentials feels threatened (is threatened) and has escalated her bullying. She took a ten minute rant about how the programs can't place students. I say, that's not been my observation. She escalates. I at last interrupt the rant and say, it's a different conversation..Let's focus on the auditing problem.
Two days later, there's a second meeting on how the budget and program monitors will review students' assessment portfolios. X keeps pushing for so called standards, for reviewing every single portfolio, getting more and more hostile and aggressive with that internalized slave master body language and face that has all the workers in our program quaking. I am hating her. I am barely able to think from hating her so much. I feel myself going under the way I did when my mother beat me.
Yesterday all anybody was talking about at work was X' performance at the meeting. I am numb from rage and humiliation. Plotting revenges...I go into her office and quit (I don't play by your rules. Keep the fucking blocks); I take her on in a public meeting; I speak to her one on one. I watch gangster movies studying the play of their bullying, looking for moves.
I go for two job interviews. The first one, the afternoon of the battering meeting I am still shifting from quaking to numb, feeling the way I used to as a child, 'If I can't even win at home, how will I survive in the world? If I can't fight for myself at home, how will I fight for myself in the world?' As the possible future boss described the job I felt myself fading, sinking...Even if this was water I wanted to jump into, it would be completely over my head. On top of all those feelings I had to pull my attention out, pull my head out of my butt, to think about what he was saying...
My latest revenge plot: take up X' point as if they had merit, on their merit...and in doing so get these thoughts said out loud: There need to be checks and balances, your unit's role is different than mine..Overall, our role is to support programs to succeed in fulfilling their contracts...Not to make their lives hell adding tons of burocratic layers simply to make empires for ourselves.
As a girl I pictured myself when I was big enough to hit Her back, beating her to a pulp in an empty green room, hitting her as hard as I could over and over. My memory is that I sustained the fantasy of my revenge for hours and then full of remorse spent hours composing sermons to atone for hating my mother, sermons that eventually boiled down to the phrase Perdoname Dios mio which I repeated over and over, my discovery of mantra. For days after the beating I went through my days quaking and numb, having to perform my many rituals and excel in school with the tiny fraction of my mind that wasn't consumed by obsessive revenge plotting, compulsive praying, or complete absence of attention to anything at all in the present.

I can't win. I can't win. I am forever the girl unable to make my mother stop, able only to make internal victories. So,the recording in my mind is I can't win. It's a desperate feeling. Or, I feel rage at the impunity, the desire to punish (the beginning of becoming the oppressor myself.
(The defeat, internalized, makes me feel hopeless about each sentence I write. I can never say what I mean, show what it's like to sit in a meeting being berated by the spectre of some slave master in X' past, or her ancestor's past. And respond like the enslaved. In wage slavery there must be the masters, the internalized slave masters. In the business of delivering the free labor of the poor there aren't, technically, real owners of slaves, only intermediaries.)
Stop. You can't whip me. You can't whip any of us any more.

I sit in the meeting racking my brain to come up with language to put forth my arguments even though X walks out as soon as I begin speaking. My arguments go into the air. We are at the long conference table in the big conference room: three people who report directly to X and are battered mostly into silence or into asking questions to clarify, rarely stating a point of view; S the budget guy (he belongs to X) and two people who report to him; W the operations guy; me and two people who report to me. Nobody says anything. I am feeling battered and humiliated that the battering is happening in front of them.
I want to say to them, say something, do something.
How can one person willing to abuse terrorize an entire burocracy of 150 workers? They all sit there blank faced, scheudenfreuiding, or just happy the guns aren't trained on them.

The question for me, is how can I win? What do I need to do at Wednesday's meeting so that I win?
How can I describe the tedium, the outrage, the despair, the human waste of putting up with this meeting?

Then came the job interview. I came to it battered, I experienced it as overwhelming.

How do I set this straight? Reclaim dignity? Roll HER over? Win? These thoughts over and over, the bone my mind is gnawing on while I walk the dog, read, write, eat, consider other jobs...My latest version
I march into X' office and say, next time you talk to me that way in a public meeting, or even head in that direction, I gather my papers get up walk out
Or, at next week's meeting on the invoicing problem, I say (in front of the other "senior" managers:
Were you sufficiently fulfilled in your quest for dominance? Did it feel good? I want you to know this: I'm almost 60 years old, I'm a professional. You are never to talk to me that way in a public meeting. Next time you even head in that direction I'm going to do what anyone does when faced with an abuser, walk away.
It's all play, according to the Swami. Don't focus on stopping the waves, learn to surf, enjoy the ride....
Me, I'm drowning. I'm lost in the middle of the ocean and I'm drowning, in over my head.
My one floating log is to get another job. But won't I feel this way there very soon? Or will I be comfortable in my role, with my rank? Here, it's the schoolyard ranking that makes the stress worst. This overempowered schoolyard bully rampaging makes the burocracy into a rogue burocrazy...serial sexual harassers, targeting of innocents for firing, even entire programs for shutdown. The ordinary, or relatively ordinary chafing of the structural, official chains (we are changed from this funder to that funder, and then back again so that dozens of us lose our pensions, our sick days; we are sent scrambling after this mandate and then scrambling after that other one, never mind they are opposite directions) is compounded by the harsher, sharper toothed , sharkier aggression of the schoolyard. We're like the worst garden variety burocracy and the worst poverty pimp cbo and the meanest not too bright petty gangster's crew, in one.
So how do I set this right? How do I relaim my dignity? How do I roll HER over? In front of people...
And how do I do all that, without becoming HER?
An internal victory will not cut it.

10-13-06
I don't pay attention. I survived my childhood through internal victories; I invented pratyahara; I live within. I don't know what is actually going on in the real world. My skills of overcompensation are huge, so I can look like I know what's going on a lot of the time, until I'm challenged in any way. Then, I panic, go under, go silent or hostile. I have no confidence in my mirror world, that what I think I see is what I see. I wish I was like Gaby and knew the torturers wouldn't get anything out of me. As a girl I imagined myself being tortured, that if they pulled out my fingernails I would withstand the pain, say nothing. As a grown woman I can't even handle being verbally abused and intimidated by X.
After being battered by her in yet another meeting I feel internally erased. It's clear I need to find another job, but I can't imagine myself able to work anywhere. I survived childhood by impersonating humans in the public sphere, although the violence in my home had erased me. I was compelled to excel because it seemed to me if I got good grades my father loved me.
And because I don't pay attention my writing is thin and brittle like a composicion worth 100 points for Mrs. Crespo, or Mrs. Harper, or Miss Nogueras (the others' names I don't remember. There was la Doctora Coronado who tutored me for my Examen de Ingreso al Bachillerato. She was tall. I was afraid I would grow to be tall and awkward like she was because I thought my big feet meant I would be tall. I wasn't. Maybe my fear stunted my growth.
What to do about Machi? When will I be able to take time off to go see him, now that we are on permanent hold, awaiting being reinterviewed yet again for our same job. This will make the third time our jobs change funder. Will they accept us as civil servants? How many of us will they accept? Or will the crazy commissioner's short attention span and hissy fitting management shift focus?
Or am I simply afraid to go see Machi? Afraid of what I'll see? Of how he'll be and how we'll be together?
Right now my brain is bouncing up into my skull. I managed one phone call about a job. The guy I interviewed with didn't call back. I didn't show up at the big event so probably he never will call. I dread those big events and that's what that job would be. I'm not good at very much. (I don't believe that. I can tell I am good at many things. But I hate that fuzzy, confused feeling in my brain. I don't like to persist. I like to throw in the towel, curl up. Lucha told me that when she visited Jody in the wilderness for the emotional growth parent's weekend, she had to make fire with a stick. "I was in tears from the frustration. Here was a task I couldn't fake. I almost had an ember and I had to blow on it to make a flame and I blew too hard and I wanted to give up. I was fine with having no hot food to eat, if being willing to have no hot food meant I could stop trying." I feel the same. Say I can stop trying. Say I can just stop. Is that why I am as fascinated as I am terrified by the drunks who live by the subway exit to my job? I know what it's like to be inwardly a bum. My Abuela's worst insult was to call a man un bon. It was as if it might be catching if one didn't inoculate oneself with expressions of disdain, contempt. One morning you wake up and there you are, on the grimy tiles of the subway station or if you're lucky with a broken, flattened cardboard box between you and the tiles...filthy, toothless, shit smeared...un bon.
All because I can't, I won't persist; I let myself be battered and then run home, don't show up at the big event; the other woman doesn't ever return my emails or my calls. They can all see through me to that thing my mother saw that made her hate me. The flaw. That I am a born bon...Fuzzy brained, inattentive, missing out on the texture of the present, on what is good, because my mind is gnawing on something, something else, something old that happened long ago and I don't even remember.

At 11:34
This must have been the way it felt then: I am an animal who is not viable. If I were not a human, I would be a beast unable to distinguish poison berries from food, predator from friend; unable to sense danger. All this because I wasn't able to defend myself when X attacked me (the wy I couldn't defend myself from my mother; I couldn't make her stop); I couldn't defend myself, I couldn't even take in that I was being attacked; acknowledge it; I leapt to pretend-it's-not-happening mode...And now I am inwardly dragging myself wherever I have to go...must go; Avoding anything I possibly can. Mymother muast have createdin me her own inner climate because she was that way: avoiding mostlife situations, ready to beg off any event; there was just aboutnothing that couldn't be cancelled or blown off. (And he was the opposite: nothing could be cancelled, refused, he was the center of any event he went to and so without him there was no event. She liked to hide in her bedroom with the tv on, her candy, and later the little airplane vodka bottles.
I feel I must manage to make it through this day without resorting to doing addictions (sugar, tv, starving). I'm in a little pen. Tied up by rules. Not in the open, not in the world, nowhere near radiance. Lonely, bored, unrealized.