The Harrowing

There’s a place in the world for the angry young man
With his working class ties and his radical plans
He refuses to bend
He refuses to crawl
He’s always at home with his back to the wall
And he’s proud of his scars and the battles he’s lost
And he struggles and bleeds as he hangs on the cross
And he likes to be known as the angry young man…

-Billy Joel

Some stories are about the journey. This one is about the destination. My year revolved around the Harrowing, a series of events that shook my foundation and led to some deep thinking about the person that I am and the person that I want to be. To summarize, a former adversary wronged me, and I insisted that the people we had in common make a choice between me and that adversary, and every one of them chose that adversary. What I’ve come to realize is that, even if every one of those people had chosen differently, there was no winning this confrontation. My meaningless vanity, the crutch that had propped up my hobbled sense of self for decades, pushed me down a destructive path. Now there’s no going back, and I have to live in the world where it happened and make my peace with it. The only victory is in the sobering and humbling lessons I picked up from this experience.

People will always choose proximity to power over casual friendship.

When it became clear how things would turn out, I bemoaned the situation to one of my closest friends. His advice will stick with me forever:

“I don’t think they are choosing [that person] over you. They are choosing their own political self-interest over friendship. Which is somewhat different from taking [that person’s] side instead of yours. There’s a fair judgment to be made that putting politics over people is bad values, and you can be disappointed that people who you thought had different/better values actually don’t and that you misjudged them. But don’t take it as people valuing or respecting [that person] over you. They are all using each other. Politics is bad for the soul and we can make a choice to exit it.”

I could stop there, couldn’t I? Understanding that analysis and taking that advice is all I need.

It was foolish of me to assume, given a political choice, that anyone would choose me, who has nothing of political value to offer, over someone who offers access to power, appointments, prestige, and the like. I might believe them to have made a bad choice, but it certainly wasn’t an unreasonable one. In fact, the fault lies with me for misjudging the relationships.

Never misjudge casual friendships as meaningful ones.

Maybe it’s a product of past bullying and/or the idiosyncrasies I inherited from my mother that led to me being ostracized or bullied. However, since I outgrew many of those and came into my own, I’ve always collected friendships and not let them go. It’s a weird byproduct of our current “always connected” times that we can hold on to friendships even past their natural point of dissolution.

So you fervently hold on to a grad school group long after it’s clear that you are incompatible with the group’s leader and the rest of the group will always follow him. Or you pine to recreate the friendships from a previous stint in New Jersey even though it should be clear you can never go back again.

But it’s not just looking back. In coming to this town, I’ve struggled to build meaningful friendships. There might have been a handful of folks who, after more than six years here, I would have considered meaningful friends. Through the Harrowing, I learned that wasn’t true of any of them. I’m still not over that emotionally but at least I now understand it intellectually. I was viewing the friendships one way, and although they all liked me, I’m sure, they were viewing them much more superficially. I forced them to choose, and they all made their choice. I didn’t have to force them to make that choice. It’s ok to have light, superficial human interactions. You can be drinking buddies without being blood brothers. Especially when you already have plenty of friendships with meaning.

You only need three m’fers.

“You don’t need twenty friends. You only need three m’fers and you can take over a country.”

-Joey Diaz

One of the good things about realizing that certain friendships aren’t meaningful is that it forces you to understand what a meaningful friendship means. On a simple level, it’s one in which the person is willing to make their life at least a little less comfortable to support you and/or is willing to make you uncomfortable to help you understand a hard truth.

There are some meaningful friends that I communicate with almost every day. There are others I might not see for a year, but when we sit down and talk, the intimacy is still there and we pick up right where we left off. One such friend spent some time with me after the Harrowing and helped me to refocus; no one else could have reached me that way, and that friendship will always have moments like that.

I’m incredibly lucky in that regard. I’ve got a list of kind, generous, smart, meaningful friends that should satisfy any person. I’m going to focus on them and on continuing to support those friendships rather than lamenting ones that never were or are no more. I don’t need anyone new to sustain me.

I’m lucky to have friends who will tell me hard truths. As a young man, I didn’t want to hear about my faults and flaws from friends. I’d had enough people tell me that I wasn’t worthy or make me feel inadequate. The last thing I needed was the people on my side doing the same. But I’ve gotten older and I’ve come into my own, both in my sense of self generally and my self-assuredness specifically. Now I crave hard truths from friends. I want them to call me on my bullshit. During the Harrowing, I’d wrapped myself in a lot of self-pitying half-truths, and it was true friends who either directly or tangentially forced me to confront my own faults so I could grow.

Distinguish between actions that wrong you and actions that hurt you.

Give a moment or two to the angry young man
With his foot in his mouth and his heart in his hand
He’s been stabbed in the back
He’s been misunderstood
It’s a comfort to know his intentions are good
And he sits in a room with a lock on the door
With his maps and his medals laid out on the floor
And he likes to be known as the angry young man.

Those of you who know me the best know that I have an “Arya Stark” list on my phone, an enemies list for the electronic age. The list consists of people who have failed to meet my standards in some way, including some people I had never even met! In searching myself after the Harrowing, I realized that this list contained two distinct categories of people: those who had hurt me, and those who had wronged me. Wronging me is an affirmative act that someone undertook against me that made me worse off as a human being. It’s beyond question that my former adversary wronged me this year. Hurting me is my reaction to another person’s actions or inaction. People who supported my former adversary despite her wronging me hurt me, but they did not wrong me.

A person who wronged me would almost certainly also hurt me, but I can be (and often have been) hurt without someone having done anything to wrong me specifically. It’s unhealthy and perhaps a bit insane for me to harbor grudges over friendships lost or political choices. In fact, I feel a fair amount of shame simply acknowledging that those were the bases of my grudges in the past. We can all decide on our own whether vengeance is ever a noble pursuit, but at the very least it should be limited to those who have wronged you.

Part of that effort is finding the line between actual loss and vanity. What does it mean to be hurt when someone hasn’t wronged you? Ultimately it’s a show of vanity, a belief that anyone who chooses not to be in my life or to share my belief system is doing something wrong. They are not, and they never have been. And drawing those types of lines is exactly what led to the Harrowing in the first place. Now, in this moment of self-reflection that only a humbling defeat can provide, I’m going to force myself to look back at how I got here, and how I can do better in the future.

Self-righteousness distorts truth.

I believe I’ve passed the age of consciousness
And righteous rage
I found that just surviving was a noble fight
I once believed in causes too
I had my pointless point of view
And life went on no matter who was wrong or right

I had a very complicated mother and a very complicated relationship with her. She had a tendency to bring people close very quickly and then alienate them just as rapidly. Her world was black and white, and filled with absolutes. I learned a lot of her traits as a young boy, and they did not serve me well, to say the least. A cruel story that someone wrote about me in high school was in fact right on the nose about some of my worst self-righteous instincts. I think I’ve moderated or overcome a lot of them, but some remain.

Perhaps the most troubling is the use of self-righteousness as a sword or a shield. Whether it’s class, or politics, or any other measurable stratum, my mother’s example showed me how to use self-righteousness as a shield against any self-doubt, or deep reflection, or even the dreaded imposter syndrome. It’s easy to understand how this happens. The more that I look inward at my own flaws and deficiencies, the more I want to retreat back into a shield of self-righteousness. So I drove away all the Trump supporters from my life, even when on a personal level most had never been anything but kind towards me. Or I made assumptions about the wealthiest among us, even as I lived in one of the wealthiest towns in the state. Or, on a more basic level, I’d demonize those who made the affirmative choice not to be friends. There must be something wrong with them, I convinced myself, rather than accepting either that something might be wrong with me or, giving myself some grace, the friendship simply didn’t work for either of us.

What is my “beer and pretzels” ethos if not a manifestation of my self-righteous shield? When I feel insecure about who I am or where I come from, I pivot to make where I’ve come from and my background attributes of higher moral standing to build myself up.

Self-righteousness as a shield led directly to the Harrowing. Some measurable, concrete wrongs occurred against me. But how I reacted to those wrongs was my choice. I chose to take an unflinching, public stand against them and refused to compromise my righteousness in the interest of comity or even peace. I was proud of myself for that stand despite how it tore my life here apart. People make the choice to be superficial and to not react deeply to wrongs because it’s smart for their emotional well-being. We could have a debate about whether there is merit in feeling things deeply or not- I’m sure it has its benefits. But we still can and should control how we react outwardly to those feelings. In reacting publicly, in taking this self-righteous stand, I isolated myself in a way from which I can never recover in this circle. I’m too old and too tired to ever make that type of choice again.

The self-righteous story you’re telling yourself is incompatible with the self-righteous story your adversary is telling. Examine that tension.

Deep in the combat that is using self-righteousness as a sword, you will encounter adversaries who do exactly the same. In the narrative you’ve told yourself, you are the hero, and that person is the villain. But that person is telling a story where they are the hero and you are the villain. And in the quietest moments, when you drop your sword for a moment, you realize how unlikely it might be that your story is entirely correct, and that your black and white view reflects reality.

When I sprinkle in the results of the choice I forced on people this fall, and I see that, no matter how many self-satisfied rationalizations I created, I am deeply flawed, and my adversary has almost certainly captured some of those flaws accurately. It’s chilling, but it has to be confronted.

You cannot lose if you do not play.

I’ve always loved this quote from Marla Daniels on “The Wire.” In that case, it was her advice to her husband not to get involved in Baltimore police department politics. But it also has resonance for me in the Harrowing and all the choices I’ve made over the past twenty years.

I’ve mentioned the bullying I faced and my domineering mother. Both of these interrelated factors contributed to my backing down from challenges throughout my youth and young adulthood. The safer course seemed to be to go along to get along.

Then I had a bad experience living with some people in New York City. They were aggressive and inconsiderate, had significant hard drug habits, and the experience ended with one of their boyfriends overdosing in the apartment. Luckily, I was staying with my girlfriend that night at her apartment and my name wasn’t on the lease, but if I had been or it had been, I would have been caught up in a police report involving hard drugs through my no fault of my own.

You would think that would make the roommate sensitive to the situation she had put me in and conciliatory/apologetic. You would be wrong. Instead she left me an incredibly nasty voicemail attacking me for telling my girlfriend about this incident, when she felt I should have stayed silent. I owed her no confidentiality and she owed me some level of regret and conciliation, but instead she attacked viciously. This was a person who wronged me, and I did nothing in response.

I felt so much self-loathing about not calling her back and absolutely letting her have it, not only about this incident but about an entire year’s worth of experiences. But instead I ate it and moved on.

But something had snapped. From there, though, it was time for the great overcorrection. From that moment forward, there was never a fight that I wouldn’t take on, regardless of whether it was in my best interest to fight it. I raised my sword of self-righteousness in every battle. If someone had wrong me or if I perceived that someone had wronged me, I would go to battle every time. I’d hold grudges, I’d fight publicly, and I would never back down.

And I could always delude myself into thinking that taking on the fight was the right course. The Harrowing taught me an important lesson in that regard. Here was a case where I believe I was clearly wronged and I was deeply hurt. But taking on the fight was only bound to leave me even more hurt. And yet, I did it, and the results predictably left me more hurt and lower than I’d felt in years. I didn’t need to take on that fight, and it was never a fight I was going to win. So why did I do it? My self-righteousness blinded to me to what was truly right for myself.

Never take the shot unless you’re certain it will be a direct hit.

I had moved on from the local political scene and then the Harrowing happened and I was right back in it. My grudge was renewed, and my adversary was facing voters in two short months. But the truth is that adversary was an odds-on favorite for reelection the whole time. I know I stated an effective case against reelection, but not enough people heard it or were willing to listen.

And that reveals another truth that this year taught me. Just as a lawyer should never ask a question she doesn’t know the answer to, a grudge holder should never take a shot at the source of that grudge unless it’s sure to be successful. Now I’ve taken my shot and have been soundly humbled and defeated, and there’s really no coming back from that. I have to accept that I’ve lost any capital I had and that person is even stronger than ever.

My pride is shattered and I have to pick up the pieces.

Even in a battle poorly chosen, the scars remain.

I wish I could take back the fight I picked and the ultimatums I issued this fall. But now that they’ve happened, now that those choices have been made, there’s no going back. This little corner of the world and my relationships in it are forever altered and in many cases irreparably damaged. I have to accept my role in that being reality, but there’s no denying that it’s reality. There’s no choice but to move on.

Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.

These observations have represented a pretty candid and pretty bleak self-assessment. There’s no question that I have a lot of work to do as a human being and lots of room to continue to grow. But on the flip side, I am always way harder on myself than I need to be. I beat myself up for not working out every day. I self-flagellate for the smallest mistake at work. I ended up seeing myself in all the terrible ways that this adversary expressed.

The song that has made me emotional more than any other in 2023 is Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All.” These problems stem from some deep-seated, warped sense of self that I need to overcome.

When the Harrowing left me feeling at my lowest point in a long time, one line from that song kept coming back: “No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity.” Because as much as I regret the fight and the destruction that followed, I know that I’m an honorable person who ultimately fought to defend my good name against someone who was maligning me unfairly. And the work I did leading the issue that resulted in The Harrowing spoke to that character. Plus, I’ve accomplished a lot of other good in this town when given the opportunity. Anyone objective would know that person was wrong about my character and my qualifications. I might have even have convinced myself at this point.

Throw away your canoes.

And there’s always a place for the angry young man
With his fist in the air and his head in the sand
And he’s never been able to learn from mistakes
So he can’t understand why his heart always breaks
But his honor is pure and his courage as well
And he’s fair and he’s true and he’s boring as hell
And he’ll go to the grave as an angry old man

I was reading a “Talk of the Town” vignette in The New Yorker about Josh Radnor of “How I Met Your Mother” fame and he said something that stuck with me. “There’s a Buddhist thing: once you’re across the river, drop the canoe. You don’t need it anymore.”

My parents instilled me a desire to hold onto things — possessions, grudges, pain. Many times, these things I’ve held onto have helped me to advance further. My beer and pretzels origin story will always start with the Princeton rejection, and it has fueled my rise for decades. But I’m now finding that the downsides of holding on are far exceeding the positives. It’s time to unburden myself from so many things that have driven me, because they are also damaging me. I can’t promise I’ll succeed, but I’m going to do my best to let things go.

I’m throwing away my politics and government canoe. The Harrowing will be my last voluntary experience with that world. From now on, my only involvement will be having the knowledge needed to do my job and to have fun conversations at brunch. But I’m not personally investing myself in local or national races. The local scene is what it is- even if I wanted to hold on, I’m as good as dead now in that world. And as for national politics, obviously my perspective on Trump will never change, but I’m not going to let Trump or whatever happens in the 2024 election affect my emotional well-being. Not one person in the Democratic Party cares about me, so I’m going to stop caring about them.

I will mourn that time being over. Almost every job I’ve held in my life has involved working for, working with, or reporting on the government or politics. I made important friendships and I built lifelong memories. But as I survey where I stand today, not a single friendship from the world of politics has sustained itself. People in these worlds are always looking at how you can help them, and when you don’t have anything to offer them, you are dispensable. Like my friend said, politics is bad for the soul. I love the art and the game of it, but the Harrowing was the final straw. It’s time to say goodbye.

I’m going to follow the example of one local guy. He was involved in the game and made a clean break. Now he has a totally unrelated hobby that brings him a lot of joy and has cast him in a totally different light. It’s been impressive and inspiring to watch, and I’m going to follow that example moving forward.

Never put politics before humanity.

In 2016, Donald Trump broke my brain. I look back at my social media posts from that time and I think two things. First, I was right about everything. But second, I did not need to be insufferably self-righteous about it. I pushed some dear friends away and shunned others, people who had never been anything but kind to me. And over the past few months, throughout the Harrowing, Republicans were incredibly kind to me and Democrats behaved badly towards me. That doesn’t teach me that Republicans are better than Democrats or the reverse. What it means is that I will going forward judge people by how they treat me and how they treat others, not by the political party they choose.

I’ve been lucky to have friends accept my apologies for my past alienating behavior. It takes a lot of grace and decency to be on the receiving end of my obnoxious self-righteousness and be willing to forgive, and I feel very lucky to have received that grace and I won’t forget it.

The Harrowing

My resolutions for 2023 included not wasting any psychic energy on that adversary, and then I ended up allowing her to monopolize my psychic energy throughout the fall of 2023. Needless to say, I failed. And all my bitter self-righteousness did was cause me pain, and isolate and alienate me from the community unnecessarily.

Most people want to avoid conflict. While I don’t think that’s always the right choice, I do respect it as a mechanism for not making our hard lives any more difficult. Leaning into fights is a choice. It’s one that I have made too often. It’s one my former adversary also made. And it’s one that Donald Trump makes every day.

Yikes.

Yes, it’s hard to look in a mirror and realize that the same petty vengeances that fuel me are the ones that fueled an outer borough kid who never felt accepted by the elites. Needless to say, if I share a defining trait with Donald Trump, I’m doing something wrong. But look at all the people I’ve described who thrive on vengeance- the through line in all of their stories is some form of narcissism.

That’s ultimately the inherited disease I must fight. In the constant push and pull between being like my mother and being like my father, it’s the place where I most mirror her bad example. I’ve done other things this year- through hard work and quiet service to my community- that mirror my father’s approach to life. That’s a model I need to lean into as I try to extricate myself from a lifetime of petty, narcissistic grievances.

As I was collecting these reflections, I wanted to find a euphemism that might capture my experience this year best. The word “harrowing” as an adjective certainly fits, as this situation was acutely distressing and still makes me sad every day. But I learned through my research that “harrowing” can also be used as a noun. In one meaning, it represents for Christians the dark, uncertain time between Jesus’ death and resurrection. Although this has certainly been a time of darkness for me and I am in desperate need of redemption, that definition didn’t fit best. Instead, I most identify with a definition that comes from agriculture, where harrowing is a form of tilling a field used to level and smooth soil, break up clumps, and control weed growth.

In that sense, this Harrowing may have been exactly what I needed. I continued for years with bad habits that were undermining my growth as a human being. I made bad choices, I picked pointless fights, and I made a life that is already hard by definition even harder. That’s not to say that I’m worthless as a person. I have a lot of strengths and good roots that run deep. I just needed to break up the surface and start fresh, so the weeds go away and fresh crops can grow.

I pledged to take all of these lessons to heart. I learned the power of meaningful friendship. I finally accepted that politics is indeed bad for my soul and I should avoid it. I have learned to toss away my narcissistic frame and see the difference between someone making an affirmative choice to wrong me and people just living their lives and happening to hurt me in the process. I am learning how to be true to myself and my values without being self-righteous about it. I accept that self-righteousness distorts the ugly truths about myself that I need to examine, and my adversaries may understand some truth about me that I don’t want to confront. I have finally accepted that I need not take on every fight just because they are there for the taking. I’ve learned to accept the reality I confront rather than bemoaning the way I wanted things to be. And finally, I’ve learned that narcissism and self-righteousness are barriers to the true path of self-love, the type of love that is necessary to sustain any of us in a cruel and painful world.

In teaching me these lessons, the Harrowing ripped away a surface layer of extraordinarily bad habits but it will leave me fresh, unburdened, and ready for new growth. And I’m excited to see what destination that journey takes me to in 2024.