I have a couple of essays that I’ve been working on, mulling over, still reading research for. I’ll try to finish them up and send them on their way into the world soon. But this week my energy continues to be drained by events of the past that I’ve been wrestling with for two years—well, longer if you count the time I spent in the toxic hell of a workplace I was in for five years before that. And in the sense of being honest and vulnerable, it’s taking up a lot of headspace this week, as I reached out to former colleagues about their experiences, sharing stories. And so—I needed to write about it. About truth-telling, about the limits we impose on others to do so, and why it’s so damn hard. It’s doubtless not one of my most polished pieces of writing, so thanks for your patience with the rougher edges.
I’m always struck by how helpful it is to share stories of experience, of being vulnerable enough to tell the truth. And how reassuring and yet devastating it is to hear such similar, repeated patterns, how abusive the manipulation and undermining can be. The sense of a universal experience, knowing, is what begins to demand a louder voice. It’s a solidarity with others that brings clarity, a wider sense of what is real beyond our own thoughts.
My former colleagues and I suffered under a boss who believed only she could do everything right. She denied the work of others. She took credit for others’ ideas. She manipulated, lied, and undermined. She gaslit, ghosted, and excluded with impunity. There was not one person I ever heard her not say something critical about.
She would send texts to me during meetings I was leading that I wasn’t doing things right and needed to speed things up. She would send me texts in the evening, weekend and 14-page manic emails about how I was failing, how the people I was managing were failing and needed to be controlled. When after a year of trying to keep up and getting to exhaustion, I eventually tried to talk with her about the low morale, the exhaustive round-the-clock pace, and confusion. I gently said that people work differently, and not everyone can work the way she can, to which she pounded her fist on the table and said I will not apologize for my success. I was speechless. As a white woman with a staff of 100+, it was such a telling statement.
What I’ve wrestled with is the way to move forward. Remain silent and move on? Try to forgive and forge a path forward without looking back? It sounds positive, it sounds healing, it sounds like an action to take—like there is a path forward, you just have to take the steps, one after the other and soon you’re in a different space, a different life.
I’ve never had an inclination for grudges. I believe in trying to understand the scars and baggage that others carry who may treat others carelessly. But what I feel is not a grudge but a need for justice. There have been so many people—former staff, but also artists and community members—impacted by the actions of one person. So many stories. So many eery similarities. So many people.
I’ve come to a point where I don’t believe that moving on is the right answer. I’m not sure when we ever should move on from injustice. Moving on without recognition, without acknowledging the pain of others can offer no true resolution. Moving on simply feels like denial and silence. Move on, and bullies keep their places, continue to abuse and diminish so many others who are so depleted they finally take the step to resign or get fired. It’s a micro version of the macro we see across the country that is so maddening—move on and we get people passing laws to ban critical race theory, 1619 history, Indigenous genocide.
I’ve come to question the entire idea of moving on—are admonishments to move on actually another way that we reinforce ideals of rugged individualism, and deny the needs of community—the relationship of community? ‘Self-care’ and ‘don’t look back’ begin to smack of denying our interdependence as human beings—it fosters a denial of those who are left behind, of other parallel experiences left behind.
In the years I worked at the museum, I read so many articles about toxic workplaces—how to spot them (because it’s painfully obvious), what to do if you’re being bullied (take care of yourself, create your boundaries, care less(!)), how to cope and manage in a toxic workplace (cope! manage! are these words we want to use to describe our daily lives and experiences in times of peace?). Ultimately the primary solution offered almost every single time: get out. Don't look back.
I struggled with that for another two years of toxic humiliation. Really? The only solution to a toxic leader and environment—even in a job you otherwise love, a place you have given up time with family for, with spaces you helped design, and with colleagues you care about—is to leave? To not look back at the continued toxicity and supposed success of someone who you know has caused and is causing so much harm? How much power are we giving over to these people?
What I know of the truth is that not telling it is a form of control. It’s so many ideas that bubble cool and hot contained within our own minds to sort through— the admonishments and encouraging advice—to not dwell, not twist and turn in the muck of the past, and to not take up too much space, not be too loud, too demanding, too revealing, too seen, too much. These are told to us so we too uphold social order, to please others. Don’t rock the boat. I’m trying to listen to all of that and navigate towards something that feels truer for myself and my former colleagues—my friends.
It’s hard and frankly, annoying, to continue to think about. But I know intuitively that until I do speak truth, and risk appearing vulnerable and revealing my own faults, it will continue to take up space in places I don’t want it to—my dreams, my thoughts about myself, in a distrust of others. It’s not who I want to be. It’s not serving me and it’s not serving the community of people I admire and want to support.
So I want it to take up space on the page, in conversation, in community, and in public. I admire others who have spoken up and worked to change systems of power that are so woefully flawed that they invite and foster the same types of toxicity, colonialism, and exploitation we experienced. Like many, they are lanterns lighting the way we need to make change.
In thinking through all of it, the etymology of gossip is something I’ve been fascinated in—particularly in learning what gossip originates from.
It comes from the Old English terms God (god) and sibb (akin, sibling)—and as those roots hint at, the term gossip originally meant ‘godparent’—those who stood in spiritual relationship to the child of a close friend. But its root also has deeper meanings, in that godparent originally referred to companions in childbirth—those closest of female companions who would be with you at a time of immense fear and transition—the birth of a child.
It then grew to become a term to indicate close women friends—without a hint of the negative connotations that it takes on today. And it makes sense, when, as Silvia Federici writes—in the early modern period of England, women worked together in crafts and guilds that were later overtaken to be exclusive enclaves of men—brewing, for instance—but also cooperating together on the tasks of daily lives—sewing, spinning, washing, baking, birth. Women’s position deteriorated from these more communal structures by the 16th century:
Wives especially were expected to be quiet, ‘obey their husband without question’ and ‘stand in awe of them.’ Above all they were instructed to make their husbands and their homes the centers of their attentions and not spend time at the window or at the door. They were even discouraged from paying too many visits to their families after marriage, and above all from spending time with their female friends. Then, in 1547, ‘a proclamation was issued forbidding women to meet together to babble and talk’ and ordering husbands to ‘keep their wives in their houses.’…It was in this context that ‘gossip’ turned from a word of friendship and affection into a word of denigration and ridicule.
By 1811, gossip’s primary meaning had become defined as "trifling talk, groundless rumor”—the talk of ‘uninformed’ women who can’t be relied upon for truth.
These past two years—coinciding with the pandemic, with social crisis and upheaval, polarized ideologies—I’ve reflected a lot on aphorisms, on the pithy words of wisdom we hand down over the years, of turns of phrase and accepted wisdom that we breathe and sometimes hear reflected back in our own thoughts. It takes two. You made this bed. Don’t go to bed angry. Forgive and forget. Quitters never win. Move on. Don’t look back. Time heals all wounds. Gossip is a sin.
I don’t believe any of these any longer, and yet I hear them used and once used them myself. Saying a conflict takes two people implies victim blaming in the worst case, or undo self-questioning in others. Sometimes one person can wreak a hell of a lot of havoc without the fault of any other person. And time doesn’t heal wounds—it creates distance, it replaces one routine with a different one, but not one that is necessarily healing.
And gossip—gossip has been used for too long to discount, to gaslight, to ignore, to denigrate, to silence those with less power.
I no longer want to be silent about the truth of my and others’ experiences. I want to gossip in community with other colleagues and friends and be kin—to support them and recognize them and work with them to ensure that no one else has to walk away and be silent.
Solidarity is never created alone
Alchemy yes
What a nightmare situation. Speaking out against it is the right thing to do.