Let me tell you a story...

On eros, projection, and power.

May in the San Luis Valley. 2018.

I originally released this piece of writing as a podcast episode in December of 2021, before I’d started my Substack page. Many of you have requested the written version, so I decided to release it here. If you’d like to hear the audio version instead, you can find it here, or search for episode #108 wherever you listen to A Millennial’s Guide to Saving the World.

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If you asked her to identify the moment she knew she was lying to herself, she could tell you. 

Her intuition had always been accessible if she wanted it to be. The problem was, she rarely wanted it to be. Avoiding her subconscious mind was a strategic game of rationalization. She had mastered the ability to silence the inner voices she didn’t want to hear, and prioritize the ones she did. 

She was stubborn, determined, and painfully intellectual in the way she moved through the world, coming up with endless rationalizations to avoid inner work, stay in toxic relationships, and play out codependent patterns over and over again. 

You could even go so far as to say she enjoyed this game. She was good at it. 

The truth is, she had played a lot of mental and psychological games throughout her life. She played them with herself, and with other people. A disturbing amount of energy went into these games, all in an effort to avoid her unprocessed trauma, racking up casualties in the form of other people, and her health, along the way.

It’s worth mentioning that she didn’t really understand what she was doing, or why. The reason she kept playing these games was unknown to her, and she didn’t even have the awareness to identify them as games. Looking back, it’s clear that’s what they were, but at the time, it just felt familiar, or like some kind of unavoidable survival mechanism.

So, there she was, the last one left at the retreat. Her teacher, Alex, got into his car, and drove away. Without a beat, a voice in her head appeared. “I’m playing the long game,” it said, and she smirked. It was a smirk of satisfaction, mixed with a bit of horrific self-awareness. Normally this sort of inner voice would come and go without second thought, but at this point she’d been to too much therapy for it not to at least be registered. It was an improvement that she recognized what she was doing, but she still didn’t know how to stop herself from doing it.

The previous three days had been the absolute sweetest ambrosia for nearly all of her unexamined behavior.

She had shown up with a mission, and nailed it.

She had fallen in love with Alex many months prior, but this was the first time they’d met in person. Three days, beautiful scenery, luxurious hot springs and a fifteen-to-one ratio of gorgeous, intelligent, and curious bikini-clad female students to one slick, well-dressed and well-spoken “spiritual” teacher. You know the scene.

To clarify, when I say “fallen in love” what I really mean is that she was infatuated with a delusional, projected, and mostly baseless fantasy of what she hoped could be.

And, to further clarify, out of those fifteen female students, at least two-thirds of them had been shot with similar eros-drenched arrows of delusion. Whether it was sex, love, admiration, praise, acceptance, balm for their unresolved daddy issues, or all of the above, the vast majority of them wanted something more than what was listed on the retreat’s bullet point list of amenities. 

Of course, their teacher wasn’t exactly the clear channel he claimed to be either, but we’ll get to that later.

From girl on girl manipulative competition, to hero complexes, suave seduction, unexamined narcissistic processes, and unspoken motives and objectives – wherever you turned, this three-day retreat had been an emotional and psychological game of epic proportions.

That said, those three days were apparently insufficient at quenching her thirst for drama, and her half-conscious acknowledgment that she was playing the long game no doubt prolonged the debacle. She came to the retreat intending to find a way to get closer to Alex, and on the four hour drive back to the airport, she’d figured it out.

She’d like to believe it started innocently. And in a way, it did. At the retreat it became clear that they wanted the same thing in life, which, at the time, was to start a retreat center. They even had the same idea for where in the world they wanted it to be located. They also discovered they shared the same favorite number, which she had a tattoo of on her wrist. “I know to always follow that number you have on your wrist when I see it,” he said to her with a wink.

She took these coincidences as a sign; some sort of predestined magical synchronicity. She’d felt magnetized and drawn to Alex for quite some time, and now it had been revealed that they both had the same magic number and the same vision for their future. What were the odds?!?!

“I know this may seem forward, and I know you hardly know me,” she typed into a Facebook message at her airport hotel, “But I think we’re meant to do this project together.” Her entire body was shivering in that way it always did when she did something that felt both exciting and incredibly dangerous. 

It didn’t take very long for the conversation to veer into a discussion about what they felt about each other, current academic and future professional relationship aside. “I need to know how you really feel about me,” he insisted. She said she didn’t really know him that well, aside from his persona as her teacher, and so it would be ludicrous to even answer a question like that. She admitted to admiring him, and spoke openly about how she credited him with a lot of her emotional and psychological growth over the past couple years.

This was all true, but also, she wanted more. She wanted her fantasies of them ending up together to become a reality. She wanted to get closer to him, and she wanted him to feel the same way about her. She intentionally left that part out though, shifting the focus back to him. “Well, how do you really feel about me?” she shot back. He evaded the question entirely. 

Of course, they both already knew the answers to these questions. For starters, she’d spent three or four hours in his cabin at the retreat, late into the night. They were discussing his teaching style, and how he was sick and tired of being projected upon by his students, totally dumbfounded as to why so many of them kept falling in love with him. 

By this point she had maneuvered herself into a role where she claimed to be far more clear-headed than the rest of them, having been to too much therapy to project unrealistically. Not only that, but she had been nominated by the group to take on the role of the messenger - to communicate the other students’ complaints to him directly. She positioned herself as a noble outsider, a hero destined to save the day. Whether or not either one of them fully believed that this was the reason she was sitting on his bed at two in the morning was beside the point. It sufficed as a decent enough excuse for the late night encounter. 

Above the surface, this was an innocent conversation, and an opportunity to vent and connect platonically. But below the surface, they were flirting, enjoying the attention they were giving each other, and getting off on the not-so-subtle inappropriateness of her sitting across from him on his bed after everyone else had gone to sleep.

“If we fucked right now and someone saw us, I’d be in big trouble,” he said at some point, rolling his eyes at how annoying it was to be judged so closely. To her, it sounded like he was asking to be absolved of the potential risk – asking to be convinced that they should just do it anyway — wanting her to tell him she could keep a secret.

In the past, she would have enthusiastically accepted the invitation to seduce him, but this time, she resisted. She felt it wasn’t in her best interest long-term to be the retreat slut, plus, she wanted more from him than just sex. As much as she wanted to crawl over to his side of the bed, gaze at him with her ravenous eyes and unzip his pants, instead, she clenched her jaw, crossed her legs tighter, and held herself back.

She wanted him to love her, not just fuck her. And she was smart enough to know that jumping into the whore boat too quickly might prevent him from ever seeing her as his Madonna.

So far, it was all going according to plan. 

He’d sat next to her at every meal, not so subtly moving his leg to touch hers under the table, both of them holding their thighs together for an inordinate amount of time. There were long periods of eye contact, winks, endless flirtation, and private conversations away from everyone else when they managed to sneak away from the group.

They both knew, and yet both agreed, nonverbally, to keep this energy under the literal and figurative table.

This was a game, afterall, and when playing these games, you can’t reveal all of your strategies or intentions out in the open. At some point, she remembered a meme she’d stumbled across on the internet that read “People are like phones, when there’s no connection they play games”. On some level, she knew that’s what was going on, but again, she wasn’t ready to admit this to herself fully. Too much vulnerability, honesty, and questioning would dismantle the illusion. For now, they were both relishing their mutually constructed self-deception. 

Her suggestion that they should join forces and build a retreat center together sparked weeks of daily communication. Sometimes sharing real estate listings, sometimes sharing their favorite songs, and sometimes re-visiting the topic of “how do you really feel about me,” but still resisting the urge to say anything directly. 

One night, they decided to get on the phone to discuss their mutual vision. The nervous/excited shivering returned to her body as the phone rang. 

The phone call lasted six hours and encompassed a range of topics from their ideas about the retreat center, possible ways to raise money, a discussion about her breasts and how his cat would love to cuddle into them, the sorts of people they were normally attracted to, and their thoughts on what kind of long-term romantic relationship they each wanted in their lives… Not with each other, of course, No, that wasn’t at all implied!

As time went on, their discussions became more relaxed and direct. Weeks had passed, and they were still chatting almost daily online, late into the night. 

“I have learned a lot about managing my sexual vibes,” he said in one of his messages. “There is definitely energy between us, but as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t exist in that way. In a future day when you aren’t my student, who knows… but what’s more important is professionalism and carrying out this mutual vision,” he continued. 

She was relieved to hear him acknowledge the energy she’d been feeling for months, but from her perspective, it seemed the boundaries had already been blurred beyond recognition.

A few days later he told her that he’d reached out to a friend of his to see if their human design charts aligned, you know, professionally. 

“And, what did he say?” she responded eagerly. 

“He said we’re a great match. Oh and, also he also said we should probably sleep together first, lol”.

“He did?” She responded, half thrilled, half annoyed that his consistent flirtations were encouraging her fantasies and delusions to grow to the point where they could no longer be suppressed or managed responsibly. 

“Well he was half joking,” Alex continued, “But the half that was real was his thinking that once the sexual tension was released, we could get really clear about whether working together was a good idea”.

“Yeah… I’m gonna assume that sleeping together would do the opposite of diffuse or release anything,” she responded, certain that this would only increase their attraction toward one another. 

“Well, some things would no doubt be released! Lol.”

She stared at this response both self-satisfied and surprised. “Did he just make a cum joke?” she asked herself, unable to suppress the image of what he’d just implied.

“But,” he continued, “you are currently my student. I don’t cross that line.”

It would be months before she found out that he had in fact slept with one of his students, but had arranged for her to take his course for free, in exchange for “research assistance” as opposed to the standard admission cost, judging that somehow that would make the fact that he had fucked her logistically non-me-too-able.

At this point, it seemed that both she and Alex were playing two sides. She, on the one hand, was giddy over what felt like months of foreplay, the erotic tension building by the minute. But on the other hand, she was beginning to become annoyed at how incapable he was at setting any concrete boundaries with her, and how horrible he was at resisting the urge to keep flirting, even while simultaneously trying to say that he wasn’t.

He, on the one hand, seemed to feel as though he was staying within his limits of professionalism by “being honest,” as long as no actual sex was happening. But he was also, clearly, enjoying this game just as much as she was. He was feasting on her attention, her admiration, her flirtation, and the not-so-subtle erotic energy, begging for more when he didn’t feel like he was getting enough. 

At the time, she was confused by her own internal conflict. She wanted him badly, that was certain, but she was also becoming increasingly frustrated with him for not living up to the pedestal she’d placed him on. She’d had a string of failed, toxic relationships in her past, and was hoping that becoming involved with Alex would mark the end to all of that. He was mature, self-aware and spiritually revered… at least that’s how he’d presented himself. But now, she wasn’t so sure. 

She was also testing him to see where his weaknesses were, although she wasn’t totally aware of this at the time. She was in search of trustworthiness and a man who knew how not to be manipulated, who knew how to set boundaries and who knew how to say no. If he was proving to be so incapable, not to mention sloppy with her, how could she be sure he wasn’t acting this way with everyone else?

[Cue long foreshadowing pause].

The retreat had marked the mid-way point of the course, and over the remaining six months as the classes continued online, things became more complicated. 

In addition to the allegiance that she had toward Alex and her fantastical dreams of a future with him, she also had a growing allegiance to the other women taking his course alongside her.

Ultimately, these two allegiances were at odds with one another.

Although each of the women seemed to be developing their own unique version of dissatisfaction with him, all of their frustrations were growing in ferocity. And, as a result of the dynamic that had been put in place at the retreat, she was still in the position of reporting these complaints back to him, keeping each woman’s identity anonymous. 

She was fighting two wars. One on behalf of her classmates’ discontents, and the other, against him directly, begging him, for his sake, and for the sake of her future hopes and dreams, to step up to the plate, take responsibility, and deal with all of their complaints directly, which at this point ranged from accusations of him having a hostile teaching demeanor, to other forms of confusing flirtation, murky boundaries and unclear expectations. 

Her conversations with Alex began to shift from flirtation to hostility. Since no one had come to him with any complaints directly, he started to accuse her of making them up. Naively, it had never occurred to her that things would pan out this way. In her mind, she was the hero, she was going to save the day through her unexamined savior complex! She was going to provoke his growth! Mend the animosity between him and his students! And, ultimately, be rewarded with undying praise, love, and the future with him she’d worked so hard to construct!

This was not how Alex saw it. 

Whether he truly didn’t believe her, or whether he got spooked about the possibility of these accusations coming out publicly, Alex’s tone shifted dramatically. As he became more and more unhinged, desperate, and demanding, she held on even tighter, begging him to believe her, trying her best to maneuver him into greater self-awareness, and sending him books that she hoped would help him come to terms with what he was doing. She even sent him anonymous screenshots of some of her classmates’ messages, which she thought would help, but only increased his anger toward her.

Eventually, as the course drew to a close, he promised to give everyone space to air their grievances to him directly during the last class. It had been a long and grueling road, but maybe, finally, it was all going to be resolved. 

Many of the women agreed to finally confront him directly. They held the majority position, after all, and made a commitment to support one another. 

At this point, she was trying her best to resist the urge to continue communicating with him. It had become more and more clear to her that the dynamic she’d constructed with him was the same as the dynamics she’d constructed with men in the past.

The entire situation started to feel like a bad dream that she couldn’t wake up from. As she continued to learn more about herself and her patterns, she also was seeing them play out right in front of her, in real time. The familiarity of her behavior, and the unavoidable survival mechanisms that she’d always played out subconsciously, were now revealing themselves in full force. She was trapped in a nightmare of her own making.

She admitted to him, herself, and her therapist that she could have done a better job at managing her own boundaries, but she insisted she had never intentionally acted with malice. Alex was not convinced. 

“I advise you to stop employing the dark arts,” he said in a message. “You are feeding their demons. If the other students do in fact come forward, just know that you were the one leading the mutiny”.

She asked him why on earth she would do such a thing, at this point having come clean about her feelings toward him all along, and her ongoing desire to protect him and to help him. 

“Well, unrequited love is a brutal experience. When not dealt with properly, it can breed dark things,” he explained. 

When it came time for the final class, he withdrew his request for feedback. “I realize we won’t have enough time for that,” he said, “So if you do have something you’d like to say to me, you can contact me privately”. 

She was livid, but hardly surprised. 

Alex gave feedback to each student, one by one. They were allowed to share some final thoughts on the course overall, but were under strict instruction to avoid giving any personal feedback to him in front of everyone else.

She, along with one other student, were the only two to disobey, mainly stating their disappointment with Alex’s lack of desire to hear any feedback, as it was no doubt symbolic of the myriad of issues they’d had with him throughout the course.

No one else who said they’d come forward in solidarity actually did, and instead opted for compliments and/or tears about how meaningful the course had been. 

And so it was written. Without any of the other women’s complaints, she would, in his eyes, successfully take on the identity of the witch he knew her to be all along. Over the coming weeks, months, and years, he would sporadically take to Twitter to describe this period of his life as “Facing a coven that wanted him burned” and “an encounter with the dark feminine”. 

The irony is that none of the horrible rumors he heard or created about her over the coming years were actually true. From being accused of interviewing all of his former students and clients in hopes of creating a class action lawsuit against him, to instigating an unrequited love-fueled insurrection against him, none of it was anywhere close to her reality.

Mostly, she was just sad, embarrassed and humbled, completely uninterested in getting revenge, and nauseated by her drawn-out defensiveness.

If she looked at the situation objectively, she could also understand how he’d constructed his version of the narrative. It wasn’t “true” necessarily, but how “true” was her version? Do games such as these hold any singular truths? How could they, given that they were based on lies from the beginning?

Her initial “love” for him morphed into compassion. It was as if she could now see the entire situation and its trajectory through some sort of astral-projection. If she could remove her own feelings and subjectivity, and look down from above, this whole situation read like an exquisitely constructed myth.

I know what you’re thinking. She’s just fawning! She needs to stand up to him! Defend herself! Call him out on his narcissistic abuse! But, I assure you, it wasn’t fawning. She’d been doing that for months. Now, after gently confronting him in front of her peers, outlining exactly how she felt to him privately, and taking responsibility for her own actions, her empathy and compassion wasn’t coming from a place of dysregulation. She didn’t care what he thought of her at this point, I mean, really, how could it get any worse? She saw herself in the same way she now saw him. They were two people, desperate for love and acceptance, entangled with eros, desire, and delusion, hoping for a happy ending, but instead, getting kidnapped by reality, pushed into the underworld, and force-fed their own shadow.

It wasn’t pretty, but it was so archetypally predictable it was practically laughable.

To be clear, she wasn’t willing to put up with any more attacks or accusations, but she also stopped caring about “making it all better”.

It never got better. After the final class, some of her fellow students sent him emails with their complaints. He told her she needed to talk them off a ledge, once again accusing her of provoking the entire situation. She started it, and now it was her responsibility to fix it, he demanded.

“I’m tired,” she wrote in a final email response to him and everyone involved. “This is a fire I no longer wish to help feed. The most prominent goal I have for my life is to always point my finger at myself and to remember that taking responsibility doesn’t mean accepting the blame. Alex fucked up, but so did I. I was presented with a very enticing game and I played it. Similar games were presented to many of the women on this email, and they played them too.”

She continued, “Through this whole experience, I have learned so much about myself, about relationships, about power, leadership, boundaries, communication, trust, community, safety, and discernment. Although painful, I am exceptionally grateful for all of this. However, I am certain that this is a dance I no longer wish to dance ever again.”

It took many years for her to come to terms with all that transpired in the time she spent as his student. The truth was embarrassing, and her shame prevented her from releasing it entirely. 

She had told him time and time again that she never meant to hurt him, and that all she wanted to do was to protect him, help him, and love him. This felt true to her, but eventually she had to come to terms with the fact that her dishonesty was malice, especially since it was, at the very least, semi-conscious. There was no denying that she had been dishonest from the start, and that she had been aware of her dishonesty from the very beginning. “The long game,” is, by definition, a game. The strategies, manipulations, and control games require make them impossible to be defined as “truth”.

Maybe she didn’t intentionally lead a mutiny against him, but had she refused to be nominated as the messenger from the start, had she recognized that going to his cabin late at night was a bad idea, had she known that asking him to build a retreat center with her was irresponsible given her desire to manipulate him into loving her, would any of this had happened? She didn’t know the answer, but what she did know is that she had been responsible for entangling herself into every single dynamic that ultimately trapped her. 

She knew she could have walked away at any point, and chose not to. Sure, he had some power, but so did she, especially in this post-#metoo reality. Even had she agreed to have sex with him that night, she always had a choice, and she was making those choices willingly. 

There’s a huge difference between being physically trapped vs. emotionally or psychologically trapped. It’s no doubt challenging and confusing to opt out of the latter sort of entrapment, but just because something is challenging or confusing doesn’t make it impossible. If you end up in a dynamic that you wish you weren’t in, or that makes you feel angry and accusatory, it might be useful to ask yourself how you really ended up there. Normally, it takes two to tango.

I know you’ve all heard this story before. In the news, from your friends, and in your own lives, not to mention as the underlying narrative in more than just a few Netflix documentaries about “problematic” teachers, gurus, and mentors. 

But the thing is, despite Alex’s faults or missteps, the value he added to her life far outweighed the harm he caused. She knows he probably wouldn’t say the same about her, though, and that, on top of everything else, makes her wish she had done things differently.

If this sounds like a story about you, please recognize that you probably weren’t fully aware of everything you were doing at the time – nor were they. Had you been fully, consciously aware, you both would have chosen different paths. You don’t need to blame yourself, but it’s essential to take responsibility now, and hold yourself accountable for not making the same mistakes again. It doesn’t really matter what they did. They’re on their own journey of reckoning with themselves that you have no control over. If you wish you had done things differently, own it, forgive yourself, forgive them, and move on. This is the essence of growth.

Victimhood and blame, although understandable, are counter-productive. We all have so much to learn, and it’s inevitable that along the way, we’ll end up getting hurt, and hurting others. It’s never pleasant, but these are steps on the journey that we can’t opt out of, and nor would we want to. Our past mistakes contain vital lessons for our future.

There’s so much work that needs to be done if we want to cultivate more honesty and beauty in this broken world. 

We still have a long way to go, and I’d hate to see us lose our way.

#108 Let Me Tell You a Story... A Solo Episode