On a fundamental level, I was thinking about them as different creatures. I’ve never done it before and I will never do it again, but I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it if I had any respect for women. I destroyed everything and I damaged her internal compass. Just treated her cruelly, pointedly, things I would never, ever would have done if she had been male and if I had never had those feelings for her.Īnd I lied to myself the entire time about it. I crushed on her and resented her for not reciprocating it and the entire time I was the one writing her paychecks and in control of whether she stayed or went and whether she felt good about herself or not, and said horrible things. I’m going to assume when she tweets about it and refers to ‘trauma’ that’s probably it. And that was probably the darkest of it all. After all, if you’re just going to be a writer then this is how ‘just writers’ get treated. I wanted to show her that if she didn’t like being liked in that way then, oh boy, she should get over herself. So, I continued to do the cowardly thing. And it was therefore rejected that way, I was humiliated. I said ‘I love you,’ and she said the same thing she had been saying the entire time, in one language or another, ‘Please, don’t you understand that focusing on me like this, preferring me like this, liking me like this, I can’t say no to it and when you do it, it makes me unable to know whether I’m good at my job.’”Īnd because I finally got to the point where I said to her ‘I love you’ because that’s what I thought it was, when you target somebody for two years. After that season, I got overt about my feelings after it wrapped. Now I wasn’t in danger of being a bad person. Now it was even less appropriate, after all. I broke up with my girlfriend and then I went right full steam into creeping on my employee. ![]() I want you to look at this and I want it to sound relatively unremarkable to you, because that’s the danger. I don’t want to explain to you what I’ve learned. I want you to be the one to examine this and every step of the way decide for yourself where I’m making mistakes. Lied to her about why I was breaking up with her, because I thought that would make having inappropriate feelings for a co-worker appropriate if I wasn’t involved. I just didn’t hear it because it didn’t profit me to hear it, and this was, after all, happening to me, right? After a season of playing it that way, I broke up with my girlfriend, who I had lied to the whole time, while lying to myself. You’re the one who actually is seeing things through that lens.Īnd so I let myself keep doing it and it’s not as if this person didn’t repeatedly communicate to me the idea that what I was doing was divesting her of a recourse to integrity. I was supporting this person, I’m a mentor, I’m a feminist, it’s your problem, not mine. It’s really easy.Īnd so that’s what I continued to do telling myself and anybody that threatened to confront me with it that if you thought what I was doing was creepy or sexist or unprofessional it was because you were the sexist or jealous. Flirty, creepy, everything other than overt enough to constitute betraying your live-in girlfriend who you’re going home to every night, who is actually smart enough and respectful enough to ask you ‘do you have feelings for that young writer that you’re talking about, that you’re paying all this attention to?’ and saying to her ‘no,’ because the trick is if you lie to yourself, you can lie to everybody. I knew I wasn’t doing anybody any favors by feeling these things and so I did the cowardly, easiest, laziest thing you can do with feelings like that and didn’t deal with them and in not dealing with them I made everybody else deal with them, especially her. ![]() I knew that they ran the risk of undercutting people’s faith in my judgement, her faith in her talent, the other writers’ respect for me, the entire production, the audience. The most clinical way I can put it in fessing up to my crimes is that I was attracted to a writer I had power over because I was a show runner and I knew enough to know that these feelings were bad news. I really want to be really careful about that language because a huge part of the problem is a culture of feeling things that you think are unique and significant because they are happening to you and saying things like ‘I had feelings for’ and ‘I fell for’ and all these things.
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