You find yourself alone, looking out at a world, alien and hostile. What people you’ve known are blank faces waiting, waiting for a stray word a gesture even a grunt to run and tell. They tell. Tell who. Anyone who will listen and pay for information to use against you is whom they will tell. You have become targeted and God help you if you once had money, position, friends, colleagues. For they too will be targeted unless they turn on you and even then they will be looked upon with suspicion. You’re paranoid you’re saying and that’s why you are thinking so black? No, friends, I am a formerly state licensed clinical mental health counselor and what I tell you is the truth, what I have witnessed and what I have experienced. I would like to deal with the following losses that can lead the loser to experience the almost big brother attack on your very existence.
Betrayal of a spouse, death of a close relative due to unnatural circumstances, lawsuits aimed at conspiratorial family business partners, imprisonment on false and grievous charges that can not be judged fairly and which the accusing party is fully aware and has laid his traps. There are other losses, some as mortally wounding to the human spirit as those mentioned. I choose to talk about these losses from a personal perspective and from a professional perspective in hope of reaching out a helping hand to others feeling as I once did that the world is closing in and there is no way out living. Live friends.
You’re single. Life is a long series of parties, family gatherings, church socials and interspersed with all of these necessities is, of course, your work. You are a professional. You work religiously. And work, if done for years with dedication and perseverance makes you a professional whether or not you needed a diploma or a degree to get hired. Your working associates respect you and you go out with them. But you do not and never would consider marriage to any of them; you are after all a professional. Boundaries aren’t there to be taken down at a whim or at a sudden display of sexual attraction. Take the case of a schoolteacher who fell in love with her principal.
She followed him around during group outings to restaurants following all night visits with parents. She would steal candle sticks, place settings, and pilfer food to set them up in his office on his desk, for goodness sake and sit there like a chipmunk munching and grinning as if expecting praise and a pat of the back for annoying the man to hell. Not a professional, how could a professional not realize that swiping restaurant paraphernalia and having the audacity of arranging them on your boss’ desk would be completely and thoroughly in enormously bad taste? But that is exactly what that schoolteacher did and ogled her principal and smirked and grabbed him in places that no woman not even a wife for heaven’s sake would grab a man. Such preposterous antics led the gentleman to leave out school. He transferred out and let no one know where he was going. The gentleman also soon divorced. Speculation was muted since we worked there.
To have sided as a female with the deranged worker turned female and made puns and aided her attacks as a form of compassionate assistance would have branded us as accessories to her now looking back in retrospect, planned demolition of a pleasant and conscientious principal. No one that I remember asked her to explain her behavior and no one was called by the superintendent of schools to verify her capabilities emotionally to continue her duties in the school. It was as it a curtain had fallen around her.
She herself seemed oblivious to the results of her humorous shenanigans as she called them. For she talked about her doings in the faculty lounges, and while playing cards with her clique, for all workers have cliques, unless they’re loners and then everybody’s afraid of them. She talked about her doings and laughed boisterously. For some reason the talking and laughing ceased abruptly the following year when our beloved principal failed to return. We were told by her that he had divorced and had moved out of the city to get work in another city. Betrayal of a spouse and in his case not willingly and probably although who can know never intimately with another woman. How does one handle the enormity of such a loss?
The man had to escape! The victimizer continued to teach now as a mundane worker lacking the object of her demented attention. Civilized society would have raised eyebrows and called that woman obtrusive and in dire need of medical attention. And if were dealing in the business world, her obvious lack of even the barest essentials of civil behavior let alone etiquette, would have cost her a job. If she had behaved in such a manner in a social setting, his wife would have had no other avenue but to handle such a beastly attraction as women usually do in private. She chose her victim in a school setting that is governed by dictates barely perceived by the outside world. She was a female schoolteacher and he was her male principal.
