The Part of Me That Wanted to Get Close to Power

I had a dream last week that I haven't been able to shake. It feels edgy, but I want to talk about it because of what it showed me about myself and my relationship to power.

I had a dream about a famous spiritual guru. One of those guys who has cracked the algorithm. He was good-looking. Had a rich, velvet voice. The kind of man who has a few million followers. I'd seen his videos years ago and knew in about four seconds that he was a charlatan. So in the dream, I was disgusted to find that a few of my dear friends had become his followers, and more disgusted when I heard he was coming to my town to give talks. I went around alerting everyone: “Stay away from this man. He's a narcissist. Trust me.”

And then I ran into him.

He was moving through a room with his little court of assistants and groupies. He came up to me, and I did something I didn't plan. I looked at him and asked him his name, as if I had no idea who he was. I watched the flicker of confusion cross his face (the small destabilization of a man who is never not recognized). And the thing about a man who runs on being known is that the one person who doesn't know him becomes the most interesting person in the room.

He was hooked.

And the truth of it was (because the dream did not let me hide it) that I liked it.

I liked that this idiot, this fraud, this man I'd been warning everyone about, was now pursuing me. I felt a hot rush moving through my body, not of disgust, but of a tingly, electric aliveness. I felt special. I felt chosen. I felt, standing in the heat of his power and his fame and his money, like some of it was coming off on me. Like, somehow, proximity had become a transfer. Like if I stood close enough to his fire, I would become the fire.

In the dream, I let him pursue me. Then the dream fast-forwarded, and suddenly we were dating. I watched myself do something I know in my bones, something I've done many times while wide awake: I began to fawn. My voice climbed higher, my shoulders started to round, and I shape-shifted into a sweeter, smaller version of myself. I adjusted my opinions and curated my actions to keep his attention. My own values started to bend under the gravity of his. And every time I saw his cruelty, his greed, his contempt for the people around him, or his ugliness, I performed a small surgery on my own perception. I gaslit myself so I could keep standing close to his power.

I woke up the next morning totally rattled. Not because of him, because of me. The dream felt so crazy friggin real.

So, here's the thing I've watched happen a thousand times, the thing this dream pointed its sharp index finger at. When a powerful man abuses his power, we know what to do with him. Or we should. Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar, Bill Cosby, etc. — the accountability is theirs, fully, period. No percentage of it belongs to anyone else. Period. I want to be unmistakable about that before I say the next thing, because the next thing is the kind of thing that gets weaponized.

The next thing is this: there was a part of me that wanted to be close to power.

That is not the same sentence as, “You asked for it.” And it is not, “Why didn't you just say no?”

Those sentences are the lazy black-and-white that people grab for when the nuance is too uncomfortable to hold. Which quickly creeps into victim blaming vs. holding the abuser accountable. I am not doing that. I will never do that. But what I am doing is the one thing I get to do… I am looking at the part of me that got something from the proximity, because that part is mine, and pretending this isn't here doesn’t serve me and my growth.

I’ll give you a few examples from my real-world, lived experience...

Years ago, I spent four years dating a man who was sexually and psychologically abusive. People who haven't experienced this kind of inner-civil-war-heaven-hell will never understand. They always ask, “Why did you stay?” I stayed for a lot of reasons, and one of them, the uncomfortably honest one, is that being with him felt like I finally belonged. He was magnetic. He was older and wiser. Standing next to him, I felt the borrowed heat of his power. And the borrowed heat felt, for a long time, better than the cold of my own half-baked self.

And then there was the massage.

In my early twenties, I was a bodyworker. I got invited to go to the mansion of a very famous man. A billionaire whose name you’d know in a heartbeat. During the massage, he made it clear what he actually wanted. He tried to reach out and touch me several times. He wanted me to finish him off. I didn't. I drove home, in shock and disgust, feeling like my body was coated in a thick green slime that no amount of showers could wash off. I knew with total clarity that I would never set foot in that home again.

But then, I noticed a week later, his secretary still hadn't called for me to come massage him again.

And I was disappointed.

Sit in that with me, because I had to.

The same body that felt violated, also felt disappointed at not being summoned back. Not because I wanted him. I did not want him. I wanted the thing he had. The fame, the money, the gravitational pull of a man the whole world knew. I wanted the heat. Some part of me had already started doing the math on what proximity to that much power could do for me, and that part felt the door close and felt the loss.

Two things, true at the same time, in one body. The disgust was real. The disappointment was real. They were not taking turns. They were both just there, the moral no and the animal yes running on separate wires.

I used to think that a part of me must be broken on some level because I fawn in the face of power. But my dream the other night clarified this for me: we are animals who survived a hundred thousand years by getting close to whoever held the food and the protection. The pull toward power is not your corruption. It’s in your hardwiring, and it’s doing the exact job it was designed to do to ensure survival.

But it doesn’t stop here.

I see clearly that even at 46 years old, with all the inner work I’ve done, I still have a part of me that hungers to feel worthy and safe. This part still wants to feel like she is a somebody, like she matters, like she is chosen. Those are not shameful hungers. The only problem had been where she was looking for them.

This part of me spent half a life looking for them in powerful men, because that was the closest fire. But the truth is, you can stand next to another person's flame your whole life and never once get lit.

True fire comes from the inside.

So, if any of you can relate to any tiny bit of this, I offer: when you find the part of you that fawns in the presence of power, don't shame her. Ask her what she's actually starving for. Then go feed her yourself. It’s the slow, unglamorous, no-one-is-watching work of becoming a woman who is already warm before he walks into the room.