Sell Me Up The River

The first time, I was 10 years old. My best friend wanted nothing more than to be popular. Imagine what it feels like to be sold for something so transient, so lacking in value, as popularity in school; for somebody to exchange a meaningful connection with you for a bond forged in cruelty; to give weekends spent together and shared loves in exchange for some people that found your pain insignificant. Imagine your pain being funny not only to the worst people you’ve ever met, but to the person who shared your burden. Who professedly liked you enough to share everything.

The most recent time, it was professional. I walked out of a job after somebody who saw my value decided to prioritise their own. [1] Imagine what it feels like to be sold for no money and middling influence at a place whose behind-the-scenes financials do not warrant a long-term career plan. Imagine somebody you had warm weekly chats with, whose personal and professional life you’d supported, deciding it was easier to be rid of you than to raise up together.

I want to explore the difference between this kind of backstabbing and other ways of being exploited. In these kind of betrayals there is a unique emotional pain – by no means the worst I’ve experienced [2] but nonetheless the surprise at finding yourself a victim marries with the swiftness of realisation that somebody you thought highly of wasn’t worth shit. Each person who has sold me down the river for their own gain is somebody I would have had no compunction helping without a price, somebody I valued on their own terms and who quite clearly saw my value as less than what me, in the abstract, could buy them. They became lesser in my eyes because they couldn’t see, or value, what I might give them, because we weren’t in it together against a world that didn’t value us… they suddenly became part of that world, and I stopped valuing their opinion accordingly.

In one of my favourite movies the main character is literally sold, and upon finding out she asks the specifics of the price during delicate, held back tears. This feels so honest to me, because what else can she do? To be sold up the river is to acknowledge that you weren’t wanted – whether for your love, your work, or your comradeship – and, unlike other kinds of breakup, wool immediately falls from your eyes and the person you loved has ambition that is naked, cold, and clear. I hope those motherfuckers did get what they wanted, because I can see what it’s worth. The friendship of some mean girls in a small-town high school? A career that loves the product less than I did, we did together? I’d gladly walk away from that, and if you want to stay, OK.

The obvious prophylactic against this behaviour is to care less, to give less of myself, until I’m sure that people are trustworthy and generous, but I don’t think that’s something I can countenance. I don’t want to protect myself. I want to place the responsibility for being sold out, sold up the river, exploited, stabbed in the back squarely on the people who did it. I would, given the same situations again, emotionally invest in each of those people: I would give them the best of myself, because I think the best is all that’s worth giving. In order to be open enough for quality relationships with work colleagues, in order to make new friends, we have to be aware that the opportunities to be taken from are in a great multitude. We have to be aware that openness and honesty give people – even good people – the opportunity to be underhanded, but does that mean we should be guarded ourselves? True connections are built on mutual opportunity and developing together. I would rather open up the vulnerable and darker sides of myself to growth, and the potential for misuse by mal-actors. Instead, I think the antidote to this sort of behaviour is self-worth. I disdain the people I spoke of above, if I think of them at all, because they found my price to be so low and could not acknowledge what I might bring them if positively engaged with. I will be open about what I can and will give my friends and work colleagues because they deserve it – and if they chose to use it against me, I have the courage of my own convictions well enough to defend myself and my actions, and to move away and cease engaging with toxicity if necessary.

I can’t help but wonder how these people reflect on their actions, and also on me. We all have an image we like to project, and I’d like to believe I am, perhaps, kinder than I am, more suave and glamorous than is true, and less paranoid of the idea that I’m not good enough or that others don’t like me as well as they seem. I will never know the truth of how others see me [3], and I will never know the truth of how they hope to be perceived, but I don’t subscribe any more to the theory that we are made up of tiny fractions that are others’ perceptions of ourselves. I believe there is a steadfast self, buried somewhere under what I’m showing the world, and if, in the rare moments others commune with that kernel of themselves, they have to reckon with they way they treated me, I honestly feel a sadness for them, and I guard against feeling that kind of regret myself. My private moments are for love, for art, and for peace.

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On This Topic:

• Obviously, Almost Famous. Cameron Crowe is an auteur and I will fight anyone who disagrees.
• This happens to all of us. I was confronted by it in somebody else’s life when I bought my copy of Christina Aguilera’s album Just Be Free and found her letter inside it revealing the complications of its release.
• The legal notes that will help prevent you from being betrayed like others have been before if you’re a Substack maven or a blogger.

To-Do:

• Finish Mansfield Park. I loved the beginning, but 1/3 in I do understand somewhat how it’s possibly Austen’s least popular… still a masterclass, though!
• EMAIL AG!!
• Get passport photos signed

Today’s Culture:

• Help I think I’m a Deliciously Ella person, my husband keeps buying me their overpriced snacks and they’re legitimately good.
• Almost being ready to text my dang friends back and plan things. Maybe that should go in to-do rather than culture??
• I accidentally got really into matcha. Like, not ‘drink of the summer’ into matcha… reading multiple books on the history of tea culture and going to private tea lessons into matcha.

[1] this has been kept deliberately vague so even people who were there might not know to what I allude; I’ve walked out of every job I had in publishing. I don’t know why I’m protecting somebody who would mine me for content in a heartbeat, but I felt positively for them before and I don’t want my own sadness to turn to rage for lack of goodwill. Also, I suppose, I wasn’t surprised.

[2] shoutout to my disinheriting grandmother and my perpetual victim ex-best-friend for more noteworthy shenanigans.

[3] husband, perhaps, excepted, based on length and frequency of discussions, and also because he swore it before god and the government in his wedding vows.