exploding feelings

 holy shit.

today has been non-stop drama.

at least getting mr smear to school wasn't dramatic, so that's good.

but everything else?

...

it's been a day full of conversations and complications, some collaborative and some antogonistic, with members of group a telling a completely different story to members of group b, with our friend "called before the council" in an emergency meeting for an hour and a half of being interrogated and "nailed". and then, just as i began eating dinner, the rabbi i'd "named and shamed" called.

it was a tough conversation, and he asked me questions that i couldn't answer on the spot, but that after the call i realized i do have the answers to. i understand him feeling betrayed, but i know he won't appreciate just how much he's betrayed us. i agreed to remove his name from my open letter, but he tried to get me to remove my post entirely and that i refused.

in the middle of the call, gd came in, furious, needing to get something off her chest. what happened next, in the midst of me trying to be diplomatic with someone i know has done what he's done, was utterly mortifying to me, and if i had been watching it happen to someone else on a tv show i would've been cringing super hard and also laughing my ass off: she *yelled* at him, and said exactly how she felt, and threatened to shut him down for pushing interfaith islamic relations into the community while the muslim community in cape town is militantly antisemitic. it was mortifying, but also thrilling and cathartic at the same time. it's the kinda thing that both upsets me and makes me fiercely proud of her, even as i'm trying to encourage her to play smart, not hard.

i really do feel bad for hurting them personally, but before and after the call i spoke to a couple of different people who've confirmed that the real stuff we talked about was me being gaslighted. i'm going to go with the strategy i laid out to gd: i'm going to assume that's he's being honest, and that he wants to fix things. if things gets fixed - which they're now under real external pressure to do - then good. and if they don't, then he's hoisting himself on his own petard.

as much as i've betrayed my personal relationships in this matter, i feel a greater obligation to the community at large. and, as i told him directly, the leaders of the community are not serving the community.

it still feels awful, though. my anxiety and my mind are all over the place trying to make sense of how things are playing out, what was legitimate and what wasn't, and how things need to proceed.

...

i barely got any work done today, both because the work itself was messy, and because i was perpetually on edge and distracted. at least i managed to pick up gd's repaired shoes on the way home.