Two Forgiveness Techniques That Set Me Free

Writing about Conspiracy required heaping tablespoons of forgiveness – both for him and for the young woman I was when I dated him. In fact, I often began each writing session with a forgiveness visualization.

Most often, I would imagine myself facing Conspiracy, with a cord of light running from my solar plexus to his. I'd picture a sharp object cutting the cord that bound us together. Sometimes, it would be a giant pair of scissors. Sometimes, it would be a huge rotating blade, the kind that cuts down trees.

I would imagine my half of the light of rope coiling back into my body, as if it were being spun back in place like a vacuum cleaner's electric cord. The cord represented all of the power, all of the mental and emotional energy, all of the parts of myself that Conspiracy had taken from me, willingly given or not.

Then, I'd imagine his end of the cord flowing back into him. Giving him back all the energy I'd stolen from him through thinking about him, bad-talking him, dwelling on him, fearing him.

I'd imagine both of us with our own energy back, and nothing but space between us.

I'd see white light surrounding me. Healing what was once broken.

And then, I'd picture the light around him. I'd say a prayer for his ability to be happy, loved, successful and understood. And then I'd watch him disappear into the light, into a life that no longer included me in any way.

On other days, I would use a different technique aimed at forgiving the 20-year-old girl who had gotten herself into this mess. I would imagine that I could talk to my younger self. I would tell her that as bleak as her life appeared to be, she absolutely would have a happy ending. That I was living her happy ending right now.

I would explain that the happy ending didn't entail perfect outcomes. That she wouldn't end up with the husband, the kids, the fame or the fortune, but she would end up with peace of mind. I would let her know that she ended up happy with how she turned out.

Doing these processes as part of my pre-writing meditation helped me move the bone-deep gunk out of the places where it was hidden and write from a place of open-heartedness.

If you have a person or situation from the past that still haunts you, maybe one of these techniques can work for you, too.

Conspiracy Diaries Parts 1-25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)

 Conspiracy Lessons Learned Part 4 of 4 (1 2 3 4)

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What It Means to be a Grown-Up

I used to think turning 21 made you a grown-up. Now I have a new definition. A grown-up is someone who takes 100-percent responsibility for the quality of his or her life.

Grown-ups deal with a lot of circumstances that are beyond their individual control. But they take responsibility for their reactions to those circumstances and the choices they make. Teenagers, on the other hand, sulk and pout and blame circumstances – or better yet, the grown-ups.

I daresay that most of us remain teenagers trapped in growing-older bodies, at least in certain areas of our lives.

We're taught by psychology to blame mom, dad, our childhood tormentors and all our ex-lovers for us "being the way we are." And that blame keeps us stuck in an immature version of ourselves.

Conspiracy now stands out to me as someone who is fully grown, but not fully grown up.

And writing about him showed me the ways that I was remaining stuck in a partially grown-up place. Because I was still blaming Conspiracy for the fact that he was the first and last man I ever lived with. ("He ruined my trust in men. He made me think commitment is a drag.") Which is really no different than him blaming me for "the hurt you caused and continue to cause."

Being a grown-up means admitting that maybe I've never lived with another man because I enjoy having the freedom to do as I wish, when I wish it. Without compromising or sharing or negotiating.

Being a grown-up means I take responsibility for being single, instead of blaming my parents, childhood tormentors and ex-lovers.

Being a grown-up means that no relationship – no matter how dysfunctional or damaging – has the power to control my life for years into the future.

I've grown up a lot this year.

Conspiracy Diaries Parts 1-25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)

 Conspiracy Lessons Learned Part 3 of 4 (1 2 3 4)

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Bone-Deep Gunk

Each of us has false beliefs that seep through our pores, flood our bloodstreams and eventually settle like concrete into our bones. For instance, I believed I was weak, I believed I was powerless, I believed I was promiscuous, I believed I was gullible, I believed that men were providers and women were sex toys.

As I've forced myself to write about my two-year tryst with Conspiracy, I've been struck by how much that relationship reflected my old beliefs and made them seem irrefutably true.

I've spent the last 15-20 years confronting and dismantling my false beliefs. Self-help books, transformational seminars, psychological counseling, acting, writing, yoga, New Age adventures of all kinds. Some of my experiments were successful, some were expensive, some were embarrassingly dumb. Some were right for a time, then needed to be discarded.

But all that self-development work allows me to see, after all this time, that those old beliefs were never true. Even if I already believed them, even if Conspiracy pounded them into my head, even if my behavior reflected them.

Yanking that bone-deep gunk out of my marrow hasn't been easy, but the resulting gains in sanity and self-esteem are well worth it.

Conspiracy Diaries Parts 1-25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)

 Conspiracy Lessons Learned Part 2 of 4 (1 2 3 4)

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If You Think It's Abusive, It Is

The problem with me and Conspiracy – or me under Conspiracy – was that I became half of a person instead of a whole, and he became larger than life at my expense.

One of the things that helped me to understand this dynamic was watching Oprah shows about domestic violence. That's when I realized that what happened between me and Conspiracy was not much different from what happens between the stereotypical mean drunk and his battered-and-bruised wife.

These are the signs I couldn't see, the signs that I was losing myself in a relationship:

1. You take on his beliefs and opinions as your own. He tells you what to think, and you think it. You even spew his words out of your mouth.
2. You stop hanging out with your friends. He engages in disruptive behavior, like talking to you in the background when you're on the phone with your girlfriend. Or bad-mouthing your friends.
3. You'll have what he's having. If he's a pothead, you'll try it, too. You'll drink if he drinks, or smoke if he smokes, or follow wherever he leads.
4. You become overly dependent on him – emotionally and financially. He picks you because you're needy. He encourages you to be needy. And then, he holds your neediness over your head every time you try to grow a backbone.
5. You believe everything is your fault. He blames you for everything. He nitpicks your every fault. And you think he's right. No, you know he's right. If only you did or didn't do X, he'd be ok.
6. You start to shrink, and he criticizes you for shrinking. He tells you you're weak (or you're fat or you're old or you're ugly), until you accept that as your own self-definition. 
7. You think you might be abused, but you're just not sure. Because, after all, everything is your fault. Maybe you're just imagining that you're being treated badly.

Twenty-something Me couldn't see the warning signs. She couldn't see the signs even as she lived them. She could only glimpse them in brief flashes as the relationship soured.

It is only now – nearly two decades later – that I can see just how abusive the relationship really was. And, even now, I still question myself.

Whether I have the right to use words like abuse, when he never kicked me or hit me or punched me or threatened to.

Whether I have the right to be afraid of him, which clearly I am. It took more than a year for me to write 25 posts about our relationship. A year when I had a nightmare about him ranting, raving and threatening to sue me. A year of fleeting thoughts about what he might do and say if he ever found out about this blog. A year when I even began hating my own blog, because not facing my fear was easier than admitting that even now, I'm still afraid.

But if I learned anything from Conspiracy, it's this: If you think it's abusive, it is.

Conspiracy Diaries Parts 1-25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)

 Conspiracy Lessons Learned Part 1 of 4 (1 2 3 4)

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The Letter

Leery of government spying, Conspiracy didn't trust the Internet. He didn't have an email address and didn't spend a lot of time online. But every so often, when he wanted to get in touch with me, he'd ask someone to email me on his behalf. One day, I got an email from a complete stranger saying that "Brother Conspiracy" wanted to get in touch and needed my mailing address.

Conspiracy's letter arrived on a particularly stressful day. I was deeply depressed. About the state of my completely stalled acting career. About my love life. About my finances. And I was operating on no sleep. I had just put in a seven-day workweek on a freelance writing project, even pulling an all-nighter to meet an impossible deadline.

I carried the letter into my home office and opened it standing up. I expected the usual gossip about various New Haveners who were on Conspiracy's bad side that day. I expected a sentence or two on the whereabouts and well-being of Conspiracy's children. I expected an update on his health and happiness, or lack thereof.

What I didn't expect was an opening sentence about "the hurt you have caused me and continue to cause me." He accused me of being a spying whore sent by the federal government. He asked – in all seriousness, not jest – if that was me he had recently seen in a porno movie. And he demanded that I keep my promise to visit him if I ever wanted to get my nude pictures back.

As I stood, holding a letter that dripped with corrosive abuse, I felt a surge of electricity shoot up through my spine, as if someone were holding a cattle prod to my tailbone.

Wait ... what ... what?!?

The hurt I caused him and continued to cause him? It was 12 years since our breakup. What magic voodoo hurt was I inflicting upon him from more than 2,000 miles away? Especially after the work I had done to communicate with him openly and honestly about our relationship? I had even apologized for attempting to use him financially and for leaving the way I did, telling him all about my secret relationship with Dollar the psychic.

Spying whore? He had pursued me.

Porn star? I had put the casting couch behind me eight years ago. And if he was watching porn, who was he to judge?

And last but not least, blackmail? Was he really that manipulative? Did he really think he could threaten me with the pictures he had promised to safeguard?

The electricity surging through my spine was the jarring shock of realization. It was the realization that Conspiracy – this man who had always claimed to be my friend – hated me.

I was shaken to my core.

But I took the high road.

I immediately shredded his letter and threw the scraps away.

The next day, I sat down and wrote Conspiracy a short, polite letter. I didn't address any of his accusations. I apologized for not keeping my promise to visit him – and I told him that I would not be doing so. I told him that we wouldn't be in touch anymore. And if he wanted to return my photos, he could do so in the self-addressed, stamped, delivery-tracked envelope that I had thoughtfully enclosed along with my note.

That was five years ago. He never returned my pictures, and we haven't talked since.

But when he sees former Yale classmates of mine, he still asks them about me.

Conspiracy Diaries Part 25 of 25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)
Conspiracy Lessons Learned 1-4 (1 2 3 4)

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The Long-Lasting, Long-Distance Friendship

After our messy breakup, Conspiracy and I stayed in touch for many years. Sometimes, I would call or write him. Sometimes, he would call or write me. Sometimes we would fall out of touch, and he'd call my mom to get my number. Sometimes we talked every week because he had free long distance on Friday nights.

But mostly, I was free of him. Free to heal from the ordeal of our two years together.

About a year-and-a-half after I moved out, I discovered a life-changing book called The Artist's Way. It introduced a new word into my vocabulary:

crazymaker: a person who drives you crazy with conflicting demands, mood swings, blame and drama, all of which cause you to stop pursuing dreams.

It was the perfect description of Conspiracy. There was a word for him. He was a crazymaker, but he was also a steadfast and loyal friend. So we continued to talk.

Conspiracy was one of the few people I confided in when I first moved to Los Angeles and embarked on my casting-couch misadventures. I told him the whole dirty, nasty, horrifying story of how I went out with my agent. When I got to the part about being squirted in the face, Conspiracy interjected that my agent had perpetuated "some nasty porn sh*t" on me.

That conversation would come back to bite me in the ass, big time, several years later.

Flash forward to me in my early thirties. I was taking transformational seminars that required me to have difficult conversations with people with whom I had unfinished business.

My first such conversation with Conspiracy blew up spectacularly in my face. I wanted to talk about the ways he had controlled me and curtailed my growth. He went on the attack, making accusations so outlandish that all I could do was sputter incoherently.

He accused me of "flashing my vagina" at a friend of his – as in literally flopping down in a living-room chair and gapping my legs open. Worse, he claimed that I "deliberately hurt him" by "rubbing his face in" the fact that I whored myself out to my agent. Wait ... what? He was claiming that the pain I shared with him was now pain I caused him? (Crazymaking, crazymaking, crazymaking.)

My desire for a spiritual breakthrough was so great that I called him again.

This time, I acknowledged the role Conspiracy had played in getting me through college and that I probably would not have graduated without him. This time, he was touched. This time, our conversation was sweet and warm.

He wanted to see me again and catch up. He still had my naked pictures, and he wanted to return them to me in person. Enveloped in the sweet, warm glow, I promised that I would come visit him. I didn't say when, just that I would.

In the deepest part of my gut, however, I knew that I really didn't want to. I didn't want to deal with a former lover who still had feelings for me. I didn't want to risk ending up alone with him in the apartment we once shared. I didn't want to listen to any of his "they done me wrong" tirades.

So I never got around to visiting him.

Two years later, Conspiracy forced my hand in a way that neither or us expected.

Conspiracy Diaries Part 24 of 25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)
Conspiracy Lessons Learned 1-4 (1 2 3 4)

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Escape

After the perfume summer, I went and got a real job. I worked for a company that sold high-priced research reports. In those pre-Internet, pre-Google days, my job essentially amounted to being a human search engine. I'd conduct searches on LexisNexis for keywords like smoking or diabetes, and copy and paste whatever I found into a Word doc. I was so bored, I thought I would die.

Into that boredom entered yoga. I found a local woman who taught a yoga class in her attic, and she introduced me to her acupuncturist.

He was weird. A young guy, probably in his late twenties or early thirties. He said that "80 percent of my problems were spiritual," that I was "deficient in prayer and meditation," and that I had "toxic emotions." As I lay on the table wearing his needles, I felt waves and waves of anger pouring out of me.

He diagnosed me as having candida, an overgrowth of yeast bacteria caused primarily by my 10-candy-bar-a-day sugarholic habits. He prescribed a very strict diet – no sweets, corn, dairy products or vinegar – as well as about five or six different supplements.

When I came home with the supplements, Conspiracy asked how much they cost, gave me a withering look and scoffed that once again, I had been duped. It was my money. I could spend it however I wanted. I began my new regimen, and in less than four weeks, three things happened:

1. I dropped 15 pounds.
2. I went a whole day without blowing my nose – after a lifetime of chronic so-called sinus allergies. 
3. And last, but not least, I left Conspiracy.

When I told Weird Acupuncturist that I was leaving town, he looked disappointed. "How are we going to get all of that fungus out of your system?" But then he perked up, saying that his work had obviously had an effect or I wouldn't be making such a big change.

He was probably right, but not entirely. The impetus to leave hadn't come solely from new-found, supplement-induced clarity. Dollar, my abusive psychic, had chosen that week to give me one of her life-and-death ultimatums: "If you don't leave New Haven before the New Year begins, you will be trapped here FOREVER."

It was the end of December.

I fretted that I was leaving Conspiracy in the lurch, that he wouldn't be able to make his rent in January without my piece of it.

Dollar scoffed, "He has money." She had always been convinced that he had plenty of money hidden away that I knew nothing about.

I agonized over the decision. I loved Conspiracy. He had been good to me. I didn't want to hurt him.

But forever in New Haven seemed like a long time in hell.

Six days later, I split.

I threw my crap into boxes, charged a plane ticket on my American Express card and moved to South Carolina to live with my mother. And my sister and her new baby. And my octogenarian stepfather. All in a tiny government-subsidized house on the outskirts of Charleston.

No sooner had I arrived than Conspiracy called me on the phone, incensed. He couldn't believe that after two years and all we had meant to each other, this was how I ended it. I had left my room a mess, and he was not going to clean it for me.

I charged another plane ticket back to New Haven, where I cleaned my messy room and endured additional monologues from Conspiracy about his anger and hurt.

I never saw him again, but it wasn't the end of our relationship.

Conspiracy Diaries Part 23 of 25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)
Conspiracy Lessons Learned 1-4 (1 2 3 4)

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Mean-Spirited Gossip

My relationship with Conspiracy was starting to unravel, like a crocheted blanket when a five-year-old yanks on a loose thread. Little incidents I would have overlooked before now stood out as blazing neon warning signs.

Like the time a girlfriend asked me to hang out with her, and Conspiracy commented in a half-joking way that he wished he could go. You can't let me hang out with one friend for one night? I thought incredulously, realizing that somewhere along the way, I had stopped hanging out with my friends to stay home with him.

Or the day my middle-aged Jamaican hairdresser started a hypothetical conversation about young girls who got with old men who controlled their every move, but were too blind and stupid to see it. I was, in fact, too blind and stupid to realize that she was talking to me, about me, in a roundabout, third-person way. Then the lightbulb clicked on. Conspiracy doesn't do that to me, I thought ... but then I realized that he did.

Or the time Conspiracy and I went to the New Haven Green to watch a summer concert and got into a screaming match on the sidewalk. I shouted at the top of my lungs that I was tired of taking his abuse  – and realized for the first time that abuse was exactly the right word.

Conspiracy was embarrassed by my outburst. He asked me not to argue with him in public like that. It provided gist for the rumor mill, and he didn't want "them" to know that we were having problems.

We were already an item that inspired both town and gown gossip.

In the town of New Haven, where Conspiracy was something of a local celebrity, his age group couldn't get enough of us. I would attend his young daughter's dance recitals, and catch glances and glares from his ex-wife and her friends. Once, when I gained about 15 pounds, the old biddies started a rumor that Conspiracy had gotten that young girl from Yale pregnant.

On campus, the rumors flew, too. A few months into our relationship, I walked past a group of black students. I heard an upperclassman exclaim, "She's living with Conspiracy!" Everyone snickered.

But the gossip from others was nothing like the gossip from Conspiracy's own mouth.

I learned – from Tragic of all people – that Conspiracy was talking major sh*t about me. She had crashed spectacularly after her brief recovery from crack addiction, and now she was back panhandling. One night, when Conspiracy refused to give her money, they exchanged nasty comments. She turned to me and said, "You should hear the stuff he says about you."

Conspiracy quickly whisked me away.

"What was she referring to?" I asked.

"She's just making stuff up."

But I knew she wasn't.

Conspiracy was an incessant gossip, and a mean-spirited one at that. He talked sh*t about celebrities and political figures. He talked sh*t about his ex-wife and even more sh*t about his (white) ex-girlfriend, who he now believed was a spy masquerading as a leftie political activist.

I could only imagine the contents of his nasty, character-tarnishing rant about me. What a lying, cheating whore I was; how I was a book-smart, street-foolish girl, the kind who got pimped; how he had done this and that for me, and gotten so little return for his investment.

I never found out exactly what he said, but I didn't need to. The fact that I knew he said it was enough.

Conspiracy Diaries Part 22 of 25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)
Conspiracy Lessons Learned 1-4 (1 2 3 4)

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The Sweet Stench of Failure

The week after graduation, I got my first job out of college – as a perfume peddler. It was a multi-level marketing scheme that I fell for hook, line and sinker. And not surprisingly, the job became a major source of tension between Conspiracy and me.

On the surface, the job looked like exactly what I needed. It would let me be my own boss, own my own business and make a ton of money really fast. Enough to move to L.A. and start my acting career.

I threw myself heart and soul into the new enterprise, which entailed getting out every day and knocking on doors, bottles of perfume in hand. For every popular designer scent, I had a $5-$15 fake. At the end of the day, if I "dropped 10 bottles," I'd get to ring a bell back at headquarters.

I set a personal goal to sell 5-10 bottles every day, en route to becoming a "manager" with my own crew of perfume peddlers, from whom I'd take a cut of every bottle sold.

It didn't work out that way, and not for a lack of effort.

There were a lot of days spent going door-to-door in the hot summer sun. I would partner up with another person in my group, and we'd go hit what we hoped was an untapped, lucrative area. I hit small towns all over Connecticut, even going as far as Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

Once, I stumbled into a sweatshop, where the foreman let me pitch a group of women huddled over sewing machines. As a joke. They didn't speak English.

Once, I pitched an office where a woman I'd never met scolded me about having a job that was clearly beneath me.

Once, I stumbled into a small town with another black woman. Not one person answered the door for us, and someone even called the cops.

Conspiracy berated me every single day until I quit.

He started the very first week, when I decided I was going to go out and sell on Memorial Day. He lectured me on what a stupid idea that was. (He was right.) He said everyone would be at the beach. (He was right.) He said I wouldn't make any money. (He was right.)

"You don't take advice very well," Conspiracy snapped. "I'm not wasting anything else on you!"

His advice didn't consist of gentle suggestions that I was free to consider or not. He expected me to heed his advice. If I didn't, it was a direct attack on him and spiteful ingratitude for all he had done for me.

He frequently attacked my character, using words like "sucker" and "easy mark" to describe me. I hadn't fallen for this get-rich-quick scheme because I was young, inexperienced and blindingly ambitious, but because I "wore my heart on my sleeve."

He explained to me that I fit the profile of a girl who was easily pimped. In the street-hooker, not the metaphorical, sense. (I believed him. And a few years later, I proved him right by getting entangled with Stripper Pimp.)

When I chose to work on the 4th of July, I came home to a five-page letter from Conspiracy ... written in red ink.

I finally quit the job, after a week when I grossed $41 in sales.

Stung by my first career failure and trapped in New Haven, I plunged into a suicidal depression that lasted two weeks.

Conspiracy Diaries Part 21 of 25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)
Conspiracy Lessons Learned 1-4 (1 2 3 4)

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Two Daddies, One Graduation

In the weeks leading up to my Yale graduation, I realized that I was reliving my teenage years all over again. The feeling of being trapped. The dread of coming home from school. The tiptoeing around a powerful, volatile male figure. Only this time, I had exchanged Daddy for Conspiracy.

Commencement was supposed to be a joyous time, and it sort of was. Somehow, despite my overall hatred of Yale, I had managed to make it through all four years. Academically, I was in the top third of my class, officially cum laude. The African-American student body had voted me "most artistic" woman, in recognition of all of the roles I had played in various theater productions.

I had accomplished everything I set out to do and more.

I had no job, no money and no clue, but I had reached this remarkable milestone. After 17 straight years of schooling, from age five to almost age 22, I was done. No more teachers, no more books.

My family came into town to help me celebrate. First to arrive were my brother and my mom, a few days ahead of Foster Mama. My dad arrived on graduation day itself, and boy, was he sour.

In retrospect, I can see that my dad was worried and angry about the antics of his two daughters. My older sister was five months' pregnant with no husband. A few days before, she had informed my dad that instead of moving to Detroit to be with him, she was moving to South Carolina to be with my mom.

Stung by that turn of events, Daddy arrived in New Haven to find me living with Conspiracy, his shorter, skinnier, angrier and only slightly younger twin.

Daddy reacted by lashing out.

My mother had crocheted a beautiful white dress for me. My dad took one look at it and declared that he thought graduation was a formal occasion, not an excuse to wear a "rape-me dress." He continued the sexually inappropriate theme at my post-Commencement dinner. We were in a fancy restaurant, with tablecloths, and he ordered me to "lower your voice because you're coming across as a ho."

Yep, I was a Yale graduate. But my dad talked down to me like I was a cheap hooker.

I could see Foster Mama's eyes flicking back and forth between Conspiracy and my dad, my dad and Conspiracy. She didn't say a word, but she didn't need to. She was thinking that I had found an exact replica of my dad and moved in with him.

I was thinking the same thing.

Slightly different package, same f*d up dynamic.

After the ceremony, my family packed up and went home.

My now-former classmates went off to their presumably fabulous new lives.

I remained in New Haven with Conspiracy.

I wanted to move to New York or Los Angeles to be an acclaimed, award-winning actress. I didn't have the money, and I didn't have a plan. But with Conspiracy, I had subsidized rent and emotional dependency and what I thought was a great friendship.

So I stayed put.

I was so mad at my dad, I didn't speak to him for nine months, not even on his birthday.

Much later, when we patched things up, he told me exactly what he thought of Conspiracy: "You already have a Daddy, you didn't need two."

Conspiracy Diaries Part 20 of 25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)
Conspiracy Lessons Learned 1-4 (1 2 3 4)

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You're Rejecting my Penis

Sexual pressure. Pressure to have sex. Pressure to feel sexually attracted to Conspiracy. Guilt because I did not.

As our relationship became more and more dysfunctional – or, to be more precise, as I became more and more aware that our relationship was dysfunctional – I wanted to have sex with Conspiracy less and less.

It wasn't that Conspiracy was a bad lover. He wasn't. He was, in fact, my first orgasm.

But increasingly, he was a man I didn't feel safe sharing myself with.

There were always outbursts. An innocent comment could spontaneously combust into a mushroom cloud. He'd been known to verbally confront one or another of his male friends, accusing him of flirting with me. And the same thing that got me praised one day could get me criticized on another.

I was always walking on eggshells, tiptoeing around his temper in the place I called home.

During my brief fling with Poet, Conspiracy and I had said we'd go back to just being friends. This arrangement turned out to be temporary, transitory, fleeting – because I was the only one who truly accepted the arrangement. Conspiracy quickly changed it back to us "being great friends and lovers."

He didn't react well as I began to pull away from him, both emotionally and sexually.

I became quieter and quieter and quieter around him. Silence was my only protective weapon. The less I said, the less chance I'd trigger an eruption. But the less I felt heard, the less I wanted to open up in his bed.

It came to a head one night while we were watching Martin, a popular 1990's black sitcom. That night's episode was about the main couple sharing a bed after agreeing to abstain from sex for two weeks. I giggled when Gina, the girlfriend, rolled over, sliding her booty all the way over to Martin's side of the bed, while he struggled with the twin emotions of frustration and temptation.

Conspiracy did not laugh.

"You may be laughing, but that's exactly how I feel." In his trademark staccato, he described his level of sexual frustration. And he ended with a startling accusation: "YOU'RE REJECTING MY PENIS!"

On the long list of things I did wrong, Conspiracy was adding penis cruelty – in all caps.

In my head, I began rebelling against the ridiculousness of that statement. Did it mean that I didn't have the right to say no to sex? Did he really blame me 100 percent for our sexual issues? Was his penis some precious specimen that was supposed to be immune to rejection? Who was doing the rejecting, me or my p*ssy? Did he really see himself as the victim and me as the victimizer?

All of that whirled silently between my ears.

Practically nothing came out of my mouth.

Conspiracy Diaries Part 19 of 25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)
Conspiracy Lessons Learned 1-4 (1 2 3 4)

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The Lost Cause of the Yale-Student Killer

One of the political causes Conspiracy championed during our time together was that of a man falsely accused of murder.

I had talked to the guy a few times at the Yale Afro-American Cultural Center. He was soft-spoken and sweet, in an odd way. I couldn't quite put my finger on what made him odd ... until after his arrest, when Conspiracy shared his history.

At the age of 15, he had been convicted of shooting and killing a Yale student. When I met him, he was in his early thirties and had only been out of jail for a few months. It now made perfect sense. Forever Fifteen looked like a grown man, but had the mannerisms of a sweet, shy teenager who was just starting to explore the world.

Within months of his release, Forever Fifteen was arrested again. Once again, the charge was murder. But this time, the pieces didn't fit. It was a street crime, and Forever Fifteen wasn't out running the streets. The police report described someone with a different hairstyle. The evidence was all he said-she said.

Conspiracy believed the cops targeted Forever Fifteen and railroaded him back to jail simply because he had once killed a Yale student. Putting him back in jail – guilty or not – was a way of appeasing the dead Yalie's grieving parents.

So he organized the Committee to Free Forever Fifteen, and I became one of its members by default.

Conspiracy printed up flyers, talked to anyone who would listen about the case and organized a protest on Forever Fifteen's behalf. It drew less than a dozen people, myself included. But that small showing was enough. Enough to create an irresistible, popcorn-and-peanuts scent that attracted clowns.

It was the scent of publicity, and it turned the cause into a behind-the-scenes circus.

A New Haven Register article profiled the case. (It featured a photo of me holding a Free Forever Fifteen sign. I looked  absolutely crazy due to a hairstyle experiment gone wrong.) There was also an article in The New York Times on Conspiracy's new cause and his days as a revolutionary.

A parade of spotlight-hungry characters came on board. Chief among them was a woman – a much-older woman – who muscled her way in and later married Forever Fifteen. (Conspiracy sneered disparagingly that she didn't even grant conjugal visits to Forever Fifteen, whose experience with women was limited at best.)

Territorial squabbling ensued, with various members trying to call the shots. Conspiracy's motive was pure: He wanted to right an injustice. Just not enough to put up with a bunch of self-serving, bickering Negroes squawking about his every decision. Rather than facing down the dysfunction, Conspiracy resigned from the group that he founded.

I silently and secretly judged him for this. It became another one of the flaws that made me look at Conspiracy in a less-favorable light. How could he abandon Forever Fifteen and leave his defense to a pack of noisy incompetents? Shouldn't Conspiracy finish what he started?

But, as usual, I said nothing.  

The results were predictably sad.

Forever Fifteen was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Mostly because he acted as his own lawyer and spent his court time complaining about the bologna sandwiches he was forced to eat in jail.

Years later, a new eyewitness emerged and testified that Forever Fifteen was not involved. Granted a new trial, with freedom within reach, Forever Fifteen again insisted on defending himself.

He is still serving a life sentence.

And for the record, I no longer judge Conspiracy for backing away from this lost cause.

Conspiracy Diaries Part 18 of 25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)
Conspiracy Lessons Learned 1-4 (1 2 3 4)

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My Crazy, Crappy Senior Project

The theater minor at Yale required me to complete a senior project. For most students, that meant having a solid role in a Chekhov play at the Yale Dramat. I wanted to do something different, more daring, more experimental: I wanted to create and perform my own one-woman show.

My faculty advisers shot that idea down as too ambitious, but somehow agreed to let me write a play that I wouldn't star in. Despite the fact that I hadn't written a play since high school. Despite the fact that I dropped out of the Yale playwriting class after one or two sessions. Despite the fact that all I wanted to do and all I actually had done at Yale was act, act, act.

Writing a show met with Conspiracy's approval. He was harshly critical of my acting, but more encouraging when it came to writing or directing. He used words like "waste of energy" to describe the same performances that earned me solid reviews in campus newspapers.

So I wrote.

On Conspiracy's typewriter, with him enjoying a ringside seat to my stunted creative process. I was so insecure, I didn't write a single sentence without asking his opinion. His "creative input" overrode my own ideas.

The result was a stilted, pedantic, wordy, plotless mess of a play filled with spotty characters giving long-winded political speeches about why Yale sucked.

But the fun didn't stop there.

I had to give a public reading of my play, and Conspiracy had more great ideas.

He suggested letting Tragic, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, direct. Tragic was talented, charismatic ... and a crack-addicted, schizophrenic panhandler. She often begged outside of Wawa, a convenience store located one block away from the institution where she had long ago earned her MFA.

Conspiracy saw her as a victim of Yale racism. She had gotten into trouble for refusing to play a role that would have required her to engage in onstage nudity or sexual innuendo with two white men. She had gotten her degree only by switching from the acting program to the directing program.

Now, she was trying to get clean and go legit. She stopped doing crack and started taking thorazine for her schizophrenia. The results were eye-popping: In about eight weeks, she went from an emaciated 100 pounds to borderline obese and borderline sort-of-sane.

My play reading became Conspiracy's community-service project to help Tragic reignite her former genius.

The result was painfully – no, make that devastatingly – embarrassing. Tragic, in a bright blue dress, occasionally saying inappropriate things in a loud voice. Conspiracy nodding his head like a proud papa. My faculty advisers clearly wondering who these colorful, pungent New Haveners were and why they were playing the starring role in my senior project.

The play was so bad, my faculty adviser decided not to even try grading it until I rewrote it. That was my task over the Christmas holidays.

I went to visit my mom, leaving Conspiracy in New Haven.

There, from a safe distance of several hundred miles, I rewrote the play. It was still bad. It was still pedantic. But it more closely resembled a play, with defined characters and a plot line. I was far from happy with it, but I knew in my heart that it was better than my first draft.

Conspiracy and Tragic dismissed the new draft as a watered down, whited-out version that "your teachers made you write."

The experience was so demoralizing, it took 10 years before I had the courage and confidence to write another play.

Conspiracy Diaries Part 17 of 25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)
Conspiracy Lessons Learned 1-4 (1 2 3 4)

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A Thoughtless Reaction to a Secret Society

The most troubling aspect of my relationship with Conspiracy was that my thoughts and beliefs were colored by his, almost to the point they stopped being my own. Conspiracy influenced not just minor decisions, but major ones, such as my outright refusal to join a secret society.

One of the first notions Conspiracy filled my head with was the idea that secret societies were evil, satanic, white-male cults that ran the world badly. Conspiracy ran down the list of recent U.S. presidents and vice presidents, pointing out that every single administration had ties to either Yale or Harvard. As an added flourish, he named which secret society each of the various men was linked to.

Skull and Bones, Yale's most prestigious secret society, received special scorn. Conspiracy described it as a "bunch of punks sucking on Geronimo's skull," regaling me with the tale of how George H.W. Bush's father allegedly dug up the Native American leader's body and brought the stolen remains to New Haven.

It didn't help that the secret societies referred to their buildings as "tombs." The more prestigious groups had huge, imposing, windowless buildings that were said to house great luxury and hide strange rituals.

A few of my upperclassmate friends had been tapped by secret societies, and had shared some of the secrets with me. One of my roommates described holding hands with her fellow society members outside their tomb and singing to the building in a foreign tongue. Another muttered sourly that his society, which featured a swimming pool in the basement, was overrated and that he hated the Sunday-night get-togethers. Still another told me the breathless story of how someone put a hood over her head while the members of the society hissed like snakes.

It all seemed like devil worship to me. Being Catholic and half-Creole, I tended to be very superstitious. My association with Dollar the Psychic had made those tendencies even worse.

And so it was, in the spring of my junior year, that the phone rang. It was a young woman's voice, inviting me to be tapped into the secret society that was casually known as the "people of color" society. It wasn't specifically an African-American group, but it was known to be more inclusive than the others.

I immediately heard Dollar's voice in my ear. She had recently done a tarot reading for me, in which she predicted that "someone was going to call me and try to pressure me into doing something I didn't want to do."

In a rude tone of voice, with Conspiracy hovering over my shoulder and Dollar living in my head, I told the caller that I wasn't interested. I didn't consider joining, not even for a split second. I could feel the society representative's disappointment and puzzlement as she hung up.

At the time, I didn't know that getting tapped by secret societies was the primary reason that many students chose Yale. I didn't consider that having valuable access to the world's movers and shakers was not inherently evil. I didn't understand that maybe, just maybe, joining that society might ease my transition into the working world.

I let Conspiracy (and Dollar) do my thinking for me.

And because I let them think for me, I will never know if I made the right choice.

Conspiracy Diaries Part 16 of 25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)
Conspiracy Lessons Learned 1-4 (1 2 3 4)

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New Love, Big Lie

His name was Poet, and I met him the way I met men back then – totally randomly, while walking down the street. He carried a tattered spiral notebook with songs and poems scrawled across the lined pages. He was about my age, about my skin tone and about my level of seriously depressed. He instantly, immediately professed his deep love for me.

And I did what I always did. Convinced myself that I was in love. That he was The One, and damn the consequences.

That very night, after a painfully bad performance of Raisin in the Sun, I went home with Poet. He lived in the basement of a fat, frumpy, middle-aged white woman's house. If the way she screamed and cried and kept barging into the room was any indication, his relationship with her was equivalent to my relationship with Conspiracy: unhappy, much younger charge dependent upon crazy, controlling sugar mama.

I lay in the bed with Poet while he masturbated. I didn't have any sympathy for Sugar Mama's tears. And I didn't really consider it cheating, because there was no penetration.

I called Conspiracy at 5 a.m. with a hastily conceived lie: I told him that I had slept over Q's house, one of my castmates in Raisin.

"No you didn't," he spat. "I called Q at two in the morning, and she said that she didn't know where you were."

Wait - what?!? He had already called Q? A woman he didn't know, at two in the morning, to check on me? That was my first realization that Conspiracy watched my every move.

That was more disturbing to me than the fact that I'd been caught in such a blatant, amateurish lie.

I felt bad, of course. I didn't want to hurt Conspiracy. He had been good to me. He was my friend. I didn't know what I'd do without his constant companionship and guidance. But I was no longer in love with him.

I wrote Conspiracy a long letter, spilling out the feelings I'd been suppressing for months.

We had several long, grueling conversations that ended in what I thought was a good solution: We would go back to being just friends. I felt relieved. Yes, I wanted Conspiracy as a friend. No, I didn't want Conspiracy as a lover. Problem solved.

Until a few weeks later, when Poet took the train in to New Haven and we spent a few completely platonic hours together. When I got home and told Conspiracy where I'd been, he went ballistic. He accused me, once again, of chumping him. "You have no human concern for me!" he shouted, eyes rolling wildly in his head.

I was genuinely confused. Hadn't he said we were just friends? Hadn't we both said that?

The tension continued to build.

Poet and I made a date to go out. Conspiracy's counterattack was to plan a night on the town to end all nights on the town ... for the exact same night. He offered to take me to New York City to see Gregory Hines in the Broadway smash, Jelly's Last Jam. My refusal to cancel my date with Poet further enraged Conspiracy, who it turns out, had become co-partners in jiltedness with Poet's landlady/lover.

"Do you know what she told me? He's a heroin addict, and he used to be a hustler before she took him in. Do you even know what you're dealing with?!"

Again, I cared less about the news flash than I did about the fact that Conspiracy was in cahoots with Poet's crazy, white-woman sugar mama.

Conspiracy and I stopped having sex. Poet and I never actually started. In less than two months, the flame between us blew out. Poet simply disappeared, and I heard through the grapevine that he was in jail.

So was I. My prison took the form of the two-bedroom apartment I shared with a man old enough to be my father. I had no idea how to get out.

Conspiracy Diaries Part 15 of 25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)
Conspiracy Lessons Learned 1-4 (1 2 3 4)

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Drying Up, Like a Raisin in the Sun

Conspiracy masqueraded as my deeply supportive friend, but in truth, he was a brutal, confidence-destroying critic. I accepted 90 percent of what he said as true, even when he attacked the one area where I was truly most vulnerable: my incipient acting career.

By the time I reached my senior year at Yale, I knew that I wanted to be an actress more than I wanted anything else in life. But my confidence had already taken a beating.

In freshman and sophomore years, I had appeared in various plays around campus and had gotten a lot of positive feedback regarding my stage presence and level of talent.

But I'd tried and failed to become a beauty queen the summer between sophomore and junior year, my first get-noticed-quick scheme. I'd hoped to use the notoriety and prize money to launch myself in the industry, so I could justify quitting school. It hadn't worked and here I was, still trudging grudgingly through Yale.

The beauty-pageant fiasco had broken my spirit to the point that I didn't do any theater my entire junior year at Yale. Meanwhile, an acquaintance of mine from my brief foray into the pageant world had just been crowned Miss USA, and her face was everywhere. While my invisible one was still bent over textbooks.

My senior year, after the life-changing voice workshop, I went out for theater full force.

My first stop was a community-theater production of Raisin in the Sun. Despite being 21 years old, I wasn't cast as Beneatha, the feisty, ambitious college student. I was cast as 30-something Ruth, the worn out wife and mother who was becoming "a settled woman" before her time. I did my best to apply the lessons I'd learned in my scene-study class, but I had no idea how to approach the character and bring her to life.

Conspiracy took it upon himself to "support" me by attending rehearsal a few days before opening night. The next morning, he proceeded to tell me, while I cried into my bowl of cereal, how completely horrible I was. He went on and on about how emotionless and expressionless I was, how I gave nothing on stage, how I came across as a college student who was focusing on her technique.

He took affront at my tearful, "ungrateful" response. He was being a friend – a friend should tell you how bad you are, not just stroke your ego.

I didn't need a friendly assessment that I was terrible. I knew I was terrible every time I went on stage, hearing the audience fidget and cough as I and my equally inexperienced castmates made a complete mess of one of the most beautiful plays ever written.

And it was into this unhappy, "supportive" vibe that a guy my own age entered the picture, just as my love for Conspiracy was starting to dry up, like a raisin in the sun.

Conspiracy Diaries Part 14 of 25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)
Conspiracy Lessons Learned 1-4 (1 2 3 4)

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