Carrying Water for Men and Being Miserable About It

On things I’ve learned about being complicit in my unhappiness.

Ten years ago, I wrote a letter that I was ashamed of. I knew I was lying when I wrote it, and I can still feel my squirrely anxiety in signing it and pretending that I believed what it said. I wrote it at the behest of a man, and I did it just because he asked me to. I wouldn’t do it today, but I did it then, and I’m fucking pissed about it now.

It was 2014. I was the lifestyle editor at High Times. The owners of the mag liked my freelance work, so they’d created that position for me. It was a heady time for the company, which was raking in massive amounts of cash by throwing Cannabis Cup events all over the country. They threw a party for 50,000 weed aficionados in Denver, which I capped off by driving a car full of weed to a Snoop Dogg concert at the Red Rocks amphitheater with a police escort — and that’s just one minuscule example of some crazy shit I got into. Cups popped up in Seattle, San Francisco, San Bernardino… anywhere cannabis was even remotely legal. The magazine staff was pressed into service to run the events, so every eight weeks or so, we’d roll into a spot like Clio, Michigan, and bend every law until it almost broke. The Cups were a wild celebration of weed culture. I saw one man weep because it meant so much for him to openly smoke pot. People who’d been branded degenerates and criminals by drug war propagandists were just so fucking relieved to light up with like-minded folks in public. The Cups felt like an apotheosis of the de-stigmatization of marijuana after decades of Nixon and Reagan’s life-ruining drug war bullshit.

At a Cannabis Cup in those heady days

Obviously, I believed in the mission. I thought I was a freedom fighter. But there was a side to weed culture that made me uneasy as a woman. The men I worked with at the magazine were cool for the most part, and I considered them friends, even though they were openly contemptuous of my new title when I was hired. One of them scoffed, “What does a lifestyle editor even do?!” at our first editorial meeting. My face flamed, and I shot back something quippy (I think), but I was keenly aware that my male colleagues didn’t think I was legit. The editor in chief was furious that he hadn’t been consulted by the owners of the mag when they created the job for me, and he was so mean about it that I cried at my desk every day for months. I didn’t want to believe that it was because I was a woman, and I muttered to myself over my daily overpriced NYC Midtown lunch salads that I didn’t want to play the victim.

Nine years before I got the job at High Times, I’d become a public “victim” when my friend Nicole Dufresne was murdered. We were out for a celebratory night on the Lower East Side. Nicole and her fiancé and my boyfriend and I were walking back to our Delancey Street apartment through freshly fallen snow, tipsy from drinks at a nearby bar, lobbing snowballs at each other and having a great time. A group of kids mugged us a block away from our place. One of them shot Nicole, and then they ran. Nicole’s fiancé held her as she died. 

The devastation of Nicole’s death; the frenzied media coverage with tabloid reporters camped on the doorstep of our apartment to snap photos of us wobbling outside, husk-like, to meet with homicide detectives; and two and a half years of grand juries and trials shattered my sense of reality. I went to as much therapy as I could stomach, testified at the trials, grieved with friends and family, and clawed my way back to some sense of not being a victim. Even though I had a letter from the New York State Office of Victims Services that proclaimed me a victim of violent crime, allowing me to access funds for victims that paid for my therapy, I was determined not to be one.

So at High Times, when one of the guys said something dismissive to me about my work, I pasted on a big fat smile, and carried on strong. What was a little light chauvinism? I was no victim! But at the Cannabis Cups, it was hard to ignore. Vendors trying to stand out at events had hit upon the age-old concept of stationing hot girls outside booths to attract business, and it soon became the norm to see a whole lotta jiggling boobs and glittery booty shorts to get dudes to stop and smell the flower. The booth babes were a phenomenon that bugged plenty of people attending Cups, and they started flaming the High Times Instagram with comments about sexist douchebaggery at the events.

One day, the owner of the magazine, who I adored (and who’d given me my job at the behest of his wife, who was/is a firecracker), called me into his office and asked, “Can you write a statement about the strong women who power High Times?” I recognized it for what it was: an order. I drafted a letter detailing how incredible the women on the staff were, from the publisher and managing editor to the events coordinator and receptionist. I outlined our decision-making power, our solidarity with women in the cannabis industry, our distaste for anything remotely sexist or misogynistic. I hand-delivered it to the owner’s corner office the next day. He read it approvingly, and handed it back to me. “Have all the women on staff sign it,” he said. I collected the signatures. It was posted online and blasted out via PR channels, and I felt fucking ashamed, because I knew that cannabis culture was deeply fucking sexist, and that I was being trotted out as a mascot to pretend that it wasn’t.

That same year, I started seeing a guy who was thrilling, and dangerous. He was excited to get published in High Times. I knew he was unstable, and I’d seen his scary side, but ooh la la, he was brilliant! At the time, I was incapable of making good choices due to, you know, shitty life events that convinced me that I should perhaps not be alive. I made excuses for his whacko behavior, hid the frightening parts from friends and family, and got him published in the magazine. I legitimized that fucker with my job, but I didn’t see it at the time. I was telling everyone he was cool, it didn’t matter that he was carried from my house bloodied and screaming on a stretcher (I did not tell anyone about that night, but I’ll never forget one of the responding officers looking critically at me and saying, “Lady, this is your guy?”). Mascot level two unlocked! Maybe I should have been a booth babe.

I fled that relationship when shit got so crazy that I was sleeping on my kitchen floor while that man was in my bed and his paramour, a Grammy-nominated singer, was bunking down on my couch, but that’s a story for another time. I arrived in Los Angeles in 2016, shattered once again. And once again, I went to a fuck ton of therapy, grieved with friends and family, and clawed my way back to some sense of sanity. Your girl knows how to weather a storm and rebuild, trust me.

California life was going to be a whole new chapter, I told myself in those early LA days. I could feel the shimmering possibilities of legal weed, of making a life for myself writing about it while tiptoeing my way back to maybe being onstage as an actor again someday, maybe, maybe. I got a restraining order against the scary whacko. I went to a friend’s wedding in Greece, and swam in the Aegean Sea every day. I got a tan, I had the required one-night stand — and then — of course! I met a man.

This guy caught me on the bounce from the bad times, and the zap of our connection made me woozy. I was starved for affection, and he met every need I had with a kindness and care that felt too good to be true (I was still unwell, I just didn’t know it!). It turned out that he was also excited to be published in High Times, and wow, can you believe we made it happen? He was funny, and charismatic, and it felt easy-breezy to make things with him as we fell in love.

Here’s a hard part for me to acknowledge: for the third time, I became a mascot. I burnished this guy’s credentials because I was thrilled about him, and he was seemingly thrilled about me. He introduced me to his industry friends, and took me to parties, and I was delighted about all of it. We were together, and it was great! We shared hopes and dreams and plans to conquer the whole dang world. It was intoxicating and healing as I swam up from the depths of the New York years of chaos and sadness. I’m guessing that you won’t be surprised to read that it all came crashing down in heartbreak.

We were never a public couple. He said early on that he wanted to keep our personal lives separate from our professional doings. I never questioned it, because it seemed wise, in a way, and also because I believed with my whole (busted! crazy!) heart that he was my person. After a couple of years together, he asked me to be his for-real girlfriend. I laughed and said, of course, I’m already your girlfriend, doofus. So we carried on with our private/professional divide, never admitting outright that we were a couple, although anyone who knew me knew that he was my boyfriend. Sure, we fought, and he was mean as stink to me a bunch of times (who tells their creative partner that they’re not funny?!) but we were together, and I loved him.

The slow-motion heartbreak started when he dumped me via FaceTime while I was on vacation. It felt unfathomable. He’d driven me to LAX with a love letter, for fuck’s sake. I could not comprehend what was happening, and I said as much over our glitchy WiFi from my overseas Airbnb. He said that he just “didn’t feel our connection anymore.” After the call ended, I went out onto my Mediterranean patio, where I smoked and drank wine and talked to a little green beetle that showed up to sit on my shoulder like Jiminy fucking Cricket. I wept and slept and sunned myself on beaches for the remainder of my trip, supported by friends who were compassionate and loving, and surely (though they never once said so) exhausted by my flameouts. 

When I got home, I asked this guy to meet up so we could unravel our business ties. I loved him, so I believed him when he told me that he wasn’t in a place to be in a relationship with anyone, that he needed to work on himself so he could be successful in his career and, someday, as a committed partner. I believed him when he said there was no one else, and that he wanted to keep talking with me about our eventual return to being a couple. We wrapped up our conversation with a vow that we’d figure out a way to figure things out.

I kept working with him as we went on long walks to talk about our families, our traumas, our feelings. After a few months, we hooked up for what I didn’t know at the time would be the last time. He dropped the final “I don’t want to be with you” hammer a couple of weeks later. Ouch, I said. I get it, though, I said. You’re focused on your career and you don’t have the bandwidth or whatever word you want to use for it to be in a relationship? Right, he said. OK, I said. But we agreed to keep our professional connection, because we were professionals, even though I was uncomfortable with the way he was treating me.

This is another hard part for me to acknowledge, but I’m writing it because I want to document all of it. I want to excavate the parts of my psyche that have allowed this kind of thing to keep happening — the parts that I think were blown into a zillion pieces on that winter night in New York when my friend Nicole was killed. 

A few weeks after the final “I don’t want to be in a relationship with you” conversation, I learned that this guy had been telling everyone that he was not in a relationship with me THE WHOLE TIME. Oof. I found out from a friend who’d met a woman he’d been in a quiet situationship with for several years. That woman (let’s call her Angela, because she angelically saved me from several more months of being a blind dumbass) did not have kind things to say about me. My friend asked why she thought I was a dingdong, and Angela said, “I asked him about her, and he says they’ve never been in a romantic relationship. They just have a financial arrangement, so he keeps working with her.” Wow.

Following Angela’s revelation, which included a big fat text thread my friend shared with me that contained all the receipts, I had a talk with this guy. I told him I’d found out that he’d been telling anyone who asked that I was “obsessed” with him, while he was only interested in being “professional” with me. And when I confronted him in what I’d like to think was a Nora Ephron-worthy scene, telling him that I knew that he’d been cheating on me for the entirety of our relationship, he gazed back at me stonily and said, “You cheated on me. With a bottle.” 

Now, I’ve been drunk plenty of times, for a million reasons that I won’t get into at the moment (although I’m writing about it in my Notes app, and I think I have like 16 VoiceMemos on the topic?). But this guy’s snappy little comeback honestly made me laugh, and I’m glad it was comedy gold, even in a moment when my heart was at the bottom of a cold, dark well. I packed up the few items of mine from his apartment, and exited, stage left. The lesson I’ve learned from this guy who used and badmouthed me, his secret girlfriend, while I bolstered his “professional” reputation? It’s that this is the third and last time that I’ll carry water for a man who makes me miserable.

There’s a Tarot card that I’ve pulled a few times lately called “The Hanged Man.” In the deck that I use, it’s called “The Tethered One.” One of its meanings is enlightenment through sitting with discomfort.

I’m realizing that most of my pain points have to do with a lack of being able to sit with discomfort. I didn’t say no to my boss when he asked me to cape for High Times as a feminist even though I knew it was wrong, because I needed the job. I hid scary behavior from an unwell man because I thought I was in love and I wanted people to support our relationship, even though he wanted to extinguish himself (and me). And I continued to shine up the reputation of someone who kept me a secret, even after he dumped my ass via FaceTime while I was on vacation (rom-com shit, amirite?), because I couldn’t believe the truth: that he was using me.

I’m sitting with my discomfort these days. I’m writing about it so I can remember, and hopefully move on to some sort of enlightenment. The tethered-ness of all of it to the night Nicole died is coming clear. The My Sandwich, My Choice project is a bright thread that’s unraveling to lead me out of the chaos. I’m going to keep writing, and I’m grateful to you if you’ve read this far.

More soon, with much love.
Mary Jane ❤️