Old spells & close calls

When I found myself caught in the messy middle.

The spell is breaking. The center can’t hold.

The older I get, the more I see that progress isn’t linear. And that it makes sense for any perception of “progress” to look more like a pendulum than a staircase, pushing in a new direction only to fail, reveal unintended consequences or create new problems, or face pushback and rejection.

And it makes sense. Trying to substantially change something usually means disrupting the status quo, challenging how things were done before, and encountering friction along the way.

Culture is the garden bed in which these new ideas are planted, and culture is also usually the last thing to change. It’s foundational, norms and beliefs inform how people act and what they care about. Pushing up against the status quo can be risky business.

When I landed on this pendulum-swing idea, it became hard to verbalize exactly what was the end goal of all this progress anymore. Was it a utopian society? Is that vision humanly possible or remotely realistic? Maybe we’re not moving toward utopia as much as we’re swinging in new directions, in messy iteration, with fresh attempts to stay safe and get free. One thing’s for sure, we have no idea how it will end.

In spring of 2010 I was unemployed in New York City with little idea of what I would do next. A job had ended that was also completely wrong for me (it entailed sitting in a cubicle and researching all the performing arts venues and practice spaces in a particular city in the US, then entering this data into big spreadsheets for consulting projects. oof.) and I had recently fallen into new love. I was renting a room in Williamsburg at the bottom of McCarren Park and playing in an indie rock band, very much enjoying the funemployed life while it lasted.

An old friend from my summer camp gig in college (my favorite job, the BEST job) had a production company, and they were in charge of putting on the TONYs that summer. He asked if I wanted to manage celebrity travel for the honorees and special guests, and I said yes — back in front of a computer and a database, but at least it had a hard end date.

June 2010: my workstation at the TONYs

In my first week, I met his co-producer who told me about her husband’s nonprofit: an anti-human trafficking organization, founded on the work of a visionary Cambodian sex slavery survivor named Somaly Mam. I was struck by the stark black and whiteness of this issue and its crystal-clear moral compass: saving the arts was one thing, but ending modern slavery? Was another level.

I came on as office manager, and jumped right in to cleaning up their startup-esque systems — they had just experienced big growth, Somaly had earned Glamour’s Woman of the Year award and Sheryl Sandberg and Susan Sarandon had joined the advisory board, and they were drowning in bad email systems and broken website links. This newly-minted nonprofit manager / daughter of an IT guy quickly found her way to relevance.

I also found myself swirling in the murky gray of nuanced and often horrific stories of exploitation and abuse and of understanding how the activist community balanced the definition of trafficking against voluntary sex work, attempting complex international aid programs to try and improve the situation.

The spell is breaking. The center can’t hold.

Stories of that grey-area complexity are for another day, but ideas of risk, power and control are on my mind as we navigate what seems to be an unprecedented moment of financial, legal and environmental turmoil in the US. We’re faced with new questions every day: what do we believe in, who’s actually in charge, and is there a new emergent moral compass that our current culture will support? How risky is it to try to question the norm or change the rules?

Two years had passed at the nonprofit, and I was in deep. My role had grown and I was directing communications and partnerships for the New York foundation. I was regularly working til 11pm, sending my last emails in time to reach the Cambodian office as they came online, and I had become your favorite dinner party guest: the one who won’t stop talking over their marg about the crisis of child sex trafficking and its root cultural issues of trauma, gender inequity and sexual stigma. Fun!

That new love had also progressed, and we got married in the summer of 2012. The next week, instead of taking a proper honeymoon, I flew to Cambodia for work. In hindsight, this may have been a sign: but at the time it just seemed like passion flowing in many directions.

And this is how I found myself, one muggy night in June, on a ride-along to the brothels of Phnom Penh.

The outreach program was run by survivors of trafficking, trained as advocates to revisit the types of establishments that used to ensnare them and talk to the women and girls who were still there. No rescues, no coercion — just conversation and care. We approached the porch of the first brothel, a worn-down house by the side of the road, holding a plastic bag filled with cold coke cans. We offered small waves of our hands, and my colleague Sora* acted as my translator.

June 16, 2012: a different brothel in Phnom Penh.

We asked the women how they were doing. Fine, they responded. Asked if they needed anything. Want a coke? (One did, the other didn’t.) Need condoms? (Responsibility and cost of condoms usually landed on the side of the sex worker.) How are they treating you here? Shrugs. Hard to get straight answers, hard to build trust, who knows what’s actually going on, but we persisted.

The sound of two motorcycles grew from down the road until they had pulled up and parked in front of the house. Two men swung themselves off, clearly drunk. Sora began to narrate: these are clients. they are going to decide which of these women they want to pay for. I nodded.

One of them stepped onto the porch toward the women. The other turned toward me.

He overtly looked me up and down. Then he squatted to get a better look at my body. He said something in Khmer to his friend.

Get in the truck, Sora said. Walk away quickly and get in the truck.

I did as I was told. I turned around and walked to the truck, glancing back to make sure he wasn’t following. I got in the passenger seat and locked the door. I waited to see if he would come, but he chose one of the women on the porch and all four disappeared inside.

My heart raced in a dozen different directions. I felt a wave of actual fear ripple through my body, realizing that the only thing protecting me from rape was the color of my skin. But even then, if he had really wanted to, would we have been able to prevent it? Or would it have become a horrible twist in my own story, an attempt to learn up close about the thing I had been working on for years, only to become a victim myself?

I also thought about the women on the porch. The two guys would pay a couple of dollars each, which may or may not end up in their pockets. Violence was common, brothels being a place for confused and traumatized men to unleash their dominance or escape their own pain, either from their immediate reality or from the generational residue of the 1970s genocide. Soon we’d drive away and sleep in our own beds, while the women took more clients. Were they there by choice? We couldn’t tell but my colleague guessed no. Did the visit plant a seed of an idea that they had agency, that they could leave and build a new life? Maybe; maybe not. Sora would come back in a week and try to talk to them about the shelters and training programs we ran. The men, the Johns would continue to generate demand until something changed, possibly by these same survivor advocates speaking up. This was the work, in the grey.

The spell is breaking. The center can’t hold.

To be clear, this isn’t a judgement of the men or Cambodian culture, nor is it a “poor me” story of my scary close call. It was one of many awakenings where I saw that the rules are relative, and that norms run deep. So deep that I don’t get a pass (but I did get lucky).

In hindsight, our idea of a ride-along where I would observe but somehow with protective shield around me was cute. In this swirl of unresolved gender and power play, why would we think we had any real control? Of course there was risk. We were the radicals, attempting to overturn a longstanding economy, engrained roles for some women, a Friday night out for some men, a coping mechanism to deal with a tradition of sexually suppressed marriages. It had layers upon layers. And with any clash of new ideas comes the chance of chaos.

This job was where I learned that nothing is black or white, and no solution is linear. In order to understand this in my bones, I apparently had to see and feel it up close. In the years that followed, and as I continued to work on complex social issues, I came to understand something: if our most pressing challenges were that straightforward to correct or solve, we would’ve done it a long time ago. And the answer will never look like flying in from afar to save the day (see: white savior complex) — in a globalized world, the only way to make meaningful, lasting change is to learn from locals and take their lead.

I ended up leaving international work in 2014 (also a story for another time) because we have no shortage of complex problems here in the US — too many, in fact, for one person to think about. Some moments require us to protect ourselves, and others are for getting in the ring, and somehow we must decide how and when to go against the grain by reading the room and following our gut and ultimately not knowing how it will turn out. We are wired for safety — but if we play it too safe we risk missing the chance to show up and participate, to enact those new ways of being, to ride the pendulum to the end of its swing just to see how it feels out there.

Right now what seems to be required of us is to recalibrate our understanding of progress, to redefine our own moral compass. It’s not going to be handed down from our leaders; it will be found within, from what we’ve seen and know to be true, and by tapping into longstanding wisdom.

Systems are crumbling, revealing their weaknesses and dark corners, and this is painfully but necessarily forcing us to see the world for what it is: created by people, for people, hungry for that same safety and freedom and spinning tales that their way is the best way. We have no choice now but to deal with the situation head-on. The spell is breaking, and we have little reason to believe that those in control inherently know best, that our leaders are on our side, or that history will inevitably bend toward the long arc of justice. We’re being asked to get clear on what we want and what we’re willing to risk, connect with others who share the same vision, and find the courage to push forward.

Progress is not inevitable, and it surely will not be linear. But if we tune in and follow that new compass, we can start to paint ourselves out of the grey.

*name changed

soundtrack: original music, home studio early pandemic with gong and synth.