On Saturday, for the first time in my life, someone accused me of being a scammer.
For the last few years I’ve found great joy in scouring our community’s Buy Nothing or Swap groups, where you can give away or sell for very cheap the shit you proudly purged, delighted to have it now be taking up space in someone else’s life. Listing items to gift, or searching through other people’s throwaways, scratches an itch when I want to participate in the exchange of consumerism but feel gross about scrolling endlessly through ads on Instagram or adding to cart a pair of high waisted white linen shorts that this time will actually be flattering and give off effortless Carolyn-Bessette-on-the -Vineyard vibes, that this time will actually communicate to the world and maybe even to me the type of woman I’ve gracefully aged into being. And now that I’ve decided not to buy a single item of clothing in the year of our lord 2025, and have stopped shopping at Amazon, Walmart and Target with only the barest whisper of wistful longing, finding something I really want from someone in our community who wants to get rid of it is a pure joy, a win I can be proud of, an item I can own and display without a twinge of shame, without putting my hands over my eyes as I justify why it was ok for me to fund fascism with this one purchase.
So after messaging back and forth about is this item still available, I was excited to go pick up my latest trophy find - a brand new oversized camel leather Hartmann briefcase with a paisley lining for a fraction of the price you could ever find online. Talk about the woman I’ve gracefully aged into being! No more slouchy totes filled with a change of shoes and two bags of crushed CheezIts and six melted lipsticks and one earring and a half unwrapped Dum Dum and a battered book slumped at the bottom. This would match the classiest thing I own, a Hartmann duffel I inherited from my step father, a gift from an airline after reaching a certain level of mileage. This would make my dead dad, a hobby pilot and a wanna be world traveler who did have good taste before the demons and the booze beat it out of him, proud of me. It would be bizarre, sure, unwieldy and inherently inconvenient for the realities of a commute to the city, say, or a flight to Atlanta with my kids. All the more interesting and necessary in these strange times.
On Saturday, as my children were at their dad’s house and I had a free, unplanned, unaccompanied day for the first time in four months, I spent the morning giving blood (B-, so precious, so rare) and decided to do the Power Red donation which takes longer (and is worth it, and a good thing to make a practice of as the dystopian future inches closer and basic care will be harder to come by), and messaged the seller of the briefcase to say I was running a little late beyond the hour window we had discussed, but here is my number if you need to contact me.
Her response came through within a minute.
“Why bother scamming? What’s the point? At least I gave you a fake address.”
I sat in the Trader Joes parking lot (granted, I had momentarily forgotten about the briefcase after the blood was drawn and the platelets returned and the apple juice consumed and had driven to the store instead of directly to her, hence the delay) as my face grew hot and my armpits set alight. My heart raced, as if a stranger on the street had screamed something violent but vaguely personal.
“What?” I responded. “So I shouldn’t come by?”
“This is a scam,” she wrote back.
How do I prove to someone I've never met that I am not what they think I am? And beyond my now diminishing desire for this random object, why do I need to? But goddammit, I wasn’t going to let this slide.
I told her that I was a mom in Maplewood, a member of all of the same groups she is a part of (as I could see from her profile, including, I refrained from mentioning, the political action organization that I served as the president of for three years). I said, I’m not scamming you, but if you think that, then best of luck.
Would a MOM in MAPLEWOOD scam someone? Would the PRESIDENT of a POLITICAL ACTION ORGANIZATION try to what, steal your identity, your money? Would someone with whom you share 30+ mutual friends risk their reputation to hack into your Zelle account and go on a shopping spree at a gas station?
Would someone with B- blood, for godssakes, who just did the Power Red donation in a church basement in Short Hills be a SCAMMER???
She wrote back.
“You asked me to call you and that’s what scammers do. I will bring it to you. What’s your address?”
After reminding her that no, I did not ask her to call me, I shared my phone number as a courtesy, and that part of the joy of this process is believing that things are being given or sold with good energy, I would no longer be able to enjoy this item and would not be inviting her over to sell it to me.
“Ah, so you won’t send me your address?” she countered.
She caught me. I was scamming her, trying to rob and harm her, using this briefcase as my way in. As anyone who has taken Scamming 101 knows, the way to suss a scammer out is to ask to come over to their house.
I can only assume her assessment of me is upheld and the story she had told herself is now fact. I doubt we’ll ever have the chance to repair that, and at this point its the last thing I want to do because, honestly, she seems like a bitch.
We both have our stories.
It made me remember a time that a story was cracked out of me. I was 30 years old at the Shambhala convening in Halifax, Nova Scotia I went to every summer for many years - Authentic Leadership In Action. The place where I learned to meditate, the place where I met myself, the place were I was introduced to the dharma and discovered that it was in fact the only truth, the way, the path. The place that didn’t change my life but just introduced me to it.
ALIA was essentially a conference with tracks, and that year my track was based on Parker Palmer’s Courage to Lead - the tragic gap between possibility and cynicism, the shadows of a leader, ego versus soul stories. The space held in that room cultivated vulnerability and tender compassion in a way I had never seen, culminating in the experience of a Quaker Clearness Committee - a soul rocking process I still think about and yearn for regularly.
One night about midway through the week there was a social gathering for the whole conference of about 200 people called “Pop Up Storytelling.” I had just led a breakout session with my friend, the producer and artist and change consultant who had volunteered with the nonprofit I worked for and recommended a program called Coming Into Your Own to me, which was offered as a track of ALIA years before and was my introduction into this community. Feeling buoyed by the success of our session, and after a couple of glasses of wine, I said - let’s sing that song from CIYO!
She knew the one - a Native American spiritual that goes like this:
When you were born, you cried
And the world rejoiced
Live your life so that when you die
The world cries
And you rejoice
She jumped right in, the good sport she is, though she was perhaps even less of a natural singer than I. We did our best on the patio outside of the meditation hall, leading this group of earnest, caring, present people in learning and singing this song in rounds.
People were struggling with remembering the words, the rounds were a lopsided mess, and I was starting to panic. She was taking my unsteady lead like everyone else was, and I desperately no longer wanted to be doing this.
Then one of the men in my track, a gentle eyed 40 something year old Methodist youth counselor from the midwest named Marc, called out to me, after what must have been the 14th time I’d tried coaching everyone through the words - “tell us again what the words are.”
My stomach flipped.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“No… goodness no, I just didn’t catch the words and wanted to learn them so I can sing with you.”
I mumbled something about us giving it a college try and sat down, trying not to cry. Once the heat of shame and embarrassment had subsided I wandered back into my tiny twin bed concrete dorm room and sobbed on and off for the rest of the night.
In my journal from that night, in 2013, I wrote about the exchange with Marc:
“It showed my deepest, most tender place - my deep distrust of pretty much everyone, my sneaking suspicion that everyone is onto me, out to get me, and that its only a matter of time before they do.”
I woke up the next morning, raw and cracked open. At breakfast I sat with two wonderfully kind women who started out the conversation by saying, “that was so cool when you and Michelle sang last night.” I started to cry again, and told them what had happened with Marc, and that it had triggered something deep and unhealed within me. They didn’t try to solve, just listened and understood. “Its amazing what comes up here, isn’t it?” one them said.
When I walked into our track’s room, as usual everyone was sitting in a circle, silently, and today Leonard Cohen’s Anthem was playing. Tears were just streaming down my face, which at least wasn’t unusual for day four of ALIA. At the first break Marc asked if we could chat, and we went outside and I told him the truth. That if I could have, after such a light comment, assumed that HE was making fun of me, probably one of the safest people I had ever met, how I was moving around the world? What kind of armor, what kind of alienation, what kind of sadness was I carrying? What stories did I believe? Where did this come from, and how can I let go of it?
He said how badly he felt that he had made me feel that way, and that “in the excel spreadsheet of people who’s hearts he admired, mine was right on up there.”
Then he said, “It’s crazy how you think you’re dealing with one thing here and then another comes and t-bones you. I realized last night after our interaction that one of my greatest fears is being perceived as untrustworthy. Isn’t that interesting?”
Both of us, in these stuck stories, unintentionally reinforcing each other’s.
How much is all of this current global collective pain about our stuck stories? I don’t want to offer compassion to the blood thirsty fascists who are kidnapping people, starving children, killing tax paying citizens for not being able to afford medication that costs $50k a year or a home health attendant to keep them alive? But maybe they are stuck in their own stories about what they didn’t get, what’s been done to them, and what they have to do in order to survive. And I suppose if we are going to fight them with courage, with wise action, with the spirit of a warrior, we have to see those stories not to heal them, because I fear that’s beyond our control, but so that at least we stop passing them down.
How many times in my life has a story I inherited, or that I was wrapped in against my will from childhood, been unintentionally reinforced by someone who was just playing out their own story? My camp counselor, my ex-husband, my colleague, a dear friend, a man I’ve gone on two dates with? The story machine is alive and well, sometimes even the very story I dragged out of the swamp and wrestled with that sleepless, tear-filled night in Halifax. There are lots of creatures in that water, but by now I think I’ve met them all. And when I start to see their globular eyes and pebbled jaws peeking out I’m not struck with the same kind of icy panic or ignited shame.
You again. You, in the darkness, you lurking where you think I can’t see you. I know you’re there. I may not be able to kill you, but if you haven’t drug me under yet there’s no way you can now.
And the woman who is still in possession of the briefcase that was supposed to make me a new version of myself? What creatures are lurking in her waters? What has been done to her, what has she been taught to fear, to whom is she trying to prove that she’s no pushover?
If she and I were at ALIA together I’m sure I would have already softened to her. And maybe by next Saturday I’ll have a more gracious take.
Because as anyone who’s ever done their own wheeling and dealing knows, even worse than not getting what you want is being stuck with something you were ready to let go of.
Gorgeous funny electrifying and true, as always.