I met Kim for the first time twenty-three years ago while swimming in the deep blue of the Aegean off the coast of Santorini island. Still in the first fragile months of my sobriety after the loss of my father, I was there to heal. To breathe. To take space. I was not expecting to connect with anyone. We encountered each other while swimming in the Caldera off Amoudi Bay where it is said the great lost city of Atlantis lay thousands of feet below the surface at the bottom of the sea.
While treading water, we engaged in an unbroken stream of breathless girl talk. She was a born and bred scouser from Liverpool. I, a born and bred New Yorker. While paddling away, we discovered we were both the same age, both lived in New York City, and at one time or another had both been performers.
She struck me as funny, vibrant, and progressively positive. Championing women’s rights and environmental issues. We vowed to connect stateside, but it never happened.
Five years later, on the same island, while pushing through a stampede of tourists in the blaze of a stifling August afternoon. I was somehow propelled forward through the crowd, and there was Kim standing in front of me once again. Bronzed and effervescent. Providence had brought us together.
Over Greek coffee and spanakopita overlooking the caldera, we took stock of where each of us had landed. I had been living in northern Greece on the remote island of Lesvos in a tiny village, writing and working on photography projects. She was newly married to Greg, a guy from New Jersey who ran a vitamin shop with a couple of side hustles, and Kim was on the cusp of starting a woman's health platform focused on birth and motherhood. We all met for dinner that night, and I found them charming. She was witty and fearless. He was wild and eccentric. Regaling us with stories of spiritual awakenings in Indian Ashrams (1st red flag ) and how he broke an arm snowboarding and eschewing traditional medical intervention, he somehow impossibly healed himself (the 2nd landed with a thud).
On a whim, I accepted an invitation to meet them on the island of Milos for a few days. This was when the cracks began to show. I noticed how he always had to drive and was dominating every conversation and shooting down all her ideas. Our itinerary was laid out based on what he chose to do, and at one point during the trip, he had a kind of meltdown and disappeared for hours in search of weed. I sat with Kim huddled by the sea, her softly crying, chin to chest, as the sun set. I've never seen him like this. She said . They had been married just a few months.
Over the years, there were a few things that gave me pause. Greg’s love of conspiracy theories and doomsday propaganda. The garage filled with rows of jars and cans of food, water, and camping gear, standing in wait for the end of the world. His fascination with gurus who were facing allegations of money laundering, fraud, and sexual assault.
Then there was the element of control he held over her. The day they were married, Greg began to immediately phase out his failed businesses that had been subsidized by his grandmother, till one day he shuttered them all together. He convinced Kim to move from NYC to rural New Jersey, buy a house using her savings, which had her commuting 4 hours round-trip. No longer working, Greg sat on the couch smoking weed all day and surfing conspiracy theory chat rooms on the dark web. This became a point of tension for them, and she often lamented putting herself in this situation.
I asked why she didn't leave. She said she spent nights lying awake planning her escape, but what's the point, she said, he’d find me.
On a trip to Greece, we took together a few years later, Greg had another moment. On the flight over, he paced up and down the aisle bellowing into the dark belly of a transatlantic flight about a recent power shift in Kim’s fledgling business. Passengers were awoken, and he was told to take his seat by obviously rattled flight attendants. The episode continued in Greece as he sulked around angrily, moving between sullen silence and dysregulated ranting. Crescendoing in the flipping over of a table at a seaside taverna. That was the end for me. Coming from a violent, dysfunctional home, it felt unsafe. After 2 days of circular conversation with Kim, I left on my own.
One of the last times I saw my friend , she had determined she would leave him. She had lost her home after securing a second mortgage while Greg dug in and still refused to work. Credit destroyed and out of a job, she had had it. I'm ready. It's time to reinvent, she told me. She was having an affair, and the newness of it had given her a sense of possibility. How things could be different. Instead, she abruptly pivoted and moved out west, settling into a very rural red district with Greg and we fell out of touch.
Half a decade later, I found her profile on Twitter. It left me cold. It was a veritable cornucopia of QAnon, anti-vaxx, and Russian propaganda. I could hear Greg’s voice bleeding through all her posts while Kim’s seemed to have softened into silence. She boldly claimed her MAGA-hood.
Espousing her appreciation for Trump’s pro-environmental policies, she talked about Fauci getting arrested, and DemocRATS were going to get theirs. She posted several memes of Lara Trump in skimpy dresses with no mention of the loss of Roe V Wade or the potential loss of women’s voting rights. Did she even know? The Kim who championed women's empowerment was long gone. Taking my trolling to the next level, I discovered her businesses were no longer a reflection of her own interests but solely the marketing of her husband's. She was selling CBD and other supplements that he sold in his shuttered vitamin shop. Maybe it was her way of trying to get Greg off the couch. I couldn't help myself and commented on her posts only to receive an expected block. I accepted at this point that she was no longer reachable. The transformation was complete. She had become the perfect MAGA wife.
Since 2016, I've lost quite a few of my sisters and family members to the Trump orbit. Women in relationships with men who never grew up, whose anger and discontent around their own lack of agency, simmer unabated just below the surface. Men who are prone to fanaticism and self-loathing, which shows up in addictive and controlling behaviors and seems to be funneled into holding dominion over and the intolerance of others.
In looking below the hood, most of these women come from a family of origin where alcoholism and other dysfunction flowed freely. Many shared fathers that were fanatical, mistrustful, rageful, acutely judgemental, or dished out the kind of physical, psychological or sexual abuse that blossoms into unaddressed shame.
If I’m honest, most of these women also live from a place of addiction too. Either through substances, sex, perfectionism or crippling codependency. They are used to making excuses for the abusive male figureheads they are helplessly drawn to in what seems like an effort to fix the past in the present or to justify why they stay stuck in these patterns, unable to find an exit or themselves. So they settle in with broken men who live in the shadow of fathers whose attention they craved but whose approval they never got. They somehow find each other, these strong vibrant women who allow themselves to be conquered, and these disempowered men taking back ground by conquering the women in their lives. It’s a cycle that goes way back and on the surface is emblematic of the Trump family ethos and those who prostrate themselves at their feet. They mirror each other.
I have asked myself over the years why some are able to escape their roots and some are not. Why some find emotional sobriety and healing, while others remain calcified in dysfunction.
That's a tough one because we’re not just talking about what has shaped us but what has shaped the generations that came before. Inherited trauma, beliefs and shame that seem to bleed through each generation to the next. Did any escape hatches present in the form of people or places that might open another path? That might flip the switch of self-reflection and shine a floodlight into spaces that were darkened by stories about the dangers of the world interpreted through collective fear and shame in the family.
Many of these women have avoided looking into their darkest corners. Perhaps the fear was just too great.
Last week, I found Kim again on a new Twitter profile. I noticed that she only had a handful of followers. I’m guessing others like myself peeled off over the years after seeing her become more and more radicalized. I was not surprised to see her spinning in the same vortex of disinformation, only this time it was about Ukraine and Zelensky’s stealing of allied defense funds. She praised Marjorie Taylor Greene’s gumption, RFKjrs ’s proposed elimination of all vaccines, and Elon’s cutting of federal workers and entitlements.
Instead of my usual battle axe-wielding style, I approached her with a softer touch. At first, she came at me, but the more measured I became, she adjusted in kind. Then, as the weeks passed and more and more draconian legislation was put forward, she disappeared and stopped responding altogether.
I imagine I planted a seed. I imagine she is beginning to question things. I imagine she has secretly stumbled upon more factual reporting, and like waking up in a stranger’s bed after a long night of debauchery, she is slipping on her shoes for the long walk of shame back to her own neighborhood, where things feel right and good.
I imagine her making her way out of the dense forest of denial into the light. I imagine us in Greece a decade from now, paddling side by side in the Aegean, reflecting on this time, all that had divided us, the global order restored, and we, just two sisters floating in the sea, dreaming of all the things we have yet to do.
Or maybe the truth is, Kim’s still there, living in ruby red Colorado, Trump flag on the front lawn, wings clipped, dreams plucked out, working her ass off trying to keep the lights on, while Greg sits home screaming at his laptop, stockpiling hunting gear and cans of chicken soup for the coming apocalypse while she continues to plot her escape.
I think you really got to the crux of the issue. Maga appeals to the damaged throwbacks in society. I guess just like with any cult.
Great and insightful post. So many of us share friends that have gone to the dark side.