“My instructor in Bali taught the real way,” she announced to my entire class, a smug smirk on her face. “But I guess you wouldn’t know about that.”
For weeks, this woman had treated my yoga studio, my sanctuary, like her personal stage. She arrived every Tuesday like a storm cloud in $300 leggings, her sighs louder than my instructions.
Her constant corrections and loud demands chipped away at the peace I worked so hard to build for my students. My class wasn’t a refuge anymore; it was a weekly masterclass in public entitlement.
She wanted a platform to prove she was better than me. What she didn’t realize was that her own arrogance was about to become the star of a viral video, delivering a kind of public justice she never saw coming.
The Eye of the Storm: My Sanctuary
The heat in the room is a soft, heavy blanket. It smells of lavender oil and the faint, clean scent of the bamboo floors. Sixty minutes of predictable peace. It’s the only hour of my day that feels truly mine, a walled garden against the chaos of a mortgage, a moody teenage son, and the gnawing feeling that I’m perpetually one step behind.
My students are a mosaic of tired bodies. There’s Carol, a third-grade teacher whose shoulders are permanently knotted with tension. There’s Mike, a construction foreman trying to undo twenty years of heavy lifting. They aren’t here for Instagram-worthy handstands. They’re here for a moment of quiet, a chance to breathe without the weight of the world on their chest. This studio, which I built with a second mortgage and a reckless amount of hope, is my sanctuary. It is their sanctuary.
Then, the door opens, letting in a slice of cold, noisy reality.
She stands there, silhouetted for a moment against the bright hallway. She’s tall, dressed in a seamless, cream-colored athleisure set that probably costs more than my monthly grocery bill. Her yoga mat is a thick, premium-grade slab of rubber that she unrolls with a loud, definitive thwack right in the front row, directly in my line of sight.
She doesn’t make eye contact. She just starts her own series of elaborate, performative stretches, ignoring my gentle opening cues completely. A ripple of distraction flows through the room. I feel the first, tiny pinprick of irritation. The walls of my garden have just been breached.
The First Crack
“Let’s begin in a comfortable seated position,” I say, my voice deliberately calm. “Close your eyes, and just begin to notice your breath.”
A loud, theatrical sigh comes from the front row. It’s a sound of profound impatience, as if being asked to simply sit and breathe is the greatest imposition of her day. I ignore it. I lead the class through a few gentle warm-ups, neck rolls, and shoulder shrugs.
When we move to our hands and knees for Cat-Cow, she adds an unnecessary leg lift, a flourish of athletic vanity that has nothing to do with the simple spinal flexion we’re aiming for. A few people near her glance over, their own rhythm thrown off.
“Now, let’s find our first Downward-Facing Dog,” I instruct. “Remember to keep a generous bend in your knees. The goal is a long, straight spine.”
“You should really press your heels to the floor,” she mutters, not to me, but to the room at large. It’s just loud enough to be heard by the first two rows. Carol, the teacher, shoots me a look of wide-eyed sympathy.
I plaster on my customer-service smile. “For a beginner-focused class, we prioritize spinal alignment over hamstring flexibility. Pushing the heels down can sometimes compromise the back.” I keep my tone light, educational.
She answers with another sigh, this one laced with the unmistakable sound of condescension. For the rest of the class, she’s a constant source of low-grade static. She holds poses longer than instructed, moves into advanced variations I haven’t cued, and rearranges her Lululemon-branded blocks with sharp, irritated clicks.
When class ends, as everyone is rolling up their mats in a state of restored calm, she approaches me. “That was… gentle,” she says, her lips pulled into a thin, critical line. “I’m used to a much more rigorous practice. More of a power vinyasa. Do you ever teach a real class?”
The question hangs in the air, dripping with disdain. My smile feels like a cheap mask. “This is a Level One class, as advertised,” I say. “It’s designed to be accessible.”
“Right. Accessible.” She says the word like it’s something you’d scrape off the bottom of your shoe. “I’m Brenda, by the way.” She doesn’t offer a hand, just turns and walks out, leaving the scent of expensive perfume and entitlement in her wake.
The Queen’s Demands
Brenda becomes a regular. Tuesday nights, 6 PM. Front row, center stage. Her presence changes the energy of the room from a collective sigh of relief to a low, humming tension. The disruptions are no longer subtle. They are a performance.
During a Warrior II pose, she’ll call out, “Shouldn’t our gaze be directly over the front fingertips? You didn’t mention the drishti.” I’ll calmly affirm the cue she just cut me off to “correct.”
During a balancing sequence, while others are wobbling and concentrating, she’ll demand a modification. Not for an injury, but for a challenge. “Can those of us with a more established practice move into Bird of Paradise?” she’ll ask loudly, shattering the focus of twenty other people.
I try every tactic in the professional playbook. I speak to her quietly before class. “Brenda, I would appreciate it if you’d let me lead the students through the sequence as planned. It can be disruptive.” She’d just nod with a placid, uncomprehending smile. “Oh, of course. I’m just trying to be helpful. Some of these people have terrible form.”
I try speaking to her after class. “Perhaps our Power Flow on Thursdays would be a better fit for you?” She waved a dismissive hand. “Thursdays don’t work with my schedule. Besides, I feel like this class needs me.”
My husband, Dan, doesn’t get it. “Just kick her out, Maya. Refund her ten-class pass and tell her not to come back.”
“It’s not that simple,” I try to explain over dinner, pushing pasta around my plate. “She’s not technically breaking any rules. She’s just… an energy vampire. If I kick her out for being annoying, she could leave a one-star review, complain to corporate. She’s the exact type of person to make my life a living hell.”
The other students are starting to vote with their feet. My Tuesday class, once reliably full, starts to have empty spots. The regulars who stick it out wear a look of weary resignation. They roll their eyes when Brenda speaks. They give me apologetic smiles. The sanctuary is becoming a war zone, and I am losing.
The Unraveling
Tonight, the class is packed. A new-student special has brought in a flood of fresh faces, people looking nervous and hopeful. I feel a renewed sense of purpose. I will protect this space for them. I will not let her ruin this.
I guide them into a gentle, restorative twist, Reclined Spinal Twist. It’s a pose of surrender. You lie on your back, drop your knees to one side, and let gravity do the work. It’s meant to be effortless.
“Let go of any tension in your lower back,” I say softly. “Just release.”
“You’re cueing this all wrong.”
Brenda’s voice cuts through the quiet like a shard of glass. She isn’t muttering. She’s sitting up on her mat, looking directly at me. The room goes silent. The new students look around, confused and alarmed.
“Brenda, please, lie back down,” I say, my voice tight.
She stands up. My heart starts hammering against my ribs. “No,” she says, her voice ringing with self-importance. “You’re telling them to drop their knees, but you haven’t mentioned keeping both shoulders on the mat. You’re encouraging improper alignment. You’re going to hurt someone.”
This is it. A public execution. She isn’t just correcting me; she’s invalidating my competence in front of a room full of paying customers. I can feel the blood drain from my face. I look out at the sea of faces, all of them staring, waiting.
I open my mouth to respond, to say something professional and de-escalating, but nothing comes out.
Brenda crosses her arms, a smug, triumphant smirk spreading across her face. “My instructor in Bali—a real yogi—taught us the proper foundation for this pose. But I guess you wouldn’t know about that.”
The silence that follows is absolute. It is heavy and suffocating. And in that moment, something inside me, some carefully maintained wall of professional calm, finally and completely shatters.
The Unbalanced Pose: The Cold Fire
The anger is a strange thing. It doesn’t erupt. It doesn’t make me want to scream. Instead, it implodes, collapsing inward until it becomes something dense and heavy in my chest. All the frustration from the past few weeks, all the forced smiles and bitten-back retorts, cools into a single, hard point of clarity. The rage is gone, replaced by a cold, quiet fire.
I look at Brenda, at her smug face and her perfect posture, and I see the path forward. It’s a dark path, a petty one, but it’s the only one left. The teacher in me, the peaceful guide, recedes. A different part of me, a part I didn’t know existed, takes the wheel.
I let the silence hang in the air for a few seconds longer, letting the tension build until it’s almost unbearable. The new students look terrified. My regulars look like they’re watching a car crash in slow motion.
Then, I smile. It’s not my polite instructor smile. It’s a genuine smile, sharp and bright, and I know it doesn’t reach my eyes. My voice, when it comes out, is unnervingly sweet.
“Brenda, thank you,” I say, the words dropping like stones into the quiet room. “Thank you for your concern for everyone’s safety. It’s clear you have a wealth of knowledge from your time in Bali.”
She visibly puffs up, her smirk widening. She thinks she’s won.
“In fact,” I continue, my voice smooth as silk. “I think it would benefit the entire class to learn from your experience. Please, come to the front. Show us. Show us the real way.”
The Arrogant Acceptance
The invitation hangs in the air, a baited hook shimmering under the studio lights. For a split second, a flicker of uncertainty crosses Brenda’s face. This wasn’t part of her script. She was meant to be the dissenting expert in the crowd, not the performer on stage.
But her ego is a much stronger force than her caution. Backing down now, in front of this captive audience, would be a greater humiliation than any potential failure. She has to prove she’s right. She has to prove she’s better.
“Of course,” she says, her confidence returning in a rush. “I’d be happy to.”
She strides to the front of the room, her Lululemon-clad hips swinging with purpose. She doesn’t just take my spot on the instructor’s mat; she owns it, turning to face the class like a seasoned guru addressing her disciples. A patronizing smile is fixed on her face.
“Now, what your instructor was trying to teach you is a beginner’s pose,” she begins, gesturing vaguely toward me. “But to truly open the thoracic spine while protecting the sacrum, a more active variation is required. What we should be doing is a posture that builds on this foundation. It’s a variation of Eka Pada Koundinyasana II.”
A few of the more experienced students in the room exchange nervous glances. She’s just named a notoriously difficult arm balance, a pretzel of a pose that requires immense core strength, flexibility, and balance. It has absolutely nothing to do with the gentle, restorative twist we were just in. It’s a non-sequitur of arrogance.
“It looks intimidating,” she says with a little laugh, “but it’s really quite simple if your core is properly engaged and you understand the basic mechanics of leverage.” She’s not just accepting the challenge. She’s raising the stakes to a suicidal level.
A Room Without Breath
The ambient music I’d put on earlier has long since faded into silence. The only sounds in the room are Brenda’s confident instructions and the soft, shuffling sounds of twenty people who have forgotten how to breathe. No one is on their mat anymore. Some are sitting up, others are half-propped on their elbows, all of them watching the drama unfold.
Brenda places her hands on the mat, shoulder-width apart, fingers splayed wide. She talks through the setup with the condescending precision of a celebrity chef explaining how to boil water.
“You create a shelf with your triceps,” she narrates, bending her elbows. “You have to stack your joints. It’s simple physics, really. You bring your hip to rest on one elbow, your knee to the other. See?”
She hooks her body onto her arms, demonstrating the setup. I have to admit, it’s a solid foundation. She clearly has some practice. Maybe she can do it. A cold knot of dread tightens in my stomach. What if she pulls this off? What if she actually nails it and solidifies her coup in front of everyone?
“The key is the gaze,” she continues, her voice slightly strained now. “You look forward, not down. You find a point on the floor and you focus. Then, you just… lift.”
She leans forward, shifting her weight onto her hands. Her back foot, then her front foot, lifts off the mat. For one stunning, heart-stopping second, she is airborne. She’s actually doing it. She’s holding a perfect, flying-splits arm balance.
A collective gasp ripples through the room.
The Fall
The moment of triumph is fleeting. It lasts for a single, perfect inhale. Then, the first tremor appears.
Her supporting arm, the one bearing the full weight of her twisted torso, begins to shake. It starts as a fine vibration, then becomes a visible, violent wobble. Her face, a moment ago a mask of serene concentration, contorts. The serene guru vanishes, replaced by a woman in the grip of raw panic.
Her carefully stacked joints come unstacked. Her core, which she had so confidently touted, gives out. Her body, which she was trying to present as a finely tuned instrument, becomes a clumsy, unwieldy burden. The laws of physics she was so keen to lecture on reassert themselves with brutal authority.
She crashes.
It’s not a graceful descent. There’s no elegant release. It’s a sudden, graceless collapse. One elbow buckles, and she pitches forward and sideways, her legs flailing. She lands in a heap on her premium-grade mat with a soft, pathetic whump. A tangle of expensive fabric and shattered pride.
The room is utterly silent, save for the sound of her ragged, humiliated gasp for air.
She pushes herself up, her face a burning, mottled red of shame and exertion. Her eyes dart around the room, taking in the shocked faces, the pitying stares. And then her gaze lands on the back row.
On Chloe, a quiet college student who attends sporadically. Chloe, who, like so many of her generation, processes the world through a screen. She’s holding up her phone, her expression not malicious, just… documenting.
And Brenda, sprawled on the floor in the ruins of her own arrogance, sees exactly what I see. The unmistakable, tiny red light in the corner of the screen. It’s been recording. It’s all been recorded.
The Digital Pillory: Going Viral
It happens faster than I could have imagined. By the time I get home, shower, and force down a piece of toast I don’t want, my phone is already buzzing. A text from a friend who teaches across town.
OMG, have you seen the Westbridge Community Facebook group?
My hands are trembling as I pull it up. The video is already there. It’s thirty-seven seconds long. The title, crude and brutally effective, is “Yoga Karen Gets Owned at Serenity Now Studio.”
It’s been up for less than an hour and it already has hundreds of shares. The comments are a roaring river of schadenfreude.
YES! Justice! I know exactly which woman this is!
That instructor is my HERO.
Serves her right. People like that ruin everything.
I feel a dizzying, toxic rush of validation. They see it. They understand. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t just being sensitive. She was a nightmare, and now everyone knows. For a solid twelve hours, I ride that wave. My phone buzzes with supportive texts from friends, old clients, even other studio owners who all have their own “Brenda” story. For the first time in weeks, I feel powerful. I feel like I won.
The next morning, Dan forwards me a link from a local news blog. They’ve embedded the video in an article. The headline: “Entitled Yogi Face-Plants After Challenging Instructor.” It’s been viewed over 50,000 times. The local radio morning show is talking about it.
The video has escaped the fishbowl of the local yoga community and is now swimming in the piranha tank of the general public. The name has stuck. “Yoga Karen.” I have created a meme.
The Sweet and Sour Taste of Justice
That afternoon, I make the mistake of reading the comments on the news blog. The glee I felt has curdled into something sour and acidic in the pit of my stomach.
The comments have moved past celebrating my “win” and have descended into a festival of cruelty aimed directly at Brenda. They are vicious, personal, and have nothing to do with what happened in the studio.
Look at the flabby skin on her arms. Gravity is undefeated, honey.
I bet her husband is cheating on her. I would be.
She has that pinched, miserable face of a rich woman with a shopping addiction and no real friends.
Someone with too much time on their hands has figured out her name. They’ve posted it in the comments. Someone else has linked her personal Facebook profile. Now they are mocking photos of her on vacation, her garden, her dog. They are dissecting her life, piece by piece, for public consumption.
This isn’t justice. This is a digital stoning. I didn’t want this. I just wanted her to stop talking in my class. I wanted to protect my little sixty-minute sanctuary. I didn’t want to unleash this mob on her.
I close my laptop, but I can’t unsee the comments. I can’t unsee her face in the video, that split second of raw panic before she falls. That look wasn’t arrogant. It was terrified.
Dan comes home and finds me staring out the kitchen window. “You okay? You should be celebrating.”
“I think I made a huge mistake,” I say, my voice barely a whisper. The victory feels like ash in my mouth.
A Queen in a Lonely Castle
The house is silent. It’s a cavernous, architect-designed space with soaring ceilings, polished concrete floors, and vast windows that look out onto a meticulously manicured Japanese garden. It is a work of art, featured in a magazine once. It is also as cold and empty as a mausoleum.
Brenda sits at a massive marble island in the center of the kitchen, the only light coming from the phone in her hands. The screen illuminates a face that is pale and drawn, stripped of the aggressive confidence she wore like armor.
She scrolls. The motion is compulsive, a nervous tic. She reads another comment, then another. Her thumb hovers over a picture of herself on a boat, smiling broadly, a picture someone has re-posted with the caption, “This is the face of peak entitlement.”
Her husband had been furious, but not in a supportive way. “What were you thinking, Brenda?” he’d yelled. “Making a scene? Don’t you know what our name means in this town? You’ve embarrassed me. You’ve embarrassed yourself.” He’d left that morning for a “business trip” to the city that wasn’t on his calendar.
She hasn’t left the house in two days. The notifications are a constant, buzzing torment. Every ping is a new person laughing at her, judging her. The humiliation is a physical presence in the room, a suffocating weight on her chest.
She had been a senior vice president at a major investment firm for thirty years. A shark. Feared, respected, powerful. A restructuring three months ago had eliminated her position. They’d called it “early retirement” and given her a fat severance check and a patronizing farewell party. She had gone from managing a billion-dollar portfolio to managing a garden.
The yoga class… it was the only place left where she felt she knew more than someone else. It was the one, tiny arena where she could still feel a sliver of her old authority. And now, the one place she went to feel important had become the source of her ultimate disgrace. She clicks the phone off and sits in the crushing, perfect silence of her beautiful, empty life.
The Price of a Meme
The email arrives on Friday morning. The subject line is just my name. The sender is Mark Henderson, the regional owner of the Serenity Now franchise.
Maya, we need to talk. My office. 10 AM.
Mark’s office is in a sterile corporate park on the other side of town. It’s all grey carpets, white walls, and glass partitions. It’s the aesthetic opposite of my warm, lavender-scented studio. Mark is a businessman. He’s a nice enough guy, but he cares about spreadsheets, liability, and brand image above all else. I know this is not going to be a friendly chat.
I sit in the leather chair opposite his huge, empty desk. He doesn’t offer me coffee. He doesn’t ask how I am. He just slides his tablet across the polished wood surface.
It’s open to an article on a different, more serious news site. The headline is stark. “Local Yoga Studio Fosters ‘Culture of Bullying,’ Alleges Patron. Lawsuit Possible.”
My blood runs cold. The article quotes “a source close to the family” who claims I have a history of targeting and bullying Brenda, that I intentionally baited her and created an unsafe environment, culminating in a public shaming that has caused “significant emotional distress.” It’s a complete, deliberate distortion of the truth, but it sounds horribly plausible.
I look up at Mark, my heart pounding a sick, slow rhythm. “This is insane. She was the bully.”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe, Maya,” he says, his face grim. He leans forward, lacing his fingers together on the desk. “Her full name is Brenda Wallace.”
The name means nothing to me.
He lets the silence stretch before delivering the final blow. “Her husband is Stephen Wallace. As in, Wallace & Finch. They are the biggest, most aggressive litigation firm in the state.”
I feel the floor drop out from under me.
“And,” Mark adds, his voice flat, “Brenda Wallace left me a very detailed voicemail this morning. She’s threatening to sue. Not just you, Maya. She’s suing the entire Serenity Now franchise for damages.”
The Price of Peace: The Legal Threat
“So what happens now?” I ask, the words feeling foreign in my mouth. My entire body feels numb.
Mark Henderson leans back in his expensive chair, a portrait of corporate anxiety. “What happens now is that I’ve spoken to our attorneys. They’re handling all communication from this point forward. You are not to contact Brenda Wallace or her husband. You are not to post anything about this on social media. You are not to talk to the press.”
He takes a breath, avoiding my eyes. “And, effective immediately, you are on a paid suspension pending a full internal investigation.”
Suspension. The word hits me like a physical blow. “You’re taking me out of my classes?”
“I’m protecting the business, Maya,” he says, his tone leaving no room for argument. “The brand is at stake. Your key card has been deactivated. I need you to hand over the studio keys.”
The drive home is a blur. I walk into my house feeling like a ghost. Dan is at the kitchen counter, on his laptop. He looks up and knows immediately. “What happened?”
I tell him everything. The lawsuit. Wallace & Finch. The suspension. His face, usually so open and easygoing, hardens. “That bitch,” he says, his voice low and furious. “After everything she did, she’s going to play the victim? We’ll fight it. We’ll tell everyone what really happened.”
“Dan, her husband is Stephen Wallace. They don’t lose. Mark’s lawyers said this could drag on for years. It could bankrupt the franchise. It could bankrupt us.” The reality of our finances—the second mortgage, Leo’s looming college tuition—presses in on me. We don’t have litigation money. We have “hope the furnace doesn’t break” money.
“There has to be something we can do,” he says, but his voice has lost its conviction.
I stare out at our backyard, at the half-finished deck Dan has been working on for months. I feel trapped. Cornered by a thirty-seven-second video and a woman whose pride I broke. Lawyers and corporate statements feel abstract and wrong. This is personal. And the only way to solve it, I realize with a terrifying certainty, is to make it personal again.
The Unwanted Empathy
Mark’s voice is a firm warning in my head: You are not to contact her. Dan’s voice is a plea: Let the lawyers handle it, Maya. Don’t make it worse.
But I can’t. I can’t sit in my house and wait for my professional life to be dismantled by a team of ten-thousand-dollar-an-hour attorneys. I feel a strange, powerful pull to see her, to face the woman from the video, the woman from the comments section. The monster I helped create.
Finding her address isn’t hard. A quick, shame-filled search online for “Brenda Wallace” and our town name brings up a charity event photo with a location tag. The house is in the wealthiest part of town, a neighborhood of sprawling lawns and gated driveways.
I don’t call. I don’t email. I write a note on a plain white card.
Brenda,
I know I’m not supposed to be doing this, but I need to talk to you. Not with lawyers. Just person to person. I will be at the Starbucks on Main Street tomorrow at 2 PM. If you want to talk, I’ll be there. If not, I will understand, and you won’t hear from me again.
Maya.
I drive to her neighborhood, my heart pounding with a mixture of fear and resolve. I slip the note into the gleaming, oversized mailbox at the end of her long, winding driveway. Driving away, I feel like I’ve just lit a fuse, with no idea if it leads to a firecracker or a bomb.
The next morning, I get a text from an unknown number. Three words.
I’ll be there.
The Coffee Shop Confession
The Starbucks is noisy and anonymous, smelling of burnt coffee and cleaning solution. It’s the perfect non-place for an impossible conversation. I get there fifteen minutes early and choose a small table in the corner. My hands are shaking so badly I have to clasp them in my lap.
She walks in at exactly 2 PM. She looks… smaller. Dressed in a simple grey sweater and jeans, with no makeup, the aggressive, polished armor she wore in my studio is gone. She looks like any other tired, middle-aged woman. She looks like me.
She gets a latte and sits down without a word, staring into the cup. The silence is thick with everything we aren’t saying.
“Thank you for coming,” I finally manage to say.
She nods, still not looking at me. “I shouldn’t have.”
“I’m sorry,” I blurt out, the words feeling clumsy and inadequate. “For what happened. For the video, the comments. All of it. I never wanted…”
“What did you want, Maya?” she asks, her voice quiet but sharp. She finally looks at me, and her eyes are red-rimmed and exhausted. “What was the goal?”
I don’t have a good answer. “I just wanted you to stop,” I say honestly. “You were disrupting the class. You were making everyone uncomfortable. You were ruining the one place I felt… peaceful.”
A humorless little laugh escapes her. “Peaceful,” she repeats. She looks down at her trembling hands wrapped around the warm cup. “I was a senior vice president at Sterling Financial. I managed a team of fifty people and a billion-dollar portfolio. I worked seventy-hour weeks for thirty-two years. Then three months ago, a new twenty-eight-year-old CEO decided to ‘streamline the legacy infrastructure.’ He restructured me right out of a job.”
She takes a shaky breath. “I went from giving keynote speeches to trying to figure out what to do on a Tuesday afternoon. My husband… he’s used to being married to a powerhouse, not a housewife. He can barely look at me.”
“In that class,” she says, her voice cracking, “I was just trying to feel like I still knew something. Like I was still an expert on… anything. It was pathetic. I know that. But it was all I had left.”
The anger I’ve felt toward her, the frustration, the fear—it all dissolves, replaced by a profound, gut-wrenching wave of empathy. The villain of my story is just a lonely, terrified woman who lost her entire identity overnight. The weight of what I’ve done, of what I’ve taken from her, settles on me.
The Final Pose
We sit in silence for a long time, the clatter of the coffee shop a world away. I see it all now. Her arrogance was a shield. Her criticisms were a desperate cry for relevance. I didn’t see a person in pain; I saw a problem to be solved, and I solved it with public humiliation.
“I will drop the lawsuit,” she says suddenly, her voice flat.
Relief floods my body so intensely it almost makes me dizzy. “Brenda, thank you. Really. Thank you.”
“I haven’t finished,” she says, cutting me off. She lifts her head, and for the first time, her gaze is steady, her eyes as hard and clear as they were that night in the studio. The vulnerable woman is gone, replaced by the corporate negotiator she used to be.
“I will call my husband. I will tell his lawyers to stand down. The entire thing will go away. Your job will be safe. The studio will be safe.”
“But,” she continues, her voice perfectly level, “there is one condition.”
I wait, holding my breath.
“You will record a video of yourself. You will post it to the Serenity Now studio’s official Facebook page. In that video, you will issue a formal, public apology. To me. By name.”
Her eyes lock onto mine, and there is no empathy in them. There is only the cold, hard glint of leverage.
“You will state that your instruction was unprofessional. You will say that you baited me into a confrontation and deliberately created an unsafe and hostile environment. You will admit that you failed in your duties as an instructor. You will say that my concerns about safety were valid. You will say that I was right, and you were wrong.”
She leans back in her chair, the smallest, most controlled smile touching her lips. She has just offered me a choice. It is a pose more complicated and more twisted than any arm balance she could have imagined. My career, or my truth. I can’t have both
About the Author
