as small as a world and as large as alone, This is about cyberbullying. Really important...

9:33pm June 1, 2015

This is about cyberbullying. Really important points made – she really got to the heart of what it feels like to be targeted online vs. offline. I was deliberately set up for cyberbullying in a similar but less drastic way than she was, many years ago, and there are still consequences for me in terms of lost friends, lost communities, lost sense of having any privacy at all for the stupid things I said as a teenager, lost a lot of things.

Although I think it ultimately made me a stronger person, nobody should have to go through that and the stress levels were unbelievable and possibly triggered the near-total collapse of my health that same year. (Autoimmune diseases can be made worse or even triggered into existence by extreme stress.) A collapse of my health that I hid for over a year, telling only close friends how bad it had gotten, allowing people to believe I’d just chosen to disappear from a lot of online places, while frantically trying to post enough online to make it look like I was still healthy, even when I could not get out of bed on my own I was still making an effort to post on at least one webforum so people would think nothing was wrong, because I was so afraid of showing vulnerability, and so afraid of yet again being accused of “faking diseases habitually” since I had no clear diagnosis at the time.

But they did get diagnosed: Myasthenia gravis, gastroparesis and associated aspiration pneumonia, and severe adrenal insufficiency, all confirmed by tests and scans that literally can’t be faked. And yet people online still accuse me of faking even those, because that was the content of the cyberbullying, accusations of faking conditions that were not faked at all, just because they were pointing out parts of my past that I’d never actually hidden, I’d been talking about them all along, but few people had read enough of my writing to know that before people started claiming I was faking things.

And they used the fact that I’d gone along with conditions I didn’t have to survive the psychiatric system as a teenager, as “proof” that I like faking things. Seriosly WTF, that’s just not okay, especially since some of these bullies were the same bullies who convinced me I had some of htese conditions in the first place and urged me to act as if I did, so they could watch me. They’re actually mentioned in my psych records as people I should have no contact with because of the things they were doing to my head – somehow they didn’t like it when I posted that information.

Anyway, this is a really important video, it says that the antidote to cyberbullying is compassion, and that posting compassionate comments can turn around the potentially life-threatening level of humiliation that people experience when cyberbullied. And she also makes the point, much forgotten on tumblr, that everyone does stupid shit when they’re young, but only some people are dragged into the public eye either online or offline because of it, and that’s gotten more frequent as social media have gotten bigger. There’s entire cultures of bullying online now. Lots of them. Lots of places. Including right here on tumblr. And someone has to stand up to it, to counteract what she refers to as the bystander effect, where people think everyone else is going to do something about it so nobody does anything about it. And seriously she’s right about compassionate comments helping.

Unfortunately sometimes bullies – the really sadistic ones usually, the ones who plan it out in cold blood — will claim to be the victim of their targets. That’s what my cyberbully did to me. Before I even understood what was happening, she claimed I’d been stalking her and stealing her life story, probably to make money from and get famous by. It turned out she had a long track record in the autistic community of picking out autistic people, almost all women or DFAB, and targeting them with such accusations. She was basically run out of the community on a rail back around 2000, and laid low for 8 years before popping up at random claiming to hae changed and become a better person, and constantly wanting to talk to me more and more, asking lots of detailed personal questions that in retrospect showed way too much knowledge of my life already (even at the time she put my teeth on edge the moment she came into the chatroom, it was like getting blasted with hatred), and then using it all against me in the end, including going to the lengths of deliberately contacting former bullies I’d mentioned online, in order to involve them in this project.

These are people who used to utterly and totally endorse the idea that I was autistic, back when it was just another way to say I was broken in some way, crazy, whatever. But when it became more fun to say I wasn’t autistic, afer talking to this woman, they suddenly started telling people I’d never shown the slightest sign of autism. Even though one of them used to host my autism website and post articles of mine all over the web without permission, talking about how insightful they were into autistic thinking, just to annoy me. I haven’t actually talked to these bullies in over 15 years, haven’t seen them in closer to 20 years, and yet they still have this desire to be involved in cyberbullying me. I’ve moved on with my life since I knew them, they apparently haven’t since they knew me, because I rarely think about them except when writing articleslike this, but they think about me an awful lot given the amount they’ve tried to fuck up my life. One of them even impersonated a reporter to try to get people to give them private information about me. (The reporter was Not Amused. Pissing off reporters is generally not a good move, either.)

Anyway… I’ve never been the subject of a TV scandal, but I’ve certainly been the subject of a manufactured Internet scandal, and it really fucking sucks, and it sucks worse when your bully is claiming to be your victim and playing up her vulnerability, while you can’t show any vulnerability for fear of being targeted worse. She posted my address online and told people what she thought my staff hours were, so that they could come and kill me outside of staff hours. We instituted all kinds of security at that point, but I was still scared for my life, especially when I became too physically weak to call for help or fight off an attacker. So I couldn’t say that I was that weak, and I had to pretend everything was fine as my life fell apart around me. I had to pretend i was eating enough, sleeping enough, able to move properly, etc. People knew I was now in a powerchair when I stated showing up to events in one, but they didn’t know how bad it had gotten, I didn’t let them. Not until I determined it was safe.

Meanwhile my bully was whining about how every single thing I did – and she would delineate them all in great detail on a blog she started for this purpose - was supposedly in imitation of her, and how thin she had gotten as a result of how I supposedly made her stop eating (she probably went on a diet or something… she used the fact that I was fat against me so many times it was horrible, but when this started there was only 20 pounds difference between us – she always added about 100 pounds to my weight and many inches to my height when she described me, claiming I was even lying when I said I was 5′2″, like how could I lie about that, you just… can’t).. And weirdly enough some people actually believed what looked to me like transparent bullshitting and deliberate histrionics designed to make people feel sorry for her (she even bragged, in private, about how she could evoke that reaction in people on purpose and how good it made her feel to do so, because she could get away with anything, including attacking people, by being “the poor little severely retarded multi-handicapped woman”). Some people I wouldn’t expect to believe a stranger over someone they’d known for years. That was the hardest part was not having the ability to be in the autistic community without some people harassing me “on behalf” of my bully. Being in that community is a thing most people take for granted, most of them are not targeted for major cyberbullying campaigns within the community, and most of them can enter and leave it freely at will without being stalked and harassed everywhere they go except for places that deliberately shut out bullies.

And that was my life for many years, it’s gotten better, but being a target sucks and we have to do something about it on a larger scale or people who don’t manage to salvage their lives will commit suicide in large numbers. And she’s right that humiliation is a more strongly felt emotion than either happiness or anger. I felt like there was giant eyeball trained o me and I was this tiny animal huddling in a corner. But I couldn’t show weakness, meanwhile my bully was making a pastime out of showing fake weakness to get sympathy about nonexistent actions on my part. This is why I loved that book Rilla of Ingleside, where there’s a woman who makes a huge public display of emotions she isn’t really feeling that strongly, while Rilla is hiding her emotions about the exact same situation (so that she won’t cause worry to her relatives who are at war by publicly freaking out about them being at war) – and because Rilla is hiding her emotions, this other person spreads gossip throughout the town that Rilla is cold-hearted and has no feelings at all for the people she knows, including her boyfriend and brothers, who are fighting in World War I.

But that’s the thing. She spread that news throughout the town. As Monica Lewinsky points out, cyberbullying spreads malicious gossip throughout the planet and then makes it so it is forever on the Internet and anyone can find it, potentially forever. So people who have never known me can google me and find out that I’m supposedly a big fraud, and some of them will believe it, and this will influence their behavior towards me, which influences my life. I’ve llearned to live with it but the bottom line is nobody should have to live with this. Nobody. I’ve seen people fall in to the trap of thinking some people do deserve it, and that “deserving” people deserve whatever they/we (if they put me in that category and they sometimes do) get.

And yes, love and compassion are the only answer in the end, as in so many other areas of life. Love and compassion not just felt as feelings, not even necessarily feelings at all, but rather acted on as fundamental aspects of how we interact with the world.