as small as a world and as large as alone

8:11pm July 25, 2013

kiriamaya:

dorkstrider:

high school friends are basically people who agree to survive together and it’s sort of like they’re your crew in a zombie apocalypse and after the apocalypse is over somehow you go on to living life and maybe occasionally you’d run into each other and be like “oh yes i see you still haven’t been eaten by zombies that is good" but you no longer have the need to survive together so that thing tying you to these people is just gone

…yyyyeah pretty much.

That’s sort of true of my one actual friend in high school, James.

And occasionally true of my ex, Karl.

But most other people that age with me were like… bullies who acted like friends.

And I can’t come up with a good analogy. But the worst of them have done everything possible to keep in contact with everyone in our group, whether those people were their friends, their bullying-allies, or their victims. It’s almost like being in a cult. You’re not allowed to fricking leave. Ever. And they will go to extraordinary lengths to track you down if you try to evade them.

Like once I started making real friends, I noticed something was wrong. Every time I was vulnerable, I expected myself to be ripped into. Every time I met someone even remotely similar to me, I thought it was my “friends” playing a trick on me, or that they were connected with that person and were going to laugh at me. Because my “friends” truly did far more elaborate things, things so elaborate you wouldn’t believe them, to mess with the heads of their victims/“friends”. All the time. So every moment I was vulnerable, every single moment, I became terrified my new friends would use that vulnerability to hurt me.

And after months of cowering in terror every time I was vulnerable in front of my new friends, and NOT getting ripped into, messed with, laughed at, or otherwise picked on or abused.  Rather the opposite…

I started to realize that my new friends were real friends. And that my old friends were scary abusive bullies, some of whom hurt people for the sheer fun of it. (My ex was abusive too, but that was an anger problem, not something he did for enjoyment.)

So I stopped talking to them. Forever.

They wouldn’t leave it at that.

One of them, in fact, began plagiarizing me, including private writings that had never been released for publication. This included writings on autism that he described as particularly insightful. He also plagiarized writing from people he saw as associated with me. And he wrote “USED WITH PERMISSION” on all of it.

One of my friends had to write to site administrators and stuff to get them to take his writing about me down.

He watched me so closely that within five minutes of me putting no contact notice to him on my website, he was writing my webmaster threatening to sue for libel. Five minutes. And all I said was “don’t contact me, don’t give this guy information about me”. Which not only isn’t illegal, but is recommended by lawyers do you can prove harassment. A no contact notice by another woman disappeared from her site at the same time that my webmaster was threatened with a libel suit.

The reason for the no contact notice is that he had put up an entire webpage  full of pictures of me, with a note saying something like “if you have any information about this person, please contact me”. The pictures were mostly from this weird thing he did where he sent me a disposable camera, and demanded I have someone take photos of me and send the camera back. And I mean demanded. The letter was written as a command, not a request. But I was too young when that happened to think there could be any harm in it.

Anyway he also put up a search engine bait page with my name all over it, and any bent if ever gone by. Same for some other people. So my dad’s cousin found the page and wrote to him. And that’s when my no contact notice was born – to make sure he knew I wanted no contact, and to make sure nobody else made the mistake my dad’s cousin made.

It still shocks me that it took him only five minutes after I uploaded that page. I think I might not even have had that webpage before that. But he found it instantly and fired off an empty legal threat designed to scare me into taking it down. But luckily,  “don’t contact me, don’t contact him about me, I’m not connected to him and don’t want to be” isn’t illegal.

And I keep wondering, who the hell has this kind of unhealthy obsession with someone they haven’t seen in nearly twenty years? And ny other bullies seem unusually obsessed with everyone they knew back then too.

At one point I got several people contacting me from that time and place in my past. At least three, maybe four? Each said that he had contacted them, making it sound like he had casually mentioned me in the course of a long conversation about other things. Except…

They all responded by contacting me and trying to get me on the telephone. They all began interrogating me about the exact same topics in my life and past. And refusing to take my honest answers for an answer. (Okay two talked to me in very awkward (physically, I have great trouble using phones with a communication device) phone conversations, one talked to my friend, but the conversations were very similar, all prying into the same topics and refusing to take my or my friend’s accurate answers for an answer. They’d pretend they have heard and ask again and again more and more insistently.

And shortly after those calls, the hang up calls began. I got them multiple times a day.

I changed my phone number. Within a day or two, I got an email from one of those three people. They told me it was extremely urgent that I connect them, and only the telephone would do.

I deleted the email and decided it was not safe to have any contact with anyone this guy, or one of his friends, knew or was in current contact with.

And from what I’ve heard from the only person I felt safe asking, this is part for the course. The scariest of our mutual “friends” were weirdly obsessed with the people they knew back then, not letting anyone get away except this one guy who managed to completely disappear off the radar screen of any of us. It’s not the normal occasional contact of people who used to know each other and don’t. It’s establishing weirdly close relationships even with people who can’t really stand them, bugging anyone who tried to long to stay away, and other things I am not even comfortable writing about.

And much of the reason that they’re angry with me is because I got away. Living toys are not allowed to get away. And I guess there’s this weird possessiveness and revenge thing going on. I bring to them and they’re angry at me for leaving without permission.

As I said, it feels a lot like leaving a cult that’s not ready to let me go yet. I don’t want to believe that real people behave in such awful ways. And yet they do, and I make myself aware of it so I won’t be sucked into believing they have any kind of normal benevolent motives .

I think that’s the other thing that makes them angry. One of them functions in the world by screwing people over, then clanking that he’s changed. Over and over. Some people fall for it. I never have. I suppose my lack of falling for it makes me a threat? .

IDK. All I know is I wish my “friends” from that she would just fricking leave me alone, directly, indirectly, entirely. Not trying to contact me, not trying to contact me through others, not lying about me, not trying to ruin my life, nothing. (Nor holding old bullying over the head of people who were there who might speak out about the lying.) I mostly forget about them. I don’t knew why they can’t forget about someone they barely know anyway, who they haven’t seen in twenty years or had contact with in fifteen.

I mean when in the actual hell is this kind of thing normal, for anyone with remotely decent intentions?

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