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2:49pm August 18, 2014

I am reading a good book.

It is called No You Don’t: Essays From an Unstrange Mind by Sparrow Rose Jones.

I used to know the author a little bit online, but it was before she wrote all these essays.  And we didn’t know each other well, we were just LiveJournal friends for awhile.

Apparently she wrote an essay that really pissed off some autism parents and they stalked and harassed her in horrible-but-familiar ways for a long time because of it.

And I feel horrible that this happened to her.  Really horrible.

But I am so glad that she wrote about it in her book.

Because I think people don’t believe that the stalking and harassment you get in the autism community can be as bad as it actually is.

And I’ve been stalked and harassed by both parents and autistic people in the autism community, and it's horrible. It’s absolutely horrible.  It’s also very, very real.  And people need to know it’s real.  People need to know how much it hurts people.  People need to know how vicious and sneaky it can be:  My stalker has an M.O. where she stakes people out for awhile, figures out all their weak points, and then she finds ways to make it look like they are “imitating her”, and then she “retaliates” by stalking, harassment, death threats, etc., but claims to be this oh-so-innocent multiply-disabled woman who couldn’t hurt a fly, at the same exact time.  (She’s even bragged, at times, about being able to pull this off on people.)  People in the autistic community used to know all about her, but as the community grew and spread, people forgot, and she was able to come back and attack me and make it look credible.  And I lost friends, and I lost communities, and it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right.

So to read Sparrow writing about stalking in the autism community… it’s very important to me.  Because this kind of cyberbullying is horrible.  No matter who is doing it or why.  And often the bullies have a way of making themselves look like the victims.