there is a thing that keeps happening, a peculiar form of interpersonal conflict that makes me feel like i'm hallucinating all of reality or perhaps trapped in a poorly-written after-school drama
- someone shows up in our spaces and interacts
- they show their whole ass and ultimately leave
- they lose their entire mind.
it just keeps happening. and you would think that well ok "the common factor is us", but that isn't really a satisfying explanation. consider, if you will: i woke up this morning to hear that a former acquaintance is accusing glip of human trafficking... because glip offered them a job as part of an attempt to get them out of their abusive family's home
and thus, my problem: how the fuck am i supposed to talk about this? because that sounds ludicrous. it can't possibly be right. or at least, it can't be the whole story. right?
right. it's not. but the more details i add the more absurd it will sound. like how the series of events is more like
- this former acquaintance's mother locks them out of the house in january in their pajamas and screams at them to move out
- we offer them our spare room because obviously this is fucked up and it is not the first such incident
- mutual friends go to pick them up; their family physically pulls them into a room to get them away and also gets physical and threatening with the friends, so the friends call the police, who... side with the family and prevent the acquaintance from leaving (i think they were 20 at the time btw so there was no legal justification for this, the cops just did it because they felt like it, acab)
- their family treats them like a prisoner for the next few weeks, with their mom now constantly emphasizing they are too helpless to move out
- glip writes up a work contract in an attempt to appease the mom's contradictory conditions long enough for the acquaintance to just get the fuck out
- that doesn't work either
- ... time passes ...
- they accuse glip of human trafficking
is that better? does that make more sense? fucking of course not.
there is stuff i can imagine they are holding a grudge about, but that stuff doesn't make sense either, and it would be a whole other (much longer) story. and it's long and it's convoluted and it has no satisfying payoff; it will always just end with "and then they did something inexplicably cruel". roll credits.
i haven't even read their callout post. it feels like it'll be a memetic hazard. they wrote a letter dripping with vitriol and misconstrued events when they left, and concluded "don't approach me to talk about any of this". so it was just a big pile of poison that we were stuck with. i suspect this will be more of that.
this is one person. out of dozens. spanning years. and it keeps happening.
i have at least half a dozen abandoned drafts (on cohost alone) where i start out trying to explain what i can only call the saga, but hit a point where i just run out of steam. because how can i possibly convey the emotional impact of any of this? how can i make a narrative out of this? it's just handfuls of spaghetti. a fractal of ever-more detail that doesn't really explain anything. there's always something i'm leaving out that feels important but that doesn't really make any of it make more sense. people do things arbitrarily, we don't know why, and often they don't know why either.
and being unable to effectively talk about it means that it feels invisible to everyone else. something that only happens to us and that is only visible to us.
and it makes me feel fucking crazy.
it's like people get in their heads that we're an acceptable whipping boy, that they can take out all the frustrations in their life on us and it's fine because who's going to doubt it when so many people have done it before? so you can just lie. why not? what's the punishment for lying about us? who's even going to step up on our behalf?
and every time someone does this it adds to the grand fiction about our lives, that we are abusive puppetmasters wringing the joy from innocents for kicks or something. just a couple weeks ago some hateblog was parading around some leaked logs from our discord and claiming they were abuse, and when the "victim" responded upset that they were being used this way when they didn't feel abused, the hateblog simply replied that victims often defend their abusers.
like where do you even go from there. it's like nothing is real. we are treated like fictional characters for anyone to project any kind of mundane evil upon.
i just want to work on stuff but people keep putting wasps in my head for reasons that have nothing to do with me