The second great cancellation of dave gunn, part two.

[zeroenthusiasm]

Alyssa would soon join in with a few posts of her own, which took me by surprise since he had done almost all of the talking for her thus far. I was again astonished by how comfortable Alyssa suddenly was with lying, with misappropriating such serious and heavy terms to exaggerate her situation and try to evoke pity from strangers, and even with playing the fucking race card. I had no idea who this person was anymore. Her saying that receiving the few e-mails, texts, and calls she'd gotten from me in the past month was traumatizing was offensive to me, as an actual survivor of trauma. Only someone who had never actually experienced trauma in their life could ever say a relationship with someone who was perpetually sad was abusive, and that a heightened emotional reaction after finding out he was cheated on and lied to for so long was traumatic. I felt so fucking dehumanized by how my mental health was being described and discussed.

The way she said, "continue to reach out and harass them," and, "affecting the people around me," in reference to the two people I'd just messaged was wild to me. Once again, she was using language to open room for a whole lotta assumptions, without actually saying anything specific. With these exaggerations, no one would ever assume what she was actually talking about. I was stunned by the rage and malice behind the way she spoke so punitively, saying I was "forcing her" to acknowledge me in "this way", and how she "wasn't going to post any of this" until I acted out, and the outright threat of "making posts I don't want her to", basically admitting that she was only now addressing me (publicly, of course, rather than privately and one-on-one) purely as a means of punishment and coercion, in hopes that the fear of her threats would dragoon me into obeying her commands and giving her a clean break without any of the inconveniences of taking adult responsibility for her actions.

I "made sure" she knew "this" would happen? I certainly had no fucking idea what that meant. What even was this? What, I warned her that I would try to maintain contact and hold her to a well established standard of honesty and decency if she were to ever break up with me? I'd trust her words in a letter she wrote me at face value? She kept writing as though she had communicated to me time and time again that I was this abusive person, and I just refused to learn from and change my harmful behaviors, but the fact of the matter was that she never had. The extent of her communication and sole complaint was just that she felt I was mad at her whenever I was depressed about things.

Then she finally told me to never contact her again, for technically the first time. There was some satisfaction that I was able to get her to do something adult in regards to this relationship, rather than write me a letter full of lies and false hopes and then leave me to be a mind reader and know that she actually didn't mean a single word in it and to actually never speak to her again.

"Breakups happen," she said. "Time to move on," she said. As if this were a normal break-up in any way, as if she didn't cheat on and lie to me for so long before coldly abandoning me, as if she didn't leave me with a letter full of misleading sentiments, as if the usual process of breaking up was even applicable to the unconventional lifestyle we had both been living together, as if it hadn’t only been a month since what was an extremely traumatic experience for me. Did she really feel that what she did was so benign, or was she just writing with the expectation that no one would ever actually find out what really happened, hoping to keep people looking at me as though I were just some over-emotional, melodramatic, unstable dude who simply got dumped and didn't want to accept it?



I had written about the time she, "tried and failed to break up with me," and it went exactly as I had written. I never threatened her with suicide, though I did grumble a lot of very angry and miserable things in between sobbing over what had just happened. I probably did say something similar to what she quoted. As it turned out, having to hear my emotional response to being broken up with in person and in real time just so happened to be one of the downfalls to doing it so abruptly in the middle of the night while living in a car with someone halfway across the country from home. That was why I rescinded my attempt at breaking up at the end of our first trip. There were better ways to do it then and better ways to do it now. On that night, the first thing I did was go for a long walk by myself. Then I came back and immediately started driving us back toward the northeast. I didn't hurt myself and I didn't even suggest that I would. It was only an hour or two into that drive that she told me I was worth fighting for and didn't want to break up with me, though she still needed to go home for a little while. I briefly wondered if I was completely delusional during that time period, but reviewing our texts from then and the little Christmas gift she'd made me proved to me that she really didn't act like she wanted to break up at all...


























Furthermore, she was actually in the perfect position to get out of the relationship during that time. She was four hours away, in the safety and comfort of her mother's home, with her car and all necessary resources at her fingertips, for weeks at a time, while I was stuck in the 518 without a car or money of my own. She could have done anything after we physically split up in Boston when she dropped me off at the Greyhound station. Because of the woman I was living with at the time pestering me about it, I had given her repeated opportunities to be honest with me had she actually honestly wanted to call it quits. Instead, what wound up actually happening, was that it seemed we became even closer and the affection she showed me intensified. I really thought that the distance had brought us closer together, and we’d even talked about how good it was for us back then. She rarely left her house while there, and she didn't have any friends even though it was her hometown. All she did was draw and write music, just like she went on to do in our camper while I worked. We took turns visiting each other every three or so weeks, and each time it felt like we were growing closer and closer together. I had even shared with her during that period that I'd realized just how different this relationship was for me by how little I was paranoid, insecure, or threatened by the geographic space between us, and just how much I trusted her. When I started expressing impatience with how long I’d been waiting around for her to decide what she wanted to do, the camper became the compromise we agreed on, because I wanted to travel some more and she wanted to be able to comfortably continue doing the creative things she had been doing while at home. Had she just been waiting to see if I’d break up with her if she held out long enough?

Maybe she really did believe I'd kill myself if she ever left, and maybe she believed that even though I had gone out of my way to reassure her and everyone else over and over again that I never would. Maybe she really did take any passing mention of wanting to die as more literal than the ones she made on a regular basis. Maybe she really thought these things based solely on the fact the she knew very intimately how little I had left in my life and how devastated I'd be if she were to leave me. I was open to her actually believing all that, especially since she constantly made it clear she believed the things she thought I meant rather than the things I actually said. I hated the thought of her being trapped in that position, even if it were her own chains she was putting on every time she ignored my words or couldn’t work up the guts to have an unpleasant conversation with me. But I only had so much control over her conclusions after trying to convince her what I was actually thinking and feeling for over two fucking years. If she continued to worry about these things despite my every effort to reassure her otherwise, that was not my fault or responsibility, and I wasn't going to be called abusive just because she decided that I meant the opposite of everything I ever said to her.



"History of stalking" was another grossly misleading wording. Yeah, I lost my fucking mind back in 2017 and did stalk Tara for a little while. I knew what was going through my head at the time I did it, and I was never dangerous or anything, but what I did could only be described as "stalking". In my defense, I did a lot of crazy things during that time, including trying to kill myself. Alyssa knew very well how much shame and guilt I internalized over that time in my life, especially over the stalking thing. I'd written about it publicly, as well as told Tara everything I did behind her back as soon as we started talking again. I had held myself "accountable" or whatever, and had been forgiven for it by the person I did it to. It never happened before then and hadn't happened since. I knew this blemish on my record was being exaggerated to destroy any credibility I had left in certain people's eyes, but maybe she really did believe I would follow her. I was open to that, but it was impossible now to know what she actually felt or thought anymore, considering how dishonest and fake she had decided to become. That being said, I absolutely did not believe she had any concerns about her "safety", unless she was referring to potentially being annoyed by me or finding herself figuratively cornered into being honest for a change. As someone she had only described as "emotionally abusive", what could I really have done if I had followed her, anyway? Make her feel guilty? Make her anxious by forcing her to confront what she had done to me? To me, it seemed her primary concern was making sure to silence me before I potentially disrupted her current rebranding goal, because people might not like knowing she was some lying, cheating, ruthless social chameleon willing to wield false abuse allegations and disingenuous idenetitarianism as weapons. It was more advantageous to suddenly come out as a survivor of abuse standing up to her captor, after all, and to convince herself and others that I deserved the mistreatment rather than actually confront any guilt over what she had done.

Despite making it sound like she left in a hurry and foregoing a bunch of her belongings in the process, the only things she left behind were her bike and car, if for no other reason than she couldn't bring them on the plane with her. She left abruptly and mysteriously, from my point of view, but it was actually meticulously planned. She had told several people that she left the car with me out of kindness and concern, knowing I'd be homeless and lost without it. I personally believed it was true she left it with me because she knew how impossible a situation she'd be leaving me in without it. I do believe that by the day she left me, she still felt some compassion for me, and I saw signs of it in their DMs from that morning. She just gradually altered the story she told based on her shifting mood and attitude towards me. She may have felt inconvenienced, but by no means was she being harassed, let alone traumatized. The constant implication that I knew anything at all about why she'd leave pissed me off so much.

I found it particularly unsettling to see her go out of her way to still deny the relationship that largely inspired the way she left when she did. Of course, she had no idea I had seen their DMs, and probably thought that no one would ever know how their tryst came to fruition. From what I saw, it was obvious she had been preyed on by this man. At best, he sincerely thought she was in a vulnerable place and was taking advantage of the situation. Yeah, opportunism no doubt had a lot to do with when and how she left, and both of them were appearing to be take advantage of each other, but it was a fact that the romantic and sexual relationship they developed behind my back through technology was at least a secondary factor in what happened. To then go on and pull the race card on his behalf was so especially reprehensible to me. Could I not bring up problematic behavior he exhibited just because of his skin color? Did he get a pass because he was black and George Floyd was killed? Was she seriously comparing what I was saying to the segregation-era cancel culture used by white people to justify public lynchings of black people? Did she really just use the acronym "BIPOC"? Was he actually writing this stuff for her?

There was no uncertainty in her wording here: she was only canceling me as an aggressive means of forcing me to do what she wanted. It was no different than the Kara cancellation when they told me they would only stop their campaign if I did what they wanted me to. After all of the experiences she witnessed me go through firsthand, after all the other cancellations of others we'd witnessed together, after all of our long conversations about cancel culture in the context of leftist politics and anarchism, I could not believe she was now using it as a way to strong-arm me into shutting up about things she didn't want public--and that was precisely what this was: retaliation to my post about J**. I wasn't concerned about whatever red flags people saw me flying--if they couldn't also see J**'s, then I had no reason to care about or trust their judgments. It was apparently all my fault how this escalated; the inherently abusive nature of canceling someone online was being blamed on me, the target of it, just like when someone would say, "Look at what you made me do!" after hitting their partner. All I had done was make an Instagram story about J** without using his name. He'd done the same thing to me a few weeks earlier!

During the publication of these stories, I received a notification of an Instagram message from Alyssa. I was stunned. Was she finally reaching out to me? Without really analyzing it too closely, I immediately jumped into responding to what I believed to be a message from her, begging her to stop trying to hurt me. I realized too late that these messages were actually just notifications of her tagging me in the recent three stories. For some reason, she had unblocked me, and I was automatically notified of the tags. She blocked me again and then made another post about me with it looking like I was continuing to harass her. It sucked...


I spent the rest of the day watching the fallout of this, as dozens and dozens of people, many of whom were longtime friends from online and real life, unfollowed, unfriended, and blocked me. It was a surreal experience to keep refreshing my account and seeing that number just keep getting lower. I honestly had to say goodbye to many people I really respected and whose friendship I didn't want to lose. I knew they thought they were doing what was right, even if it was in a misguided and hypocritical way, or were just going with the flow so as not to become targets themselves. After all, not participating in a cancellation was grounds enough to get canceled. What little support I had left was almost completely eradicated. There would be no coming back from this one. My name was completely destroyed back in 2019, and whatever was left of it had just been finished off by the wildest and most shamelessly dishonest callout I'd ever been the target of. No one would talk to me, not even to talk shit. No one communicated with me at all.

In a last-ditch effort to defend myself, I attempted to create an open line for anyone who wanted it by live-streaming on Instagram for three hours, one while sitting in the car in a nearby park, and the final two on the couch at my brother's place. I naively hoped to strike dialog with people and give them an opportunity to come tell me off, to ask me questions or have me verify anything. I wanted to show people in a very clear display that I was not afraid to talk about these things, that I was confident about who I was and what the truth was, and that I was more willing than most people to be held accountable for things I'd done wrong. Two or so dozen people came in and out, mostly just to watch, I assumed in hopes of a total public beheading, and a few people asked some really great questions that allowed me to talk openly about what had actually happened, but it ultimately didn't help me in any significant way. An old friend of mine named JC, who ironically was dating a person who was very abusive to me after my suicide attempt, was the most vocal against me in it, bringing up things he knew nothing about, like Tara. He'd also continue to stalk my stories and made his own posts announcing that he had screen-grabbed the streams "for posterity" and uploaded them to YouTube. When I went to the links, they were already down, and I suspected it was because I said a lot of things in them that Alyssa and J** didn't want people to hear. It was so corny watching this poor kid play detective or something as he followed someone who didn't matter so closely...





All of these people kept acting like I really had something to hide, or that I hid things online to begin with. I had maybe two secrets in my entire life, and everything else was in my years of public writing. If nothing else, I was always transparent and brutally honest. Everything mentioned in J**'s callout post had already been made public by me (and now here I am posting the links to these videos and e-mails myself).

The night ended and so did whatever was left of my reputation. I decided that the only thing left for me to do was to follow through on disappearing. I posted a story announcing that I'd be deactivating everything indefinitely, leaving my number and e-mail for anyone who wanted to stay in touch. I'd receive this message from someone I had a lot of respect for before laying down on the floor that night...


While laying there and driving myself crazy, I decided to try one more thing like a fucking idiot: send Alyssa a fake e-mail claiming to be an ex of J**'s and warning her of his predatory behavior. I figured that, if she didn't want to be with me anymore, I at least wanted to make sure she wasn't with someone who I and many others genuinely felt was sketchy and dangerous. I sent it to her using ProtonMail, a fully anonymous, encrypted temporary e-mail service that she wouldn't be able to respond to. Even though there was technically no way to know it was me, I'd wake up to a post about it the next day...



I felt like such an idiot. So much so, I even lied to Kyle and Kayla and told them I didn't send it. I was just so goddamn embarrassed. This post looked like it had actually been written by J**, though, based on word choices, style, and font, and it creeped me out so much to think he was probably in control of so much of her online presence at the moment. The second post was a screen shot of me logging into a Chaturbate account I discovered she had at least made. Up all night, I started overthinking, and wondered if and how often she had lied during the relationship before all this. The Chaturbate account was never used, though, as I'd find out, and the login would go on to be used as more evidence of my stalking. I didn't care anymore. I knew the truth of what happened, and I knew why I did the things I had done. As my time on social media slowly came to a close, I got to see the nosey pieces of shit who stalked me looking at my stories, including a close friend of Kara's and the Albany chapter of the IWW that was co-run by C**** of my cancel campaign a year earlier. I hated knowing how exciting this all had to be for them.

My last day on social media was June 22nd, I think. I deactivate all of my social media, made all of my LiveJournal entries private but for one post just to see who was looking me up through the embedded IP tracker, and focused on desperately trying to find somewhere to live.

A couple days later, her mom and grandfather came and got the car I had been "refusing to return", because god forbid she have to do anything for herself. Her mother and grandfather were probably so happy to know I was finally out of the picture. They both hated me for being poor, or different, or too negative, or whatever. It didn't bother me too much because I knew they didn't know Alyssa, who she was with me or who she was now with this new guy. I refused to go outside and interact with them in person. I left the keys on top of the car and watched them through the blinds. It was wild to me to see someone's mother drive four hours just to pick up a car for her daughter, and then have to drive two cars four hours back. What a lucky girl. Her mom's final text to me seemed like a clear attempt to pick on me...


And just like that, my story with Alyssa was over, even though I'd have to continue living in its wreckage...