The second great cancellation of dave gunn, part four.
K**** hadn't been inspired by Alyssa, though. I'd later find out she was following the lead of posts made about me by one of my ex-girlfriends from high school, a girl named S*****. I actually thought we were friends, but after watching this highlight reel in her Instagram bio, I had to discover and accept that she didn't like or respect me, believed me to be a serial abuser who duped her into thinking otherwise, and had now considered me one of her "abusers" based off of shitty things I had done to her as a teenage boy. It was official: you had to be held accountable for every harmful thing you'd ever done, from infancy to present day. If you weren't a perfect angel who had never negatively impacted another human being or ever said something hateful or ignorant, you had to be punished until you were able to prove yourself as pure and flawless as your detractors obviously were, based on criteria that was actually impossible to ever live up to and therefore were actually a futile trap that would render you indefinitely under the thumb of their vengeful, sadistic whims and erratic temperaments.
From what I could gather from the videos, S***** was compelled to post them because she had just found out that I had been accused of abusing my most recent ex, Alyssa. Using my first and last name several times, of course, she made vague allusions to what I was guilty of, probably because I hadn't actually been accused of anything specific, there was absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing on my part, and she knew about as little as anyone else did about a relationship she had no involvement in or knowledge of before speaking with my ex just a day or so earlier. The purpose of the video wasn't necessarily to announce to everyone that she too was one of my many victims, though she would most certainly include and harp on that, it was to just let all of her followers know that I had been accused of it yet again like she was some kind of news reporter. She also seemed eager to somehow make it about her and use it as a segue into self-righteously talking down to me and anyone else watching as though she had all the answers and was bestowing unto us all these things we were ignorant to and needed her to educate us on. As if the pomposity weren't bad enough, she had the nerve to post these videos while leaving out my brother entirely, who also dated her and was literally physically and sexually violent towards her back when they were kids. This was likely because he had recently reached out to her to apologize for everything, resulting in a reconnection and her actively cheating on her boyfriend with him through video chat. It was always the ones casting the first stones...
In the video, she also referred to me as "one of her abusers", which caught me off-guard. This word--"abuser"--apparently meant absolutely anything anyone wanted. When we had dated in high school, we were both about 16/17, it lasted for about seven months, and I'd even be the first person she ever had sex with. I was an unjustifiably shitty boyfriend, and subsequently became a frequent bully of hers. I cheated on her, and truthfully never really had the strongest of feelings for her while we dated. We were both straightedge vegetarians with weird haircuts, so it seemed right at the time, but I couldn't force feelings. At the same time, she showed multiple signs that she actually wanted to be with my younger brother. When we broke up, she almost immediately started dating him, which obviously hurt me a whole lot and further fueled the petty unspoken sibling rivalry that had been brewing between us as kids. I responded to this with really cruel acts and it was totally unfair. I openly wrote disgusting things about her online, shaming her vagina in graphic detail, I once threw a bulky hardcover textbook right at her head while in the halls at school, I had stolen a doll she carried around with her and ripped its head off, I filmed a video of her crying while her and my brother were arguing at the mall and posted it on YouTube set to the "The Scientist" by Coldplay. I was fucking awful to her, all while my brother was being incredibly rough with her publicly and behind the scenes. The Gunn Brothers were definitely an unpleasant duo of memories for her.
I cringed and shuddered at the thought of how I acted toward her then. She was a genuinely kind, gentle, sweet person, even as a teenager, and even if her dating my brother after we broke up hurt my young ego, she hadn't ever done anything to hurt me. She had a rough upbringing like we did, except it didn't turn her into a bully. From what I could remember, she was never really mean or tried to hurt anyone, though I did know several people who claimed to remember being bullied by her. About five years earlier, long after we had both grown into adults, I was haunted by the way I treated many people when I was a kid, her in particular. I reached out on Facebook and apologized.
Apparently, even though I was so awful, I was also the type of person who internalized guilt over what he did as a kid. We started talking and I even met up with her in Vegas where she had been living at the time. Seeing each other went really well, we got along better than anticipated, and became what I considered to be friends. She accepted my apology, and told me she believed I had changed for the better. At no point in all of our conversations rehashing the past did she tell me she considered me "abusive", or "one of her abusers". It would eventually become clear to me that we were speaking different languages, and that we just had very different standards and reverence for terms pertaining to things as serious as actual assault, but at the time this miscommunication would come off to me as a very sudden, surprising escalation of the past events I'd already held myself accountable for, an act of unprovoked antagonism, maybe even an opportunistic grab for attention. Whatever was going on, I would not apologize any more than I already had about shit I did as a teenager, period. Again, I wasn't even sure if I agreed that a kid could be considered "an abuser", in the same way and for the same reasons minors weren't legally considered able to consent to sex and usually wouldn't be charged with homicide. She did not include details, as always leaving it up to everyone else's imagination to assume the worst, because she knew in the Courtroom of Cancel Culture she didn't have to be detailed to earn the praise and sympathy I felt she was looking for. She did specify that we dated 15 years ago, but described us breaking up as "escaping" me. The reality was that she broke up with me because I cheated on her, and she would later confirm for me that I was actually an otherwise good boyfriend who practiced good consent and never did anything to hurt or make her feel uncomfortable. This did not undo the pain that I had clearly caused, but the facts were that I did not mistreat her until after we broke up and she started dating my younger brother.
I didn't know what more these people wanted from me. I basically no longer existed. My life was completely over. I no longer left the house or used social media, I didn't have a career or anything, and I was forbade from participating in the things I was passionate about. I was obviously not trying to date or meet new people. I could have been dead at the time she posted these things and no one would have even knew. What was this video meant to accomplish, other than to virtue signal, place herself on a pedestal, and kick me while I was already very, very down? When would anyone try to communicate directly with me? Again and again, I was left to assume that the only thing they actually wanted was for me to kill myself, just like Kara had explicitly stated she wanted out of me.
I again decided to try and spark dialog between us in hopes of defusing the conflict and coming to a mutual understanding. I messaged her on Facebook...
It was instantly met with more aggression and, still, no real answers as to what she or anyone else fucking wanted from me. It seemed she was actually a little distracted by trying to be overly combative and aggressive, probably a performance for whoever she would show these conversations to later on, I thought. She was just totally obstinate and unreasonable the entire time, telling me who I was and what my experiences and intentions were...
We really were speaking two different languages, where words meant very different things to each of us. She was using terms that had been in my vocabulary for many years, as both an anarchist involved in community organizing and activism and someone in long-term therapy as a psychiatric outpatient. "Gaslighting" meant intentionally trying to convince someone you have power over that they couldn't trust themselves, their own feelings or thoughts, for the sole purpose of exploiting and controlling them--it did not mean disagreeing, real or perceived deception, lying, or over-/under-exaggeration. "Abuse" meant physically and/or mentally and/or emotionally violent acts perpetrated by one person with power over another for the purpose of maintaining that power and control over them through fear and threats against safety--it was not any and all normative conflict within an interpersonal relationship that made one of the parties uncomfortable or feel unpleasant things, nor was it anything that left someone feeling hurt. "Sexual harassment" was physical or verbal acts forcibly committed against someone, consciously violating their consent and disregarding their comfort zone--it was not... whatever the hell she was referring to here that I had allegedly done. "Restorative" justice was a direct alternative to our common retributive model, where mutual agreement and understanding is attempted to be gained through participation of an outside mediator or the larger community, with the duel goal of aiding in the healing of the alleged victim and the personal growth and transformation of the alleged victimizer, or perhaps something in between if the issue is determined to just be conflict--it was not her messaging me on Facebook and asking me about the accusations made against me by someone and then abandoning the conversation without any verbalized conclusion. We were also speaking to each other from alternate realities, where she thought she knew things about my life that never happened and she knew nothing about, and I knew all the things she didn't because I was actually present for my own life. What resulted was a frustrating circular discussion that made communication totally impossible, assuming she was even sincerely open to such a thing to begin with...
It always astounded me how abusive and manipulative cancel culture's language was. Seen here, I was being told what I'm thinking and feeling, and even what my intentions are and internal monologue is; that I should have been a mind-reader and known what she and others were thinking, feeling, desiring of me, and silently perceiving my actions to be, or else my punishment was my fault; that my responses were annoying because I was not matching her level of aggression, or because I wasn't cowering and unquestioningly letting her steamroll me into admitting to things I hadn't done and to being a person I knew I wasn't; that it was inherently manipulative for me to resist letting her dominate me into silence and coerce me into agreeing with things that I knew to be untrue; that defending myself when and where I could was in and of itself an act of abuse and a lack of accountability; that "accountability" meant self-flagellating, denying my own truth, and accepting any and all punishment from anyone who volunteered to dole it out. The overarching themes seemed to be, "Shut the fuck up, or else you're abusive and avoiding taking responsibility," and, "You are forever defined only by your flaws and mistakes, and are irrevocably impure for the remainder of your life, so says we." I couldn't help but feel that, once again, people were telling me I needed to close my mouth and stop expressing any feelings.
As usual, it didn't matter how tactful I tried to be, because anything I didn't say would be assigned to what I actually did say, and what actually was happening was irrelevant compared to what was being felt by her. I wasn't one of those "the facts don't care about your feelings" assholes, but this was ridiculous. She was getting angry with me because my responses were "making her" feel like she didn't really have a point--and it couldn't possibly be that maybe, just maybe, she didn't. With me unwilling to admit to her that I was still an awful human being that never improved or evolved beyond my teen years, and her unwilling to admit that maybe she was projecting things onto me that had more to do with her than with me or anything I may or may not have done recently to people unrelated to her... she was right: the conversation was going nowhere. Just like with Kara, there simply wasn't a way for me to validate someone else's feelings while still advocating for myself and my own reality, and I was done sacrificing myself for the feelings of others who seemed to be using me as a scapegoat for their own issues.
No matter how many times I asked, she could not tell me what she wanted from me or even suggest something I could do to make things better between us; at least, nothing that didn't require me to betray myself or minimize my own experiences. From where I was, it seemed to be because she was getting exactly what she wanted: an opportunity to dominate someone else, and someone she perceived as worthy of punishment and therefore easy on her conscience, at that, to help cool whatever real issues she was going through deep down. Everyone wants someone to blame, because it's way easier to endure and process hurt when there's a simple, singular source to aim our worst feelings toward. The harsh truth was that, again, if this woman were still reeling in her late-20s/early-30s over the bullying she experienced while a teenager, she needed to stop telling me what I should do in therapy and focus more on what she should be doing with her own. Either that, or admit that she was exaggerating the true extent of how these memories truly affected her.
I knew I didn't owe anyone anything, and that there was nothing I could ever do to repair my reputation after all that had been said about me. This didn't mean I felt any better about having potentially hurt anyone in any significant, long-term way, though. So I tried to reach out again...
I hoped I had found just the right wording this time to successfully express both my sympathy and feelings of guilt with my maintained grasp on who I was and what actually took place. To my surprise, I eventually received a text from her, agreeing to a Facetime conversation.
I think it went as well as it could, definitely better than I'd expected it to. She was a lot calmer and more reasonable face-to-face, as most people were when they didn't have the dehumanizing separation of a five-inch screen. It was easier to be cold and cruel when you couldn't look into the other person's eyes, and this had been true since the original days of witch hunts. We ended up talking for almost two hours, I think. Things seemed pretty calm by the time we said goodbye. She wouldn't take the videos about me down from her Instagram for a really long time, though.
As with the last entry in this series, I feel I must explicitly clarify: I do not think the things I did to S***** as a teenager constitute abuse, but if she sees it as abuse, the semantics of it mean far less to me than my impact on her as a kid and potentially into adulthood. I was verbally and physically abusive toward her after we broke up. I apologized for all of this in 2015, and I meant it. More than that, I did not do those sorts of things anymore as an adult. Even if she'd never believe me amidst all of the bogus lies that had been spread about me, I knew that I was not abusive toward anyone in any way, though I was definitely unwell, and unknowingly behaved in ways that were inappropriate, particularly after feeling abandoned by someone I cared about. I did not put my hands on other people, ever. I always practiced good consent, no matter what. I did not use the problematic language I used in my early 20s. That was the best I could do, and I was doing it.
Looking back to my teens, I'm pretty ashamed, and I internalized a lot of guilt over the things I said, did, and believed when I was younger. I was definitely on a bad path toward becoming more like my father than I wanted to be, and so was my brother. Everyone was a little asshole and a bully sometimes, if not all the time, and my brother and I were no exception. In many ways, we were worse than most. For one reason or another, the two of us were still very popular, or at least infamous, in our little city, probably because we really did do whatever we wanted, never trying to do what everyone else was or being influenced by what was popular at the time. We were both straightedge vegetarians, and were angels compared to the druggie kids who hated us, but we were also incredibly misogynistic, oftentimes mean and cruel, and like many youths with disadvantaged, traumatic upbringings, we had a lot of aggression in us that we didn't even know we were unleashing onto a lot of innocent people around us--people who just thought we were cool and desired our attention. While I usually dove into one long-term monogamous relationship after another, my brother tended to hang out with many girls. We both agreed that he was a lot worse than I was, and some of the things he'd done could easily be considered outright violent or abusive. I was mostly just really mean. I never put my hands on girls, and I always practiced good consent or let the girl make all the first moves. Words were my weapon of choice, and I used them to try and tear people down, face-to-face and on this blog. However, I got into a three-year relationship toward the end of age 17, and let that consume me until it ended when I was 20. During that time, I had dropped out of high school in my senior year, was still avoiding therapy and medication for mental illness I didn't want to accept I had, and mostly isolated myself with my girlfriend or my best friend at the time. Outside of talking a whole lot of shit on this blog, I didn't have much contact with anyone else, and slowly disappeared into my early 20s, when I'd begin repeatedly leaving town for long trips elsewhere. My brother would begin what would become a 14-year relationship when he was only 16, but he kept in contact with many of these kids until they got as sick of his shit as they were of mine. In their defense, I burned a lot of bridges and stopped coming around, so none of them ever got to see if or how I'd changed or grown as a person.
While I fundamentally disagreed with cancel culture campaigns, and retributive justice in general, I still knew that most accusations of abuse were usually honest ones. However, I also knew I wasn't special, and therefore had to assume that false accusations still happened far more often than anyone wanted to acknowledge. They weren't all attempts at revenge or spite, of course--sometimes, the person making the accusation was actually the abusive one, and was using cancel culture the same way abusers commonly use the cops, as another means of control, domination, fear, and deflection; sometimes, the person was suffering from mental illness, specifically psychosis or something similar, and over time truly began to believe that something happened when it didn't, such as with Kara; sometimes, it was just another form of triangulation being used preemptively to cover up something they didn't want people to know they did to you, as with Alyssa; sometimes, people were convinced by others that something unpleasant was actually abusive, since all normative conflict now fit the ever-expanding criteria of abuse and trauma, or the person feels that their experience would only be taken seriously if its severity was escalated, like I thought was happening here.
I constantly saw a repeated statistic stating that "less than 1% of all rape accusations turn out to be false", which even if true still was disregarding a minority of still thousands of people in America alone who have been affected by it. Was the implication that collateral damage did occur, but to so little an extent to not matter? I never could find where that number came from, but the figure I did keep finding when looking deeper into it stated that the prevalence of false rape allegations was actually between 2-10%--still a minority, but at worst the difference between tens of thousands and millions of people. Suffice it to say, a small minority of accounts are false ones, and that was demonstrably true. My problem with it, though, was that it seemed this 1% figure, regardless of its credibility, went on to be conflated with all forms of abuse, whether it be domestic violence with no sexual component or the increasingly vague "emotional abuse" most people seemed to be canceled for nowadays. From there, it was being applied to every conversation about false allegations overall, and used to dismiss the reality that it ever even happened, let alone that many people such as myself were having their lives upended by it. There were no numbers on how often people were falsely accused of some form of generalized psychological abuse against someone, of course, but if we were all really honest with ourselves, we'd probably be able to think of dozens of examples of very serious lies we'd told or been the subject of since we were teenagers. It was no secret that people lie, and that they even lie in spectacularly significant and outrageous ways. Arguably, what was now known as cancel culture had been historically used to justify the exiling or even murder of certain groups of already marginalized people. My wager was that these sorts of lies happened way more often than ones about sexual assault, so it wasn't surprising to me that I had found myself on the receiving end of more than one gruesome lie or exaggeration.
Anyway, I had been canceled into oblivion, and that was that. I could pontificate all I wanted, the damage had been done and there was no coming back.
From what I could gather from the videos, S***** was compelled to post them because she had just found out that I had been accused of abusing my most recent ex, Alyssa. Using my first and last name several times, of course, she made vague allusions to what I was guilty of, probably because I hadn't actually been accused of anything specific, there was absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing on my part, and she knew about as little as anyone else did about a relationship she had no involvement in or knowledge of before speaking with my ex just a day or so earlier. The purpose of the video wasn't necessarily to announce to everyone that she too was one of my many victims, though she would most certainly include and harp on that, it was to just let all of her followers know that I had been accused of it yet again like she was some kind of news reporter. She also seemed eager to somehow make it about her and use it as a segue into self-righteously talking down to me and anyone else watching as though she had all the answers and was bestowing unto us all these things we were ignorant to and needed her to educate us on. As if the pomposity weren't bad enough, she had the nerve to post these videos while leaving out my brother entirely, who also dated her and was literally physically and sexually violent towards her back when they were kids. This was likely because he had recently reached out to her to apologize for everything, resulting in a reconnection and her actively cheating on her boyfriend with him through video chat. It was always the ones casting the first stones...
In the video, she also referred to me as "one of her abusers", which caught me off-guard. This word--"abuser"--apparently meant absolutely anything anyone wanted. When we had dated in high school, we were both about 16/17, it lasted for about seven months, and I'd even be the first person she ever had sex with. I was an unjustifiably shitty boyfriend, and subsequently became a frequent bully of hers. I cheated on her, and truthfully never really had the strongest of feelings for her while we dated. We were both straightedge vegetarians with weird haircuts, so it seemed right at the time, but I couldn't force feelings. At the same time, she showed multiple signs that she actually wanted to be with my younger brother. When we broke up, she almost immediately started dating him, which obviously hurt me a whole lot and further fueled the petty unspoken sibling rivalry that had been brewing between us as kids. I responded to this with really cruel acts and it was totally unfair. I openly wrote disgusting things about her online, shaming her vagina in graphic detail, I once threw a bulky hardcover textbook right at her head while in the halls at school, I had stolen a doll she carried around with her and ripped its head off, I filmed a video of her crying while her and my brother were arguing at the mall and posted it on YouTube set to the "The Scientist" by Coldplay. I was fucking awful to her, all while my brother was being incredibly rough with her publicly and behind the scenes. The Gunn Brothers were definitely an unpleasant duo of memories for her.
I cringed and shuddered at the thought of how I acted toward her then. She was a genuinely kind, gentle, sweet person, even as a teenager, and even if her dating my brother after we broke up hurt my young ego, she hadn't ever done anything to hurt me. She had a rough upbringing like we did, except it didn't turn her into a bully. From what I could remember, she was never really mean or tried to hurt anyone, though I did know several people who claimed to remember being bullied by her. About five years earlier, long after we had both grown into adults, I was haunted by the way I treated many people when I was a kid, her in particular. I reached out on Facebook and apologized.
Apparently, even though I was so awful, I was also the type of person who internalized guilt over what he did as a kid. We started talking and I even met up with her in Vegas where she had been living at the time. Seeing each other went really well, we got along better than anticipated, and became what I considered to be friends. She accepted my apology, and told me she believed I had changed for the better. At no point in all of our conversations rehashing the past did she tell me she considered me "abusive", or "one of her abusers". It would eventually become clear to me that we were speaking different languages, and that we just had very different standards and reverence for terms pertaining to things as serious as actual assault, but at the time this miscommunication would come off to me as a very sudden, surprising escalation of the past events I'd already held myself accountable for, an act of unprovoked antagonism, maybe even an opportunistic grab for attention. Whatever was going on, I would not apologize any more than I already had about shit I did as a teenager, period. Again, I wasn't even sure if I agreed that a kid could be considered "an abuser", in the same way and for the same reasons minors weren't legally considered able to consent to sex and usually wouldn't be charged with homicide. She did not include details, as always leaving it up to everyone else's imagination to assume the worst, because she knew in the Courtroom of Cancel Culture she didn't have to be detailed to earn the praise and sympathy I felt she was looking for. She did specify that we dated 15 years ago, but described us breaking up as "escaping" me. The reality was that she broke up with me because I cheated on her, and she would later confirm for me that I was actually an otherwise good boyfriend who practiced good consent and never did anything to hurt or make her feel uncomfortable. This did not undo the pain that I had clearly caused, but the facts were that I did not mistreat her until after we broke up and she started dating my younger brother.
I didn't know what more these people wanted from me. I basically no longer existed. My life was completely over. I no longer left the house or used social media, I didn't have a career or anything, and I was forbade from participating in the things I was passionate about. I was obviously not trying to date or meet new people. I could have been dead at the time she posted these things and no one would have even knew. What was this video meant to accomplish, other than to virtue signal, place herself on a pedestal, and kick me while I was already very, very down? When would anyone try to communicate directly with me? Again and again, I was left to assume that the only thing they actually wanted was for me to kill myself, just like Kara had explicitly stated she wanted out of me.
I again decided to try and spark dialog between us in hopes of defusing the conflict and coming to a mutual understanding. I messaged her on Facebook...
It was instantly met with more aggression and, still, no real answers as to what she or anyone else fucking wanted from me. It seemed she was actually a little distracted by trying to be overly combative and aggressive, probably a performance for whoever she would show these conversations to later on, I thought. She was just totally obstinate and unreasonable the entire time, telling me who I was and what my experiences and intentions were...
We really were speaking two different languages, where words meant very different things to each of us. She was using terms that had been in my vocabulary for many years, as both an anarchist involved in community organizing and activism and someone in long-term therapy as a psychiatric outpatient. "Gaslighting" meant intentionally trying to convince someone you have power over that they couldn't trust themselves, their own feelings or thoughts, for the sole purpose of exploiting and controlling them--it did not mean disagreeing, real or perceived deception, lying, or over-/under-exaggeration. "Abuse" meant physically and/or mentally and/or emotionally violent acts perpetrated by one person with power over another for the purpose of maintaining that power and control over them through fear and threats against safety--it was not any and all normative conflict within an interpersonal relationship that made one of the parties uncomfortable or feel unpleasant things, nor was it anything that left someone feeling hurt. "Sexual harassment" was physical or verbal acts forcibly committed against someone, consciously violating their consent and disregarding their comfort zone--it was not... whatever the hell she was referring to here that I had allegedly done. "Restorative" justice was a direct alternative to our common retributive model, where mutual agreement and understanding is attempted to be gained through participation of an outside mediator or the larger community, with the duel goal of aiding in the healing of the alleged victim and the personal growth and transformation of the alleged victimizer, or perhaps something in between if the issue is determined to just be conflict--it was not her messaging me on Facebook and asking me about the accusations made against me by someone and then abandoning the conversation without any verbalized conclusion. We were also speaking to each other from alternate realities, where she thought she knew things about my life that never happened and she knew nothing about, and I knew all the things she didn't because I was actually present for my own life. What resulted was a frustrating circular discussion that made communication totally impossible, assuming she was even sincerely open to such a thing to begin with...
It always astounded me how abusive and manipulative cancel culture's language was. Seen here, I was being told what I'm thinking and feeling, and even what my intentions are and internal monologue is; that I should have been a mind-reader and known what she and others were thinking, feeling, desiring of me, and silently perceiving my actions to be, or else my punishment was my fault; that my responses were annoying because I was not matching her level of aggression, or because I wasn't cowering and unquestioningly letting her steamroll me into admitting to things I hadn't done and to being a person I knew I wasn't; that it was inherently manipulative for me to resist letting her dominate me into silence and coerce me into agreeing with things that I knew to be untrue; that defending myself when and where I could was in and of itself an act of abuse and a lack of accountability; that "accountability" meant self-flagellating, denying my own truth, and accepting any and all punishment from anyone who volunteered to dole it out. The overarching themes seemed to be, "Shut the fuck up, or else you're abusive and avoiding taking responsibility," and, "You are forever defined only by your flaws and mistakes, and are irrevocably impure for the remainder of your life, so says we." I couldn't help but feel that, once again, people were telling me I needed to close my mouth and stop expressing any feelings.
As usual, it didn't matter how tactful I tried to be, because anything I didn't say would be assigned to what I actually did say, and what actually was happening was irrelevant compared to what was being felt by her. I wasn't one of those "the facts don't care about your feelings" assholes, but this was ridiculous. She was getting angry with me because my responses were "making her" feel like she didn't really have a point--and it couldn't possibly be that maybe, just maybe, she didn't. With me unwilling to admit to her that I was still an awful human being that never improved or evolved beyond my teen years, and her unwilling to admit that maybe she was projecting things onto me that had more to do with her than with me or anything I may or may not have done recently to people unrelated to her... she was right: the conversation was going nowhere. Just like with Kara, there simply wasn't a way for me to validate someone else's feelings while still advocating for myself and my own reality, and I was done sacrificing myself for the feelings of others who seemed to be using me as a scapegoat for their own issues.
No matter how many times I asked, she could not tell me what she wanted from me or even suggest something I could do to make things better between us; at least, nothing that didn't require me to betray myself or minimize my own experiences. From where I was, it seemed to be because she was getting exactly what she wanted: an opportunity to dominate someone else, and someone she perceived as worthy of punishment and therefore easy on her conscience, at that, to help cool whatever real issues she was going through deep down. Everyone wants someone to blame, because it's way easier to endure and process hurt when there's a simple, singular source to aim our worst feelings toward. The harsh truth was that, again, if this woman were still reeling in her late-20s/early-30s over the bullying she experienced while a teenager, she needed to stop telling me what I should do in therapy and focus more on what she should be doing with her own. Either that, or admit that she was exaggerating the true extent of how these memories truly affected her.
I knew I didn't owe anyone anything, and that there was nothing I could ever do to repair my reputation after all that had been said about me. This didn't mean I felt any better about having potentially hurt anyone in any significant, long-term way, though. So I tried to reach out again...
I hoped I had found just the right wording this time to successfully express both my sympathy and feelings of guilt with my maintained grasp on who I was and what actually took place. To my surprise, I eventually received a text from her, agreeing to a Facetime conversation.
I think it went as well as it could, definitely better than I'd expected it to. She was a lot calmer and more reasonable face-to-face, as most people were when they didn't have the dehumanizing separation of a five-inch screen. It was easier to be cold and cruel when you couldn't look into the other person's eyes, and this had been true since the original days of witch hunts. We ended up talking for almost two hours, I think. Things seemed pretty calm by the time we said goodbye. She wouldn't take the videos about me down from her Instagram for a really long time, though.
As with the last entry in this series, I feel I must explicitly clarify: I do not think the things I did to S***** as a teenager constitute abuse, but if she sees it as abuse, the semantics of it mean far less to me than my impact on her as a kid and potentially into adulthood. I was verbally and physically abusive toward her after we broke up. I apologized for all of this in 2015, and I meant it. More than that, I did not do those sorts of things anymore as an adult. Even if she'd never believe me amidst all of the bogus lies that had been spread about me, I knew that I was not abusive toward anyone in any way, though I was definitely unwell, and unknowingly behaved in ways that were inappropriate, particularly after feeling abandoned by someone I cared about. I did not put my hands on other people, ever. I always practiced good consent, no matter what. I did not use the problematic language I used in my early 20s. That was the best I could do, and I was doing it.
Looking back to my teens, I'm pretty ashamed, and I internalized a lot of guilt over the things I said, did, and believed when I was younger. I was definitely on a bad path toward becoming more like my father than I wanted to be, and so was my brother. Everyone was a little asshole and a bully sometimes, if not all the time, and my brother and I were no exception. In many ways, we were worse than most. For one reason or another, the two of us were still very popular, or at least infamous, in our little city, probably because we really did do whatever we wanted, never trying to do what everyone else was or being influenced by what was popular at the time. We were both straightedge vegetarians, and were angels compared to the druggie kids who hated us, but we were also incredibly misogynistic, oftentimes mean and cruel, and like many youths with disadvantaged, traumatic upbringings, we had a lot of aggression in us that we didn't even know we were unleashing onto a lot of innocent people around us--people who just thought we were cool and desired our attention. While I usually dove into one long-term monogamous relationship after another, my brother tended to hang out with many girls. We both agreed that he was a lot worse than I was, and some of the things he'd done could easily be considered outright violent or abusive. I was mostly just really mean. I never put my hands on girls, and I always practiced good consent or let the girl make all the first moves. Words were my weapon of choice, and I used them to try and tear people down, face-to-face and on this blog. However, I got into a three-year relationship toward the end of age 17, and let that consume me until it ended when I was 20. During that time, I had dropped out of high school in my senior year, was still avoiding therapy and medication for mental illness I didn't want to accept I had, and mostly isolated myself with my girlfriend or my best friend at the time. Outside of talking a whole lot of shit on this blog, I didn't have much contact with anyone else, and slowly disappeared into my early 20s, when I'd begin repeatedly leaving town for long trips elsewhere. My brother would begin what would become a 14-year relationship when he was only 16, but he kept in contact with many of these kids until they got as sick of his shit as they were of mine. In their defense, I burned a lot of bridges and stopped coming around, so none of them ever got to see if or how I'd changed or grown as a person.
While I fundamentally disagreed with cancel culture campaigns, and retributive justice in general, I still knew that most accusations of abuse were usually honest ones. However, I also knew I wasn't special, and therefore had to assume that false accusations still happened far more often than anyone wanted to acknowledge. They weren't all attempts at revenge or spite, of course--sometimes, the person making the accusation was actually the abusive one, and was using cancel culture the same way abusers commonly use the cops, as another means of control, domination, fear, and deflection; sometimes, the person was suffering from mental illness, specifically psychosis or something similar, and over time truly began to believe that something happened when it didn't, such as with Kara; sometimes, it was just another form of triangulation being used preemptively to cover up something they didn't want people to know they did to you, as with Alyssa; sometimes, people were convinced by others that something unpleasant was actually abusive, since all normative conflict now fit the ever-expanding criteria of abuse and trauma, or the person feels that their experience would only be taken seriously if its severity was escalated, like I thought was happening here.
I constantly saw a repeated statistic stating that "less than 1% of all rape accusations turn out to be false", which even if true still was disregarding a minority of still thousands of people in America alone who have been affected by it. Was the implication that collateral damage did occur, but to so little an extent to not matter? I never could find where that number came from, but the figure I did keep finding when looking deeper into it stated that the prevalence of false rape allegations was actually between 2-10%--still a minority, but at worst the difference between tens of thousands and millions of people. Suffice it to say, a small minority of accounts are false ones, and that was demonstrably true. My problem with it, though, was that it seemed this 1% figure, regardless of its credibility, went on to be conflated with all forms of abuse, whether it be domestic violence with no sexual component or the increasingly vague "emotional abuse" most people seemed to be canceled for nowadays. From there, it was being applied to every conversation about false allegations overall, and used to dismiss the reality that it ever even happened, let alone that many people such as myself were having their lives upended by it. There were no numbers on how often people were falsely accused of some form of generalized psychological abuse against someone, of course, but if we were all really honest with ourselves, we'd probably be able to think of dozens of examples of very serious lies we'd told or been the subject of since we were teenagers. It was no secret that people lie, and that they even lie in spectacularly significant and outrageous ways. Arguably, what was now known as cancel culture had been historically used to justify the exiling or even murder of certain groups of already marginalized people. My wager was that these sorts of lies happened way more often than ones about sexual assault, so it wasn't surprising to me that I had found myself on the receiving end of more than one gruesome lie or exaggeration.
Anyway, I had been canceled into oblivion, and that was that. I could pontificate all I wanted, the damage had been done and there was no coming back.