I went on Twitter for thirty seconds

[felinejumper]

to find my entire twitterverse (my irl friends that overlap with my ex-friend ex-boyfriend) retweeting a piece said ex wrote and recently published. This is, was, a piece that used to be partially about me, which I know because I gave them edits & permission to reference me.

so...the piece is out in an unexpected and quasi-prominent venue. I am not in it at all, nor is there even any *ghost* of me. I want to say something articulate and clever about all writing being a lie, but lord, I have never been behind the scenes quite like this to see the stagecraft. It's a really public lie, even if a lie of omission, and I just...didn't know it was possible to erase someone like that. It means they had to go back through their piece and delete my name, delete the narrative structure about me, make it like I never existed, never made a ripple. So: ouch. And also: fuck you for being a narrative coward.

And there's some lemon, some salt in the wound, when it's my close friends and confidants! being like "wow beautiful" and they don't know it's all this, agh, partially fictitious construction of a story. [literally any John Silver gif here]

Should they care? Do I have to very carefully not tell anyone I was hurt by this thing they liked? Should I just keep salting this wound in the hopes that keeping it clean means the healing will happen faster? Do I have to keep generating empathy? Should I delete every social media account except dreamwidth? (This last seems like a...really good idea, actually).

And, aha, if I can ever manage to translate this particular flavor into fanfiction, I'm sorry in advance, it is a nasty set of feelings.


Oh god what if someone on dw posts it, I will absolutely lose it, silently and quietly and then crawl into a deep deep dark hole with my books FOREVER, but also maybe it would be useful to someone and, UGH, i hope that it is good for any number of people, I also hope I make a million dollars and fund the Trevor project completely and then they put my name on the list, discretely but still very obviously, and also I fix climate change, for vengeance reason, also maybe time for access locks, because, lol, arguably identifying information is involved

Comments

[sciatrix]

Whooooof. Let me know if there's anything you'd like me to do or like...

*thoughtful*

You don't have to keep generating empathy. I've never seen this piece as far as I know, and I know the flip side of that--having written a piece that then became prominent about my feelings of loss about a person, and having had that person correctly identify herself and then make me fucking talk about it even after I was pretty sure we were done.

So like. It wasn't lies, but I have a lot of feelings about it. And I don't take it down because, well, all the shit you're feeling right now.

But I like you. And I don't know this piece, but I like you more than I like any one given piece, and it's quite possible I haven't seen it, and I would like to at least be able to give you warnings about it etc.

So like. If that is a thing you would like, you are not fucking letting the side down by talking about your feelings and your side of the stagecraft you see.

also if it's on scitwitter what lawks! I am behind on mine and haven't seen anything anyway so you can count me doubly safe in that venue. Assuming we have tweeps in common, which isn't exactly unlikely but god knows exactly who they are, etc etc.

[felinejumper]

truly, I am most reassured about ~my own human existence~ when engaged in meaningful communication (reading included), so on that very important front the dreamwidth renaissance has measurably improved my life; it does feel somewhat cold that my emotional coping mechanism is "stuff information into my mind" but, you know, work with what you've got. thus: this very comment was up there on possible things that you could have done, thank you. I have been feeling exceedingly emotional and fuzzy about it for days <3

Being on opposing ostensibly-opposite sides of a written piece about loss sounds so hard, for both of you! And the aftermath/situation of talking about something you thought was done—big yikes. (And are you secretly Trista Mateer who published online all of the poems she wrote about a breakup & published them as Honeybee? it was so good and high-key angsty and I cried a bunch at the baking metaphors because I am extremely on brand.)

The responsibilty to generate empathy is hard, and—this has been SO helpful to write, you have no idea because you didn't see the earlier drafts of course—I think it feels so tricky because I have spent a lot of time learning to be comfortable with emotional ambiguity and differing viewpoints, because of the non-monogamy. But that comfort is based on being able to consistently generate empathy for people in hard and sometimes inherently incompatible conflicts. And if I can generate empathy for a friend who's been hurt and also for a friend who is forced to hurt someone else as a self-defense mechanism, then I ought to be able to keep on generating empathy for someone who has hurt me as a self-defense mechanism, and if I can't, then there is an internal inconsistency that must be rooted out and destroyed! (so says logic brain; emotional-competency brain is obviously on the phone with a best friend saying "I've tried everything but they won't listen!").

W/r/t practical concerns: I am pretty sure I could handle it with a minimum of grumbling were it to appear on DW generally, after my first few days of incandescent rage. Altmetrics tragically doesn't cover non-science things, so I'm not sure how likely it is to come into your orbit based on sheer numbers, but it's not in science-sphere, so a bit less likely. In any case, if you DO come across a piece about, hmm, building trans masculinity out of bits and pieces of other people from this past week, then that's the one (probably).

This was all SO nice to read and think about AND helpful, I am going to keep an eye out to return the kindness with interest sometime soon, just you wait.

[sciatrix]

<3 I did it because it made me feel good to say, not because I expect you to pass it back--but I appreciate that, too!

I am not secretly Trista Mateer; the post in question was written under the name I am using here, going on ten years ago now. And at the end of the conversation, we were in exactly the place I'd been in before it--she just hadn't noticed or cared. I had tried to talk about the conflict in question, she didn't want to talk about it in any way I could understand, and I... vanished, is probably the best way to put it. It was very college and very fucked up.

The money quote that sparked the conversation that followed has since made it into one of the major books about asexuality, which I have... very conflicting feelings about, but it seemed to do some good for people reading it. And I doubt she'd be checking out something like that today.

(It was such a small thing to say, too--a postscript on a much longer blog post about a totally different topic in which I mentioned that I'd figured some things out and was stepping back from a relationship that was making me sad, and expressing relief about that decision. A sentence or two, and I thought she'd never bother looking at my blog--and she wouldn't have, except I ran into her on the street and let a split section of exhaustion and dread flash over my face before I came over to pretend everything was fine. What a mess.)

I've never written publicly about that particular aspect of that time in my life; it's always seemed unkind to do so, and while I'm in no way free of reservations about the things I did that contributed to the whole thing, I also don't think there was anything I could have done differently. It was that fucked up queer-woman-in-college thing so many of the people I know have gone through, except this was 2009-2011ish and I was trying to work out what I wanted and what I could have and whether I was going to be forever alone, and there was no way for me to figure those out except by trying. I don't have hard feelings, exactly, but then it's also been nearly eight years.

I have not seen the piece in question, but I'll keep that in mind if I do see something that matches that description!