I am currently making a video about how stalking can come about and escalate. While I was doing that, I realized that here where I am based, people may still – I mean, after all these years – see me as one of such people, someone with a learning disability, a cognitive deficit or whatever.

Oh, poor old learning-disabled girl!

Oh, what a poor senile old cow!

Oh, that vulnerable delusional woman who believes she graduated from university!

The abuse started the moment I moved to this town. It came out of nowhere. I didn’t know anyone here and I still don’t know anyone here. I just want to get out of here. I want my life back. People here do not seem to get that I no longer want to know anyone here either. I feel that my pattern of expectations simply has become too negative for me to still be able to have a fulfilling life here. I too often expect abuse now. What’s happened went way way way too far and the response from (most) parties I asked for help was to otherise me more.

(That said, I am by nature a positive person and I’ll for example still often happily tell locals that I will keep my fingers crossed for them when I happen to witness that they’re buying a lottery ticket. Also, after a lot of sunshine, I may feel much more positive again about where I am. We all live mostly in the moment, ideally. Portsmouth, however, is not only often a pretty unpleasant place, it is also where the person lives who controls almost every aspect of my life, from which e-mails I get and who I can reach to who provides my electricity.)

Anyway, I wrote the following:
“In this video, I do my best to show where some stalking behaviours come from. I talk about guys who think differently, who use a different kind of logic and who may be autistic in some cases and who do not always get things or don’t get things the same way as neurotypicals. Quite a few of these guys seem to end up in roles in which they put on a uniform and protect others, such as volunteer firefighters.”

See, here locally I do my best to take care of garbage, put up signs to try to stop the horrendous illegal rubbish-dumping, do litter-picks and so on and it may keep local people thinking that I must have a learning disability or whatever. (I simply often do not have much else to do!)

Everywhere I go in this town, no matter what I do, there will always be a few of the looks that spell “Oh, look, there’s the village idiot!”, “Oh, that poor old learning-disabled girl!” or “Oh, she’s such a poor senile old cow who can no longer keep up!”.

When I take care of garbage etc, I am simply trying to make myself useful and fill my time. (Besides, why do people in England feel so little responsibility for their immediate living environment? Why do they have so little pride?)

That’s all.

Actually, my parents instilled this in me, come to think of it. My dad was self-employed, we had a large house and garden so my sisters and I were given small rotating cleaning duties. (I was the eldest, that too.) I remember one day when I was wiping down the external windowsill of the large front window – the traffic made it grimy – and cleaning the door entrance – I loved polishing the black stone to a nice shine – a classmate walked by and asked if it was punishment for something I had done. No, why? My sisters and I have had a strong sense of personal responsibility for a long time. It’s empowering.

It may be helpful to look into Maslow’s theory about the hierarchy of needs. It may also be helpful to look into what Tony Robbins says about people’s needs as it’s basically the same.

Tony Robbins talks about the need to contribute to the world beyond oneself. (You have to contrast this with the desire to make as much money as possible.)

That is a need that can only surface when other needs are met, such as the need for food.

To me, English people often come across as having no drive and very little motivation. Many seem content with sitting in a lazy chair all day and doing nothing much, other than complain. Many aren’t go-getters and seem to want very little from life.

Of course, this has a lot to do with the inequality and the class system here, but I need to keep reminding myself of that. It’s much easier for me to simply criticize people. If you want too much here, you condemn yourself to frustration, because of the way things work here.

The people who are convinced that I am going senile or am leaning-disabled have no idea that I actually often find Britain extremely slow and boring (besides unpleasant and abusive).

I try not to upset people here because they’re also often pretty aggressive. I did feel immensely intimidated for years, too, until I started to get fed up with the mental place that was putting me in. It so wasn’t me. The ways in which the local abuse has impacted me is actually quite shocking.

I still often am defending myself against expected imagined criticisms. One of the milder things that happened, for example, was that someone had looked at what was in my shopping basket at Asda and then decided to go find me on Facebook to lecture me on the use of a freezer. (I no longer had a freezer.)

The obsessive fascination English folks can have with the strangers in their midst, that’s actually a form of stalking too. It’s as unbalanced as traditional stalking. These people don’t have normal conversations with those strangers and usually carefully avoid meeting their eyes when they run into them in a social context. They just gossip about them, make stuff up about them and yell strange things at them. Insults, too. It’s almost like sniper fire. Sometimes, the strangers are even attacked physically. It all comes across as pretty hostile and points towards voids in people’s own lives that they fill by obsessing over strangers. Are they living vicariously?

There is so much hate here in England, even already merely for women and for older adults. Older adults are “demonised” in England, in a truly shocking manner.

Now put yourself in the shoes of real minorities, including people who are genuinely learning-disabled. How much worse it has to be for them.

For the record, in the video that I am making, the hacker(s) wanted me to specify that Portsmouth does not equal “Gosport and Fareham”. Oh-kay. No problem. He also removed at least two bits from the video. One bit was me saying that the stalker in the first case has not been in trouble since. (True, that’s only as far as I know. Maybe he just hacks people to pieces these days.) The second bit was the phrase “voice cloning” which was superfluous in that spot.

(My screen indicated a few times that my video editing program was not really running on my computer or, rather, that someone else had access to it too. I think that what I have these days is remote working software installed with someone else being able to control my computer. The pandemic caused a proliferation in that kind of software, and hey, why would anyone like me need a safe home that strangers don’t go into when I am out? I’m obviously far too demanding.)