Very odd that this video went live all by itself. That’s never happened before. I was asleep at the time. I added the description later.
Since 2008, I have been dealing with something called “sadistic stalking”, which has included a lot of lock-picking and a lot of hacking. I initially didn’t even know that the lock-picking was happening. It took me years to discover that. Unable to get any support, it caused me to dive into personality disorders, neurodiversity and so on. I was a migrant in another country, on my own.
I remember being on the phone with the autistic man, telling him about the animals that were getting attacked just to spite me. His response was “you really need to get out of that place”. This reality is so ugly, however, that he then wipes such things from his mind. He fabricated a reality in which 10+ years of my life had disappeared. He told himself that I had only recently lost my income, that I had been “pioneering”, doing something unique, something risky. I’d already become self-employed in 1997, however, not really doing anything revolutionary.
With regard to his unfaithful wife, it’s like he was floating in and out of two alternate realities all the time. One was reality. The other one was his preferred version of it. He would for example say that his wife had no problem at all with unexpected guests staying over, that people from her country were all very hospitable and welcoming (can I see this as masking?). However, he would also say, sounding panicked, that she’d “already left the house” in response to the idea, to go stay with friends of hers.
I partly get that. Sometimes, when I have the option of interpreting something negatively or positively, I will choose the latter, if it doesn’t really make a difference anyway, other than that the latter will make me feel better. That is different. I draw a line. I don’t marry anyone who’s clearly taking advantage of me.
I’m in my sixties. If I were to go do fieldwork in a poor country and a 22-year-old guy would declare his love for me, I would laugh my head off. Even if my husband had just divorced me, I would not see the 22-year-old as validation, as a sign that my husband was wrong to divorce me. I’d think that he is up to something. At least, I would hope so. But this man, he took her seriously. There was no coercion of any kind.
Then again, he’s very generous and very compassionate in his own way. He’s not stupid. Far from. I think he saw it as a trade, a trade off. That wasn’t how it started out, however. Initially, he seemed besotted with her, infatuated. Was that love? Was that (mind) blindness?
With regard to the woman who’s bipolar, I remember that in 2016, I gave her a watered-down sugary version of what was happening in my life. I don’t even remember what I told her. I did my best to keep everything from her. (This is someone who had her own business as a self-employed person and who I have worked with a few times. She became part of my network of female scientists around 1990.) There came a point that we were video-calling and I just couldn’t keep the facade up any longer. She instantly backed off and said that she didn’t want to hear about it. This sort of stuff was very hard on her, to hear about. It would threaten to upset her balance. I had figured that out correctly.
But where does that leave ME?
It’s even more complicated. The woman who had been my best friend for a long time (decades), she turned out to have a (covert or vulnerable) narcissistic personality disorder. She would of course now often call me crazy… That’s not supportive. But there were also many days on which she was or at least seemed very supportive. Was she merely being manipulative on those days? (It’s a long story.)
Neurotypicals too respond with rejection to unpleasant realities, but they do that differently. I think that they are far more likely to reject the person rather than the unpleasant reality.
I am always supposed to shut up about what has been going on in my life just so that others can feel more secure? Always? No. To hell with that. https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/SourenAW
