I just ran into an organisation that my hacker(s) blocked me from in the UK. InterNations. A flood of pain and some odd kind of relief came over me.
😢🤢😓😢😥😖😣😩😫😵😔🥺😬😑😐😶
Relief because of the confirmation that what I went through truly was a nightmare.
Then the memories came.
I was climbing the walls for so long.
I got an invitation for a network event, I think online because it was in the pandemic, organised from London. I signed up. He blocked it. My actual participation. There was never anything to access.
I got an invitation from a women’s professional network (Dell). I signed up. The only “people” wanting to connect with me were… babies?
I tried to sign up to local Toastmasters groups. I couldn’t.
In the pandemic, I searched for the local support groups for which I had seen posters in people’s windows. I could only find a small group for a small village north of Portsmouth. Nothing going on.
My LinkedIn, consisting almost exclusively of people who I actually knew, got completely destroyed. When one day one of my oldest contacts had been replaced by a week-old contact with a different photo, of a much younger person, that is when I should have shut my LinkedIn profile down. The real person was someone who I had worked with and had explored the possibility of other projects with, at his initiative, but which wasn’t obvious to anyone who didn’t know the background as it was a Brazilian man at an engineering company with a Brazilian name, based in Brazil.
I often left comments on newspaper sites and people’s blogs in efforts to get some networking going. They didn’t actually make it onto the internet.
I remember not being able to access all sorts of things, for example, Facebook marketplace for a used bicycle.
Eventually, that changed but the damage had been done… My network had completely collapsed. Everyone had disappeared from my life. I remember having attended a scientists’ meeting in early 2023 and being so happy about it – it was like old times and I was in flow – when he interfered again. This time he probably meant well but I didn’t want him to interfere.
God forbid that I might interact with others and be able to support myself again.
Just about everyone had already disappeared from my life. I desperately needed to make new connections.
Next, I ran into the Chibok girls. Eating grass. The way they looked. And I had trouble.
The deprivation. The powerlessness.
Part of me wants to start bawling. I won’t.
So many years.
How can people do that to a stranger? And how can so many people stand by, watch and be okay with it?
So much abuse. The sadism. The cruelty. (How could people simply let it happen to me?)
I stopped watching that documentary then. Enough. Time for something different.
