Some of this interference with my life is still ongoing today, even though I am in a different country at the time of writing. Certainly the hacking activity still really gears up again from time to time, such as in June 2023 and right now in May 2025, in both cases together with some IRL activity.

Yes, there’s even been some IRL interference since my fifth desperate escape attempt from Portsmouth (in England, where this began).

Hacking certainly does not stop at borders and in highly overregulated countries, and also sometimes if you open a new account for something that you had an account for before and for which you need to submit ID, hackers can find you in no time. There’s nothing you can do to stop it. Before you know it, someone else controls all your equipment again including whose emails you get and when.

Whoever is behind this is totally off his rocker (making up and believing alternate realities, which points toward autism along with a number of other factors), often deliberately mean (which can be part of autism but can also point toward psychopathy) and also cunning, sadistic and highly manipulative (which indicates antisocial psychopathy). A Jekyll & Hyde character, perhaps. Someone who is not quite what he seems or claims to be. Someone who is extremely controlling and obsessive and probably often gets bored.

People who do this kind of thing have different brain structures and cannot change at will. They tend to demand complete acceptance of who they are because they see no alternative and they hate being hated and rejected. They can retaliate rather viciously for perceived slights and for a perceived lack of acceptance of who they are. Everything they do is a desperate cry to be seen and heard and accepted. They don’t care about other people, whoever. They care about how other people make them feel. If you accept them the way they are and let them into your life, you essentially have to give up on who you are, however, and become someone else’s puppet, unless you’re an exceptionally strong person. Most people aren’t keen on that. That may be the crux. That may be what ultimately triggers this type of behaviour. I don’t know. I have lots more questions than answers.

So if anyone feels that I’ve got it all wrong, then stop bullshitting me and start fessing up. I asked around for years, but nobody in Portsmouth never has heard of anyone else there – also in different contexts – and nobody in Portsmouth never knows nothing about anything there if you catch my drift. It could be that in my case it concerns someone who manages some of his urges through excessive “pranking” of which he may not understand or, rather and more likely, forgets to consider that this can have serious consequences for others. I don’t know. I have a lot more questions than answers.

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A little Boxing Day update: All is well. I decided to do a little cleaning up and reorganization while he was out because he wasn’t happy with something. (Yes, he said so.) I didn’t do anything too drastically and made sure not to involve, for example the iMac, but I did move a few things around. When he got back, I was trying to introduce him gently to what I had done. Guess what? He didn’t even notice that anything was different. (I think that is because it didn’t involve any of his stuff.) So I did a good job. I had the idea while I was doing some vacuuming. I couldn’t just do nothing; it felt like I was being lazy. It didn’t require a major effort.

1. He’s under a lot of stress because of his home situation. At least, that’s what he has indicated to me. That he is in the middle of a divorce, that the divorce is dragging on and on, and that he has taken in yet another little family that he really wants to move out asap and that his wife is all sorts of things. At least, that’s what he has indicated to me. He is highly (emotionally) empathetic and wants to help but then he starts feeling overwhelmed, I think (but this stays under the surface).
2. Then he took me in, which was incredibly kind, but doesn’t resolve my main issue. (It’s not housing, it’s income money.) So that too put pressure on him and undoubtedly caused some frustration. I couldn’t do much more than wait and keep calling and emailing people and search the web for inspiration and solutions.
3. He is under pressure at work because of the move to a new building there and because of the new so-called hybrid working situation. (I’d completely overlooked that; I shouldn’t have because it’s cropped up often enough, and in ways that were a little puzzling.) I’ve actually been in touch with the department in the past, not mentioning anyone but in a general context, to inform them that they were creating a lot of stress for many (but not all) autistic people. Their response? Zero understanding or willingness to listen and accommodate. 🤬😠😡
4. It’s been resulting in actions that constitute pathological demand avoidance, such as being on the road to Amsterdam and suddenly at the last moment, yanking the wheel and driving into Zaanstad, as clearly indicated. It makes no sense. It confuses, angers and worries him. (Yes, he’s said that it angers him. He’s very well versed in navigation and geography, after all, so that is not surprising.) This has recently been getting worse or is a recent development, he’s told me.
5. Pathological demand avoidance is also the cause of some and maybe even all of his memory issues. It makes him feel powerless and frustrated. He doesn’t understand where it comes from. I think I’m seeing it in some of his other actions too.
6. He was initially pitching me as an ally in the “fight” against “the others”. (I can’t rule out that he assumed that I am autistic. I’m not. I may appear”autistic” when there’s too much fear and powerlessness in my life for far, far too long and not enough nourishment. I shut down and go into (get-outta-here-asap and) survival mode. I have great bounce back ability, provided people let me bounce back and don’t get in the way of my speedy recovery. Most people are probably much more resilient than people assume. I certainly am, but it requires that basics are provided for. It’s like with poverty, and what Rory Stewart has said about that.)
7. When it became clear that I was not going to turn into some kind of fairy tale ending, like a forty-years-younger woman falling in love with him, I increasingly became a source of stress for him too. I don’t even mean anything like romance. I don’t think that he grasped the reality of my situation, that nothing was actually being resolved. That’s not uncommon, nothing to do with autism. (I was so desperate that I started playing online games just to make a few cents. You can’t do anything if you have zero money. People generally vastly underestimate the effect of this.) That said, he really freaked me out two weeks ago when he I suddenly found him standing looking at me intently, then was making these really weird motions that I decided to ignore because I didn’t know what to make of this and because it creeped me out. In hindsight, I suspect that someone once told him that if you do what he was doing and the woman doesn’t wipe off her lipstick, it means that she likes you romantically, but I can only guess. Nothing happened but I did have to make clear that he needed to back off (because he seemed to see my lack of response as encouragement). I did that by clearly backing away and creating a greater physical distance. I got off the couch, for example, when he started to move in. It worked. The situation has been tense since. (My mistake: I underestimated the autism angle – or maybe it’s just the male chauvinism angle.) Me, I am into friendships.
8. He has been masking like crazy. Masking, so I understand, is very stressful too.
9. He has developed financial pressures, he says. He shops at the most expensive supermarket and won’t set a foot in other supermarkets, not even just to look around. I accept that. You have to work with what there is, not try to force things. Not put pressure on, but take pressure off. I’ve gotten him to download his supermarket’s app and am trying to get him to take advantage of their weekly bonus box offers, which he needs to pick and activate weekly. (Takes 30 seconds but constitutes another burden on him.) He just bought 1000-euro glasses. My eyes are more complicated than his. My glasses cost around 50 pounds max. It’s a matter of making choices. He now refuses to buy olive oil because it’s gone up in price so much (which would be good for his heart; he’s told me that he has a minor heart condition condition), but undoubtedly spends a lot of money on highly processed fake meat products (which he fries in sunflower oil now, which doesn’t appear to be that much cheaper, btw). He could probably use some help making better choices. Many people can, nothing to do with autism. He needs gentle guiding that allows him to feel in control (autonomy) and feel better.
   
   Mind you, I still owe him EUR 700 toward the first month of my rent at what turned out to be a dreadful place but was supposed to have been regular independent housing (unfortunately also in the boondocks). My life completely collapsed after I moved into that place. I never should have moved into it. It wouldn’t exactly have been a complete nightmare for everyone around me if I had put my foot down and waited a month longer for a nice place in Amsterdam. I’ve really been beating myself up over that. How could I have been so stupid?

I think he also needs to build a daily relaxation routine into his life. He has no hobbies (left; he used to play the piano and he used to skate on natural ice). (His life looks pretty burdened but empty to me. Little nourishment. But that’s just me, and I know it. I’d be going to lots of cultural events and attend meetings and go on walks and so on.)

After the incident in which he threw me to the floor, his breathing was actually normal for a while, so he’d gotten rid of some tension. It didn’t last very long. (It’s notably his breathing that indicates to me under how much pressure he is. It’s undoubtedly affecting his heart rate and that in turn may make him feel uncomfortable too.)

I find it hard to separate the stories he makes up from reality when he’s making up stories. He often says things about others that are actually a way of communicating his own wishes. (That way, he can hide or avoid vulnerability or discussions.) To me, he said last year that I had a pioneering business that didn’t make it. (That’s hogwash, if only already because I wasn’t really doing anything out of the ordinary.) To others he said that I had lost my income in 2022. That’s not true either. Instead, I suddenly actually had a source of income the origin of which I wasn’t sure of as I was receiving text messages about DWP home visits that were actually about lock-picking intrusions. I decided to try to make use of that income to get out of there. I’d already tried to get away four times before the pandemic. (He’s aware of that, but he didn’t like the reason why I had to leave, so he tried to turn it into a more palatable “reality” several times. That said, others weren’t willing to accept what was happening either; it was much too crazy.)

He gets annoyed when people talk to him when he’s cooking. I just read that even that can be pathological demand avoidance. (Someone posted that about themselves.) I see it as feeling overwhelmed – or as sensory overload, sometimes, too – or as having a very narrow focus or preferring a very narrow focus (as seen from the outside). (There’s a lot going on inside that doesn’t surface.)

I have known another mildly autistic person for slightly longer. I think that her autism is quite a bit stronger. The way she deals with sensory overload is shut out all other signals. She literally won’t hear you. That’s her version of demand avoidance, I suppose. She’d also make appointments and then forget about them. (She was diagnosed by her daughter, btw, when the daughter was studying to be a psychologist, which she is now. One day she said “Mom, do you know that you’re autistic?”. So is her sister and so was their dad, who I’ve met.) So when I realised that she’s autistic, I read up on what I should do and I let her know what I thought. She confirmed.

My big problem is that I sometimes Iose patience when I am dealing with an autistic person by email (particularly when I am under a lot of stress myself). I need to remember that. (My now different cultural background is hard enough on people, also allistic ones. I can see that. I’ve really become pretty English. In England, I increasingly started using email because it was often the only way to get straight answers out of people.) I like having people around me with super-fast allistic minds – like HvP, may she rest in peace – because they challenge me to but other people challenge me in different ways and I’ve also sometimes been told that I have an amazing level of patience (also by a teacher). It’s just or mostly email in which I seem to fail. I’ve never liked email (etc), because there’s so much you miss. There are no facial expressions, for example, to go along with the words, on either side.

I get the impression that it helps autistic people to offer them a spacious and supportive/empowering soft cocoon, so to speak, not a restrictive and imposing steel corset. I don’t know how else to put it. Something that let’s them be, and allows them to feel expansive when they want to but doesn’t try to force them into anything. They also prefer short and clear, unambiguous communications.

Autistic people can be really peaceful to be around, I’ve found, thinking back to the hours I used to spend with my female friend. They can be like gently babbling brooks. That’s probably if you focus on them and just let them be. (It takes the focus off yourself, also because they miss things about you that others might focus on instead and want to talk about.) Just like a gentle flowing brook?

They can also be a little controlling, I think, and for example visit your home and change things while you are away, do something about things that annoy them, such as ticking clocks, or grab documents off your desk when they visit, right in front of you, without considering that it might be a highly confidential client communication. (I don’t know about you, but this isn’t something that I would do.) They won’t ask for permission. (Am I generalising?)