While I was on the bus on the way home from storage and post-storage errands, I saw this video on Threads that triggered a traumatic flashback for me.
The video doesn't matter really, it's just a woman being abused, what else is new, a guy picked her up and tried to throw her in a pool and she choked him out, put him to sleep, and all the surrounding people did not defend her and did not say put her down as the guy was carrying her, but they were saying let him go let him go. It was like a half dozen guys and one other woman. Young people. And it was a white guy that had picked up this black girl and tried to throw her in the pool. Nobody defended her, but they tried to stop her from defending herself. She put his ass to sleep.
Those elements somehow made me remember something that was not like that but when I was 17 and I was with this group, I wasn't really one of them but I was associated with them, this group of young hippie type guys and girls called the Love Punks, we used to go to one of the guy's places, his name is really distinctive so I don't wanna say it, because he still exists and he can be Googled by that name, but anyway we used to go over there and like hang out. Several of them lived together. They all took psychedelics and smoked pot and such, but I didn't. I wasn't into that. I was dating one of the guys in the scene, but it was over btwn us by the time this event happen. This incident.
I liked another guy there but we weren't seeing each other. But anyway we were all teenagers and this woman across the hall in the apartment building, she was a black woman in her 30s and we were all in our late teens, she invited us all over to smoke weed. I don't smoke but I wanted to go cause I wanted to be around the guy I liked. So we all went over there, it was like three guys and two girls.
Then once we got in there it very quickly became a super bad scene, the woman said she was gonna go into her room and find the weed that she wanted to share with us. But she actually went in her room and smoked crack. Then when she came out she was of course acting crazy and weird and paranoid and scary. And she was saying that she couldn't find her weed and she thought one of us stole it.
And we were all saying no not at all we've all been right here waiting for you none of us moved, etc. And then one of the guys was like saying this is a bad vibe and we should all leave and she was saying nobody's leaving until I find my weed. So we all consented like, you know, turn your pockets inside out and whatever.
At some point she decided that, for whatever reason, it was me who had stolen her weed. I was sitting on the couch with one guy on either side of me, and then another guy was in a chair across the room with his girlfriend in his lap. And the woman who lived in that apartment decided it was me who stole her weed. And then everybody was saying Adam doesn't even smoke weed. And she said I don't care, then she took it for one of you guys. And she wanted to search my purse. And I said no. Which enraged her.
And she told me to stand up which I did immediately because for whatever reason I assumed that she just wanted to look around where I was sitting to see if I had tucked it around there or if it was lost on the couch or something.
As soon as I stood up in front of her she backhanded me so hard she knocked me back down into a sitting position on the couch.
Of course, in general, in any normal situation, I would usually not want to strike a woman especially not a woman who was smaller than me, which she was. She was like petite, but maybe she was just a skinny crack addict who was shorter than me. But she was fucking high on crack! So she had some power in her. And it was an automatic primitive instinct for me to immediately rise up to fight back.
Are you familiar with what it feels like to get violently attacked? 
The two guys on either side of me immediately tried to hold me down and stop me telling me it's not worth it, don't do it etc. They found that I was more wild than anticipated and they could barely hold me down and the third guy that was in the room came over and participated in holding me down and holding me back. And it was like all three of them with all their might holding me down on the fucking couch after I'd been struck really hard by this irrational cunt that I didn't do anything to. And I just snapped.
I mean from a position of being unable to do anything physically after getting hit, something just snapped in me mentally. I couldn't believe that people I thought were my friends allowed me to get struck like that in their presence and not only were they not defending me, they were preventing me from defending myself.
That compounded the trauma of the moment for me. I couldn't believe I was tightly securely held down by three males that I had trusted before we walked into that apartment.
For some reason that video that I watched on the bus, brought this all back viscerally into my experience, and I can still feel it physically. Which is the nature of PTSD, and I have CPTSD, which a lot of people do.
And then once we left that place, but not before she found her little baggie of weed and was apologizing to us and then nobody wanted to smoke with her we just wanted to get the fuck out, then they were all saying they didn't want me to get legally in trouble, they didn't know if she had a gun and she would kill me for fighting back or on and on and on all these excuses they had for why they wouldn't let me fight back. I was absolutely stone cold enraged by what they had done to me, which was worse for me than what she did to me. Because I didn't know her, but I knew them.
So like this is like 40 years ago I'm talking about, and I'm still angry.
I wish I had said I never wanna speak to any of you again, to the three guys that held me down. But I didn't. One guy I continued to be friends with for about five years more.
The other two guys were out of my life pretty soon anyway for different reasons.
The guy I was friends with for five years, he would come over to visit me and Rupert and Ruby when I was like 22, and then he smoked weed with Rupert once when I was away for my friend Ken's weekend birthday party with his five best friends at a cabin in the woods. And Rupert was supposed to be not using any drugs, including weed.
After that I stopped talking to the guy. I told him I would never speak to him again. And I never did. He tried and tried for years to contact me and apologize, trying to use as an excuse that Rupert was older than him, pressured him to lie, etc. It doesn't matter.
But that's beside the point, funnily enough, that guy is a fucking bank president now. And I don't hate him, but I know from that experience and the other that he's weak as fuck. I don't miss him, that's for sure.
Anyway. Yeah. How's your Friday night going? 🤣
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