#lsstd

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beginner embroidery kits arriving the day before your birthday? it’s more likely than you think

i watched the untamed with friends into the midnight rollover, and i’m considering adding a custom bough of leaves to the top pencil sketch bit in this photo? i think it’d might be a nice way to add and practice a different leaf technique

and also, since it is my birthday...

i’m gonna give myself a gift, or at least one that isn’t the dgm volume i ordered that arrived 10 days early

i’m going to write the next part of this text post as though someone who has previously surveilled my blog might see it, and in the case she or someone she knew did, I would want to say these things to them

this is a decision made against the best advice I have gotten and acting against the best wishes of every person I know who doesn’t want me to inadvertently hurt myself or anyone else.

but honestly, I just don’t feel good thinking about this situation from any angle :/ I don’t feel like I got to just talk with my own true, non-depressed voice.

I’d like to ask people who don’t know someone called “Dread” not to read below out of a general respect for my wishes. But I also know I can’t actually enforce that, so there isn’t really any personal information here.

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i know jumping into abolition could be bandwagoning on my part, but I’ve been trying really hard to think about what it does mean to separate my thinking from carceral logic and justice.

one of the very first things I looked into was the idea of different kinds of justice... and thinking about the questions of what is harm and how do we address it?

and in the concept of restorative justice, I found the language for all I wanted with that person who used to be my friend. 

I was talking to someone about this the other day. When harm happens in a relationship, there’s going to be a need to address it somehow. And if two people harm each other, the harm isn’t cancelled out like fractions or algebra. It just means each person needs a just response from the other.

(To my understanding, this is very different from vengeance. I don’t mean a retaliatory “A hurts B so B lashes back out at A”, and if anything, revenge is a great lead into cool discussions on punishment vs consequences/just responses. Punishment does NOT replace or mean or achieve justice.)

I have tried again and again to say that the thing I needed to feel like I could heal properly was accountability. And I have felt denied in so many ways.

I could list how I experienced everything in the last 2 months, or in the last 4 months, but that feels excessive here.

All I wanted to see was a path to healing that included validation of my pain before it could be healed. I didn’t even necessarily want us to be friends at the end. but I wanted to heal from my pain as much as I wanted her to heal from hers. I don’t like the idea of hurting anyone or being hurt by anyone.

I like to think that two people who are both looking to accomplish healing and justice and restoration can do it so long as they remain committed to respect and communication. I do feel like I have demonstrated a lot of both, I do not feel like I was shown either in return. 

I never initiated a serious conversation without checking in far in advance about availability for both time AND energy long before no contact. I did not ever break no contact after it was asked of me. I always keep a large section in my writings and messages that acknowledge her feelings if I know I will be talking about my feelings. I always make sure to include that I may have misinterpreted her feelings, so I would always be willing to hear and correct and adjust in case I am. I keep myself open to hearing about harms I have caused and I try to apologize and reflect on how to act differently to avoid recreating that harm before I move on to other topics in conversation.

On the other hand, she blocked me with no notice, made me go no contact, invalidated my hurt feelings about both these things (telling me it wasn’t any of my business, even though I’m the one these actions happened to), and then arbitrarily reinserted herself into my life repeatedly, including through Diet Stalking™ and sharing my personal blog with her friends. She told me that my interpretations and feelings are just flat out wrong, deflected basically any of my requests for accountability, and has never addressed my base issue with the incredible disrespect I have felt for a long time. She has also constantly walked away from conversations or just literally blocked me from holding any, while also claiming, I am sure, to have tried everything she could think of to communicate.

I wouldn’t be okay with any of this in another romantic partner in my life, but I wouldn’t even be okay with this in any of my friends.

So what does restorative justice help me think? 

I guess it validates my desire for justice in response to harm to my emotions and feelings, which is nice. I do not feel obligated to be given what I think of as justice, but it’s nice to think that I can wish for it just because I think it will heal me. I’m allowed to want it and not feel guilty just because it’d be hard to do.

Second, justice doesn’t have to look anything like punishment. Sometimes justice looks like apologizing sincerely and listening. To me, it means being available to listen, even if you need to acknowledge beforehand that listening is going to be hard. That listening hurts too, because it’s complicated and emotional. 

It means both people in a hard conversation acknowledging the difficulties with listening first. And it looks like knowing that it’s important to tell the other person about if it gets too hard while also promising to come back to the conversation, even if it needs to be split up into parts because hearing the other person is respectful and important to acknowledging their personhood.

I think justice for me just looks like each person knowing that the other person deserves to be healed. I’m so sad that that is what my heart wants, but that where the situation is actually at right now is... nothing like that.

I really think that you don’t have to be friends to talk about past harm. But you do have to respect each other, and I am so frustrated with the asymmetrical disrespect that I was never able to point at without getting yelled at or making her too angry to listen or acknowledge it.

Just walking away is a resolution too. It doesn’t look like justice to me, but it absolutely stops the further generation of more harm. 

Ending a cycle of unhealthy interactions prevents more harm from being caused. But having difficult conversations addresses past harms that already existed... and I think it’s an important step in genuine healing and recovery. I wish that was a thing that was more possible in this world.

I think it can be intimidating that hard conversations can sometimes raise awareness of intense harms at first. Finding out I did something that hurt someone never fails to make my mind race and blank out at the same time in the first moment.

But I think being ultimately recovery-oriented is one of the most important things. I don’t want to center on my shock, I want to ask what can I do to make you feel safer with me? What can I do to show that I am sorry and I don’t want to do it again? 

And that is an attitude I would want my friends and acquaintances to care about too if I ever wanted to talk about their feelings and my own.

I’d also like to not have people spying on my posts in the future, though :) I would give permission willingly for strangers to read them in other situations, but man, this situation feels too weird. 

There’s an alternative universe timeline where no one I’m kind of addressing this to sees it at all or tells the person it’s mostly addressed to about it being here. There’s a universe where they do see it. And isn’t that weird? That I won’t know which reality I’m in.

This is the packing away I’m at, though. I don’t like being watched, but I figure eventually, and maybe already, there has to be some kind of avoidance of harm that we come to naturally. No one likes harm that much, or at least not the harm itself. There are things that come with harm that are complex, yeah, but I think we have an understandable natural aversion to it.

I can be 25 and temporarily engrossed in a personal conflict, but I want above all to show love and respect in the best ways that I know how. I want to look at my actions and say, do I think this is the best thing I can do?

I like people. I like thinking the best of people, and I like thinking about what it takes to get along. I don’t enjoy resentment, particularly because I’d always rather just talk about something than just simmer with the resentment of it. And above all, man, I’m sappy as fuck for all the kinds of love out there.

I think that keeps me grounded, in the end. Knowing that we tend to avoid harm and generate love and sometimes those wires get crossed in a difficult way. But I want to think the best is possible for everyone one way or another. That love is natural and more infinite than I can imagine.

And sometimes, I can look at myself writing a long text post at 4am and say, hmm. Maybe not this, but a lot of the other things were pretty damn good B)

Mistakes do happen. I'm just still trying to learn from them. Being available to talk is something I don't know how to classify, but it's crucial to my current self image.

Happy birthday to me 🎉 gonna go food shopping with a friend in the morning, so i’d better sleep soon, actually

I don't know if this is all ridiculous or a stretch, but I like to be very earnest and not worry abt anyone who finds me extreme. I would rather live intensely for love of other people than not.

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A month ago, a conversation ended when she was too angry to listen to me or accept my point that distrusting me does not mean it is okay to disrespect me in our friendship. 

I did not feel heard, but I accepted that the conversation should end because she did not want to listen to me anymore. This was a form of shutting down communication that I accepted because I understood the presence of her feelings. 

I did not feel extended the same understanding.

Two days later, she also suddenly blocked me on every platform I exist on without a word. This hurt a metric fuckton and I experienced a lot of emotional pain from the incredible rejection of my entire person that that was.

Another two days later, she suddenly texted me, which kicked up more emotional turmoil again. She asked what I needed for closure. 

I felt that blocking me everywhere without speaking was a pretty clear sign that a full and vulnerable conversation was not something she would want to have with me again, so I simply asked to be heard. I took 2 hours to compose what felt like a final goodbye, and though I was emotional, I respected that she did not want me to be in her life. It was not my place to debate something as important as that.

And to make sure I understood the terms, I asked on that day: is this for forever? The foreseeable future? And she said yeah. There were no maybes about it.

I asked, would it be best if I never contact you first? And she said, that would be for the best.

And I listened. I respected all of this. I understood that I was blocked once again from then onwards. I think it’s actually logical that I assumed this was going to be a forever thing, and that she was going to leave my life entirely. This was basically No Contact.

It hurt so much to have to go No Contact when I wasn’t asked if I wanted to or even told that she thought it to be the best idea at all. I had still really, really wanted to repair things. I had only wanted to feel heard and shown that she could respect me even if she didn’t want to be friends with me. 

Being blocked without notice, as though asking me to leave her alone wasn’t an option, as though I am not worth being told to my face in plain words that she did not want to be my friend any more... It was just plain insulting. It was a pretty genuinely degrading show of how little she actually respects me as even just a person. 

But my hurt feelings were not her problem any more because I understood the rules of no contact. Blocking isn’t a challenge to me to get around the block. It’s a clear signal to not communicate.

So I turned to my personal and private blogs to vent my frustrations and my pain and my sorrows. I have literally never initiated any contact since then. None of my private posts were anything more than diary posts, sometimes addressed to the idea of her in my head as the person who cut me out of her life and left me with tons of unaddressed hurts. 

Even this post isn’t me sending anything. But if any of you are still snooping on me, you might as well get the whole damn picture from me, myself, and I.

I had a long and awful depressive episode after realizing this really was for forever in her mind, but I processed the lack of genuine healing and closure with a lot of help. It was tough, but I really accepted the idea that she would never be a part of my life again out of respect for her desire not to talk to me...when I got a series of messages... from her.

This kicked up more emotional turmoil with no regard for my actual mental or emotional states. I had not touched her accounts anywhere, I had accepted that I would never speak to her again, and that she and I were simply going to have to live different and separate lives... and then she broke into my personal space once again.

Worse, it turned out she had actually been watching me the whole time?? Like, yes, she blocked me, but she was looking at my accounts, my blogs, and talking to people about them behind my back? And in fact, she had gotten a link to my diary blog and had decided to start reading it all.

I found a text on my phone that day. It asked, how did I interpret things like this, so differently from how she meant them? It hadn’t been a forever thing, but we just needed to have time and distance. How could I say these things about her if I ever wanted to be friends again?

The bald faced lie that that held has made me stop trying to protect anyone from the idea of gaslighting being a recurring theme in our communication. I don’t think it’s intentional, but you have to understand how the fuck it happens and why the hell you perpetuate it.

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Caeona, you have not only dismissed my hurt feelings, you constantly tell me that I’m not right for feeling the way I do. You deflect taking responsibility for how your actions have hurt me. You claim you are too emotionally drained to do it or that I am the one who is wrong because that’s not how you meant it, so my interpretations must be wrong. You used to deflect to the coming out frustration even when I tried to address our deeper trust and respect imbalances.

This is basically a checklist of things I had my friends keep track of for me, because when I talk to you and you constantly rewrite the narrative and dismiss my experiences, I get so foggyheaded that it’s ridiculous. It makes me feel crazy, like I’m too sensitive and that somehow I am hurting you by having hurt feelings.

You constantly told me how my interpretations are wrong or improper just because they don’t match yours. You find a way to make things about your feelings even when I am talking about mine, even when I try to acknowledge yours and you don’t acknowledge mine.

But in this month, I’ve gotten a LOT of practice again. It turns out I’m just as good as anyone else at identifying and trying to talk about my feelings.You just got way too comfortable with avoiding personal accountability, and all I have seen is you shutting down conversations I thought we needed to have.

You have disrespected me over and over. You have ignored my space, my time, and my feelings, even after you acted like you were going no contact. When I asked for clarification, I was snapped at for interrogating you. And yet even when we went no contact, I wasn’t aware that that meant you were going to stalk me onesidedly and prey on my willingness to leave my accounts open to the public for my own friends and reasons.

What did I do before we went no contact? I asked you that, if you had time in the week ahead (which you did not have to have because I knew you were busy), I wanted to have a serious conversation with you. I asked you to let me know when you might be free. After you confirmed a time with me, I asked if you had time, energy, and a desire to have a serious conversation first before beginning.

You proceeded to snap at me for asking how much time you might have for the conversation, as though it is invasive and unfair to want to know how much time I have in a serious conversation I tried very hard to leave mostly open to your schedule, and that while I did not care what you would leave for, it would help me to have ANY idea how long I could talk for. You also proceeded to yell at me to shut up, and I really just knew from that moment on that, if you weren’t going to apologize seriously for being in that headspace, that you had genuinely decided disrespecting me was an okay position to have.

When you asked me to go no contact, I did. I stopped contacting you. My personal vent diary is none of your or anyone else’s actual business. It’s true that I made a mistake by leaving it publicly accessible even if it was private in every way except being password protected. I wrote you a very thorough apology for it, acknowledging that this had led to harming you. 

You rejected the apology twice.

Where have you shown me a fraction of the same consideration? Where have you shown any awareness or accountability for the harm you have caused me at any point? 

What are your reasons for stalking me? Why did you do all those things evern after you already asked me to leave your life? Either talk to me or just get out. Take my name out of your mouth and eyes and move on.

I never blocked you. I’ve never left a conversation first. I never stopped trying to acknowledge both your feelings and my own. I would happily post every written thing I’ve ever done to prove it to anyone else. 

But you have literally constantly told me how wrong my feelings are for my having them, you have constantly jerked me around emotionally and felt entitled to treat me horribly with no explanations or accountability for the harm you cause, and I am just so done with the constant “Will she? Wont’ she?” of me never knowing if you’re looking.

Maybe in one timeline, you never see this ever. And you never know all these things I said. And maybe in another, you see it and you never tell me. Maybe you stop reading my blog on your own and I can never tell. I just have to live with the fact that I expected security and privacy from a place of mutual respect, but it turns out, once again, I was trying to respect you and you had no respect at all for me or my experience.

There’s no way to replace that trust without a conversation, so I just have to live with the weird broken trust state. I have to live with the random pangs of fear that you are still watching me and judging me and might suddenly message me for whatever reason you feel like.

Why do I even fear talking to you? Because every time I have tried, you have still dismissed me, just like you have anyone who is even remotely neutral, which makes them equally fair to me and you. It feels like you’re unable to admit to your own mistakes and potential for error. I’m not. 

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