I kept wondering whether I should make this post or not.
This is the truth about what really has been going on with me and my experience with someone else that you probably know.
Now that I have advanced enough in my healing and that the rose tainted glasses and the distorted filter of love are no more, I have no reason to pUrotect that person anymore.
The images in this post are screenshots from things that were public. I do have further evidence in DMs proving it is indeed them behind the content in all of these screenshots but it wouldnāt feel right to share them publicly.
Backstory
I got bullied by them after having befriended them for around two months in summer of 2021. The whole cyber bullying and online stalking phase lasted for well more than 6 months (started in September 2021, ended in end of March 2022). It started on Instagram with their public stories about me (not naming me, but absolutely dropping my name everywhere in DMs to various people of the fandom) right after lying to my face in DM about how sad they were about the friendship ending. If you saw these stories back then, well yes: these were about me.
Now as a side note to retrospectively defend myself about these claims for people here who might not know me well:
- when visioning these for the first time I was multiple times having doubts if these were really about me with just how much things got twisted out of their context. When showing the stories to people close to me they pretty much had the same reaction and laughed at me when I asked them if I was manipulative (which I was really wondering back then as a result).
- Mind that I got all this treatment all because I was doing ādelusionalā things along the lines of what this person is currently doing with their yumeship. She got obsessed with self shipping culture and further to an unhealthy extent ever since she knew me.
- I had come across these stories because I wanted to check on them at first to see if they were doing okay, as they had told me in DMs before blocking me saying right before that they were soooo sad that this friendship ended. It was out of a place of concern and not whatever they had depicted here.
- The whole claim about me being a āstalkerā and āobsessedā with them was due to me knowing they had a public online activity since around 2015 and checking their profile when they would post Vaati art. I had indeed personal issues back then but that werenāt relevant anymore around the time I started exchanging with that person.
- visibly I wasnāt that ātoxicā in the end since afterwards we got into a 2 year long romantic relationship (I know).
Now for the context following these stories:
They couldnāt stop talking about me online for all these months. Among others they kept vague posting on Reddit for months about me, making a whole freaking website for me to find, joining multiple places they knew I was in.
The peak of it was when they joined an online ācringe cultureā forum to mock people like me. I was not targeted on this forum but another person had been put in danger because of their behaviour. (You might wonder why and how I know of such a place online in the first place, which is a very valid question. It was a pretty well known place we kept tabs on in a āfictoā community I used to be in to make sure we didnāt have any leaks from private servers).
^ Some of the Reddit posts. These were screenshotted a while ago so I apologise for the missing info there although their username was pretty random and really wouldnāt have prove much except if you had access to their posts history. The (multiple) accounts donāt exist anymore anyway. These specific ones were from a time when they thought to leave the Vaati fandom altogether before joining a fandom server again in end of March 2022 where they finally saw for themselves that I was a normal functional human being despite my love for a fictional character.
The relationship and its end
As you see it had started already very unhealthily. I had accepted their apologies and their feelings for me, just grateful that they wouldnāt hurt me anymore, also thinking that they had learnt a lot from it and changed. Overtime I learnt to love them. They do have some nice qualities, I believe in that, although I wonder to this day how much of them I truly knew.
In hindsight some of their behaviour persisted in the relationship. They always said themselves that they were very scared of abuse, always looking for signs of it, always saying that they would never lay a hand on their partner for that reason. And it is true, I have never known any physical violence from them. Their constant vigilance about these topics were a double edged sword however. Somehow in arguments I found myself called manipulative, controlling, wanting to cage them, when in hindsight I realise I was asking for the bare minimum. I ended up questioning my own reality. By the end of our relationship I was getting regularly ghosted. I felt literally insane. āIt is not about you, it is about me.ā They were going through some issues and I wanted to be there for them. I tried my best at leaving them space. But got angry outbursts from them when I dared checking in on them because I feared the worst (I am keeping it vague on purpose here). So I left them that space by breaking up, seeing that all my partner needs were stressing them out and proposing my friendship instead for the time being so that i could still be there for them but in an healthier way. It still wasnāt good enough and I ended up getting blocked everywhere again.
They came back months after following someone elseās advice because they were seeing me ātriggeredā. I indeed was alarmed by their behaviour mimicking a lot their behaviour of back then, no bullying this time but including claims of them saying once again that they were ācagedā , metaphors about how glad they were free from me and in those new DMs being upset at me that they couldnāt ācontrol the narrativeā as they once did after they learnt that I had talked in private about what I am talking here now. We did talk some of the things out. Ultimately I felt like the only reason they wanted to keep me around was to give themselves a good conscience: āI am glad we can be on friendly termsā; to keep me around for self soothing and their own peace of mind. They would say that it would be an advantage for the both of us. It only reopened old wounds for me and gave me false hopes because I was blinded by the idea that their love would help me heal. But it didnāt back then anyway. For that, thank you for turning me down.
That is when I realised once more that we lived in two different realities. It is easy for someone to move on when they were not on the receiving end of everything they did. They were not the one whose name got dragged in the mud, had very private emotional info displayed publicly for everyone to laugh at and judge twisted out of their context (which used to make me feel very shameful hence me keeping my mouth shut until now), spent an entire night deleting private messages with them because fearing them using private info once more against me, were constantly anxious for months then years after around their own social medias because this was the place it all happened on, got their very soul raided for their own ādopamine hitā and are still dealing with the aftermath to this day with them running around in the same online space as if nothing happened.
This is for these reasons that I am doing this post now. Yet I am still doubting myself. Until the very last minute I will ask myself if this is really the right move. If all of this will help me heal. If this will help me move on in a last desperate attempt. If this person deserves it. If I will get once more my words twisted so that I look once more like the villain. If people will start hating me. If itās too late because the core of it happened āyears agoā as this previous partner said. If this really is the right place to talk about this. If people will see me as the crazy one.
But then I remember that they didnāt have any issues destroying me and betraying my trust multiple times.
Final words
I do not want to disguise this post as me doing it to pass a big self righteous message. I think there indeed are several lessons from this experience but I do not want to tell you what to see in it or what to think. In the end I am really making it now to move on, now with a rested mind knowing that I stood up for myself like I was supposed to instead of wondering for the next years wether I should make this post or not.
If anything, the one takeaway I could point out is that it is so scary because itās never something you think will ever happen to you. That you would never let yourself down to anyone. Then you come across someone who says or does something that you find upsetting and you try to stand up for yourself or ask for explanation. Then you are called abusive for it. You love that person and trust their judgment so from now on you try to watch out your behaviour for any toxicity sign. you slowly end up not standing up for yourself anymore because that would be ātoxicā and you do not want to be toxic, do you? And by the time you realise it you already are a shell of your former self. Once it ends, they tell you to cherish all the good moments like they do, they tell you that it wasnāt all that bad, that they learnt so much from being with you, but you cannot because they are tainted by everything else and you didnāt get really anything positive out of this experience. And now itās your problem for not sucking it up and moving on like they do. Which you obviously cannot because while they might be able to walk away with scratches you are paralysed by open wounds and deep seated trauma.
Before I get eventual backlash from them, I am not perfect. We are all fallible. I had some unresolved issues too, notably considerable ones that the trauma of the online harassment left on me. I wasnāt honest both with myself and with them with blindly believing that their love would make up for everything they did. I also had some issues as well prior to this but I never wanted to make it anyone elseās problems.
By now I have rewritten this post multiple times, not sure of which approach to take in order to not be misinterpreted because I am well aware of how this post can come across with having an ex who happens to have been a well known and very liked figure for years. I know how people tend to treat exes of such people who come forward. In fact there is no perfect approach. No matter how I come forward with this, there will always be people to criticise me for simply coming forward in the first place. No, no one needs to know what happened behind closed doors between two online micro personalities. In fact I HATE talking about personal things publicly (I did try not so long ago being more public about some things as a coping mechanism to make up for my anxiety but it simply is not like me to do that so I stopped). I do want though for people to finally have my side of the story out there as well so that I can finally move on and for that I do, yes, need to talk about some behind the doors things.
Ultimately I hope I can build a safe place here for myself again and no longer have that sinking anxiety when visiting my socials. I want to set the record straight because this is pretty much still widely affecting me to this day.
I still, somewhere very deep within myself, believe that people can change, just I learned that for some it can take several lifetimes.
I know so far I made it sound like everyone will be against me but objectively this is not true today. I have had many people who supported me in private places in the last few months: I am very grateful for that and in fact this is also what today gives me courage to talk about this here. I guess all my concerns are just the trauma speaking again.
I trust you to be mature about this, form your own opinion (or none). This is supposed to be my very last post about this issue and I donāt want this mess to drag on for any longer or give it any more of my energy.
Now I have talked for way longer than I originally intended. Thank you for reading.
