Harriet's Sordid Past
Dear Harriet.
What happens when the state one used to reside in during the shadiest period of one’s life has an online database wherein one can (if inclined) look up the criminal offenses committed by ex-friends?
Love,
Harriet
Dear Harriet,
An excellent question! In said situation, one will likely discover details of ex-friend’s lives that one did not wish to know and are yet unsurprising in any given way. One then spends the rest of the night feeling all gross in one’s tummy.
Love, Harriet
Dear Harriet,
Why didn’t you tell me this before?
Love, Harriet
Dear Harriet,
Because you NEVER ASK ME IN ADVANCE, DO YOU? You and your GOOGLING.
Love, Harriet
So, back in college, Flint and I were friends with a pack of boys. Each of these boys were HORRIBLY FLAWED in one way or another, which was presumably why we were friends with them. A side note: if you ever look around at your friends and think, “Good lord, how did I get involved with such a pack of losers?” it is likely because you are kind of a loser yourself, dude. At the time, we all pretended we had created a friendship based on fate, a shared love of dinner parties, and the practical need to develop contacts with weed dealers. In retrospect, it’s incredibly obvious that the real glue that held us together involved several serious drug problems, misogyny (I gave as good as I got), and a fierce denial of crippling and dangerous personal problems of a looming nature. Oh, we were such friends.
We met this group of boys through Nero. Flint and Nero were on the same Greyhound one day, both of them fiending for a joint and awash in the brutal unfairness of a world that does not allow you to smoke a joint on a Greyhound, and only allows you like one five minute stop, seriously, you can’t smoke that quick and like enjoy it, which is a crime against fucking nature. Nero introduced us to his dealer, and also to the pack of rancid boys who hung around his dealer’s apartment CONSTANTLY, and this is how I made friends in college. This is also, by the way, why I think kids smoking pot is a bad thing: LOOK AT WHO YOU MAKE FRIENDS WITH, JUST LOOK AT THEIR FERRET FACES AND STINKFEET.
Not too long after that, Nero fucked off to a farm somewhere to live in a tent and get over his high school girlfriend (Nero was always and forever getting over his high school girlfriend, and it was, by the way, his sophomore year in college). But Flint and I had already made friends with the other dudes, so we spent that summer getting really high, watching shitty pirated movies, and talking about what a loser Nero was, seriously guys look at his hair does he think he’s a hippie, which is how I learned that boys are way more of gossipy shits than girls have ever been.
When Nero came back, I ran into him, as I always did, on our dealer’s couch, stoned out of his mind. I asked him how his trip was, and he blathered on for a while about how CLEANSING it was to be out their in the woods, not HIGH AND STUPID AND WASTING HIS LIFE like all of us had done all summer. Then he picked a fight with Flint about how Flint was bogarting the bong, and it’s not about weed, man, it’s about RESPECT and FRIENDSHIP.
Ugh. Those days.
I hadn’t known Nero very long, but one day I looked at him and just had this overwhelming feeling, the kind of thought that hits you fully formed and without doubt. Nero has a serious drug problem, I thought, and someday he’s going to need help badly. Then I looked around at all the other boys, including Gregory, who was Nero’s best friend. And nobody here will help him, I thought with that same calm sense, because everybody here has a drug problem, too.
Way to sober up the party, Harriet! I didn’t mention my little Premonition of Obviousness to anybody, because I also (psychically) had forseen really bad reactions to this little bit of information. But I made a silent note of it, then spent the next several months quietly reading books about drug addiction and interventions on the side. I wasn’t going to be caught unawares like all these other assholes (it’s okay, you can laugh).
Predictably, Nero got worse. He used a copious amount of drugs in social settings – all the boys did — but I had the feeling he was using far more in private, because his behavior was becoming more and more erratic. If he had a fight with one of the boys, he would get on his bike and ride circles around the house in the rain, sobbing and shouting gibberish until he fell face down in the mud, where he stayed for a while burbling. He pretty much stopped wearing clothes when he could get away with it, even though he lived with roommates. I don’t mean he went around naked, but I do mean that he went around – unwashed – in the same ratty half-closed bathrobe with nothing on underneath. He arranged all his classes for Tuesdays and Thursdays so he could plow through the crates of Wild Turkey he had on standby for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Sometimes, when he spoke, he didn’t make sense. Not “I don’t understand the concept you’re trying to explain” sense, but he wasn’t actually using real words anymore. You could see him plaintively trying to communicate, and it was like he was speaking in tongues. I pointed this out to him once, told him that he wasn’t using real words, and he got so upset he started hysterically sobbing. All the boys rolled their eyes and started riding him, because it wasn’t the first time he had tried to 1) monopolize the only woman in the house with obscene prattling, 2) failed to actually use words, and 3) broken down into hysterical sobs.
Without consulting any of the other roommates, Nero purchased a snake. Oh, god, everybody confided to each other. You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Nero won’t be able to take care of the snake, because he’s GONE FUCKING INSANE, the snake will die, and then it will be one more thing for Nero to lose his mind about. And that’s almost exactly what happened. The snake refused to eat frozen mice, but would eat live mice. Nero couldn’t bring himself to feed the snake live mice, so several frozen mice carcasses just built up in the cage while the snake wasted away. Nero lost the snake in the house for an exciting period of time. And, eventually, the snake just died. And Nero went off the deep end.
Later we learned that the snake hadn’t “just” died, but one of the roommates – the roommate nobody liked and nobody could recall how he ended up living there – had purposefully killed the snake by spraying chemical cleaners on it every day. This was a bad house for anybody, much less a drug addict, to be living in. These were bad men.
After the snake died, what I suspected was Nero’s more hidden drug use started to make its way onto the public social scene; he just couldn’t hide it anymore. One day, I arrived at the house to see Gregory, and Nero handed me a pipe. This was pretty normal – we were all potheads. Just before I smoked it, one of the other roommates stopped me and told me it was full of opium. “Jesus, Nero,” I said, “You know I don’t do hard stuff. What the fuck, man?” Nero just shrugged, not an “I don’t care what you think” shrug, but an “I didn’t even hear you because I am on another planet because I have been smoking opium all fucking day” shrug. Gregory told me that Nero was plowing his way through coke (Gregory with him, because Gregory had a crippling drug problem, too), and had started talking about how cool it would be to go live in Thailand.
I finally brought up my premonition. “Nero is a drug addict,” I said. “He can’t stop using. He is destroying his life. And when he goes to Thailand, he’s not coming back. He’s going to start with heroin and then he’s going to die. We have to confront him.” At first, everybody was super excited. Yeah! Let’s do it! There were some really good conversations as everybody related things they had seen Nero done and never discussed, and how it made them feel. I started contacting interventionists in the area. All the boys worked at the same place, and Nero’s problems had become apparent to management, so Flint discussed with the manager the possibility of his sitting in on an intervention, to add some consequences to the weight of the confrontation. The manager was very good-natured and agreeable, and worried about Nero.
One day, I was getting ready for class when our dealer came over to smoke with Flint. He mentioned casually, “Oh, that intervention? Yeah, we totally had it already. We just had a talk with Nero last night about how maybe he uses too many drugs and should cut back a little. He cried. It was really good.”
“Did you tell him any of the things we all talked about? The different things he’s been doing that scare you guys?” I asked, trying to contain my anger.
“Nah, nah, we didn’t need to. I mean, he’s hurting enough. Why bring that stuff up? Anyway, it totally worked, so…” Shrug.
I tried to collect myself and speak as calmly as I could. After all, this was our dealer, and if I pissed him off, Flint would be all over me – and yes, I understand how creepy and ridiculous it is to try and have an intervention with the dealer present. But our dealer was the social hub of the entire wheel – he paid the most rent, he organized the social events, he dispensed advice like a kingly lord. Nobody would get together without him, and Nero probably wouldn’t have respected anybody’s opinion as much as his. ‘Cause, you know, he was the gatekeeper. “I understand why you did what you did,” I said, “But I think it was the wrong decision. If Nero is an addict – and I think it’s obvious he is – a nice chat won’t make him better. He said whatever you wanted to get you off his back, and now he’ll self-destruct even faster.”
“Nah. He won’t. He’s better now,” our dealer persisted.
“I have to go to class, so I can’t argue,” I said, “but I think Nero will prove my point for me soon enough.”
I didn’t realize quite how soon it would be. When I came home from class, Flint was curled up crying. Nero had come over and beat him up. Apparently, during the fake intervention, the boys had let slip that Flint had spoken to their manager – I’m guessing this was a detail that made the intervention too real for them, and part of what made them sabotage it. Despite the fact that the manager really didn’t care (he had a drug problem, too, did I mention?) Nero considered this an unpardonable offense. He knew Flint had recently had his wisdom teeth out, so he came over, threw Flint up against a wall, and smacked him around his jaw. There wasn’t any serious damage – I don’t think he even bruised – but obviously that wasn’t the issue.
There were a few huge red flags that I wish I’d recognized at the time, as they could have saved me a few more years of grief. When I saw Flint curled up crying, I didn’t care. I honest to god felt nothing. I can’t imagine feeling nothing if somebody hurt my bear, and I acted the way I knew I should – outraged, angry, comforting – but deep within me, I felt nothing at all, no sympathy, no protectiveness, nothing. Hey, Harriet, maybe YOUR MARRIAGE SUCKS, did you think of that?
After making sure Flint was all right, and hearing what happened, I had only one thought. “We have to get to an Al-Anon meeting,” I said. “Our lives are crazy. We can’t do this.” Flint, who had been a whimpering sad sack a moment before, suddenly became aggressive and overbearing. “ABSOLUTELY NOT,” he said. “That’s not the answer.” We argued back and forth. Finally, I told him, “Fine, but I’m going to an Al-Anon meeting.” “JUST LEAVE IT ALONE, HARRIET!” I was shocked to discover he wasn’t just against going to a meeting himself, but seemed poised to actively restrain me from attending one. I laid off the argument for a while, then told him I was going out for groceries. At the grocery store, I used the pay phone to call the local chapter. It was a voice recording. As I listened to the recording, I realized two things: I had really needed somebody to pick up, and this was something abused women do. They call for help from pay phones after escaping on the pretext of domestic chores.
Well, that wasn’t me, I thought. Flint is right. I’m overdramatizing. I’m not one of those women. And I hung up before noting any meeting locations.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that Flint was an avid, obsessive, frighteningly addicted role-player. Like, D&D style. The weekend after I left him, his game was still on. The day I told him I was in love with another man, his game was still on. Nothing stopped his game. There was a game scheduled that day, and when I came home, it had already started. So it was another five hours before I could even talk about what had happened.
After the game ended, Flint mentioned what had happened to the boys. I remember having this palpable sense of relief, thinking, “They can’t possibly pretend Nero is okay, with what he’s done. He’s obviously out of control. Out of his mind. He needs help. They can’t possibly deny help now.” Everybody agreed, grumblingly, eyes downcast, that yes he sure needed some help. I told them I’d put together some information on addiction for them to read, so they understood it more, and I’d call the interventionist I’d found.
And then we didn’t see or hear from our friends for a month.
During that month, Flint decided to quit smoking pot. The whole thing had shaken him up pretty bad. I was ecstatic. I had quit smoking pot as soon as I’d started talking intervention, because I knew it was a goddamn laugh to try and tell somebody they had a drug problem while you were high. And I’d discovered that when I quit smoking, I lost all my friends. Nobody wanted to hang out if I didn’t want to smoke, even though that didn’t stop them from smoking. So I was overjoyed to have Flint quit and join me, so I wouldn’t be so alone.
The first time he quit, he asked if I could buy him some comic books and role-playing books to distract himself with. He worked min wage, and always spent all his money on pot and books and movies, so he had to ask me (or steal my credit card) if he wanted anything extra. That was always a source of stress with us, so we were both happy this time to have me go out and voluntarily, excitedly, buy him everything he wanted.
A week later he swiped my credit card to withdraw money and buy from a different dealer, one who didn’t care who we were interventioning.
Then he quit AGAIN. In celebration, and to show him I had no hard feelings, I took him out for the fanciest dinner. I remember how proud and preening he was, having the waiter give him the wine for approval, look to him for orders, and hand him the bill (though he handed it back to me when the waiter was out of sight).
A week later, Nero had left for Thailand, and the imposed ban on our company had apparently been lifted. I came home one night to find the boys at our house, having a memorial smoke about what a good guy Nero had been. Flint had joined in whole-heartedly. This was the point in my life where I started cutting myself again.
Not long after Nero had gone, I heard a story from a girlfriend of mine who had also worked with those boys. If slut was a word with good connotations – meaning a sexually fulfilled and well-adjusted woman who knew her own desires and didn’t accept the status quo of relationships on face value – that’s what I’d call her. But since it’s a word with nasty connotations, I’ll call her free-spirited. All the boys wanted to get in her pants, but she had pretty specific standards about the kind of sex she wanted, and with whom.
One night, after their shift was over, Nero started badgering her to go back to his place and have a smoke. She said no, nicely, in a thousand different ways, but he kept on badgering, and eventually she went. Once there, he badgered her into a drink. Then he badgered her into a backrub. Then he badgered her about taking off her shirt, ‘cause that would make the backrub easier. She drew the line there, stopped saying no politely, said no firmly and unequivocally, and threatened to leave. He backed down, only a few minutes later to suggest that she take off her pants. She got up and left, and ever after, he treated her like shit in public, bad-mouthing her as a stuck-up skank and trying to convince the other boys to hate her (they hadn’t taken a chance and gotten shut down yet, so they didn’t take him up on the hatefest, still hoping for a piece). She was pretty glad Nero was gone, ‘cause she was sick of being treated like shit, and she was sick of hearing his endless diatribe about how no woman can ever be truly satisfied without dick, thus lesbians are broken human beings. Directly after turning him down, she had started sleeping with a woman, so I’m pretty sure that’s where that came from.
I heard bits and pieces about Nero over the years, while I was still in contact with the boys. After the fallout of Gregory, I stopped talking to any of them, suddenly realizing that disclosing my rape to the same guys who hung out with fucking Nero was just a bad idea from beginning to end. After the bear moved in with me, we were cleaning up some of my old things and found a 20 page manifesto Nero had left for me and Flint, after beating Flint up. It was supposed to be an apology, but was really a grievance list of every wrong Flint had ever done him, and why Nero was the saddest, most sympathetic person in the world. I had never wanted to read it, because I knew the mind that had written it was diseased. When he’d sent it to us, I’d flipped through it to find any mentions of my name, and then written him an 11 page manifesto about how I was not his secret goddamn girlfriend, for reals. I brought a knife with me when I dropped it off (he wasn’t home), and yet still lived in a fantasy world where my life hadn’t become unmanageable.
I’d never read the rest of it. The bear did, and told me all the good parts, the only one I remember being that Nero was sorry to have “completely emasculated [Flint] like that, making you impotent by using my commanding masculinity.” Wowzers.
All this leads up to the present day, wherein I stupidly put Nero’s name into the search database of criminal offenses in the state I used to live in. I’ve never mistrusted my perception that Nero was a drug addict with problems bordering on dangerous and violent. What I learned the other day was just how naïve those perceptions were. I had figured he was starting to go downhill, was getting near rock bottom. I hadn’t realized that he was in a mad spiral, already through bottom, and more dangerous than I had thought. Which is a good lesson to re-learn: whatever badness you sense seeping through a person, that’s only the badness they can no longer hide. There’s a whole pressurized vat of badness where that came from.
Nero has built up a series of charges over the years, getting more expensive and serious. Underage drinking, paraphernalia charges, speeding, reckless speeding. Assault. Intimidating a witness. Death threats over the phone. More assault. And finally, just before I left that town, sexual assault of a child. Then, a year later, a paternity suit.
Telling myself, “You know a rapist,” doesn’t have much of an impact, because, uh, yeah, I know my rapist. And hearing that Nero turned out to be a rapist isn’t much of a surprise, from the guy who tried his best to set up a rape of my friend, who thought no woman was complete without a dick, who harangued me for “flirting” with him and not being his bestest soulmate ever, who “apologized” for physical attacks by talking about his incredible manliness, who still obsessed for bitter long years over the woman who had left him. Who hung out with my rapist.
But I did stop to think about those bad, bad years that could have been much worse. I’ve sometimes wondered what stopped most of those boys from getting more pushy with me than they did, and I’ve always figured it’s because I was obviously somebody else’s property. That’s a really extreme way to say it, but I don’t think it’s inaccurate. Gregory didn’t care that I’d been raped, but when his girlfriend told him she’d been raped, suddenly rape was evil and rapists should be killed. I knew then, and I know now, that if I’d fucked Gregory a few times, my rape would be evil, too. It wouldn’t be a violation until some other dick was getting what only his dick should.
I’ve said this before, but I never really applied it to my own life. Sometimes, the reason women stay with abusive men is because they assume they will always be abused, and they’re choosing their abuser. I am certain, had I been single, Nero would’ve made a move on me. And without the omnipresent threat of stealing another man’s girl, he might’ve felt perfectly safe about raping me. I don’t have any doubt that the other boys would’ve told me it wasn’t rape, which would’ve been part of Nero’s sense of safety. Granted, the only reason I was in a social group like that was because of my association with Flint, but being surrounded by people of his choosing did exactly what he wanted it to: It made me choose him as the best alternative. For a few years, I was surrounded by completely amoral drug addicts and rapists/rape-apologists. And I assumed everybody was like that, once you got to know them enough; after all, I’d seen the boys act decent and human in front of new women. That’s a dangerous place to be, and since I wasn’t yet together enough to realize “I don’t have to hang out with these fuckwits,” the second best solution was to find some way to protect myself from all of them by choosing one of them. Letting Flint rape me was insurance against anybody else doing it.
Those boys are still hanging out with rapists. God, that gives me a gross feeling in my tummy.
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That’s awful, Harriet. I’m so glad you healed and got away from that life.
This is a good example of why listening to your gut is so important. Thank you for sharing your story.
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I felt the same way when the person I was living with after fleeing my abuser was going out nights and hanging out with said abuser while I lived on his couch.
It sucks but it could have been worse.
I think there are a lot of reasons people stay in abusive situations, mine was I honestly didn’t see it as abuse. The punching I recognized right away but the more subtle mental abuse gets overlooked a lot. The control is seen as just being really protective, you know for your safety being a helpless vagina and all.
I made lots of excuses, hid behind the thought that if you love someone you compromise not realizing that most of mine was not really that but me just giving up every human right until I was no more than a bird in a cage.
People over look abuse unless it is physical way too much. The mental takes a lot longer to heal from imo.
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Thank you for sharing your story. I was raped by my long-term boyfriend, and although it doesn’t sound nearly as bad as your situation, I empathise.
I’m glad we are both in much better places now.
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I’m so glad you got out – being the sober person is hard, realizing your friends won’t hang if you don’t use is hard. It sucks a lot of people back in.
The thing that gives me a sick feeling in *my* tummy is that every addict and abuser I ever steered clear of just went and found someone else who thought that behavior was unavoidable, or who had never encountered it so they didn’t know the warning flags. And after they break through that person they go find another.
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It sucked me back in multiple times. I never got addicted (stroke of goddamn luck, and the good sense never to use harder stuff), but I spent about five years getting high multiple times daily, ignoring the fact that it wasn’t any fun, that I was tired all the time, that I couldn’t think straight, that my lungs felt nasty, and that I had panic attacks just about every time. But hey, I couldn’t be surrounded by addicts, could I, even though every time I refuse a hit I am harassed into providing a reason why (“just don’t want to” isn’t good enough), and then have to defend that reason for an hour before finally getting cold shouldered or harassed into just taking the hit, Harriet, seriously, it’s not a big deal. I mean nobody gets addicted to weed, it’s a social drug, it’s harmless, even if we are all smoking about five joints a day, and Flint throws a shitfit if he ever has to go more than a few hours sober, and my sense of morality is getting increasingly numbed with each creepy dealer we interact with.
So many of my ex-college friends are still hanging out with college kids, though they’ve been graduated for years by now. College is one of the few places where excessive drug and alcohol abuse looks “normal”, since college students are binging and experimenting frequently, so it’s a great place for them to hide their advanced and degenerative addictions. It’s also a great place to meet young people who don’t yet know how to vocalize their boundaries or have enough experience to tell a “bad phase” from a “bad life.” I suspect the “sexual assault of a child” charge Nero finally got slapped with was partially a result of Nero finally getting too obviously wrong for even the college kids, and having to move on to minors before he could find people who were vulnerable and ignorant enough to interact with him. Nero’s a seriously fucked-up guy, but for reals, in that series of increasingly worse criminal charges, could the system have maybe put the brakes on by A) giving him a real consequence instead of a fine and/or B) put him in fucking drug counseling? You know, before his mind got so diseased that he could only socially relate to children?
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‘For a few years, I was surrounded by completely amoral drug addicts and rapists/rape-apologists. And I assumed everybody was like that, once you got to know them enough; after all, I’d seen the boys act decent and human in front of new women. That’s a dangerous place to be, and since I wasn’t yet together enough to realize “I don’t have to hang out with these fuckwits,”’
This one hundred million times!
The worst relationship I was ever in, which was stupid if not abusive, was the result of the gradual wearing down of my ability to see this guy was a total petty criminal asshole.
Being surrounded by other people who were even more sketchy slowly changed what I thought was “normal.” That combined with my social conditioning to think that, “He likes me so much!” meant that, “He’s perfect for me!” Led me down a road that I would not have chosen to go down if I had had a map and could see where it was going to end up.
I am extremely lucky that I had a family that continued to love and accept me without regard to my mistakes, opportunities beyond this relationship, and a way out of the job which exposed me to the sketchy folks. But I’m also sad, because I know luck is the only thing that saved me, and if I had not been able to change course my life would have become increasingly out-of-control and unliveable.
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I realised today that I quite enjoy running in the dark. Dave had instilled Teh Fear in me from the beginning, despite my previously having been all I *will* walk home in the dark and hey, if anything happens I’ve got a handful of keys (and a boatload of privelege should I have to report anything to the police). So anyhoo, it being winter, it’s gonna be nice not having to worry about getting home soon enough to go running. Here’s to breaking our conditioning.
x
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Ya think? Like, they could notice a pattern and try to actually remediate it? Instead of treating each instance as separate?
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okay, that came out way snarkier than intended and you don’t know me at all – sarcasm totally aimed at the “justice” system.
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I actually was in a relationship when I was raped by two guys at a music festival, and even if my boyfriend was horrified, the biggest problem was that I wasn’t anymore only his, I was someway at fault. So he wasn’t only all upset, he also blamed me secretly.
By the way, I’m all for making slut a positive word. We sort of normalized it in sweden at least (the swedish equivalent at least):).
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I mean nobody gets addicted to weed, it’s a social drug, it’s harmless, even if we are all smoking about five joints a day, and Flint throws a shitfit if he ever has to go more than a few hours sober
My now-ex-husband (the man who gave me the option of abuse or homelessness- I chose homelessness) reminds me a little bit of this. He was a wake-and-bake type of guy. When money was tight and we had to cut back, I suggested cutting down on the weed expenditures. That was unacceptable- he suggested we cut down on groceries instead. This, when the weed budget was already more than the grocery budget. I was NOT cool with any drug use besides weed or alcohol, but he would still take pills and then tell me how sorry he was afterward. His alcohol use wasn’t well-managed either- in the first three weeks we were married he ruined a leather hat and a pair of boots by vomiting into them. And yet, I was so willing to overlook everything. He’s sorry, right? It’s not like he’s addicted or anything, right? He’s so perfect for me in every other way, surely I can compromise on this, right? Right.
The worst relationship I was ever in, which was stupid if not abusive, was the result of the gradual wearing down of my ability to see this guy was a total petty criminal asshole.
The ex-husband was also rapist, or will be eventually. He never raped me, but I had to talk him down from raping our friends when they were too drunk to stand up straight, let alone consent. I still don’t fully understand why I didn’t leave him right then and there. I never would have excused that behavior with anyone else. But, after all, he’s perfect for me, and someone who’s perfect for me would never consider raping anyone. Never mind the fact that I JUST HAD TO TALK HIM OUT OF RAPING SOMEONE. Man, those were fucked up times.
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Argh at the bf.
I’m all for making it a positive word too, but at the moment it has to be explained every time. I also find if I’m in a context where it would take years to reclaim it, I really enjoy using it on guys as a joking insult. Maybe that’s the first step? A subtle way of pointing out the double standard?
x
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But marriage takes work!
You have to compromise sometimes!
He needs help! You’re his wife!
Love is unconditional!
We have to make sacrifices!
Everybody makes mistakes!
You took vows!
Yeah, yeah. All that goes on the opposite side of the scales against “My husband is trying to rape somebody,” and somehow looks reasonable. Which it would be, if we were talking about reasonable people instead of abusive drug-addicts, and the other side of the scales wasn’t rape but “sometimes he wears dirty t-shirts in public and it is so so gross.”
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Huh. It’s funny – My stoner ex was the one who treated me with respect. After my completely straight-edge abuser broke up with me (because I would never make a good wife to anyone, anywhere), the stoner was there to talk to me and let me vent and triple check to make sure I consented to hand holding.
Granted, the fact that he lives in CA and I…don’t means that the we didn’t last too long as a couple, but we’re still really good friends and he’s still a great conversationalist. And he still smokes every day.
I don’t know that there was a point to this comment, I just thought the intense contrast was interesting.
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I completely agree that drug use will not magically turn a good person into a sketchy fucker, while at the same time drug use does allow sketchy fuckers many, many excuses to proceed with their sketchy fuckitude.
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Well you just managed to describe most of my high school and after high school friends. Several years of hanging out with pot smoking, coke snorting, meth smoking criminals who had extensive records by age 20. One ex was a rapist, and went nuts on meth, locked me in a closet for WEEKS and raped me nightly at gun point, making me list off reasons why I wasn’t worth wasting a bullet on.
I haven’t looked any of them up. I just assume they’re either in prison or dead by now. Either suits me just fine.
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And I’m sure, in his mind, he had such a perfectly good reason for doing that. Sensible, even. Good lord, they all do.
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Oh, I’ll cosign that completely.
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Which is the whole point of abuse – to make it impossible for you to see your choices clearly. From the outside it seems easy, but when you’re suffering from the emotional equivalent (and sometimes the reality) of repeated head-blows, your logic circuits are blown.
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Of course. I was leaving him. And I belonged to him so he couldn’t have that. So he kept me from leaving and punished me for even trying.
I burned his life down around his feet when I got away from him, and never looked back. (burned figuratively speaking, not with actual fire)
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This is one thing I learned from a decade in law enforcement sorts of jobs: people who do bad things always have excellent reasons for them (at least in their own minds.) Essentially, if you do something bad, you have a choice: either you can admit it was bad, or you can justify it with the available evidence. Very few people can admit they did something bad and just keep going. We are really disinclined to accept the possibility that we are wrong or wicked. And admitting that you’re wrong means making things right. So it’s much easier to say, “They cheated me by not giving me a raise, so they basically owed me the money I took.” Or, “She said no, but she clearly wanted it, and everyone knows women are teases.” Or, “If my three year old weren’t such a little smart-ass, I wouldn’t have had to whup him for his own good.”
This is why I bristle every time I hear “he’s a really good person who made a mistake.” Because every wickedness can be justified under that rubric, at least by its perpetrator. It’s not just the meth-heads–it’s everyone who is too cowardly or too selfish to admit to a wrong act and make it right.
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As if a reason makes evil shit not so evil. If you have REASONS for being evil, by the distributive property, your reasons are evil, too.
I always want to say, “If I punched you in the face right now, I’d be a really good person who made a mistake. But I bet you wouldn’t be inclined to think of me that way.”
But because I am working the boundaries and disengagement and not-judging, instead I am all, “I think you and I have different definitions of what makes a person good, or what is good enough. I don’t think we need to spend any more time talking about this, because I think the actions this person took speak very well for themselves, and we have made our own decisions about what that means to us.”
Okay, but honestly sometimes I just say, “Fuck you, you’re gross.”
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Fuck non-judging. I don’t know who got that shit started. Adults judge. Judgment is a good thing. I also believe in righteousness and wickedness and in good and bad. I believe that righteousness leads to clear understanding and wisdom, and that wickedness leads to self-inflicted blindness and stupidity.
I don’t know whether or not I believe in God, but I do believe that. If I didn’t, what would be the point and purpose of social justice?
Much props for “Fuck you, you’re gross.”
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Thank you for posting this, Harriet. Of course it was trigger-central here, and probably is for a lot of people. I admire your courage for breaking free.
I left my drug-addled abusive situation by greyhound bus in the middle of the night and never looked back.
I just hope that everyone can read your account and be supportive to other friends who go through similar things. I was lucky enough to have an ex-brother in law who was willing to give me a couch long enough for me to get a job and back on my feet.
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When I say non-judging, I mean that I try not to judge the inherent value or worth of people; instead I judge their actions. When I judge people by their worth, I end up maintaining really unhealthy relationships, because sure that guy did a horrible thing, but he’s a good guy at heart. Or, yeah, I always feel bad when I’m around my friend, but she does such nice things for me! It was nigh impossible for me, in the past, to end friendships with people I thought (and still think) are basically good people, because what kind of a person ends a relationship with a good person? A shitty one, that’s who. So I base my decisions instead on this thing you do that I don’t want in my life, which is my right to control, rather than this person you inherently are, which is not my right to control. For the people I care about, that leaves open the possibility that I can maintain a relationship with them with the understanding that I will immediately leave their company if they do this thing I have told them I don’t want them to do.
For example, you can hang out with your alcoholic brother, but never when he’s drinking. The drinking is bad, and the way he acts while drinking is bad, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person. Judging the inherent value of a person gives them every excuse to never change their behavior with you, because they get to pretend that their chosen behavior is actually an inborn, unalterable trait. As in, “Well, what can I tell you, I’m just an asshole,” “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you have to act like one.”
The conflation of actions with worth was one of the things I identified as a component of my abuse, and it was just crazy-making to deal with, trying to tell Flint, “You did this horrible thing to me,” and have him respond with, “But I love you!” Or doing something Flint considered “wrong,” like buying an unripe cantaloupe, and having to listen to a tirade about what a stupid, ugly person I was as a result. So part of my “unlearning” of abuse, and my unlearning of getting too wrapped up in other people, has been to separate actions from a person. I do not, and never will, really know if a person is good or bad, because I am not them. But I do know how a person makes me feel, and I can act with 100% accuracy and authority on those emotions.
It may be an over-explain, but that’s what I mean by not judging. It’s just a tactic I use to keep myself from getting sucked into never-ending value-based nitpicking arguments that cannot be won or lost without browbeating. What I am saying is I have had the “but dad is a really good person, and who are you to judge him with your fucked-up life” argument with my sister a lot, and I’ve found this is the only way to avoid it completely.
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There seems to be a real drive to separate who people “are” from what people “do.” Which is, of course, bullshit. I mean, if Jesus Christ himself came back to earth and started robbing banks, and stealing children’s toys, and beating his disciples around the ears, he would stop being good deity and start being a bad deity.
We are all just a collection of our past decisions and actions; good actions = good person, bad actions = bad person.
I don’t usually have such black and white opinions, but fuck.
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I agree with you to a point, and that point ends at the tip of my nose. I can decide who is good or bad for me. I can’t decide who is objectively good or bad. I can’t do this, because I won’t let other people do this to me — that is, I won’t let other people tell me, definitively, whether or not I am good or bad, or whether or not I should consider a thing good or bad because that is the way they consider it. I consider that a real violation of my boundaries and autonomy, because what the hell does anybody else know about what I believe, think, feel, or want? That’s all my call, and anybody telling me what is good or bad is trying to take away my ability to make that call.
So I respect other people’s boundaries and autonomy by not doing it back to them. Which means I can say somebody is bad for me, but I cannot tell anybody else that person is just bad. They get to make that call themselves, with all the evidence I used to make my call — though the call they make might determine whether I find that person good or bad for me, as well.
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Fuck you’re a genius. The whole ‘For example’ bit is exactly what I should have said to an ex-friend instead of the screaming matches we actually had when I tried to stop him from being an ass. (He’s an ex-friend because he forgot to feed my pets when he promised to and apologized to my bf but never me. I took the hint.)
I’ll try to remember that.
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I think if you’re aware that what you’re doing is bad, and you keep doing it anyway…then yeah. You are inherently a Bad Person. Caps and all. If a drinker keeps doing bad mean shit while drunk, and keeps drinking knowing this? Fuck him, he’s a Bad Person. This does not count if what you’re doing is only bad for you. But once it strays into bad for other people, you’re in charge of your choices and if your choices are bad and you never stop making them, then it’s a Bad Person making bad choices. On purpose. Knowingly.
Sometimes, it can be an incredibly stupid person making bad choices, but mostly, from my own experience – Bad People make Bad Choices and don’t give a shit who they hurt in the process and sometimes like that they hurt someone in the process.
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I’m comfortable with the idea of identifying patterns — as in, you keep doing this bad thing over and over again, and so I don’t want to be around you anymore, ever, because I expect you will keep doing this bad thing over and over again and I’m not going to risk it. What I’m uncomfortable with is generalizations about any person’s internal or total worth, because I think once you decide that’s a relevant tactic, it’s one you open yourself up for as well. If I feel I have the right to dismiss an entire person’s life, feelings, ideas, beliefs, and complications due to their actions, I have no right to complain when other people do the same with me.
I have a chip on my shoulder about that kind of treatment, because I’ve gotten it enough as an abuse victim — i.e. since I stayed with an abuser for so long, it must be because I’m a rotten, needy, horrible person. It was that exact kind of generalization that helped facilitate my abuse, was actually part of the abuse. So, in my mind, those kinds of generalizations are part of the whole problem — that is, if you say somebody is Bad, that is something you did and not them. They acted a certain way, and you placed a value on that action. And when you box somebody in with a value, they have no reason to act differently with you, because their voluntary action has ceased to be a voluntary action and has started to be a permanent fixture. I was a sad and lonely person when I was with Flint, but I wasn’t Bad until somebody told me sadness and loneliness made me bad. And then, why bother trying to change the sadness and loneliness? Obviously, these are inherent parts of me, not things I can choose to change. I’m not willing to say that because I made a very terrible choice, over and over again, I am now a Bad Person. And because I’m not willing to say that about myself, I’m not willing to say that about anybody else. I’ve got no right to judge their reasons for making those choices. I’ve only got a right to judge how I might let those choices might affect me, and whether or not I’ll be around to put up with that.
I also figure, most Bad People don’t think they’re Bad People. They all think they have perfectly good reasons for doing what they do, and pick and choose what consequences they want to see and care about. I don’t think I’m a bad person, and I think I have perfectly good reasons for doing what I do, and I decide what “matters” and what doesn’t when I take actions. If all that separates me from being a Bad Person is that I believe I am a Good Person… well, that doesn’t actually separate me from Bad People. Bad People think they’re Good, too. I feel like setting up two kinds of people — bad and good — lets me dismiss what the Bad People do, because hey, they’re bad, how else are they going to act? And it lets me dismiss any serious evaluation I need to make of my own actions, because hey, I’m good, I don’t do bad things. Alternatively, back when I was 100% convinced that I was a bad and horrible person, I really didn’t need to think hard about my life and how to change it. It couldn’t be changed. I was bad, and I did bad things. Case closed. I really could’ve used somebody telling me that making a bad choice wasn’t the same thing as being a bad person, who deserved bad things.
I also think back on all the boneheaded things I’ve said in my life because I let value judgments slip out of my mouth. Like saying, “Oh, that girl? She’s crazy. She’s completely insane,” in front of somebody with bipolar. Or, “You know, she’s the kind of person who just lets people walk all over her, just completely worthless,” in front of somebody in an abusive relationship. Or, “Well, nobody can ever love somebody like that,” about a drunk in front of another drunk. I just gave those people all the ammunition they needed to continue hurting themselves (and, in the process, hurting other people), because why bother stopping, now that they know they’re crazy, worthless, and unloveable. So I try to change my language so I won’t inadvertantly give somebody an excuse to maintain their sickness, and their rationalizations for the way the sickness hurts others. Instead, I try to take responsibility for the fact that I have problems with other people, instead of assuming that other people are problems. I try to say things like, “Oh, that girl? She’s very aggressive and focused on herself, and I have trouble understanding or agreeing with her decisions,” or “I find it too painful to watch people be treated poorly by others, it makes me feel really horrible inside,” or “When he drinks he gets emotional in a way I can’t handle, and he drinks often enough that I just can’t ever be around.”
Part of the reason I think that way is because I do work in the social services sector, and you have to deal with people who are Good and in a bad place, and people who are Bad and in a bad place. And if I based my work on who deserved my help more, based on if they were bad or good, I’d probably feel better, but I wouldn’t actually be doing much good. Bad People who stay bad keep hurting other people, including good ones. That is, helping an adopted kid get over the trauma of having been in an abusive home is a good thing; helping the birth parent acquire the resources to have gotten their shit together so they never abused the kid would have been better. Nobody wants to help an abusive person, because they’re bad and don’t deserve it, but if they don’t get help, we just end up spending our energy putting out their fires. Which is not to say that’s something to carry over into your personal life — nobody has an obligation to help anybody — but it does mean that I don’t want to classify some people as, basically, human garbage, not worth anything because of their actions. There’s a lot to be lost that way.
I just don’t like putting absolutes on people. An inherent value is absolute, and cannot be changed, and now nobody has to try. A behavior is chosen and voluntary, and it can be changed. People don’t have to change those behaviors, and I have no control over whether they do, but I do have control over whether or not I’m exposed to those behaviors. So I just focus on what I can change, and I consider the rest of it to be extra bother. That is, trying to justify why Flint is bad and evil is a qualitative, lifelong, impossible task. He has done good things. He will probably continue to do good things. People will tell me, “Oh, but he is turning his life around now, he gave a puppy a flower.” And then I will have to argue why he’s still bad, even if he’s nice now. So, this method is a way to help me sidestep all that, to disengage from the really heavy weight of having to judge other people, and justify my judgments, and get trapped in the webbing when those judgments come and bite me in the ass, because sometimes I act shitty, too. I never have to have arguments about whether or not Flint truly loves me at heart, or just needs somebody who understands him, or is capable of so much with the right help, or I should forgive him because I made mistakes, too. None of that has any relevance to the things he does, and the fact that I do not let people do those things to me. Talking about actions instead of people is a cut and dry way to state my boundaries without bleeding into somebody else’s boundaries, and a way to avoid asinine arguments that cannot ever be won because they are inherently qualitative.
This doesn’t mean that this is how I talk all the time. Me and the bear sometimes cut loose about our ex-roommates, and it is all, “Oh my god they are freaks, they are just completely wrong and insane in everything they do.” But if somebody else asked me, “What are those people like?” I wouldn’t say, “They’re wrong and bad and crazy.” I would say, “I’m not compatible with them at all, and we do not get along.” I’m not going to blame them for being crazy, because I know they’re blaming me for being crazy, and there’s no objective way to prove who is really the goddamn nutcase. We both can rally enough people to agree with us, either way. So I just opt out of the whole blame game, and all the energy it sucks out of my life, by keeping the focus entirely on me, ’cause that’s all I can really say I’m an authority on without any argument.
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Great post, and actually, that’s a really good point. People keep saying “but they’re a good person!” like the harm that person does is somehow voided by the fact that they’re really good underneath.
I have a friend who got out of a mentally abusive relationship a years or so ago (she’s doing great now), and another friend kept asking “why does she keep talking to him?” whenever, in the first few months, she’d slip, and talk to him again, and he would be a fuckwad. I’d have to explain, again, that my friend was operating from an assumption that people are good, and that underneath the abuse, he was a good person, so maybe they could eventually be friends (she needs people to like her; we’re working through some of that). She kept excusing the harm he did, like it didn’t count.
I feel that it doen’t matter whether someone is “good” or not; the harm or good they do is all you need to know about. If the harm outweighs the good, then it’s probably safer to avoid them. What’s underneath isn’t what I have to live with – as my ex-husband demonstrated so admirably by being a mentally abusive fucker. “Marriage is about compromise”, my ass. The only one who ever compromised was me.
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What a brilliant post. I have always believed “You are what you do” — do bad things, bad person. Simplistic, and like all simplistic ideas, allowed me to avoid thinking too deeply about some things I didn’t want to think too much about. At the same time, I know human beings, including me, are enormously complicated and do both good and bad things all the time. As a foreign correspondent, I have met people I considered evil, without question. But in talking to them, I found every time that they of course don’t consider themselves evil, they are “forced” to do evil things for very good reasons, usually somebody else did something evil to them, or their brothers or parents, etc. And I know I’m a good person, yet I’ve spent a lot of time looking back at the bad things I’ve done. But unlike Those people, I either really did have good reasons, or just made a mistake, well, lots of mistakes. That doesn’t make me Bad. Just human.
Your way is lots better. And a last thought – in your very articulate, personal take, you seem to be parallelling the principles of a certain 2,009-year-old prophet, allbeit with a bit more colorful language.
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but what about the harm *i’ve* done? what about the shitty choices *i’ve* made as a result of my history/issues/demons/realities? what about *my* struggles and their fucked up manifestations? would it be safer to avoid me? or is it in the calling out and owning of shitty choices that counts? cuz, don’t we all have our shit we have to slog through, best we can – which on bad days can be so opposite of best, it ain’t even funny – but, don’t we deserve to receive support and “compromise” and acceptance and love (maybe not unconditional, but maybe not completely reliant on conditions)? cuz people hurt people. and the shitty reality of it is, the people you love most are gonna hurt you the most cuz you give em opened up access to yer squishy little heart. and so, what? you hurt, or get hurt, and then walk away?
oh my.
but then attack_laurel makes the glorious point of harm outweighing the good, which i guess i just skimmed over first time i read it, so my real question is…
how do you weigh that stuff out?
pro and con lists?
or maybe my real real question is
do i need to leave my lover?
oh somebody help me.
i’m gonna lay it all down on my (new) blog so i don’t take up anymore space on this glorious testament to internet amazingness (harriet you are a fount of strength.)
blah.
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I think everybody develops their own way of judging the good against the bad. It’s a long learning process, and by necessity, it requires you fucking up now and again — that’s how you learn new things.
I’ve got two tactics. First, whenever I review my reasons for maintaining a relationship with somebody, I add a question at the end of every reason. This is something my therapist did to me, and it was just a wonder — I hadn’t realized how many assumptions I had set in concrete that really didn’t need to be. So, for example, if I’m thinking something like, “Well, she was really there for me in a bad time, so I should be there for her,” I then follow that up with an honest, “Should you?” Like, is that realistic? Is that really the way things work? Is that necessary? Is it a physical law? Why should you? If what I’m doing isn’t worth it to me, then I often find my reasons for motivating myself to do it anyway are abusive self-talk, as in, “Well, if I’m not there for her, everybody will think I’m a selfish bitch.” If what I’m doing is worth it to me, then my reasons for motivating myself sound and feel much better, as in, “I feel good and energized when I’m able to help her.”
My second tactic is just a recognition of patterns. There are certain phrases that, as soon as they leave my mouth, I know I’m taking the wrong course of action. Any sentence that ends with, “…but, you know, I love him,” is a bad sign. Any explanation that begins with, “I want to do this the right way,” is a bad sign. Anytime I need to angrily assure myself or someone else with, “But she’d never do that!” is a bad sign. These are all phrases I use to build up an unassailable wall of defensiveness. And you don’t get defensive unless there’s something to defend. Usually what I’m defending is the fact that I know I’m making a poor decision and I’m afraid of what will happen if I try to make the right one. Which brings me back to tactic number one: “I can’t make another decision because the other decision will have apocalyptic consequences!” “Will it?”
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An ex-lover of mine once told me how years after the fact she realized that one of the only reasons she hadn’t been assaulted by the crew she hung out with while younger was that she was clearly the property of someone higher in the pecking order than they. (Or at least high enough to be able to effectuate some sort of reprisal.)
Very fucked up. As are lots of this story.
And yeah, the whole bit about the relationship being fucked in a way so that it makes sense at the time and all compromises being on one side.
Ugh.
I have only one ex friend I would be afraid to look up in a database like that, and that’s just because I’m lucky.
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New reader here. Thanks for this and thanks for your whole blog. I’m here because I live in Richmond, California and I have been trying to figure out how to handle/help/respond to my community about the recent gang rape of a 15 year old girl and the conspiracy of silence by every man who witnessed the attack (at least 20) over a two hour period.
I have a 15 year old son who attends high school in a different district, a white affluent district in the next town over. He has recently become sexually active. His dad is not interested in open dialogue, except to make demeaning comments objectifying women in the presence of his son.
So, obviously, it is my responsibility to not let these learning opportunities go by and I turn to the Internet for the feminist perspective since the feminist perspective is not where the current conversation is focused, either in my private conversations with my female friends or in or community dialogue.
Jesus. I am reeling from the dawning realization of my complicity in a system that marginalizes the fact that we live in a rape culture.
I am sad that I have not thought more about this in recent years, that i took the easier “middle” road that ultimately supports the objectification of women and excuses sexual assault.
It’s confusing. It also is forcing me to admit that I was raped. Fuck. I can’t really figure out how to talk about this now, it doesn’t feel simple. In fact, I am so confused about men and sex that I have chosen to remain single for the past three years. I’m 48 and the rape happened in my mid twenties, but my relationships since then have, for the most part, been rife with emotional abuse and relentless boundary crashing by pathologically insecure men.
Maybe I need to sort this out a bit and reconsider my internal dialogue which revolves around blaming myself for my choices.
I can’t really refuse to engage in some introspection around this issue if I am the only involved parent of a teenaged son, now can I?
So thanks for giving me a roadmap for discussions with him. He is reading these posts too, and he gets it and he wants to have these discussions with his friends. You articulate the truth about our culture so well. I am so grateful to have your blog as a resource.
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Yeah, calling boys sluts does actually work, at least in terms of pointing out the double standards, a simple way of saying that both parts of that sexual encounter is equally slutty… I know they did some interviews in the news paper about this a couple of years back, and the teens did call both girls and boys sluts, and didn’t care much for it. Maybe the change already came, we might just be too old to notice it… ?
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just pointing out that scylla = silia. I just forgot to log in to wordpress last time..
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