Pivoting back to the subject of how the attention to my public relationship last year affected this place…
What I didn’t like was that it brought in a large volume of people who were yet-to-decide.
It wasn’t that I was worried they might not like me or not like my writing or want to stay. It wasn’t that I was going to be upset if people didn’t stay.
It was that there was this big group of people who were all the way out in the farthest ring of intimacy in a place whereas I want to draw people as close to center as possible.
In life, there are people you like; people you love; people you know; people you encounter; and people you only know of. People who arrived here having only heard of me while knowing nothing about me were all the way out in the thinnest ether of human connection… and there were a lot of them.
That transient population rivaled the actual residents in size for a while. I didn’t like that.
I wished there was a way that I could speed up the gravitational process. Some would pull closer; some would leave orbit; none would be in that farthest ring for long… because they couldn’t just know of me while hearing from me.
I don’t take people deciding I am not for them as a failure. While losing a subscriber isn’t something I want, there is something larger in that loss that I do want. I want to be fully myself exactly as I am and I want to show enough of me and who I am and what I care about for people to decide. When someone bounces, I take it as having given them enough to decide that I am not for them. I don’t see that as failure. I see it as at least a partial success.
To me, failure would be writing pleasant, mass appeal tripe that I didn’t give a shit about because it would be generally appealing to people or might ‘do better’.
When my account on Twitter went from nothing to nutso, I came to fully grasp a fundamental truth about popularity and popular opinion: if you are a fully authentic human being, the larger the audience, the closer you will come to having 50% of the people hate you for the exact same reasons the other 50% love you.
If you want to be widely loved, you need to be narrowly seen. You have to hide your facets and reveal only the ones that people will like.
To that, I say ‘fucketh, no.”
I didn’t like a place I think of as long table where a community of people meet being suddenly chock-a-block with people uncomfortably mingling about the yard not yet sure they wanted to sit down. It just felt uncomfortable to me.
Soooo, dating someone famous whose celebrity could funnel people my way… made me uncomfortable… and the thing I refused to do was write things that would appeal to those new arrivals. The reason was because my doing so would be intentionally doing something inorganic and inauthentic in order to benefit from the person I was with. I thought that was a moral hazard. I loved the person for them. I wanted nothing from them but them. Doing anything at all that sought to benefit from them would compromise that. I wanted them to see that when I told them that I loved them for them and wanted nothing else from them, I meant it, I lived it, and they could believe it.
And that is a perfect segue to one of the things I wanted to say in advance of entries to follow:
I was authentic with this person. I was moral and upright and authentic in how I navigated my relationship with them. Being authentic and being authentically who I am is not just important to me, at this point in my life, it is one of the central pillars of who I even am. It is core to my identity and how I think of myself and who I want to be – who I have chosen to be. I am vigilant about living up to that authenticity and I am defensive against anything that would compromise it…
…and it has been compromised over the past year.
The reason:
The person I was in a relationship with – someone who I just loved with the whole of my ability to love someone who doesn’t have half my DNA – just up and decided one night last July that it was actually perfectly fine to just be an abject fucking liar about me and everything having to do with me, our relationship, and their feelings for me.
It is that simple. It is that blunt. The other party decided July 2nd of last year that being a complete public liar was fine.
It literally happened overnight.
The other party literally erased all evidence of my existence in the dead of night… and then only added back what they had erased when they couldn’t come up with a good enough lie to explain why they had done it.
They did it because they had lied about our relationship to people in their life for reasons having nothing to do with me or our relationship. There was dysfunction in those relationships. They lied about ours to try to resolve dysfunction with more of it.
And they thought that was a fine thing to do after having brought someone out into their public spotlight three months earlier.
Someone with a platform that reached millions of people just up and decided it was morally appropriate and acceptable behavior to lie through their teeth to those millions of people to keep *individuals in their life* from finding out they had lied to them too.
Literally, overnight.
I opened Instagram and all traces of my existence had been wiped out – along with everything else on their feed.
The video from three weeks earlier of us at the Emmy’s where they had been probably the happiest they had ever been in their life, gone.
The post from a week earlier where they had said I was worth fighting for and facing their ghosts, gone.
The first picture we ever posted of us together – which I just treasured because it tracked to what I wrote above about loving my supporting role when it was her moment – gone. It was a selfie we took at the hotel bar the week their book launched – which was also the day our relationship became public. We were both dead tired. We hadn’t eaten. It had been a long day which had ended with the book signing which I had bought tickets for before we were even together.
That picture was just… happiness.
It was just… being full.
And it was just… gone.
Like every other trace of my existence.
From that day forward through the following March – a period of nine months – the other party was so abjectly dishonest – and their public display was such an abject fraud – they literally never again referred to me, our relationship, or having any feelings for me in the present tense.
Nine months.
Over the entirety of those nine months, I very much existed in the present tense. We spoke nearly daily for most of it. They talked to me – literally - more than they talked to their entire circle of friends and family combined… and over the entirety of those conversations, there was never a time when they weren’t telling me they loved me - in the present tense - and that they wanted to spend the future tense with me until the day they… past tensed.
For nine months, the person who preaches authenticity in t-shirts about kindness, thought it was perfectly kind to lie publicly about my existence while telling me privately of my importance…
that I was the love of their life…
that they had never loved anyone more.
In November, they wrote a post about ‘their journey’ in which they thanked their friends and family for being in their life in the present tense… and thanked me for… my help… in the past tense. We had spent 60 hours on the phone that month and had talked every day but two. They loved me when there were no witnesses. I didn’t exist when there were.
While they were lying about me publicly they were also… threatening me to keep me from talking about any of this.
The same month the other party decided launching a wholesale public fraud about me was perfectly fine adult behavior, they dangled a backhanded comment which effectively suggested I could have my public reputation destroyed by lying about me as a person.
Their suggestion was that I could be harmed by taking heated comments I had made; stripping them of context; and then using them to misrepresent me in a false and defamatory way. The other party didn’t experience their comment as threatening. It absolutely was. I told them so at the time. It was concerning enough that I reported it contemporaneously to multiple other people.
It wasn’t threatening in the other party’s mind because those heated conversations had been about their behavior – and they mentally erase their half of those kinds of conversations. They just… wipe them out… leaving only my half… as if they happened in a vacuum… and I just randomly blew my top about something at minute 96 of a conversation… for no particular reason… and out of the blue.
In reality, those heated comments were typically made in the 50th minute of the 100th argument about the 150th episode of the same lousy, hurtful, wildly inappropriate thing the other party had promised to stop doing 50 times.
The other party has since dangled that same threatening statement many times – including as recently as a month ago. Just as I did the first time they did and every time after, I reminded them of the part of the tape they mentally erase – which would not leave them looking like the victim in the equation… AT ALL.
I have thought long and hard about just talking about the sometimes heated, out of character, out of bounds comments the other person was referring to.
[I have been so fucking tempted to do that these last few months in particular. Doing so would have gotten me out of being at perpetual gunpoint just waiting to wake up one day and find out the other person had pulled the trigger. I had actual nightmares about that happening. It took a shitload of work to cope with that prospect.]
At some point, I will talk about the comments the other person has been using to threaten me. I’ll talk about what I did wrong and take accountability for it… and then I’ll explain how I modeled personal responsibility and having personal ethics and character that actually mean something to me in taking steps to actually get better at handling being treated terribly.
I literally did work to do better at handling being constantly subjected to battering behavior psychologists characterize as… Well, it starts with an “A’.
I will absolutely own up to and take full responsibility for my behavior, flaws, and mistakes… and the reason will have zero to do with the other person.
It will be because of the person I have to answer to…
I don’t answer to a jury. I answer to an internal judge.
That judge doesn’t accept justification or mitigation as a defense or in considering a reduction in sentence. If I did something that violates my own standards of right and wrong, I am guilty of it. There is no “but I only did it because…”. If I did it, I did it. My internal judge accepts no explanations for code violations. Violate the code, the verdict is guilty. It isn’t complicated.
And there absolutely was some “I did it.” in this. I sure as hell did lose my damn my mind sometimes. I absolutely did. It was my responsibility to keep how I expressed that inbounds and sometimes I didn’t. I give myself no leniency because of the circumstances.
There is one group who strenuously disagrees with the harshness of that self-judgment:
The American Psychological Association.
They see being baited into behaving in ways that are out of character by chronic or persistent severe mistreatment as not deserving of conviction.
My inner judge doesn’t care. That is not how my inner judge works.
And I like my inner judge – harsh bastard though he is – because if I pass muster in his court, I need fear no jury… and that is exactly why that judge has the power over me.
When I was a kid, I couldn’t trust the jury because my father was on it, and he used guilt as a weapon. So, I turned down the microphone in the jury box and turned up the one in front of my internal judge. If I lived up to a high enough standard set by me, I was immune to wrongful convictions by my father – or anyone else.
I hold myself to a standard I find plenty high enough specifically so that I am not vulnerable to unfair external judgments. That protection is the benefit. The cost is having to live up to a judge who doesn’t care what the APA thinks – even though he knows they are right in this case.
I have more to say and I’m going to say it... but before breaking this off, I just wanted to thank folks who have sent me kind messages. I have yet to get through my whole inbox but have seen people’s kindness and appreciate it.
There has been one common refrain in replies I’ve seen so far that I wanted to just touch on – and it has been about treatment, support, care, etc…
People are being incredibly kind when they take time to share experiences, recommendations, or advice on care they think might help with the emotional duress I’ve been under. I see and feel and appreciate the heartful, kind place those offerings come from. I feel the thoughtfulness and kindness in them. Thank you.
I feel like I should shed some light on where I am in regard to the entire subject of my mental health, wellbeing, and recovery though…
First, since this will circumvent much of the subject, in terms of clinically appropriate treatment paths, while this may be counterintuitive, what is actually most appropriate in the specific situation I am in – and after the experiences I have had - isn’t more care; it’s… less.
The most beneficial thing I could do at this moment (and for the foreseeable future) isn’t working on all of this more. It is stepping back into my life in the present; staying in the present; and moving forward.
Delving into all of this more is actually harmful. It entrenches and keeps present things which only serve to keep my beloved and badly mistreated hippocampus looking like a latex balloon three weeks after the birthday party while my amygdala looks like an appendix about to burst.
The faster I complete this divulgence and turn to face forward, the better off I will be and the better I will be. That is a very large contributor to why you are even reading this. I am better off making haste in this undamming than in moving slower so as to make the reading better.
There will come a time when it will make sense to call up the therapist who I adore and respect and consider the chief of my pit crew. I will have things left from this that I will want to (and need to) work through so as to not carry them forward. That isn’t work for today though.
Today’s task are twofold:
1) Get back to living
2) Manage the financial wreckage
In terms of the second of those, the past year has had diametrically opposite impacts on the two parties involved.
By the time the dust has settled and the numbers have played out, one of us will have made several hundred thousand dollars thanks to the other. It wasn’t me.
The other will have suffered losses close to the same size because of the other. That would be me.
The difference between how the two of us were impacted as a result of the other will literally be over a half-million dollars.
One person wasn’t working when the relationship started and only has their current job because of it. The other party was working, and now has half the income they had when it started.
The person who doesn’t drink but has a vineyard next to a wine cellar with a teacher’s salary worth of wine outside a house will pocket what five teachers make thanks to my entrance into their life.
The person who wrote “The Toothache” about the long tail of financial PTSD and how prolonged financial insecurity leaves a person preferring the certainty of pain to the pain of uncertainty… well, that guy got a return trip through the same asphyxiating stress that made it take me a full day to fill out the paperwork for an apartment eight months ago… which is now harder to afford.
My biggest problem at the moment is the financial wreckage left by someone who fully knows they caused it - and who fully acknowledges they did and that it was wrong and that I didn’t deserve it - but just doesn’t have the decency to take any responsibility for repairing it.
That party simply prefers to pocket the money they made off me; wash their hands of the harm they did to me; and go on not giving a remote shit about the damage done to the person they called the most important relationship of their life a month ago.
[But they’re very kind. Just read the t-shirt.]
I deeply and sincerely appreciate the kind sharing of thoughts regarding my emotional health. I am okay there. I really am. I have a firm and full grasp on where I am and the path forward. I am well tooled, knowledgeable, and capable at managing there.
My biggest area of focus is the more pressing and real problem of having a landlord who doesn’t really care that someone who has never had a day of hardship in their life didn’t care about causing hardship in mine.
When your bills don’t even come to your house because you have someone who just takes care of that kind of stuff… and every other kind of stuff… you have the luxury of sitting around wallowing in problems you invent, could solve, and just don’t take responsibility for.
Down here in the valley where us wee regular folk live, the bills actually show up in your own mailbox and you have to open them yourself and then you have to pay them yourself… and you don’t even have a vineyard to sit in while you do it!
Maybe I just need a vineyard.
Folks… this was just the surface stuff. This wasn’t even the stuff that hurt most.
…and for what it’s worth, a little over a month ago, I gave the other party a chance to change all of this… to change the entire story by changing the ending. Despite all of this – which hasn’t even touched on *the bad parts* - and despite them doing nothing whatsoever to make amends for any of it – I approached them. I wanted to give them one last chance to choose to be a decent human being.
I had a proposal. It was strategic. It was designed to be something that would work with their own internal war and bring them relief. It had outsized benefits to them and a modest benefit to me. They would get as close to a free pass on everything they did and all of the pain, suffering, duress, and harm it caused. We would be brought instantly to a place of peace and kindness and positive regard for each other.
The cost to them would be so small, they could literally more than satisfy it by making a sacrifice so small, it was the equivalent of parting with an unused purse they have had laying around for decades.
I’m being literal.
They could have literally told their assistant to go get rid of one of their unused purses and it would have more than covered the slim sliver of responsibility they were taking for damage five times larger - which they alone caused. They’d keep the hundreds of thousands of dollars they will have made off me. I’d keep 80% of the damage they caused to me. I’d still have at least two years of clawing back to even where I was a year ago $4.67 at a time. They would be instantly square with me.
My proposal was basically a no-fault wiping of the slate clean – even though THE ENTIRETY of the harm done here has been caused by the other person’s behavior or potential behavior OUTSIDE our private relationship – their PUBLIC behavior – which violated even the terms of service of the platforms it occurred on.
Had the other party merely respected the boundary between ‘private’ and ‘public’ I would not have experienced an ounce of this. An ounce. I could handle someone badmouthing me to their friends and family in private standing on my head. The totality of the harm here was caused by a person with power, a platform, and reach misusing that power or threatening to in ways materially harmful to my livelihood IN THE SHARED PUBLIC SPACE where I earn that livelihood.
I proposed to the other person that we just come together as two people who care about each other, push everything into the middle of the table and just… share it all. The hurt, the blame, the damage. That we just adopt the posture “Neither one of us wanted this to happen. We have both been hurt. We have both done things that hurt the other. Dishes were dropped. We each care about the other too much to let them get hurt more by the shards. We’re going to sweep them up together because we both want the other to be happy and healthy and well.”
No blame. No finger-pointing. No dividing up the who-did-what. No apportioning the damage. I wanted to get to peace. So I lowballed the damage so severely, it literally would have left me with 80%. I shouldn’t be left with a dime of it. I *proposed* eating 80% of it while the person who profited could part with… a purse… or wine they will never drink… or a tiny slice of the money they made thanks to me.
I told the other party that the two biggest benefits to us coming to that peace were 1) We would be in a good place with each other; and 2) It would change *this*… this story… it would take it from being about a person with means and privilege behaving deplorably and not giving a shit about the harm done to someone’s actual life…
…to being about two human beings were both just human and who had found a way to move past hurt to a place of mutual caring and compassion.
It would be a triumph not an egregious wrong…
…and all they had to do was…
…literally nothing that would have any impact on their actual life whatsoever.
The other party spoke to me in hushed tones… and told me how much they cared about me… and told me I had been the most important relationship of their life… and agreed.
With their previous record of keeping their promises standing at 0%, I said over and over that the peace would only hold if they could keep from the wild pendulum swing from contrite to imagined victimhood that had happened after every other moment of taking any responsibility at all for their own behavior.
They gave me their word…
They assured me, that wasn’t going to happen this time…
They got me to lean in and trust them…
We got off the phone on a Thursday night with them assuring me, they wouldn’t pull the rug out this time.
The next day, they did a complete 180; snatched away their dangle of taking minor responsibility for their major harm; slammed the door in my face and told me they weren’t going to speak to me again.
They had invented some nonexistent, entirely made-up-in-their-head slight which somehow magically reversed the roles and made them the victim. I honestly don’t even know what this latest self-gaslighting was…
The woman who makes as much as an average American does in a year for a couple of hours waving at a parade dangled taking the tiniest amount of damage out of my lap…
…and then they snatched it away and slammed the door in my face…
…and as I went right back into the place I was when those door slams were practically daily, they spent the rest of the night…
…shooting a video to fish for public sympathy on social media literally while treating me with private cruelty.
The following day, while ignoring a dozen messages from me including the one where I asked them to please just stop because I had flashed back to a silent panic attack and had to flee a public place, they were on social media posting a thank-you-thank-you-thank-you to all of the people who had filled their bucket with attention and support for their performative fraud filmed while actually behaving with deplorable cruelty.
And then two weeks ago, in a video shot for the job they have because of me, they chose to answer a question about ‘knowing when to let go’ in a month where the only they let go of was the fleeting dangle of having any human decency, they offered an answer that was the single most dishonest thing I have heard in my entire life. It was so violently opposite of the truth, it is literally impossible to utter something less truthful…
…and it landed me in People magazine again when they connected the comment to our relationship.
I’m not going to print it here, but suffice it to say, it is the most violent opposite of the actual truth possible. Every word. Every sentence. Imagine the complete opposite, you land on the truth.
I wanted us to be at peace. I have never wanted otherwise.
I have done nothing but seek it with this person.
This is simply who they have decided to be as a person.
And I have simply accepted that whether they could be better or will ever be better, they simply aren’t better today.
This is who they are.
The future is for them to reconcile.
They won’t be in mine.
The damage they caused will be though… for at least a couple years.
They get to keep the unused purse though…
…because to them, an unused purse has inherent worth even when not useful, while a human being is just an object to discard the second they’re not.
[Thank you for reading. This undamming won’t last long… and then we can go back to talking about salmon and nature and life and our kids and the things that get us up in the morning and get us through the night.]