This post is for you. You, the person from my past who creeps my site. You, popping in here “just to see how C is doing.”
There are several of you.
You might be that person who shares my last name, the one who continues to intrude on me with your “So-and-so died, please get in touch” every few years.
You might be that guy I dated awhile back, the one who moved away but tried to keep me on the back burner for booty calls.
Or you might be that other guy I was secretly having sex with and our friends probably all knew but kept quiet about it for the sake of your fiancée who you eventually married.
You might be that former friend whose house I rented for a couple of years. You know, the house you didn’t pay the mortgage on for a decade, even though I was paying you rent? And then you just walked away from it, leaving me homeless in the middle of my worst mental health crisis in years? And you graciously let me stay in your own house for a couple of months until you told me, via text message, while I was still unemployed and near-suicidal, that I had to leave?
You might be that former boss of mine. The one who professed to care about me, who always told me how awesome I was. But you still let the other boss fire me and didn’t look back, and yet you continued sending me text messages on the holidays until I finally blocked you.
You might be that other former boss, the one who professed to be a Christian but who abruptly fired me after months of telling me how much you loved my work, and refused to reconsider even when I begged you to keep me on even just at half the hours, and ghosted me even when I told you I wasn’t able to find another job and was about to be homeless (again).
Or you might be that guy I dated back in the 1990s, in my hometown. The one who keeps tracking me down every couple of years because you still — still! — haven’t learned how to respect a woman’s boundaries and you think messaging me on LinkedIn or my freelancing profiles would be a great way to reconnect.
You might be some other former friend or mentor or colleague whom I’ve forgotten. Someone who used to mean something to me but then ceased to have meaning. You can’t seem to let me go.
And so you keep popping in on me.
You Google me or we have mutual acquaintances on social media or you hire a lawyer because all the people of my bloodline keep dying intestate for some reason and you can’t just tell the judge hey, she doesn’t want anything to do with us, why don’t we just leave her alone and do the probate without her.
When you have the audacity to actually make contact instead of just being a creep, you justify it with variations on the theme of “I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”
“I need to know if you’re okay.”
“Oh, I just thought I would check in.”
“I would like to hear from you.”
Stop it.
You do not, in fact, care about me. At best, you are curious. At worst, you’re indulging in schadenfreude. In between, you’re pursuing me for some utilitarian reason of your own convenience, like streamlining the administration of a dead person’s estate.
Whatever your ostensible reason for “checking in” on me, the result is the same. You are causing me harm.
When I choose to excise someone from my life, it’s for a reason. Other people may not feel it’s a “good” reason, and maybe it isn’t, but the choice was mine. If I cut you off, I want you to stay gone. Every time you show up in my server logs, every message I get from someone we both know relaying your “best wishes,” every fucking piece of certified mail from the place of my birth, it causes me pain each and every time because I thought I was finally free of you.
You keep sending me into the shadows.
Every few years or so, I feel like I’ve gotten into a decent place, maybe even a good place. My life seems to stabilize a little and I make a few new friends and I post fun stuff on social media and I make people laugh and I start to think hey, maybe it’s time for me to open up a little more. Come out of my shell, you know? I used to toy with the idea of making some of my friends-only Facebook posts (where you’re required to use your real full name) public. Who knows, maybe I could go viral with some of my anecdotes and pictures.
And then, you show up. You appear in my life and send me back into hiding.
You pop in, slide into my DMs, or tell a mutual friend to send me a message. Maybe you weasel around and figure out what my current website is and help yourself to the contact form. Or you pay the estate lawyer to fire up LexisNexis.
Maybe you try to remain in the shadows yourself. You stay in “look but don’t touch” mode. Eyes-only, using whatever tools you have at hand to keep yourself hidden as you try to satisfy your curiosity. “I’m not gonna contact her,” you think, “But I want to make sure she’s all right.”
Ask yourself why.
Why do you want to know that I’m all right? What’s the real reason you want to see how I’m doing? Altrusim? Christian love?
Admit it. You want to reassure yourself.
“See? She’s fine. C is doing all right. She’s still alive, she’s even thriving. Therefore I did nothing wrong in how I treated her.” You want to ease your guilt over whatever you did to make me remove you.
I actually touched upon this a little in an older post, Coals of Fire. The part about people merrily chirping that “living well is the best revenge” and how much I despise that phrase because it’s not revenge when the person is happy and believes they did nothing wrong and takes your success or well-doing as proof of that.
If you, that person from my past, are reading this, please take note: I’m not okay. And even if I were, it doesn’t absolve you of responsibility for your past actions. And, and? We both know you have no intention of actually DOING anything to help me, now that you know I’m not okay.
If you truly want me to be better, to be happy, to heal from all the wounds of my past, you would stop checking in on me. Forget me. Block me, even, so that you won’t be tempted. Because every time I see you or hear from you or find out about you inserting yourself into the edges of my consciousness again, I regress. I become less okay. My circle becomes smaller and I stop blossoming and I shrivel up and it’s because of you.
“No, it’s because you’re mentally ill.”
No shit, Sherlock. Decades of abuse and abandonment and “she has to want to help herself” while leaving me broke and homeless and humiliated with no learned coping skills will do that, turns out. I’ll struggle with mental illness for the rest of my life, even during periods when I get stable enough to be medicated and given therapy.
You’re not helping.
You have no desire to help.
Leave me alone.
This post is one of many, many (like, over twenty at this point) items I started writing several years ago and abandoned in my drafts. I’m working on getting back into the writing habit, but I wanted to finish and publish this one in particular. It’s been something that has been plaguing me more than usual these last couple of years.
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