blocked feelings

I drank coffee this evening while I was at work, and somehow the coffee seemed much stronger than usual. I am now 'wired' and manic. I won't be going to sleep for quite a while.

I broke down and sent another email today. No answer yet, and there probably won't be any answer. I asked if there was a convenient time that I could call him on the phone.

I am trying not to send emails or call. Sometimes I do it on impulse anyway.

There is a painful conflict between my troubleshooting brain ('Did you receive my letters? Did you send anything back and somehow I just didn't receive it?') versus my emotions ('You got all the letters and decided not to answer them. This hurts me very, very badly.')

After years of enduring harassment from hackers, I know it's easy to get into people's email accounts. A malicious person could prevent letters from reaching somebody.

When McDonald's finally gets around to calling me back, I'll start working there along with this job. I'd like to set up an arrangement like I used to have, where I was working only three days in a row, with extremely long days, followed by four days off. If I can get that set up, it will be better for me overall: I'll have more time to live a real life instead of dragging myself out of bed at the very last minute, five days a week, with only two days to barely recover before I have to go back to work again.

I have this feeling of wanting to leave - I'll work only three days a week, and so I won't see him very often, and it won't hurt so badly - it will be like 'Fine, have it your way - you want nothing to do with me, so I'll leave'; at the same time, I don't want to leave - I would like to be closer to him, but that obviously is not working, for whatever reason. The troubleshooting questions never resolve.

There's no way to explain to him about my hearing voices and experiencing 'puppet' phenomena. I told him about it, but I'm not sure if he believes me. He might think that I'm joking, or just crazy, or lying to him. I've been telling more and more people about it in recent months, since this whole thing began with him. When I tell them, most people are shocked, because they think I seem like a relatively normal person (I say 'relatively' normal). I don't 'babble' the way a lot of voices-hearing people do. If you think of somebody who hears voices and claims that people are zapping them with electromagnetic weapons, those people usually SEEM crazy, at least in that stereotypical image. They babble and have trouble communicating. I don't act like that, so it's hard to believe that I really do hear voices and have these alternate personalities sometimes controlling the things that I do and say.

I would want him to believe it. I wrote him emails, in the beginning, where I talked down to him in a condescending way, like he was a child. It wasn't my own writing style at all. Would he believe it if I told him that the morning I wrote that email, one of the earliest letters, one of the condescending ones, I woke up at 6 AM feeling as though somebody had drugged me with an antidepressant? Would he believe me if I said that I wrote that entire email to him while feeling drugged and experiencing one of the external personas controlling every word, every sentence I wrote to him? I don't think he'd believe it - most people wouldn't. He'd just read the email and notice that I was talking to him like he was a child or an idiot, he'd get insulted, and want nothing to do with me ever again. How do you form normal, stable relationships whenever you have these incidents of being controlled by some external personality who tells you what to say, and you say something awful to somebody or talk to them in a way that they hate? They look at you afterwards and think it was YOU who said those things.

I woke up this morning with a dream - I don't take it literally, but I get the basic idea. They were showing me Frank TJ Mackey being interviewed by the journalist in the movie Magnolia. If you haven't seen that movie, this is going to be a little spoiler, if it matters; but anyway, he's hiding painful memories from his past, memories that are too horrible and traumatic, and telling lies to cover them up. His mother died, but he pretends she's still alive. His father abandoned him, so Frank had to take care of his mother while she was dying of cancer, and his father never called him during that time. This is all the key to understanding why he seems to be such a jerk and has such a twisted belief system. And Frank Mackey is trying not to cry. He doesn't cry until the very end of the movie when he sees his father on his deathbed. Then he curses at him with hatred and begins to weep when he remembers how he waited for his father to call. When you are trying not to cry, but something happens and you lose control of it, the crying can become an extreme, uncontrollable sobbing and howling. It is very loud and very humiliating. I know because it's happened to me before.

I couldn't tell if this dream was intended to be about ME or about HIM. It applies to me in a way because I'm avoiding him - I won't look at him or go near him - because when I look at him, it triggers very intense painful feelings that I do not want to express in a public place while I'm clocked in and supposed to be working. If I talk to him, there is a chance that I could start crying or get angry or shout something. I doubt that I would get angry - crying is more likely. (Today, I accidentally almost walked past him, but I saw him, I turned the opposite direction, and squeezed through a tiny space between a couple of customers who were in another checkout lane so that I could avoid walking near him.)

I feel hurt, humiliated, angry, worthless - I already went through this once before, and it was the same thing all over again. You meet somebody who seems interesting and likeable and attractive, you send a couple emails back and forth, something goes wrong, the other person starts ignoring and avoiding you, and then you get stuck continuing to send them these pathetic, pleading, begging emails, 'Why won't you answer me? Waahh, wahhh,' and you leave messages in their voicemail asking them to call you back and they never call. I didn't want to be put in that situation again, but that is exactly what happened.

This time, I prevented myself from going too crazy with the emails - they were a lot worse the first time around. The first time this happened, I said crazier and crazier things, trying to get the guy's attention, trying to make him answer, but all that happened was, it made the hackers respond by doing things to my computer any time I wrote something especially entertaining in the emails. I don't know if that guy himself was hacking/harassing my computer, or if it was some opportunistic onlooker - it doesn't matter - it was a substitute for real human interaction, for actual conversation - a substitute for reality. That was the first time around. I learned enough then and applied it to this new situation. But I'm still stuck.

************

I could tell how this began. I've had so much coffee, and I'm nowhere near out of energy yet.

There's so much background leading up to it - I was still recovering from the household contamination problem, and I was working two jobs for a while before I got fired from McDonald's. I wasn't trying to meet any men. I was seeing Peter, but we can't see each other very much; he was pretty much the only person I was talking to at the time. I was isolated, going to work every day and doing nothing but that.

While I worked, I daydreamed about how I would build a shield to protect me against the attacks; I thought about the stuff I was learning in my Schaum's Outline of Bookkeeping and Accounting; I thought about what I needed to do to clean up the house; I thought about the future and made plans for how I would get out of wage slavery somehow.

I didn't look at guys. All men were invisible to me. I talked to some people but had no intention of dating them or getting any closer to them. Still, all my life, ever since nursery school, I've been in the habit of noticing at least one particular guy to have a crush on, every year, somebody to focus on. (I still remember my nursery school crush: his name was Benjy.) So I felt kind of bored when I didn't have a crush on anybody. It was like there was nothing to look forward to every day.

Well, this is where 'THEY' got involved. One night they had me thinking of each guy that I worked with and they tested my response, to see if I found that person attractive. They basically wanted to find out what kind of guy I liked. Eventually they called my attention to this one particular guy and suggested that I should notice him. I hadn't really noticed him before, but that's because I just wasn't noticing anybody at all.

I had recently started reading a new blog, FSK (fskrealityguide.blogspot.com), which I found whenever I googled questions about silver price manipulation and negative real interest rates. After reading that blog for a while, I decided to call myself an 'anarchist' instead of a 'minarchist' or 'libertarian.' It was in the spring of this year, 2008. So it felt like a significant time period for me - I had 'changed my name' to anarchist.

Well, about that time, FSK started blogging about seduction games and dating relationships. There are books about how to seduce people, and there are discussion groups where people talk about their strategies and tactics and what worked and what didn't work. I glanced at some of the web pages where people were talking about it.

I recognized one terrible thing right away. This made me angry. Judith Swack had told me that I had the 'Satan Seduction Pattern' when I was doing therapy with her. When I stopped the therapy, and then had the court case/false conviction/mental hospital incident, that was when the psychotronic attacks began. They gave me these disgusting, horrible nightmares. In the dreams they made fun of everything about my physical appearance - they made fun of me because I have whiskers, and, unlike most people, I keep them and let them grow, because I have unusual beliefs and values about hair and grooming. It is a rule that I do not cut or remove any hair from my body, and I obey the rule, the same way people obey a religious rule, even though I'm an atheist and it's my own rule. Anyway, they made fun of that, and because of them, I ended up compromising, and I bleached the whiskers for a while - I didn't completely remove them. But that was one of the things that fit in with the 'seduction' theme.

And there was another thing: they made fun of my shoes. I had these cheap, $5 canvas shoes from Wal-Mart. They specifically made fun of my cheap shoes, over and over again.

When I read about seduction tactics, I saw there is something people do where they insult somebody, tell them negative things, try to humiliate and degrade the person and bring them down to a lower level. Oddly enough, they specifically mentioned: shoes and mustache whiskers. One of the famous seduction authors made a joke about how you might ask a woman 'So, how long has it been since you had your mustache waxed?' This was meant as 'Something you shouldn't say.' It wasn't meant to be taken as a real suggestion for something to talk about. But it was actually the shoes that caught my attention more. They talked about insulting a woman's shoes, that this was a tactic for supposedly making the women feel insecure and vulnerable so that you might be able to take advantage of them. That was exactly what 'the voices' did to me in the nightmares, repeatedly. That was right after Judith Swack told me that I had the 'Seduction Pattern.' They made fun of my shoes.

Well, anyway. FSK and the seduction websites also talked about making eye contact and physical touch. Those were the more positive, 'gentle' methods of signaling that you are interested in somebody. (Not like insulting somebody's shoes or their whiskers.) Those were usually perceived as a good thing, not a bad thing, and tended to be successful.

So, bringing all this storyline together... It was right about that time when I started noticing the one guy at work, and was making eye contact with him.

'They' were involved in it from the very beginning, which was a guarantee that it would go disastrously wrong and something terrible would happen. This is why I don't blame him. (Well, my FEELINGS blame him, but my rational/troubleshooting mind doesn't. And this is all my one-sided point of view: I haven't any idea what HE experienced.)

I was very fragile and very vulnerable and I didn't know it. If you isolate yourself from all of humanity for decades at a time, the result is that you get lonely. You forget that you're lonely and you aren't consciously aware of it. So when I got a crush on this person, and we started talking, and then he suddenly started avoiding me, it became this huge, exaggerated disaster instead of just a minor 'get over it' kind of thing.

And 'they' wouldn't let me forget about him for even a second; they woke me up every morning telling me things about him, trying to convince me to believe all kinds of stuff which I'm sure was probably a bunch of lies. Every time I tried to use my St. John's Wort to help myself get things done around the house, they had me writing more letters to him or calling him on the phone because the drug made me more suggestible.

I assume that he probably knew nothing about me when we first started communicating with each other. He might have, I don't know. But I think he didn't know what he was getting into. I imagine it's probably NOT EASY to form a normal relationship with some lady who suddenly tells you all this weird stuff about how she hears voices that make her do things, etc, etc, and how I've been isolated from people for a very long time and I don't usually try to date anybody and I never open up to anyone or trust anybody.

We are each in our own little separate worlds. 'The voices' are not there to HELP us talk to each other. Instead, they give us a SUBSTITUTE for reality - a fantasy of talking to somebody telepathically. You think it's the other person in your head, but it's not. It's some malicious third party, somebody playing mind games with you, while meanwhile, the REAL person sits alone someplace else suffering because they're not with you. The malicious third party gets to have all the fun, while the real people are separated from each other. You try to ask somebody a question, you try to ask it telepathically, but the question never reaches them - they can't hear it. Every day I hear a voice saying 'Answer my questions!' They try to tell me it's him. I can't answer anybody's questions, because I'm not receiving any questions and I don't know what those questions are. The voices just deceive and mislead you - you assume the other person ALREADY KNOWS stuff, and you don't need to tell them, you don't need to say it out loud. They did that trick to me from the very beginning: 'He's hacking your computer,' they told me, 'so he can read everything you write about him, and you don't need to tell him anything.' It prevents real communication.

I'm stuck - I'm not sure where this will go from here. My feelings are very painful and it prevents me from talking to him in a normal way - I have to either dodge him, or talk to him in a terrified high-pitched squeak, or a sullen angry voice, but never just something calm and normal.

There's a lot more that I haven't written here - this is already probably too much. I wrote tons and tons of stuff in my journals.

I did finally confess some of this story to a couple people who know him. One of them tried to push him to say something to me - she wanted him to apologize, or perhaps she was trying to get him to ask me out on a date, or something - I'm not quite sure what she was urging him to do. Unfortunately, at that moment, I turned and ran away. He didn't get to talk to me.

I don't want to force him to apologize. He could if he felt like it was necessary. But I want to understand his point of view: what did he experience, how is he feeling, what does he want to do about this situation. If I find out what he experienced, then I might need to apologize to HIM.

I'm responsible for getting through this somehow. 'Puppet Show,' they called it, just now. It IS like a puppet show. It looks like I'm the crazy stalker lady who hears voices and got obsessed with some attractive young guy who got freaked out and wants nothing to do with me. This is humiliating. I worry about what's going to happen, whether I'm going to get in trouble for this somehow, whether I'll get fired from my job, or somebody will decide I'm dangerous and they'll throw me in the mental hospital again.

It's hard for other people to understand. When I told his friends, they were compassionate and sympathetic, and also shocked to find out about all of it. But I know it must seem weird to them. They've been nice to me, but we also feel awkward. However, at least it's getting out in the open a little more. It's no longer a big secret.

I'm writing in this blog because I don't know if he gets my emails. He might possibly read the blog - I tried sending him a link to my myspace page, long ago. I don't know if he got that email - he might not even know that I HAVE a myspace page. But when I tell the story here it's really for him to read.

I will get through this somehow. But I can't speak for HIS point of view - I can't speak for what HE wants to do about this. I can only speak for myself.