#stalker things

They stalked me for a year. It started off kind of gradual – they would talk about me constantly on their blog. This intensified after I had to leave, because I suppose they thought I couldn’t see them or I wasn’t checking. Well, I heard from others that this was going on and kept an eye on things, because I’ve had to break off contact with people before and very often they begin lying about me, so I watched to make sure I could defend myself if need be. This person didn’t lie about me, but they did make a lot of posts basically beating themselves up about what happened, and not in the normal “oh shit I made a mistake and feel bad” way. No, they acted like me leaving was the end of the world, and even insinuated that by leaving, I had robbed them of the desire to improve their own life, which is a very heavy statement considering the shit they talked to me about. The whole thing was very creepy, and the way they wrote about me was very dehumanising and just incredibly uncomfortable. Obviously I never contacted this person, and I made it quite clear I didn’t want to speak to them again, and I remained at a distance.

I’d left Tumblr by this point (a combination of this and a load of other crap; this sure as hell didn’t endear me to coming back, though) and obviously people were worried, and this person seemed to think that they were entitled to worry about me more than everyone else so they took an email that I had linked to some other stuff and used it, without my permission, to email me. Bear in mind that this is after they had done an awful thing to me that had put me in a very bad place, and after I had made it very clear that I didn’t want to be contacted, especially not by them (I had broken things off with them and hidden my blog at this point, replacing the layout with a simple HTML page that told people I was gone and to not contact me). They ignored all this, and sent me a huge self-depreciating email to an address I had not given them to use for this, and the email went between their usual hating on themselves in a way that made me super uncomfortable, and sort of putting me on this pedestal, I guess? I don’t know how to describe it, but again, it was the over the top, really dehumanising language. Again, bear in mind that this person had done something really awful to me, and it was a really jarring experience to see them show up in my inbox after I’d done so much to get away from them.

I didn’t reply, obviously, so they started sending me money. I was in a seriously bad financial situation at the time, and it put me in a very awkward position. On the one hand I didn’t want to take it from them, because I no longer wanted anything to do with them. At the same time, I literally had no money at all, and was actually meeting medical starvation, so I didn’t really have a choice. The decision left me feeling incredibly uncomfortable and like my hand was being forced, especially as this person set the money to send in a way that they would be notified if I took it, as a way of checking up on me without my consent.

I didn’t contact them, things went on, they were still incessantly talking about me. Eventually I returned to Tumblr, and after a short while, I got another email from them. This time, they were literally asking me to unblock them. I had blocked them on both my personal blog and an RP blog (of a character they love – more on that in a moment) and they again messaged me on the email I hadn’t given them permission to use, asking me to unblock them. I hadn’t had any contact with them for nine months at that point, and yet they still thought this was acceptable. They seemed more upset about the character, which is a character I have been RP’ing for four years now and have had a huge influence over, and that they associate a lot with me. This lead to them making a double-encrypted post about me on their blog, because obviously they knew I was around and could be looking, and I don’t know, maybe part of them knew what they’d been doing was really creepy? Unfortunately for them, ciphers are my jam, and I got through both layers of encoding in about ten minutes. Lo and behold, the post was about me. Or, should I say, about the character I RP’d (which, from that email and the way they acted, they seemed to basically see as me). In the code, they still referred to me as “[my] friend”, which is really fucked up considering I’d been trying to get away from them for the best part of a year now. The email had asked me if I was going to unblock them and mentioned that they knew there was a possibility I didn’t want to talk to them again, so who knows why they thought this was acceptable. Also, there’s the especially creepy factor that there were writing in code about me. 

I should probably mention that in these emails they would keep making puns even though they were trying to act like they were apologising, so there would be these random puns (usually about my character) in an email that was also doing all this uncomfortable shit like self-depreciation and you know, apologising for a super shitty thing they did that resulted in an incredibly dangerous and bad time for me. It was extra upsetting for me to see them make light of something so awful, that they caused, after I was so supportive to them, and even more upsetting to see it show up in my inbox without my permission, from someone I was actively trying to avoid.

The posts continued after I got back, and by this point I was really annoyed because it had been nearly a year, and so I had to call them out and tell them to quit it. It seems to have worked, as they’ve shut up about me publicly for the most part, but I can only imagine the shit they must be saying in private. I have a folder of screenshots from their blog just in case people ever try and start shit with me over this, because I’ve seen that happen before and I want to ensure that I clear my name if it does. I tried being nice and I tried stepping back, but in the end nothing worked until I called them out publicly. I guess nine months of silence just didn’t translate to them as “please leave me alone”?

(On a side note, the reason I haven’t gone back to my RP blog fully and probably won’t for a long while is because I know that they still watch it even if they can’t follow/reblog, and the thought of them having any part of that character (which they strongly associate with me) makes me feel incredibly violated. I put so much effort into that character and my headcanons have even been accepted as canon in wide areas of the fandom, and their creepy coded post proved that they see him as directly related to me. The fact that they can do this to me and then take what I helped to create makes me feel very uncomfortable, so the blog puts me in an awkward position.)