Kinda forgot this page was supposed to be a blog lmao. You’ll never guess what’s prompted me to remember (it’s Orion, it’s always fucking Orion). TW: threats of violence, discussion of abuse
Myself and my as-yet-unmentioned flatmate who I’ll call Cole were talking to Scylla about how we feel about Orion and the way he’s treated us over the time we’ve flatted together. She knew most of the stuff but there’s always stuff I forget, like the time he threatened to kill me, or was drunk and got very close to Cole’s face with a knife, or how when he got mad enough he’d ask me to leave the room because he thought he might hurt me, then got even more mad at me for leaving. You know, ‘normal’ stuff. Soooooo normal and forgivable and easy to forget about.
So Scylla had already come to the conclusion that the relationship was abusive towards me, but after that discussion she went 'ah that wasn't an abusive relationship that happened because of bad metal health, it was abusive because Orion has an abuser's mentality and is genuinely an Abuser.' Scylla's a youth worker studying psychology so I’m inclined to believe her.
And we still live together for the next 4 months. Right.
So then things came to a head that same night when Orion was tipsy. He’d been acting like he was mad at Cole for a little bit - just the previous night he’d been rambling to me about a game in the lounge when I was clearly not interested, just to abruptly leave to his room when Cole came out to go to the bathroom. As a result, Cole’s been pulling away because he’s sick of chasing after him asking what he did wrong (and rightfully so).
So Orion goes ‘hey what’s up are you mad at me?’ And Cole goes ‘look I don’t want to talk about it’ but Orion keeps pushing and pushing until Cole just kinda goes ‘are you mad at me? Are we still friends?’ And of course Orion goes all indignantly ‘of course we’re fucking friends, what the fuck?’ It’s at this point that he goes on a fucking self-contradictory justification loop to explain why he doesn’t bring up the shit that he gets mad at Cole for even though it’s clearly spilling out into his interactions with him. In one sentence he goes ‘well they’re my feelings so my responsibility to deal with on my own’ (which he failed to do by making said feelings visible to Cole), and in another he goes ‘well if you noticed I’m mad at you just ask?’ in a very ‘oh well it’s your responsibility to respond to my feelings’ kinda way which I found pretty contradictory.
He then goes on about how if he tells Cole he has a problem he’ll just go into his room and self harm so therefore he can’t tell him??? Scylla went to tell him that Cole does not react that way when she tells him things that she has issues with and he turns to her with so much vitriol and says something to the effect of ‘you stay the FUCK out of this, you don’t get to say ANYTHING you piece of shit.’ He still hadn’t told her about his issues with her (which were such a nothing burger) so she was very taken aback.
Orion then does the real-life equivalent of that thing where writers make a villian kick a puppy so we know they’re evil - he says Cole is ‘flaunting his self harm scars for attention’ around the flat. Fucking piece of shit. I can forgive emotionally abusing me, but I draw the line at doing that shit to my friends (insert Community meme here). The guys then go off to have a chat outside, which I was definitely not anxious about - I went to sleep cause I ain’t dealing with that at 11:00 at night when I need to wake up for groceries the next day.
So the next day after groceries and before I leave again for theatre rehearsal, Scylla says she’s gonna use his aggression towards her as a springboard to open a discussion about what he’s pissed about with her. I pack pjs for rehearsal in case I have to stay with my uncle for a bit. Apparently they talk and it wasn’t as bad as I feared - unproductive according to Scylla, but they are now officially just flatmates and not friends and Orion’s trying to be all buddy-buddy with Cole since Scylla called him out on trying to force closeness with me so soon after the breakup, which Cole is kinda acquiescing to out of anxiety (yayyyyy).
This now makes me the only person affected by the situation who hasn’t had a one-on-one convo with Orion about it (double yayyyy). I’m not opening that discussion, since Orion has made it abundantly clear that he’s only willing to have serious conversations with me on his own terms when he said to me ‘well I don’t want you knocking on my door tomorrow and telling me you’re mad at me’ when trying to get me to tell him why I was distant one time and just wanted to deal with it on my own. If he closes down avenues of conversation, he doesn’t get to complain about not being communicated with.
Sooooooo that’s my shit - putting it here because 1) Lavender is too busy and exhausted for me to feel right dumping all this detail on her and 2) I also just don’t wanna dump all this detail on her regardless cause it’s a lotttttt. On that topic, Lavender’s wonderful <3 got to catch up with her on Uni break and she’s so adorable when she falls asleep and it’s been literally a week since I saw her in person and I already miss her. Next on my to do list: invent a teleporter.
That said, spending time with her did reveal a lot of anxieties I didn’t have before Orion. I feel better about how long it’s taking to deal with them now that the fact of ‘emotional and psychological abuse’ has been stated by someone other than the voice in the back of my mind, but still. I don’t want her to have to deal with this, but I also want comfort from her about it? I don’t know. She should probably at least have the context of ‘oh yeah the last relationship was probably, like, actively abusive’ so she knows but that feels like a pretty heavy thing to say to the girl I like.
Anyway you really didn’t need to read all this but if you did, that’s my current situation :/ the flat is calm atm because everyone’s tactically ignoring what’s happened - we’ll see how long the peace lasts lmao
