The rage I feel right now is nothing new. But the difference between what happened then and now is me, I am new, in a healthy head space. I am no longer suffering a clinical semi functional breakdown and the problem with being in a healthy head space and feeling this way is that I have to find new ways to deal with it. I can’t freak out and start throwing stuff or threatening to harm myself, I can’t just take a handful of prescription drugs and head to bed and forget about it because as I’ve stated over the past few months, I’ve been out of the year plus long breakdown and my head is finally above water. So all I feel right now is pain, and hurt, and anger. I feel betrayed, used, screwed over. I’ve been feeling like this since March and despite my best efforts I can’t hold it in any longer, even at the threat of charges being filed against me for alleged harassment.

This goes way back, in March 2008 I entered breakdown mode. I was hospitalized, it is all on the blog. I was also on the Bloggers Bowl for Big Brothers Team and was friends personally with all the bloggers on the team when it was formed; the main blogger running it, we’d been friends since new years 2006, off our blogs. The details are irrelevant except for the part where I threatened to throw down the gloves because things started to fall apart with this group right around this same time and I was upset, not even remotely in my own mind and made a stupid comment that has since that very day never ceased to be used against me when needed by the organizer and her husband. Having been friends for the amount of time we were, she and her husband knew full well the only person I had ever harmed with violence was myself. I apologized to everyone on the team even those who I had not insulted and took responsibility for what I said. I was deeply embarrassed and ashamed that my depression and my temper where getting away from me to that extent.

Enter me early last year, still trying to recover from the breakdown which had originally been brought on by my relationship with my parents falling apart. Take a that a step further, my parents were now in Indonesia and at the time all we knew was that my mother was having a breakdown and was in the hospital and completely terrified of my father. Here came the hardest time I have ever faced in my life. For people who weren’t reading at the time, there is no Canadian Consulate in Bali, you have to deal with Australia but you obviously have to deal with them through Indonesian laws. To say I was dealing with a lot would be an understatement: Three consulates, foreign affairs, the hospital, and all the while trying to keep my dad from finding out our plans, which consisted of Adam flying to the other side of the world in under 72 hours to rescue and bring my mother home not knowing how she really was or what my father was really capable of under these circumstances. I did this with no help except from my husband and the legal contacts and dealing with my mother completely out of her mind and in hysterics. I was a wreck and at the time although I had no idea how to feel about my father, I was still an only child at 31, about to watch my parents go through a divorce after 39 years of marriage and after they had already retired to Bali.

Just for the record, i am not trying to condone my actions, only to say that both parties would have had to avoided twitter for weeks to be unaware of my state of mind, because they were both following me and I wear my heart on my sleeve.

March is Earth Hour month, and I realize now that we were both playing the keep your enemies closer card but we had agreed to work together on Earth Hour. The organizers were following myself, her, and one other blogger as the main people highlighting the event in Vancouver. The year prior my post was the first one up on the event in the city but by the time March 2009 rolled around my blog was just an alley compared to her traffic. I still managed to get my post up, it wasn’t as good as I wanted, I hadn’t promoted the event to the degree I had wanted to but I did my best given the situation I was in and when her post came out there was no link to me and I was livid. Were this just a regular post I wouldn’t have cared, she had done this to me before where she knew I was doing something that someone had done a talk on, for example, and intentionally left me off the linking of bloggers participating in whatever. But I never saw it coming, having the carrot yanked back over a CHARITY while I am in family emergency mode and nothing makes sense anymore.

I flipped, at first I was sort of calm, but for me this was the final straw, I’m sure she saw this as payback for a nasty post I had written within a day or two of the part of my breakdown where I was taken to hospital via ambulance having overdosed on clonazepam, seroquel and a bottle of wine. I never took the post down because I wanted it left as an example of what not to do when you have a massive fallout with someone and to this day I’ve spoken to numerous people who still have no idea who I was talking about as I never did use names. It was for the most part the depressed ravings of a mind with a raw deal.

I have all the emails exchanged between us but they are on another hard drive, and to be honest I only glanced over the response which unfortunately turned out to be the one that must have said something about me leaving her alone and not contacting her again, because when I sent her back her post with the exact line where my link should have been and she still refused to deal with me and honour our agreement, I made it a point to call her a cunt. But what I did read of her response was so insensitive and again, this is charity we were dealing with here, one that having been friends she KNEW meant A LOT to me. Where I completely fucked myself was when I couldn’t leave it at that. I could hardly see straight, Adam was watching this happen, he tried to get the computer away from me, but I was out of control, how does ANYONE do that to someone when they KNOW that their life is literally falling to pieces around them, for real not just blog drama bullshit, real life shit that my family is still dealing with; we are a family, but things are different. I couldn’t get control over the fact that she took advantage of me at a time where I was at my lowest, I didn’t get to be the person that Earth Hour dealt with because my blog wasn’t what it was back in 2006. I’d found Twitter and though I’ve always had a solid supportive reader base I’ve never wanted to be a social media maven, I just want to blog, I just want to write. That is all this is for me, and that is all it ever was, somewhere I could be myself and write, even prepare for a novel. But the small amount of popularity this blog brought me was so threatening to her that she had to shut me up for good, leaving me basically not allowed to even have opinions anymore and voice them. I just wanted to support a charity that I care about, I wasn’t trying to gain anything, I wanted to help spread the word. I couldn’t believe someone could be so cruel at a time of such disaster and I just couldn’t leave it at cunt, I was so distraught I do not remember exactly what I said but it was something to the effect of “don’t fucking fuck with me, I am so fucking sick of you fucking with me” or “if you fuck with me again… “. As a friend put it, “what did she think you were going to do, walk up three blocks and bang on her buzzer?”. I don’t know what she thought, but instead of calling my husband, or emergency medical services, or even just taking a step back and thinking of anyone but herself for two seconds, she missed the chance to realize that the Vancouver police may have other more pressing matters than breaking up a chick fight that never happened.

She wanted to charge me with harassment. If this same situation had happened in 1999 when people still talked face to face, it would have gone something like this:

me: so fuck you bitch you didn’t give me credit for that paper and you promised cunt face

her: don’t talk to me like that

me: i’ll talk to you however the fuck i want to talk to you, you fucked me over, did i mention yer a CUNT?

her: i’m leaving now you are scaring me

me: well then stop fucking me over

(no cops)

Cops didn’t arrest me, she just apparently didn’t exist after that.
I wasn’t charged with anything, but the officer’s suggestion to basically clam up was the real goal of her legal threat.
But see after she did this she continued to follow me on Twitter under other accounts she ran and for a while I let her, seeing if she’d come to her senses and we could talk like civilized people. I knew from the get go that she hadn’t unfollowed Adam, and still had him listed as a friend on Flickr, meaning he could see all of her photos, even ones blocked for friends and family only. I had taken her and her husband off my Flickr immediately. A few months went by and I realized that not only was she still following me on Twitter under a different account, my photos were appearing regularly on her husband’s Flickr homepage, and she still had my husband listed as a friend.

I messaged the mr, this problem was between the girls, and told him that what they were doing was malicious. Keeping me at bay while still accessing my life was having it both ways, I felt totally played but I cut contact as suggested all the while knowing that was what she wanted all along. I offered to drop the whole thing, and again, offered to act human. We both got dropped as requested, and they were out of our lives.

But you try living online and avoiding people.

This morning I woke up to find myself blocked from a contest that last year I won runner up in. If you read the comments on my Best of 604 post, the post by the blogger who finished behind me, and the comments made by the organizer herself, in most circles I am considered the winner. This in no way means that I can’t be nominated, but honestly I don’t feel I deserve to win, I didn’t blog for three months of last year, mostly due to this mind you, it was one of the most violating and cruelest things someone who actually knew me had ever done to me. But the fact remains I’m blocked. She is going to be interviewing past winners and well, I’d be one of those, the category I was in had the most blogs nominated and most votes cast and I didn’t even do one post on it, until after. I have never openly campaigned for anything I’ve been nominated for in my life.

If somebody nominates me this year, all I want is some maturity instead of the smoke show and tear gas. If we ladies can’t get along, how can we expect peace in the Middle East? We both got hurt, but it was a speedbump miles and miles ago, a dime on the horizon. It never should have come to this. And I am sickened by us both.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 12:23 and is filed under Blogging, Depression & Therapy, Earth Hour, Vancouver, parents' divorce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. All content (c) 2005 - 2010 Gus Greeper, unless otherwise credited. All rights reserved.