Before we can determine whether or not anyone is worth our time they need to have some fundamentals in place. Different people have different priorities, and will be a better fit for others with similar priorities. Some prioritise intelligence, some beauty, some reliability, some honesty, and so on in order of priority until others tick enough boxes to meet your standards. This is true of all relationships, including acquaintances and friendships. A lot of people make a big deal out of niceness, and think niceness is a major criterion for accepting anyone. They praise niceness and criticise unkindness, putting niceness ahead of everything else. However some others might say ‘it’s better to cry in a Mercedes than on a bicycle’, suggesting financial stability to be more of a priority. There are many other possible criteria besides, everyone’s different.
I’m going to try to hash out the chief deal breakers regarding the abusers harassing me, and why it would be impossible for anyone in such a situation to put up with them. In other words, I’ll run through a quick analysis of the characteristics they display that would be deal breakers for anyone.
Firstly, we need people to respect others’ right to consent. Persistence is all very well and good, if you don’t succeed try and try again is all very well and good, but at the end of the day no means no, and if someone says no to you for whatever reason you need to respect it as their right and prerogative to refuse anything you might want or consider yourself to be offering. It is true that sometimes a no is temporary, like if someone feels crowded and stifled and tells you to back off and stop being clingy, or tells you they need more space; it can sometimes simply be to check you would do if asked. If you did then it’s possible after a period apart they would return to you with renewed vigour and increased trust due to your having shown that when asked you respect people’s wishes. Sure, it’s possible. If on the other hand you didn’t and continued to be intrusive and stifling, they might then see that as a glimpse of what the future would hold, and terminate the relationship entirely before they got too entwined into an oppressive relationship that would have sapped them of their autonomy and personal privacy.
Even if you obligingly gave someone space they might then make the distance permanent anyway, sadly some people grow apart, so rather than expect anything it’s best to take your cue directly from whomever you’re communicating with. Perhaps it’s best to do your best in a relationship, but if it ends despite your best efforts, be ready to move on to pastures new, ‘one door closes another door opens’ as they say, a good rule of thumb for jobs and relationships both. Unfortunately the antithesis to this is standing obstinately outside a closed door, thus making a refusal or rejection increasingly awkward, and increasing the opportunity cost of not doing whatever else you could have been doing had you not decided to dig your heels in and be sore about being rejected. The abusers fit in this category, as I very quickly decided they weren’t my sort of people at all, the reasons for which are the subject of this post, but they wouldn’t leave me alone and have been sullenly abusing me for nearly eight years now, with a complete and utter disregard for my lack of consent. I don’t know them, and as a result of their behaviour I don’t want to know them, but despite this I receive a torrent of abuse from them daily, spend all my time telling them to leave me alone, and can’t get away from the auditory harassment. It’s a deal breaker.
Secondly, we need people to be sane, level headed, easy going, straightforward, whatever terminology you might care to use. High maintenance high stress people, kooky, off key people, distracting and unpredictable people, are always difficult to deal with. Emotional instability of any kind is a spectrum, becoming increasingly difficult to deal with long before approaching clinically detectable levels. Of course at the other end of the spectrum we have unresponsive dullness and no one wants that, a happy medium is always preferable, but I would think most people would agree with me when I say we need our companions to function within acceptable norms, and it is rare to find anyone who enjoys extreme emotional swings and instability beyond the normal ranges. Emotional instability beyond tolerable levels is therefore a prime deal breaker, and something the constant abusers display no end of. The constant torrent of abuse and not listening to anything, the compulsive lying, the accusations, projection and scapegoating, excitably aggressive when nothing is happening, and most of all refusing or unable to stop speaking, the steady torrent of compulsive mindless chatter with no regard for the feelings of whomever they’re speaking to, to me suggest immense emotional instability and impulsivity, and are a deal breaker.
Thirdly, we need people not to be lazy. Frequently when the speakers are talking to me I count how many are speaking; there used to be more, but these days there are few, quite possibly precisely because it becomes difficult to maintain even a passing interest in such a pointless way to pass the time. It involves sitting around doing nothing other than talking to an unconsenting adult for inordinate periods of time, and would thus only suit exceedingly lazy people with nothing else to do. As the abusers lie to me about their status or intention or identity, I am very aware that if they’re here, they’re not anywhere else. I am most aware of how indolent the abusers are, because I have firsthand experience of them sitting around doing nothing while chattering in my ear. It’s not possible to do two things at once, or at least to do them well. Frequently when I’m listening to a podcast and have to read something, such as a recipe, I momentarily lose track of what I was listening to as I have trouble focussing on two things at once. Therefore when the abusers speak of who they want me to believe they are, or try to give an impression of a background they hope I’ll believe, I can’t disguise my scepticism, because I know more than anyone that they’ve been focused on talking to me for far too long and therefore couldn’t possibly be doing anything else to any significant degree.
I don’t know what the economics or profit margins are of spending their time talking to me in some sort of shift rotation; in short I don’t know what the benefit is, but as I busy myself about my life trying to get things done and keep on top of everything, I am frequently infuriated by the fact that the people sitting about aimlessly talking to me have so much free time on their hands; I wonder how they’re supporting themselves, I wonder whether they’re dependent and supported by someone else, and if so I wonder why anyone would support people who spend their time in such a wasteful manner. These are things to consider when trying to identify the abusers; however I must confess that I find their laziness and the pointlessness of their abusive harassment while I’m keeping busy to be as offensive in itself as anything they might actually say while harassing me. In other words, I find their mere (auditory) presence to be offensive, as it always means they aren’t anywhere else, and aren’t doing anything else, as a result of which they are vegetating and not developing and will never have anything to report back to anyone as they haven’t been anywhere doing anything, they’ve just been sitting back trying to come up with ever more ways to be a remote nuisance to me.
Fourthly, we need people to be interested in the world around them. The abusers range of focus is narrow enough to be bordering on autism, with no other interests besides. Such people do exist, but such behaviour would quickly approach clinically detectable levels and is therefore rarely found in the free community. It’s like the generally accepted physical distance between people; you stand next to someone and they’re too close you step back, if they’re too far you come closer, we all do it with each other naturally till we’re standing a comfortable distance from each other while communicating. Now imagine someone invades your space and you have to tell him to step back, but he ignores this and invades your space again, standing so close you’re almost touching, giving you the urge to push him away as he’s simply too close for comfort and your fight or flight responses are kicking in. Imagine further that he does this every time you run into him, until you realise you simply can’t communicate with this guy in person, as he is bizarrely unable to maintain a comfortable distance between you when you’re talking.
The abusers are like this in their weirdly narrow focus on me. Half their statements refer to ‘we’, the rest refer to ‘you’, and a few are about ‘them’. There seems to be little interest in or understanding of anything else, they only really seem to want to talk about me and whatever I may be doing or thinking, and themselves and whatever they may be thinking. It’s like the film quote ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’, a never ending simplified approximation of how civilised people communicate, involving commentary about themselves, me, and them, and not much besides. The sentences are frequently short and disjointed, don’t tie in together and often lack context, with the same themes, obsessions and fixations cropping up time and time again. I have logged this manner of speaking extensively in folder 23 of the Stalking and Harassment reports, documents 170 – 172. It appears sometimes as though some of them actually lack the mental capacity for more expansive ways of thinking about the world, resorting instead to simple ‘me’ and ‘you’ sentences as a poor substitute.
Fifth, we need people not to tarnish our reputation by association. Immediately the abusers started talking to me in my home in April 2016, I realised it was illegal harassment. When a few months later I discovered they were reading my thought processes without my consent (one of them shouted out ‘we’re reading your thought processes!’, then in the ensuing months they began replying to things I was thinking without me having vocalised them), I realised that it is an indecent violation of my privacy. When they talked when I am masturbating (let’s not be prudish it’s natural for men and women to take care of themselves) in an effort to put me off, I realised it was an intrusive sexual assault. When they wake me up at night and prevent me from sleeping, causing me to either have to take a pill to sleep and end up oversleeping to compensate, or go about my day tired from not having slept enough, I am aware it is direct physical torture. The constant intrusive chatter about nothing in particular the rest of the time is physical torture also, as I can’t get away from them, and it is an ongoing violation of my personal space and right to privacy.
Even had the above crimes happened to someone else and not to me, on hearing about them I couldn’t conscionably associate with anyone who would do such despicable things; none of these things are sanctioned by law, and they all violate essential principles of human dignity and decency. There couldn’t possibly be any reasonable explanation for doing these things, they are inherently vile, and I would be tarnished by association with anyone involved in such activity, just as I would be tarnished by association with a pedophile ring, or a cannibal death cult. Some things are beyond the pale for anyone, and it goes without saying that such association would be a risk to my reputation, and an obvious deal breaker.
Sixth, of course, we need people to be nice. We need people to be nice, once everything else is in play, without which it hardly makes a difference. At this point opinions may diverge, feel free to reorder according to your priority. What do we need sixth? Penny for your thoughts...
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