The Marks Some Leave Upon Us - Witty, literary blind-item memoirs on surviving celebrity narcissists, cults, & reclaiming the self. Powerful healing is found in telling our stories.

Simone de Beauvoir spent a good part of The Second Sex describing a trap most of us recognize before we have the words for it. A person, she argued, wants to be the Subject, the one at the center, the one whose view of the room is the real one. To manage that, someone else has to agree to be the Other: the mirror, the supporting cast, the person whose job is to confirm that the Subject exists and is as important as he suspects. Most women get handed the Other role early, wrapped in nice paper, presented as manners. You learn to read a difficult person the way a chef checks a simmering pot. You soften your edges.

It is exhausting work, and it is mostly invisible, which is the point. Nobody thanks you for the storm that didn’t happen. But de Beauvoir was writing about the ordinary version, one Subject and one conscripted Other. She did not spend much time on the rarer event, the one that is quietly, guiltily hilarious to witness:

What happens when two actresses who both insist on being the main Subject end up in the same small orbit, and neither one will agree to be the mirror. Two black holes entered the room. The rest of us discovered we were movable objects.

Physics has a name for the bodies that behave like this. When two of them get close enough, they do not merge and they do not settle. They circle, they fling each other around, they shed energy as they spiral, and the arrangement ends with one of them consumed or thrown clear. Astronomers watch it happen. So, occasionally, do the rest of us, from the cheap seats, holding our drinks very still.

One thing I know from writing strong females heroes is this:

Feminism does not require women to be morally exemplary, emotionally serene, or loyal to every other woman. Women can be vain, cruel, territorial, funny, contradictory, and fully real. Liberation means allowing women the full range of human conduct, including failure and aggression.

The problem begins when one woman’s Subject-hood requires another woman’s reduction into an Object.

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For a part of my celebrity trauma years, staying safe meant keeping an eye on the loudest person present. You develop a sensitivity that would be impressive if it weren’t a survival adaptation. You know who needs to be agreed with, who is collecting compliments, and who is collecting grievances. It is a full-time position without ever being paid.

Then one night two actresses, the ones Mr. Black (celeb CEO) and Mr. Blue (celeb actor) had learned to keep balanced like spinning plates on poles, turned and found each other. They had been managing them separately for months, like translators running between two heads of state who each believed the summit was being held in their honor.

What was not planned for was the moment they stopped needing me as a target at all, because they had discovered a more interesting target. Each other. Ms. Red (almost celeb actress) decided she was not being publicly supported enough by the other actress, which of course the latter said the same of the former.

For The Record

Here is what the record shows about how this goes, when the people involved are famous enough, the collision gets written down. The studio system had spent years teaching actresses that there was room for one woman at the center, then expressed astonishment when two of them treated the center like disputed territory.

In 1962, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, two of the largest stars the studio system ever built and then discarded, were cast together in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Both women needed the film. Both knew it. Neither could bear the other’s presence at the center of it. Crawford was the widow of the CEO of Pepsi and sat on the company’s board, so Davis had a Coca-Cola machine installed on the set. That is the detail everyone remembers, and it earns its fame, because it is so purely petty. It does no practical harm. It exists only to say: I see the thing you have built your dignity on, and I would like to put a small humming insult next to it.

The stories get more physical from there. By most accounts, in a scene where Davis had to drag Crawford’s body across the floor, Crawford, who knew Davis had a bad back, weighed herself down with a lead weightlifter’s belt. In an earlier scene Davis kicked Crawford in the head hard enough, some say, to require stitches, and later described the pleasure of getting to shove her down a flight of stairs on camera. The director, Robert Aldrich, said the two behaved professionally and the big on-set explosion everyone waited for never actually came. Does this excuse the behavior, if true? The movie seen as the most important thing to be protected above life?

The two Subjects are genuinely at war and simultaneously aware there is an audience, and the war is better with witnesses. The purest example arrived at the Oscars. Davis was nominated for Baby Jane. Crawford, not nominated, campaigned against her, and arranged to accept on behalf of another nominee if that nominee won. When the other woman won, Crawford swept past Davis in the wings with a line I could not improve and would never dare invent: Excuse me, I have an Oscar to accept.

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The two people in my orbit were not as big of movie stars as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, but they operated by the same rules, and one of them was close enough to that world that the rules had extra teeth. What I remember is the physical sensation of the pressure moving off me. I had walked into that week doing the math I always did waiting for the mocking and triggers to come, but they had locked onto each other. Busy, all of them so wonderfully busy, with themselves. The men called themselves caught in the middle of it, which was flattering. In reality, they had helped construct the middle, furnished it, and placed the rest of us there.

Why I am targeted

De Beauvoir’s frame explains why this collision is astronomically guaranteed and not just random. If your entire sense of existing depends on being the one Subject in the room, then another Subject is not a peer. She is a threat to your existence at the level of physics. You cannot acknowledge her fully as a person, because a person with her own center would mean you are not the only center, and being the only center is the whole architecture holding you up.

So when two people organized this way meet, cooperation becomes difficult: each experiences the other’s independence as an insult. Neither can do the one thing that would resolve it, which is to let the other be real. This is exactly what they were doing to me for years. Upset that I existed and refused to be their Object. Upset that I was getting attention.

For the person who has spent a few years as the forced mirror, this produces a very guilty happiness. All the emotional labor you have been called to carry, the anticipating, the softening, the weather-reading, evaporates, because the two of them are now doing it to each other, badly, at full volume. And the men are panicking around them, trying to put out the fires. Neutrality was attempted, declared, and immediately interpreted as aggression.

The exact skill that exhausted you, they turn out to lack entirely when the target is someone who won’t stay flattering. You get to stand there and watch two people who never once wondered how you were doing suddenly become extremely interested in being wronged and they want an audience to see it.

The culture has an old name for two women in conflict, a word designed to make aggression look both animal and trivial. But there was nothing trivial about the labor their conflict displaced onto everyone around them.

And there is a night’s worth of relief in that, genuinely. But the deeper thing the collision taught me was not about them. It was about the job. I had believed, without ever deciding to believe it, that the peace was mine to manufacture. That if I stopped reading the weather, the storm would be my fault. The collision proved otherwise. The storm was always going to come. It did not need me to prevent it and it did not need me to cause it. It needed me only as a surface, and the moment a better surface appeared, I was released without notice or severance.

They did not merely want to be subjects in their own lives. They wanted Subject-hood to be a single-occupancy position. I had a doctoral degree, a life beyond them, and a history they could not rewrite. I would never be the Object and mirror they so desperately wanted me to be. For that I would be destroyed.

The so called lions, in the end, did not eat each other. Davis and Crawford both outlived the film and went on hating each other for years, which is its own quiet verdict on the fantasy of watching bad people destroy themselves. They mostly don’t. Crawford died first. Davis, asked about her, is supposed to have said something so vicious I will let you look it up rather than repeat it, and even that was, of course, for an audience.

What ended for me was more useful. I stopped mistaking my vigilance for peace. I had not been holding the room together. I had been holding myself still so that other people could call the room stable. Once I understood that, I could leave the chaos to its owners. No audience needed. ©

The marks some leave upon us are not always visible.

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Also see: Abolish the terms Bully & Mean Girls

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References:

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1953), Introduction. Note: abridged; the Borde/Malovany-Chevallier 2011 translation is the complete scholarly standard.

Shaun Considine, Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud (1989; 25th Anniversary ed.). The origin book for most feud details, including on-set behavior and the wig anecdote. goodreads.com/work/quotes/364526

Bette Davis, Trivia, IMDb. Ties several claims to Davis’s own on-record interviews (the 1987 Bryant Gumbel and Barbara Walters interviews, the Oscar-night account, the Coca-Cola machine). imdb.com/name/nm0000012/trivia

KQED, “Bette Davis v. Joan Crawford: The Hateful History Behind Old Hollywood’s Nastiest Feud” (2017). Public-media outlet; covers the Pepsi/Coke machine, the weighted belt, the stitches, and explicitly raises whether the feud was partly a media creation. kqed.org/pop/33377

ScreenRant, “Feud: Joan Crawford & Bette Davis Backstory” (2017). Directly cautions about validity. screenrant.com/feud-joan-crawford-bette-davis-backstory

KARE11 / Entertainment Tonight explainer (2017), for the left-side-of-photographs and newspaper-billing detail. kare11.com

The Marks Some Leave Upon Us - gritty witty blind item memoirs on celebrity, narcissistic abuse, public image, cultural obsession, & thriving after trauma. Powerful healing is found in telling our stories.

© I have called myself an empath for most of my adult life, the way other people call themselves early risers or procrastinators. It was never a brand though, it was a plain report about how I am built: the fact that I walk into a room and feel the vibe in it before anyone has admitted there is a vibe; that other people’s pain arrives in my body before it arrives in my thinking. This is not a superpower or a costume. To live this way is to keep the body as a house with no walls, and to spend a great deal of your life explaining to people why you felt the chaos before it started.

Then, in 2021, a phrase surfaced in a personality journal and moved across the internet with the slick speed making that cruel phrase sound peer-reviewed: the dark empath. A creature said to be high in empathy and high in the dark-triad traits at once, sensitive and predatory in the same skin. Any true empath knows this is impossible. It is just reactive abuse being twisted into a thing that shames them as it steals a part of their identity. It is DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) at a level that gaslights to the core. All that you think is good about you is in fact evil, and you, dear empath, are the villain.

The paper was one study. A single sample of fewer than a thousand people, heavy on students, which is the kind of sample other researchers will tell you not to build a type on. Evidence was thin. But thin research travels fast when the conclusion is flattering to the wrong people, and this one was very flattering to the wrong people. Academic research can be useful, but one small study does not get to discover a new goblin and hand it a LinkedIn profile.

For me, the timing of this new goblin was not an accident. I had been calling certain powerful people in a celebrity cult what they were - malignant narcissists - out loud, and in a voice they did not control. Right as I was moving toward doctoral work, where a formal academic citation would land harder on me than a mere online accusation, this tidy piece of scientific language arrived. It took the one word I used for myself and handed it directly to them.

I am not telling you they commissioned the study. I am telling you what it is like to watch your own vocabulary get repossessed by monsters and be unable to prove it. When you call a predator a predator, the gears turn. Suddenly the sensitive one is the suspect, the one who feels too much is the one to fear, and the empath is the danger in the room. I am certain this celebrity cult helped the term trend, using slick images to illustrate a supposed dark evil inside some of the most compassionate people on earth. But the dark empath is just DARVO with a footnote. It does not need to be true; it only needs to trend to protect them.

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The Psychology Manual Doesn’t Want It

The clinical facts, however, are on my side. The dark empath is not a diagnosis. It is not in the DSM-5, and you cannot be assessed for it any more than you can be assessed as a Slytherin. What clinicians will tell you, when you ask, is that the thing the internet is calling a dark empath is a person they already had a word for: someone high in the dark-triad traits who happens to have good social skills. Empathy simply cannot live in the same room as predation. What these public figures are calling empathy is just pattern recognition with bad intentions.

The DSM-5 doesn’t know her; it has left her on read. As sociologist and writer Candace Ranee put it, “Dark empath is NOT a valid clinical term or a diagnosis.”

The study’s own details give the game away, resting on the split between cognitive empathy (the intellectual ability to work out what you are feeling) and affective empathy (the capacity to actually feel it with you). A manipulator can have the first without a trace of the second. He can know exactly where you are tender and remember your wounds. That is not empathy; that is reconnaissance. He is casing the joint. Calling a narcissist an empath is like calling a burglar an interior designer because he knows how to get in through the window.

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The Weaponization of the Word “Empath”

This is where the feminist history clicks into place, because it is the same trick wearing a new coat. For centuries the woman who read the danger first was the problem. Her perception was hysteria, her anger was instability, her intuition was paranoia, her boundaries were cruelty, her memory of what happened was drama. The move was never to argue with what she saw. The move was to reclassify the seeing. The dark empath is that maneuver updated for the algorithm. It takes the one capacity a woman like me was told all my life was my best quality, the ability to feel another person’s pain as my own, and asks me to wonder whether it is secretly evil.

It’s Just Malignant Narcissism in a Trendy Trench Coat, Pretending It Went to Grad School. A narcissist can study your feelings but he cannot feel them. The whole grief of dealing with one is discovering, usually too late, that the warmth you thought you were standing in was a very good drawing of warmth. A mirror angled to catch the light.

When someone puts “dark” in front of “empath” and sells it back to you as science, understand what is actually being purchased. Not a new type of person, but deep cover for a predator. It is a way for the narcissist to borrow the coat of the empath they are torturing. This celebrity cult jumped at a chance - commissioned or not - to change the dictionary so I would stop trusting my own identity, so I would look at a word I had for who I was and flinch.

The dark empath does not exist. Malignant narcissists would simply love it to because it makes the reversal they try to inflict on victims who are usually empaths, so much cleaner. A thin little study gave them the citation to try. It never should have.

A narcissist will steal your pain, your language, your friends, your story, and then ask if anyone has seen his empathy because he left it somewhere near the ring light. These people do not need a new diagnosis. They need consequences, a locked group chat, and fewer opportunities to discover themselves being falsely vindicated on TikTok. ©

The marks some leave upon us are not always visible.

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References:

The study the term comes from: Heym, N., Kibowski, F., Bloxsom, C. A. J., Blanchard, A., Harper, A., Wallace, L., Firth, J., & Sumich, A. (2021). “The Dark Empath: Characterising dark traits in the presence of empathy.” Personality and Individual Differences, 169, 110172. Nottingham Trent University. One preliminary study, described by its own authors as a “novel construct,” is the entire foundation the trend rests on. Very Thin. Debunked.

On the dark empath not being a clinical diagnosis: Fiorini, C., LISW-CP. “Dark Empath: Meaning, Traits, Signs, and What a Therapist Wants You to Know.” LifeStance Health. States plainly that the term is a descriptive construct, not a diagnosis, and does not appear in the DSM-5.

On the lack of professional consensus: “What Is a Dark Empath?” MentalHealth.com. Notes that dark empathy remains a debated construct, with no consensus on whether it is a distinct psychological profile or simply a descriptive recombination of traits psychology already measures, the Dark Triad, emotional intelligence, and attachment.

A sociologist’s public criticism of the trend: Ranee, C. “The ‘Dark Empath’: A Dangerous Trend Glorifying Sociopaths.” Points out that the source is a preliminary study, that “dark empath” is not a clinical term, and that the label risks glamorizing the same predatory behavior clinicians already have names for.

The Marks Some Leave Upon Us - gritty witty blind item memoirs on celebrity, narcissistic abuse, public image, cultural obsession, & thriving after trauma. There is powerful healing found in telling stories.

©Philosopher Jean Baudrillard spent his career arguing that modern society has replaced reality with symbols and signs, copies of things that no longer have an original meaning. He called these copies simulacra. Eventually, he warned, the sign becomes more real than the thing it was supposed to represent.

If you watch the background of a film closely, you’ll see people having what looks like the most animated conversations of their lives. They nod, they gesture, they laugh, but they aren’t making a sound. In the industry, this simulated crowd noise is called “walla.” To create the illusion of a bustling room without drowning out the main dialogue, background extras are trained to mouth meaningless phrases on a loop: “Peas and carrots, peas and carrots,” or, “Rhubarb, rhubarb.” From a distance, the mouth shapes look flawlessly organic. Up close, it’s nonsense designed to fill the space. It is oppression with a SAG card. The patriarchy has finally achieved its purest form: background actors muttering root vegetables while everyone pretends this is greatness.

The genius of walla is that it only works on the audience. The extras know they’re performing nothing. The lead actors know the chatter is fake. The director knows. Everyone on set knows. The only people who believe the background conversation is real are the ones watching from the other side of the screen. This is, when you think about it, a near-perfect model of how institutional power maintains its innocence. The background noise is coordinated, purposeful, and empty. It exists to create an atmosphere in which the foreground story can be told without interference.

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For a long time, I have been forced to watch a highly coordinated public version of walla. When you are targeted by several famous narcissistic abusers, particularly those operating within the calculated ecosystem of a cult, the harassment rarely looks like an overt public assault. It relies entirely on plausible deniability. To the casual observer, their social media posts, their oddly specific interview tangents, their public gestures of charm look like harmless background chatter. Just peas and carrots. Peas and carrots, of course, are much easier to digest when you are not the one being pelted with them.

But this ambient noise is not meaningless. It is finely tuned to do one thing: provoke a reaction out of me, a reaction they can then point at and use to claim I’m the one acting out. They create the absuive walla, but they are looking directly at me to see if it breaks me. And maybe, just maybe, their goal is not to just discredit me but to have me committed. They are, after all, friendly with Maga types who are seeking to create laws to make involuntary institutionalization easier again. Some men hear the words “mental health care is important” and instinctively start measuring a woman for a locked door, for her own good, while he keeps the key.

The feminist philosopher Kate Manne coined a word for the cultural physics that makes this possible: “himpathy,” the disproportionate sympathy extended to a powerful or famous man over his victim. Rebecca Solnit has written that credibility is a basic survival tool, and that entire systems around powerful men are designed to accommodate their silencing and devaluing of women. Miranda Fricker named the epistemic structure underneath both observations: testimonial injustice, the phenomenon in which a speaker’s word is discounted because of prejudices about her social standing or emotional state. The celebrity’s peas-and-carrots act depends on all three forces running at once. He is the charming public figure. I am the reactive, obsessed observer. The system is built to believe his background noise over my direct testimony. It is less “gaslighting” than “gaslighting with craft services.”

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Mr. Black and Mr. Blue often uses gals who agreed to join the cult to do this to me. Once those women were in, they were granted higher status, not because of skill or character or any quality you could point to, but because they had said yes. The only credential that mattered was membership. Membership that functioned like a frequent-flyer program for cruelty: enroll today, receive priority boarding, complimentary superiority, and one checked conscience.

At first it was just Mr. Blue (maybe Mr. Brown too) running the game, the way he may have done for decades on many targets as a prelude to recruitment. But then Ms. Red (almost celeb, actress) dropped her card on the table like a woman who had been waiting for permission to be cruel. With her came the actress flying monkeys: Ms. White, Ms. Yellow, Ms. Green. A film set became their playground. Everyone had to hang out and wait for call times. It was high school with per diems and bored people forced together all day, every day, with nothing to do but pick a target. And this project went on and on.

They took turns being the abusive walla. On Twitter, one of them would ‘@’ someone random, as if responding to an ordinary conversation, and blurt out the trigger. On Instagram, it was a press release or an event invitation, something given in payment for the work of harassment, because even flying monkeys don’t broadcast cruelty for free. They needed something to show for it. Their involvement arrives pre-lit, pre-edited, and already nominated for Best Supporting Alibi.

Cults and celebrity culture are both empires of simulacra. The public persona is a beautifully constructed simulation, and when they target you using walla, they are using that simulation as a weapon. They are weaponizing a copy of normal life, a copy that has no relation to the reality underneath it, to destroy your actual reality.

Figuring out this dynamic takes a feminist rigor that most cultural commentary skips. In a culture conditioned to grant the powerful automatic benefit of the doubt, the abuser’s background noise enjoys a protective shield. By broadcasting these empty symbols of peas and carrots to the world, they rely on a structural asymmetry so deep it functions like gravity: invisible, constant, bending everything toward them. The public consumes the pleasant simulation. Peas and carrots are a staple. I am left choking on the toxic exhaust of the reality underneath - the part that never makes it into the trailer. ©

The marks some leave upon us are not always visible.

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References:

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981). The core argument that modern society has replaced reality with symbols and signs (simulacra), and that the copy eventually becomes more real than the thing it represents. Originally published in French as Simulacres et Simulation.

“Walla” as a film industry term for simulated background crowd noise, with “peas and carrots” and “rhubarb” as standard phrases extras mouth to create the illusion of conversation. Documented across industry sources including Central Casting’s production glossary and the Wikipedia entry on walla, which traces the term to early radio production.

Kate Manne, “himpathy,” coined in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017, Oxford University Press). Defined as the disproportionate or inappropriate sympathy extended to a male perpetrator over his female victim. Manne is an Australian philosopher at Cornell University. She further developed the concept in Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (2020).

Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me (2014, Haymarket Books) and The Mother of All Questions (2017). Solnit’s argument that credibility is a basic survival tool and that entire systems around powerful men are designed to silence, devalue, and discredit women.

Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007, Oxford University Press). Fricker defines testimonial injustice as the phenomenon in which a speaker is given less credibility because of prejudice related to their social identity.

The Marks Some Leave Upon Us - gritty witty blind item memoirs on celebrity, narcissistic abuse, public image, cultural obsession, & thriving after trauma. There is powerful healing found in telling stories.

© There were two versions of the pandemic. The commonly understood one involved closed borders, supply-chain anxiety, and a collective agreement to stay home that functioned, for most people, less like a social contract and more like a locked door. The other version involved private planes to the paradise of Dubai.

The philosopher Iris Murdoch argued that love is “the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” The failure she described was not cruelty in the obvious sense. It was something quieter: the inability to perceive another person as having a full interior, needs and passions that exist independent of your own. Murdoch considered this the most common moral blindness. You can call someone “wife.” You can believe you mean it. And the person you are calling “wife” can still not be real to you at all.

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Dubai reopened its borders to international tourists while most Western nations were still debating whether six feet of distance was a medical recommendation or a polite suggestion. By summer, social media told two parallel stories simultaneously: the people disinfecting their groceries, and the people posting from rooftop pools against a skyline that did not believe in restrictions. If you had the right resources, the pandemic was something that happened to other people. If you did not, it was the air you breathed.

The Relationship Xray

What has been less examined is what this two-tier reality revealed about relationships. Specifically, who got flown out and who got left behind. The lockdown was a relationship X-ray. It showed who mattered to a powerful person and who merely belonged to them. The distinction between being loved and being claimed has always been difficult to name in real time. The pandemic made it visible.

I can tell you exactly what that distinction looks like, because I lived inside it.

For the duration of one such “relationship,” the only thing Mr. Blue (celeb actor), who called me “wife,” ever gave me was toilet paper. He had a private plane and he used it to fly his actress co-stars to Dubai where the borders were open and the sun was out and life was continuing as if the world had not stopped.

I had recently moved to a new state when everything closed. I was entirely untethered in a strange city, surrounded by unfamiliar streets that had suddenly gone quiet and dead. My world shrunk to the perimeter of a few sterile rooms while harassment from his larger Hollywood circle continued. In that closed world, where Mr. Blue did not allow other men to get near me, the sum total of his care arrived in bulk packaging from a supply chain he could afford to access and I could not.

Toilet paper. Toilet Paper.

He would later say it was a big deal to give it to me. A grotesque punchline delivered in clear Charmin wrapping.

Then the photographs appeared on verified accounts, posted in real time. Actresses I did not know, smiling beside horses. His female co-stars, flown out on his private plane, were playing with horses in Dubai, wearing their masks, of course. The digital glare of my screen filled my room with images of sun-bleached horse play, huge banquets, and other fun left only to the imagination; along with the knowing that if the whole world stops and there is nothing else to do, Mr. Blue still will not show up, even as he still demands my romantic loyalty.

The Horses

Horses are my love. I do not mean I enjoy them casually, the way people say they like the beach. I mean I have organized significant portions of my adult life around them. And there were these actresses, on Mr. Blue’s money, on Mr. Blue’s plane, in a country Mr. Blue had access to and I did not, standing beside animals that have always been mine in every way that matters, posting the evidence to accounts anyone could see. Including me. Especially me, as I would later come to understand. They wanted me to see. All this happened while I was not allowed to date anyone else. I had been given the status of an item on layaway, next in line, waiting my turn, which I never agreed to.

The Protection Racket

He would have said he was protecting me. He did say that, in various ways and at various volumes, throughout. Protection was the framework he offered for every absence, every locked door, every privilege extended to someone who was not me. The harm he was protecting me from originated almost exclusively from people in his own circle.

If you are a student of history or criminology, you will recognize this structure. The oldest word for it is a racket. You cannot run a protection business without first ensuring there is something to be protected from. And you cannot keep a woman grateful for toilet paper unless her world has been made small enough that toilet paper feels like proof somebody cares.

The sociologist Evan Stark, whose 2007 book on coercive control re-framed domestic abuse as a pattern of un-freedom rather than a series of incidents, identified isolation as the primary instrument. Not hitting. Not threats. The systematic narrowing of a person’s world until the controller becomes its only point of access.

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Judith Herman, in her landmark study of psychological trauma, went further: she found that captors (political and domestic alike) maintain compliance through what she called “occasional indulgences,” small mercies calibrated to arrive just often enough to sustain hope. The crumb is not an accident. It is the thing that keeps the architecture standing.

Toilet paper, delivered to a woman who could not leave her apartment in a state where she knew no one, by a man with a private plane, is an occasional indulgence. It is psychological starvation where crumbs are rebranded as a feast.

I did not understand this at the time. Coercive control works precisely because the framework is built to look, from inside, like love with complications. From outside, if anyone had been close enough to see, it would have looked like what it was: a man with the resources to give everything, giving toilet paper to the woman he called his wife, and giving the life he claimed she deserved to actresses on verified accounts in a country she could not reach.

You can rationalize a man’s absence. You can re-frame his stinginess as practicality, his control as concern, his withholding as a complicated situation you do not fully understand. But when you are sitting alone in a locked-down apartment in a state where you have no one, and you open your phone, and you see actresses you have never met standing next to an animal that represents everything you love, and you know who paid for them to be there, and you know he calls you “wife,” something in the architecture of rationalization collapses. Not because the horses were the worst thing. Because they were the most yours.

What I Kept For Myself

I was in the process of earning my PhD during all of this. I held on to that. They did not support it. Members of his circle actively tried to sabotage it. But the fact of becoming a doctor was mine in a way they could not reach, and it proved them wrong every time they tried to make me small. Sometimes when you are a fundamentally decent person it is hard to imagine that people operate this way, that the friends-with-benefits culture of celebrity insanity is a real system with real casualties standing in real apartments holding real toilet paper.

Mr. Blue still does not want me to date anyone else. Neither does Mr. Black. They operate like joint curators of a prison I never volunteered to inhabit, exchanging notes on my containment while offering nothing but restrictions. The organization he belonged to, the one whose members did things I will describe with more detail in the essays to come, was both the source of the danger and the reason a man could position himself as my shield against it. That is the racket. That has always been the racket.

The only racket I want is the kind for tennis. ©

The marks some leave upon us are not always visible.

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References:

Iris Murdoch, "Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real," first published in "The Sublime and the Good," Chicago Review, Vol. 13, Issue 3, Autumn 1959, p. 51; the broader framework of moral attention and "unselfing" is developed in The Sovereignty of Good (1970, Routledge).

Evan Stark, "Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life," 2007, on isolation as primary instrument.

Judith Herman, "Trauma and Recovery," 1992, on captivity methods and "occasional indulgences."

The Marks Some Leave Upon Us - gritty witty blind item memoirs on celebrity, narcissistic abuse, public image, cultural obsession, & thriving after trauma. There is powerful healing found in telling stories.

© In his meditations on the elusive nature of reality, French philosopher Henri Bergson observed that “perception is never a mere contact of the mind with the object present; it is impregnated with memory-images which complete it as they interpret it.” We rely on this internal archive to anchor us, trusting that our minds are faithful curators of our lived truths. To be human is to operate under the comforting illusion that while the outside world may be a chaotic theater of conflicting narratives, the state of our own consciousness remains a sanctuary of objective record. We are, we like to think, the reliable narrators of our own lives, or at least the only ones holding the master key to the archive.

But what happens when the archivist turns double agent? The most insidious legacy of trauma is not merely the weight of the event itself, but the quiet coup that follows: internal gaslighting. The mind, in a bid for safety or control, adopts the voice of its original denier, which is especially persuasive if that person is famous or powerful or simply the kind of person other people believe at parties. You find yourself standing in the courtroom of your own psyche, acting simultaneously as the victim, the defense attorney, the forger of evidence, and the hanging judge, and somehow losing the case on all four counts. Cross-examining your own pain until the truth dissolves into a fog of reasonable doubt you manufactured yourself. How do we reclaim our reality when the call is coming from inside the house?

I can tell you what it looks like on an ordinary Wednesday morning. It looks like standing in your own kitchen arguing with yourself about whether to brace the door you just locked. You know why you want to brace it. Your body knows. Your hands know. But the voice, the one that has by now been installed so deep it passes for your own common sense, says: You’re being dramatic. Nothing is happening. Normal people don’t think like this. So you leave the locked door un-braced. You make coffee. You act like a badass woman who is just fine, but your eyes keep wandering back to the door.

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Ms. Red (celeb actress) made fun of me for checking my doors, closets, and windows often, mind you, she noticed I did such things from all of them looking through the windows, or possibly hacking my alarm system cameras, so it was a valid concern. But the trick of internal gaslighting, the thing that makes it so much more effective than the original external version, is that it comes without a face you can argue with. When someone else denies your reality or makes fun of it, you can at least feel the friction and have someone to argue against. But when the denial has migrated inward, when your own narration has been colonized, the friction disappears. You are arguing with yourself, and you keep losing, because the opponent has access to all your evidence and knows exactly which memories to misfile.

This is compounded enormously when the original denier occupies a position of public admiration or power. The cultural reinforcement is constant and ambient, like a low hum you stop noticing. You turn on the television and there is the person the world adores, being adored, and some part of your brain, the part still running the old software, whispers: See? Everyone loves them. The problem must be you. The implausibility of your own experience becomes its own evidence against you. Who would believe it? You barely believe it, and you were there.

Psychologist and clinical researcher Paige Sweet, whose work on gaslighting as a sociological phenomenon has sharpened the clinical lens considerably, argues that gaslighting is not merely interpersonal deception but a strategy rooted in social inequalities. It works best, she notes, when the gaslighter holds structural power the target does not. The internalized version operates on the same principle: the voice you’ve absorbed carries the authority of the person who installed it. If that person was credible, charismatic, beloved, the voice inherits all of it. Your own counter-evidence, your body’s record, your memory, gets filed under unreliable narrator by an internal bureaucracy you didn’t hire and can’t fire.

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What the research on self-gaslighting describes, and what I lived inside for longer than I’d like to admit, is a three-part loop.

First, a perception arises: something is wrong.

Second, the internalized voice re-frames the perception as evidence of your own dysfunction: you are paranoid, dramatic, broken.

Third, and this is the part that braces a locked door, you generate your own corroborating evidence for the re-frame. You scan your history for every time you were wrong, every anxiety that turned out to be nothing, every overreaction. You build the case against yourself with the dedication of someone preparing for trial.

The loop is brilliant in its simplicity. It requires no external maintenance once installed. The original denier can move on, can be photographed at a charity gala, can receive a humanitarian award, and the target will continue the work of self-erasure without any further input. Like a program left running in the background, it consumes resources you don’t notice until the system starts to slow. You lose trust in your own memory. You begin to preface true statements with qualifiers: I think, maybe, I could be wrong. You become, in the clinical language, a diminished witness to your own life. I know this sounds crazy but…

Breaking the loop is not a dramatic moment. There is no scene where you stand in the rain and declare yourself healed. It is smaller and stranger than that. For me, it started with dates. I began writing things down with dates attached, not because I planned to use them, but because a date is a fact that cannot be argued with by a voice inside your head. On this day, this happened. The internal voice can re-frame your feelings. It can question your interpretation. But it has a much harder time with a Tuesday.

Bergson was right that perception is never pure contact, that memory is always in the room, interpreting. What he did not account for, because he was a philosopher and not a woman being gaslit by someone the culture was busy applauding, is that the memory-images doing the interpreting can be forged. The archive can be tampered with. And the most important act of recovery is not to rebuild the archive from scratch, because you can’t, but to notice the handwriting. To look at the annotations scrawled over your own records and recognize: that is not my voice. It never was. ©

The marks some leave upon us are not always visible.

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The Marks Some Leave Upon Us - gritty witty blind item memoirs on celebrity, narcissistic abuse, public image, cultural obsession, & thriving after trauma. There is powerful healing found in telling stories.

© Some women keep journals. I keep refrigerator photos as evidence I existed.

I have a polaroid on my fridge of the street I grew up on. It is not a good photograph. The light is blown out on one side, and someone’s thumb is ghosting the bottom left corner, and the elm tree that used to split the sidewalk has been dead for twenty years. It is not the kind of image you frame. It is the kind you almost throw away three separate times and then don’t, for reasons you could not explain to anyone who asked, so nobody asks. You do not explain it to yourself, either. You just know that something about the way the light hits the pavement needs to keep existing in a place where you can see it while the coffee is still brewing, and if that sounds like sentiment, I promise you it is something colder than that.

I moved it from a shoebox to the fridge door six years ago, the same week I started emailing myself after prank texts. Just the date, the time, a sentence or two about what was said. No subject line. No system. It looked like the sent folder of a woman who had started writing letters to herself with an urgency she could not yet explain. I did it because there was so much happening, so constantly, in so many rooms and on so many devices and across so many ordinary Tuesdays that it all looked the same from the outside, that the sheer volume had started to blur. So much happened that my memory could not hold the individual weight of each thing, as it all blurred together.

That blur is not a symptom but a manipulation strategy paired with the phrase “let it go and move on”. After all these people are famous, what are you going to do?

A part of you that has already been trained to consider yourself unreliable sees that gap between “I know this happened” and “I’m not sure which Tuesday this happened” and it is not your mind failing. It is your mind doing exactly what someone else’s behavior trained it to do. The confusion is a product delivered on time and performing to specifications.

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Internal Gaslighting

Coercive control works, in part, because it makes the target’s own memory feel like a hostile witness. Not through a single dramatic act of gaslighting, the kind you see in films where a man moves the furniture and denies it, because that would be too legible and legible is not what we are dealing with here. Instead it is the slow, institutional, absolutely relentless failure to record. Nobody writes it down. The voicemail gets saved to a phone that gets replaced. The email is sent from an account that is later deleted.

The conversation happens in a room with no witnesses, and then the room is discussed as though the conversation never occurred, and then the room itself stops mattering, and then you stop trusting that you were in it. Your certainty does not collapse all at once. It is not demolished. It is defunded. Like a public library in a district that would prefer you didn’t read.

Martha Stout calls it the pity play: the sociopath’s most reliable tool. The aggressor reframes himself as the injured party, and he does this not occasionally but structurally, as a governing principle, the way some people organize by color and others by the persistent need to be the most wounded person in any room. He reframes until your own account of what happened starts to sound, even to you, like something a difficult woman would say. And you have spent your whole life trying not to be a difficult woman. That was the first rule you learned, long before any of this started, and it is doing more load-bearing work in his favor than he will ever have to acknowledge, because the system he is exploiting is one you arrived pre-trained in. He did not install the software. He just found the keyboard.

The phrase “emotional stake” is doing a remarkable amount of work in legal and institutional settings, because what it really means is: she cares about the outcome, which makes her testimony suspect, unlike the testimony of someone who doesn’t care about the outcome, who is by definition not a witness to anything.

I thought the shoebox of photos and the emails to myself and the habit of writing down what was said and when made me the kind of person I did not want to be. Suspicious. Lawyerly. The woman who takes notes. Someone who could not let things go, as though “letting go” were a wellness practice and not, in this context, the completion of an erasure someone else had been building for years. I thought documentation was the opposite of healing. I thought it meant I was stuck.

Obsession or Preservation?

But there is a difference between obsession and preservation. Obsession circles the wound because it cannot leave. Preservation labels the wound because one day someone may ask where it is, how deep it was, and whether you are sure you did not put it there yourself.

I know now that “let it go” is the most dangerous phrase in the English language when it is said to a woman by anyone who benefits from her silence.

Letting go sounds like health. It wears athleisure. It has a podcast. It sometimes arrives carrying a copy of a book about radical acceptance, which it has not read past the introduction but has referenced in three separate arguments. Letting go, in the mouths of people who mean it honestly, is a gift. In the mouths of people who need your story to stop existing, it is the last brick in a wall.

It is the final act of the disappearance someone else started, performed by the person it was done to, which is the whole point. You erase yourself, voluntarily, and call it peace. The sent emails get deleted. The voicemail disappears. The polaroid goes back in the shoebox. And the record, such as it was, simply ceases to exist, not because it was taken from you but because you were convinced that keeping it made you a person who could not move on.

Just Move On

As if moving on were a direction and not, in some cases, an instruction.

I did not move on. I moved the polaroid to the fridge.

The photograph is still bad. The thumb is still there. The elm is still dead. But the curb is the same curb, and I stood on it when I was nine and did not know any of the words I know now, and that girl is admissible evidence that I existed before I became someone’s version of events. I did exist before this and I will not betray that gal I was by ‘just moving on’.

She did not know that one day she would email herself after phone calls and back up the thread to a drive in a location she will not name in print, not because she is a spy but because she learned, the way you learn anything that saves your life, that the difference between “it happened” and “she says it happened” is documentation. And the difference between documentation and memory is that memory can be rewritten by someone who was not in the room, and paper cannot, which is why paper is so frequently not produced.

Judith Herman writes that the ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. The ordinary response of institutions is to help. Not to help the survivor, obviously. To help the banishment. The institution does not say “this did not happen.” The institution says “we have no record of this happening,” which is a different sentence with the same outcome and much better legal standing.

The Pretty Little Shoebox

I say this because every woman I know who has been through something like this has a version of the shoebox. A box of letters in a closet that locks. A best friend who was told, early, “If I ever say this didn’t happen, show me this text.” We build our own evidence lockers because the ones that are supposed to exist for us are either empty, unstaffed, or designed in such a way that the door only opens from the outside.

I am pinning reminders of who I am to a surface where I can see them every morning, in a kitchen that belongs to me, in a life I rebuilt with my own money and my own nerve and a shoebox that would make a forensic accountant weep with something between admiration and concern. Not because the photographs are beautiful. Not because the evidence is cinematic. But because they are mine, and I have decided to take them out and that they will not go back in the shoebox, as pretty as it is.

Some women keep journals. I keep a Substack and a polaroid and a shoebox that has never once apologized for existing.

The fridge hums. The box is open. The light is on. ©

The marks some leave upon us are not always visible.

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References

Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence. Basic Books, 1992.

Stark, Evan. Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Stout, Martha. The Sociopath Next Door. Harmony Books, 2005.

The Marks Some Leave Upon Us - gritty witty blind item memoirs on celebrity, narcissistic abuse, public image, cultural obsession, & thriving after trauma. There is powerful healing found in telling stories.

© I keep a folder. It does not have a clever name. It is called “stuff,” because by the time I made it I had stopped having the energy for cleverness, and I have never renamed it, because renaming it would mean opening it, and I open it only when someone makes me prove that my terror happened. After all Celeb CEO Mr. Black and Celeb Actor Mr. Blue claim, when backed up against the wall, to care about me.

Inside the ‘stuff’ folder are screenshots. Hundreds. A voicemail saved so many times across so many phones that it has the grainy, underwater quality of a recording of a recording. There are photographs of a parking spot. I did not write down the context of it because I was too scared and panicked, like a drowning person, to realize this might go on for years and I’d forget why this parking spot was integral.

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The Marks Some Leave Upon Us - gritty witty blind item memoirs on celebrity, narcissistic abuse, public image, cultural obsession, & thriving after trauma. There is powerful healing found in telling stories.

© There are some words that arrive in adulthood still wearing elementary school shoes. “Bully” is one of them. Say the word and the mind produces a child with a bad haircut, a lunch tray, a locker, a playground, perhaps a dramatic shove near a drinking fountain. The word smells faintly of sour cafeteria milk. It belongs to a world where the adults are presumed to be in charge, where consequences exist, where someone eventually says, “Use your words,” as though words are not often the weapon in question.

When adults do it, “bullying” is too cute a word. Too soft. Too nursery-wall. It makes adult cruelty sound like immaturity. It makes coercion sound like bad manners. It makes targeted harm sound like a social skills deficit, something that might be fixed with a laminated poster, a restorative circle, and perhaps a bowl of mini muffins. This is not language. This is upholstery. And the Flying Monkey Gals (Celeb Actresses) hid behind it well.

When an adult monitors you, threatens you, humiliates you, follows your movements, floods your phone, shows up where you are, recruits others to isolate you, spreads lies about you, interferes with your work, damages your reputation, intimidates you into silence, or makes you afraid to live normally, that is not “bullying.” That is harassment. That is coercion. That may be stalking. That may be defamation. That may be workplace abuse. That may be intimate partner violence. That may be criminal conduct, when the law says so.

And the modern version travels at the speed of a group chat. Screenshots, quote-tweets, burner accounts, coordinated DMs at three in the morning. Celeb CEO Mr. Black and Celeb Actor Mr. Blue were skilled at hacking their way right into my social media feed and bothering people I followed, even some of my teachers. Calling any of this “bullying” is like calling arson “a disagreement with curtains.”

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And yet the word persists, especially when the target is a woman. A grown man can stalk a woman online, contact her friends, mock her publicly, threaten her privately, sabotage her professional life, and somehow a nearby committee of reasonable adults will stroke its collective chin and say, “Sounds like there’s some bullying going on.” Some bullying. As though the problem is tone. As though the solution is a workshop. As though what we need here is a poster in the break room featuring three diverse cartoon hands forming a heart.

Not because men are never stalked or harassed. They are. But women’s fear has a special cultural talent for being converted into temperament. She is anxious. She is dramatic. She is difficult. She is “making it bigger than it is.” Meanwhile, the behavior itself strolls out the side door wearing a hat.

Women Do It Too

And when the aggressor is female, the vocabulary gets even worse. Then we are not even in adult life. We are in “mean girls” territory, which is shorthand for “do not take this seriously, it is just feelings.” A gal who orchestrates a yearlong reputational attack on a colleague is not a “mean girl.” She is conducting a campaign. A gal who isolates a junior employee and recruits others to freeze her out of meetings is not “catty.” She is harassing. But “mean girls” lets the institution treat the whole thing as a sleepover gone sideways.

The word “bully” has become one of the great minimizers of adult cruelty. It lets institutions remain sentimental about harm.

It allows managers, schools, nonprofits, churches, families, and professional circles to behave as though the issue is interpersonal friction rather than targeted domination. It also does a sly little trick: it drags the target backward into childhood. The woman reporting the behavior is subtly recast as a girl on a playground. Maybe she is “sensitive.” Maybe she needs resilience. Maybe she should ignore it. Maybe she should not “give him the satisfaction.”

Just Ignore It

Ignore him? Lovely. Excellent. Has anyone told the stalker? Has anyone informed the man who has been tracking her, messaging her, copying her emails, contacting her colleagues, posting about her, and showing up at events that the official plan is for her to become emotionally aerodynamic?

Women have been told to ignore male aggression for centuries. Ignore the comment. Ignore the look. Ignore the “joke.” Ignore the drunk uncle. Ignore the professor. Ignore the boss. Ignore the ex. Ignore the man outside your apartment. Ignore the man who says he knows where you live. This advice is always given with the air of ancient wisdom, though it is mostly just cowardice wearing reading glasses.

And if they are malignant narcissists then the very act of ignoring them sets them off and they will do insane things to get your attention back. They don’t want you to have peace or thrive, it makes them feel the gaping hole inside where your reaction lived.

The adult world prefers the word “bully” because it keeps everyone comfortable except the person being harmed. It suggests immaturity rather than malice. It suggests a character flaw rather than a pattern. It suggests a social problem rather than a legal one. And pattern is the point.

The line is not crossed because someone is unpleasant. The line is crossed by repetition, directedness, unwantedness, credible fear, and interference with ordinary life. In adult settings, those details matter. Stalking is not a mood. Harassment is not a vibe. Coercion is not drama. These are conduct categories, and conduct categories are where records begin.

Context is King

“Context is absolutely critical.” — International Association of Chiefs of Police

In stalking, context is the whole game. One text may be nothing. Fifty texts after a clear no are not nothing. Please do not make me explain this to another committee with name tags. One appearance at your event may be coincidence. Repeated appearances after clear boundaries become surveillance. One lie may be gossip. A campaign of lies becomes reputational attack. One cruel remark may be bad manners. A choreography of humiliation, isolation, monitoring, and threat becomes abuse.

Adult aggressors understand pattern. They rely on it. They often do not need one spectacular act, because repetition does the work. Fear is built the way a pot of water comes to boil, so slowly that by the time she notices the temperature, she has been cooking for months.

A hundred small intrusions can imprison a person as effectively as one dramatic threat. It is built by making someone check the parking lot, change the route home, stop answering unknown numbers, avoid professional events, warn friends, sleep badly, rehearse explanations, and slowly make her own life smaller so the aggressor does not have to make one large move in public. Celeb Actor Mr. Blue and Celeb Cult Dude Mr. Brown were skilled in the art of 1,000 cuts, cutting and cutting until I reacted. There was no “OK she must have healed and moved on” no it was “we must at all cost do this until we get that reaction.

Gamergate Was Just Criticism?

Consider how often this gets dressed up as something else. During Gamergate, women in gaming, including Zoë Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and Brianna Wu, were targeted by coordinated campaigns of threats, doxxing, and abuse laundered through respectable-sounding language about “ethics” and “criticism.” Caroline Criado-Perez was buried in rape threats for the crime of campaigning to keep a woman on the British ten-pound note. Taylor Lorenz has been swarmed and doxxed in waves for the journalistic offense of writing about the people doing the swarming. Different decades, same architecture. The tactics are intimidation. The vocabulary is “concerns.”

This is not rare villainy with a cape and a basement. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that more than one in five women in the United States have experienced stalking in their lifetimes.

Celebs and Cultists bothering me had enormous resources and tools of their trade to monitor me and since many of them had a crazy fan or two, they thought it was normal to deal with such things and one should get used to it. I’m sure if they had a fan hack their accounts or bug their home they would get their immense security teams to call the police and not “get used to it”.

And yet among female stalking victims, the most common tactics are not cinematic. They are ordinary-life invasions: being followed, watched, spied on, approached at home or work, flooded with unwanted calls and messages, or monitored through social media and technology. This is the part people keep trying to make cute. It is not cute. It is repetitive intrusion with consequences.

Which is why the word “bully” fails so badly. It focuses on personality. It invites us to ask, “Is he a bully?” as though we are casting a school play. The better question is: What is he doing? Is he contacting someone after being told to stop? Is he making threats? Is he recruiting others? Is he spreading false claims? Is he trying to control where she goes, who speaks to her, what opportunities she receives, what she is allowed to say? Is he making her alter her life to avoid him?

There. Now we are closer to reality.

Language Can Illuminate or Conceal

Language is part of the safety system. The wrong word can conceal danger. The right word can open a door to records, policies, boundaries, lawyers, protection orders, HR obligations, police reports, and witness statements. “Bullying” says: maybe be tougher. “Stalking” says: document everything. “Harassment” says: this may be actionable. “Retaliation” says: the institution may be liable. “Coercive control” says: look at the whole pattern. “Threat” says: take this seriously now.

Illumination does not mean pretending every cruel act is criminal. It means refusing to collapse all adult harm into one childish word. A repeated humiliation campaign at work may be workplace harassment, retaliation, a hostile environment, a policy violation, or psychological abuse, depending on the facts and the law.

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Repeated unwanted contact after a clear boundary may be stalking. False factual claims may be defamation. Threats, monitoring, exposure, isolation, and interference with work may belong under coercive control or abuse. Jurisdiction matters. Facts matter. The word “bully” notices none of this. It is the verbal equivalent of calling every illness “a tummy ache” and sending the patient back to her desk with a juice box.

But They Are Nice To Me

This is especially true because adult harassers are often socially skilled. They are not always snarling villains. Celeb Actors are very good at this. Some are charming. Some are funny. Some are helpful to the right people. Some donate to the fundraiser, compliment the receptionist, remember birthdays, and then go home and spend three hours making sure one woman knows she is being watched. People find this confusing.

“But he’s always been nice to me,” they say.

Yes, and my dentist has never bitten me. This is not evidence of universal benevolence.

Many destructive adults are selective. That is not a contradiction. That is the method. Their public likability protects their private cruelty. It is as though she has been handed two maps of the same city, and only one of them shows the alley where it happened. Everyone says the one without the alley is definitely the real map. Then the target has to prove not only the harm, but that reality itself has not had a small nervous breakdown.

This is where institutions often fail with impressive efficiency. They ask whether the aggressor “meant it.” They ask whether the target has tried being “civil.” They ask whether both parties can sit down together, which is an especially popular idea among people who have confused mediation with feeding a goat to a tiger.

“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.” — Judith Herman

A woman says, “He has been monitoring me, contacting people around me, threatening my reputation, and making me afraid.” The institution says, “Would you be open to a restorative conversation?” A restorative conversation? With the person who has been using access as a weapon? Wonderful. Shall we bring snacks? Perhaps the stalker prefers hummus.

There is a deep cultural hunger to turn abuse into a misunderstanding. Misunderstandings are cheaper. Misunderstandings do not require courage. Misunderstandings allow everyone to leave by five. But targeted adult harassment is not a misunderstanding. It is behavior. It has methods. It has consequences. It should have records.

Let’s Retire “Bully” Forever

So let us retire “bully” for adult conduct. Let children keep the word if they must, though even there we should teach them better language. Among adults, let us be precise. A colleague who repeatedly humiliates someone at work may be engaging in workplace harassment or workplace abuse. An ex who keeps contacting, tracking, or appearing after being told to stop may be stalking. A man who mobilizes friends, followers, or coworkers to punish a woman socially or professionally is conducting a campaign of intimidation. A person who threatens exposure, ruin, humiliation, or consequences unless someone complies is coercing. A group that isolates and targets one person while hiding behind process, politeness, or “concerns” may be participating in collective harassment.

These distinctions matter. They do not mean every cruel act is criminal. They do mean adults deserve adult language for adult harm. The word “bully” has done enough damage. It has softened the edges of behavior that should remain sharp in public view. It has helped bystanders feel sympathetic without becoming useful. It has allowed institutions to confuse discomfort with danger and conflict with abuse.

A bully takes your lunch money. An adult stalker takes your peace, your routes, your sleep, your sense of safety, your professional standing, your trust in ordinary life. We should not use the same moral vocabulary for both.

So abolish “bully” from adult life. Send it back to the playground, where it can sit in time-out and think about what it has done. For adults, use the real words: harassment, stalking, threats, retaliation, coercive control, abuse, and criminal conduct when the law says so.

The adult target of this behavior does not need a character-building exercise. She needs accurate naming, practical protection, and witnesses with spines. She needs people to stop confusing calm language with truth and dramatic behavior with danger. Some dangerous people are calm. Some injured people sound upset because, and I realize this may shock the committee, they are injured.

And when a woman says, “This person is making me afraid,” do not ask her to make the case for her own fear. Ask what happened. Ask what changed in her life. Ask what he did after she said stop. Then write it down. ©

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The marks some leave upon us are not always visible

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References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2023/2024 Stalking Data Brief. Common stalking tactics, and the fear/safety impact data.

U.S. Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women. “Stalking.” Core definition: stalking as a “course of conduct” directed at a specific person that causes fear or substantial emotional distress.

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “Harassment.” Workplace section, especially the distinction between general cruelty and unlawful harassment that becomes severe or pervasive enough to create an intimidating, hostile, or abusive environment.

Office for Victims of Crime. “Stalking.” Stalking is “a crime of power and control,” and repeated proximity, nonconsensual communication, and threats.

Washington State Legislature. RCW 7.105.010, definition of coercive control. Coercive control involves a pattern that interferes with “free will and personal liberty.”

International Association of Chiefs of Police. “National Stalking Awareness Month: Increasing Knowledge and Understanding.” Idea that stalking is about a course of conduct, not a single incident, and that context is critical because ordinary acts can become threatening through repetition.

Evan Stark. Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press. Conceptual anchor for coercive control. Stark’s work helped shift domestic abuse discourse away from isolated incidents and toward patterns of domination, isolation, monitoring, and deprivation of autonomy.

Judith Lewis Herman. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books. Psychology of denial, credibility, trauma, and the social pressure to make harm disappear.

Gavin de Becker. The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence. Little, Brown. Women being taught to distrust fear, politeness overriding self-protection, and the danger of telling women to ignore escalating conduct.

Martha Stout. The Sociopath Next Door. Discussion of conscience, charm, sympathy, and socially hidden predation. Do not imply every adult harasser is a sociopath. That would weaken the rigor. ©

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The Marks Some Leave Upon Us - gritty witty blind item memoirs on celebrity, narcissistic abuse, public image, cultural obsession, & thriving after trauma. There is powerful healing found in telling stories.

Several famous men have been fixating on me for quite some time.

What’s a gal to do?

If I had a dollar for every time Celeb Actor Mr. Blue called me ‘wife’ or Celeb CEO Mr. Black flipped his script on me, I’d be a bazillionaire. Sadistic Narcissism is the art of lies and misdirection and those who are not prepared to encounter such personalities get blindsided. But this is not the art of a harm that hits your body and runs, this is the art of a harm that marinates your psyche and soul in it for the long haul, doing way more damage for the sheer length this slow burn lasts.

I used to think silence was the intelligent choice. Actually no, silence looked safe. Silence looked strategic. Silence looked like not giving anyone the satisfaction of knowing they had gotten under my skin. But at a certain point, silence stops being wisdom and safety and starts becoming a room you are forced to live inside. In fact I have been way too afraid to talk openly let alone remember who I really was - strong, confident, capable. Where had I gone?

Audre Lorde once wrote, “Your silence will not protect you.” I understand that sentence differently now. Silence can look elegant from the outside, but from the inside it can become a cage, especially when other people are using your silence as permission to continue.

And I think once you hit ten years of insanity, it is time to speak, because clearly it will kill you if it continues.

Not because speaking will make everyone understand. It will not. Not because speaking will suddenly make powerful people accountable. It rarely does. Not because speaking is clean, easy, or rewarded. It is usually none of those things.

But because there comes a point when you have to stop letting other people narrate your life from behind curtains.

How much of this is because I am a Democrat? How much of it is because I am a woman with a mind of my own? How much of it is because I refused to be flattered into compliance, frightened into silence, or confused into submission?

And what exactly is oppression?

Is it only oppression when there are bruises?

Is it only coercion when someone says the threat out loud?

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Is harm only real when it can be photographed, documented, screenshotted, or explained in one clean paragraph to someone who has already decided not to believe you?

Feminism has given me language for something I once only experienced as confusion and utter terror that was - is - destroying my life. Sadistic narcissism, celebrity, and the cult mindset.

It taught me that domination does not always announce itself as violence. Sometimes it appears as fascination, pursuit, joking, admiration, implication, denial, and return. Sometimes the point is not to possess a woman’s body, but to occupy her attention; not to silence her with one threat, but to make speech itself feel impossible.

And when she finally speaks, when she sees the only way to protect herself and her future is to speak… the same culture that trained her to be polite asks why she waited, why she sounds angry, why the story is complicated, why she cannot make ten years of psychological torture fit into a sentence small enough to be understood.

And while we are asking questions, is MeToo still alive? Or did the men successfully crush it when they took over twitter?

What happens when the behavior is more subtle, more psychological, more humiliating, more prolonged? What happens when the men involved are charming, famous, wealthy, admired, and very practiced at seeming harmless?

If I had a dollar for every time Celb Actor Mr. Blue called me ‘wife’ or Celeb CEO Mr. Black flipped his script on me, I’d be a bazillionaire. And yes, I know how that opening statement sounds. That is part of the trap. The more surreal the behavior, the situation, the harder it is to describe without sounding surreal yourself.

That is one of the cruelest parts of this kind of harm. It makes the person telling the truth sound unstable, while the people causing the instability get to remain smooth, polished, and plausible.

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What I have encountered can only be described as a pattern of coercive, reality-bending behavior: insidious, slippery, full of lies, reversals, misdirection, and plausible deniability. People who are not prepared to encounter behavior like this are often blindsided. They think manipulation will announce itself. They think cruelty will look like cruelty. They think a dangerous person will seem dangerous.

Often, the opposite is true.

Some people do not harm you by exploding. They harm you by bending reality around you, little by little. They suggest, withdraw, flatter, mock, deny, reappear, disappear, imply, provoke, and then act innocent when you finally react. They study your conscience and use it against you. They learn your empathy and treat it like a door they are entitled to walk through, especially if they are famous.

This is not the kind of harm that hits and runs.

This is the kind of harm that keeps returning.

It marinates you in confusion over the long haul. It does not always terrorize the body. It terrorizes the psyche. It terrorizes the nervous system. It terrorizes the soul. It turns ordinary life into a field of signals, traps, and second guesses. You begin to wonder what is coincidence, what is intention, what is mockery, what is warning, what is bait.

And after years of that, the damage is not dramatic in the way people expect. It is cumulative. It is a slow burn. It is the drip, drip, drip of being treated as an object while everyone else pretends the room is dry.

The public loves a simple story. A bad man. A good woman. A clear event. A clean timeline. A confession. A cancellation. A courtroom. A headline.

But some forms of domination do not work that way.

Some forms of coercion operate through ambiguity. Some forms of cruelty hide inside charm. Some forms of obsession disguise themselves as admiration. Some forms of misogyny come dressed as romance. Some forms of control never have to touch you, because they have already learned how to occupy your attention.

The question is not only whether a woman can prove harm to the satisfaction of people invested in not seeing it. The question is why women are so often required to become archivists of their own humiliation before anyone will admit that something happened. Why must the wound come with receipts? Why must the pattern become a spectacle? Why must she be calm enough to be credible, damaged enough to be sympathetic, but never so damaged that people start calling her unreliable?

This is part of what philosopher Miranda Fricker calls testimonial injustice: the injustice of having your credibility discounted because of prejudice. Women know this problem intimately. We are asked to produce evidence for things that were designed to leave none. We are asked to explain patterns to people who only recognize incidents. We are asked to sound reasonable while describing behavior that was meant to make us doubt reason itself.

And feminist scholar Liz Kelly gave us another useful idea: sexual and gendered harm often exists on a continuum. It is not always one spectacular event. It can be a pattern of intrusion, humiliation, pressure, entitlement, and fear. The fact that something is difficult to summarize does not mean it is not real. Sometimes it means the opposite: the harm was cumulative, atmospheric, and deliberately hard to name.

That is why I am speaking.

Not because I expect the world to become fair overnight.

Not because I think everyone will believe me.

Not because I have any interest in being anyone’s spectacle.

I am speaking because ten years is too long to be polite about madness. Ten years is too long to keep translating someone else’s distortions into something gentler than what they were. Ten years is too long to let powerful men play games with a woman’s mind, family, and income; and then hide behind fame, money, politics, charm, or silence. This will kill me.

Feminism gave me one thing I badly needed: the understanding that I am not the object in someone else’s fantasy, joke, courtship, vendetta, or performance. I am not the muse, the wife, the target, the punchline, the rumor, or the unreliable narrator of my own life.

I am the narrator.

So here is the question I keep coming back to:

If a woman can be targeted, toyed with, psychologically tortured, and publicly disbelieved because the story is too strange, too long, too inconvenient, or too threatening to powerful men (and sometimes women), then what exactly did we mean when we said we believed women? Though the truth is many women join in the abuse too.

And what, exactly, are we waiting for a victim to prove?

Or maybe the better question is this:

Why are powerful men still allowed to make women prove reality alone? ©

The marks some leave upon us are not always visible.

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References:

Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Kelly, Liz. Surviving Sexual Violence. Polity Press, 1988.

Quoted: Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in Sister Outsider, 1984.