In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I haven’t posted as “Asher’s friend” and I don’t intend to. (I am that but that’s not the direction my voice is coming from.) I have not gotten approval for posting anything about this from any of the people involved. That’s part of why what I say isn’t always flattering about the people I’m talking about. If I got approval I’d probably feel obligated to edit that those bits out and I suck at leaving stuff out if it’s true. I have not asked permission of anyone else involved once. They’ve been cool with this. We’ll see if this continues. If not, well, we’ll work it out on our own like friends do. I think they’ll be okay with this, though, they already know this isn’t exactly for them.
[TW: Abuse, self harm/suicide threats]
Reading this, I realize that I have still been being relatively apologist on behalf of my abusers. I can’t do that anymore because it’s not just about me. It’s about my friends, and if I am apologist for Twiggy and Jamie in any way, than I am being apologist for the abuse of my friends. Which, whatever, if I wanna minimize my own trauma it’s my own right to make myself feel like a piece of shit who deserved it. But I don’t have the right to minimize what so many people that I love went through. I don’t have the right to minimize what Char went through, what Anja went through, what Allyn went through or what any of the other victims who I cannot publicly name went through.
The truth is that Twiggy and Jamie had the entire Bay scared silent.
Yeah, that’s right, the whole Bay Area full of radical queers, a huge-ass collection of people who generally take no shit, scared to say anything or come out in public or stand together against these two serial abusers.
I felt so, so isolated for the first month after I broke up with them, because everyone I knew was still acting like they thought Twiggy and Jamie were great. I thought I had nowhere to turn. People would not even go so far as to de-friend T and J on various websites. People didn’t even dare to fail to smile and say hi when they saw T and J at parties. And it turned out that none of those people who were acting so polite and pleasant wanted anything to do with them, because they could all smell the danger, but they were too scared to even run away lest the avoidance be noticed.
And, they still had Anja.
Oh, my god, I was so afraid of what they might be doing to Anja. And I assumed that I would have no ability to help Anja because I assumed they would have zir convinced already that I was a horrible abuser.
I was so afraid of what they were doing to zir, them and their fucking knives and their fucking lies and manipulating and gaslighting and guilt-tripping.
I had NO contact with Anja during that time, no way to know what was really happening, only my worries and my imagination. And now T and J wanna say that I convinced zir to throw them out. Hell, I WISH I could’ve done it! I wish I could’ve saved zir even a tiny bit of that suffering! But I was cut off from Anja completely.
And they wanna say that I turned people against them, but I couldn’t even get people to defriend them on facebook and fetlife! Because everyone was too fucking afraid to even admit to not liking them!
I am SO ANGRY about what we all went through while they abused, threatened and intimidated us and basically held our friend hostage.
I am SO FUCKING ANGRY that Allyn hasn’t slept in 72 hours. I am so fucking angry that Char had to leave work the other day because they couldn’t stop crying. I am angry about all my other friends who are triggered and losing sleep and torturing themselves.
I AM SO FUCKING ANGRY.
And you know what?
It feels so much better than being afraid.
You know what else? I don’t even give a shit what they are saying about me on the interwebs anymore, because this is about something a lot more important than my little fucking reputation. This is about our right to be left alone by these abusers. By these fucking serial abusers who silenced all of us and isolated all of us from each other.
It’s ironic that their long-range attempt to continue to hurt us has brought us out of the woodwork and brought us together.
