X often contemplated how she could possibly reach her lost friends through the frames of reference she’d been caged into. She could stand in front of them, speak to them in many ways, but none that she could think of could be reasonably expected to breach the engineered misunderstandings laid between them through not only the hacking and cloning, surveillance and doxxing, but also through the mighty morphing mask she’d developed in her lifetime as a highly sensitive autistic under coercive control. She’d been beaten into taking shapes that cast shadows that she could only merely extrapolate the shapes of based on how she was regarded by others.
Others saw many things in her, that varied greatly, seemingly dependant on their unique filters of perception, interpretation and awareness, cross referenced by the states she was in at the time of the interaction. Nobody had actually ever seen her, not even the ones who had watched her relentlessly. Wether they had heard rumour of her or the symbols of language, appearance, or behaviour that she arrived with at that time, before or after the interaction, would mould the frame of reference that they held her in, swapping lenses that would change her meanings entirely from person to person.
She was usually left to guess what people thought, as it seemed that people withheld honest expressions these days more than ever, for how the outright honest are most often mistreated in ways nobody wants to risk.
Her proclivity to swap her symbols in hopeful translations to whichever new demographic she approached, although intended as an honest means of connection, seemed to leave her all the more obfuscated. She could never be quite sure what was heard of what she had said, and she failed to bridge the gap left by the lack of standardized language to ascertain and correct for the differences, though she tried as though in a repetitious nightmare of babel. She was trying so hard to be direct through indirect means, searching for something that would work, but she failed to see whatever wrench consistently foiled her plans to be seen and understood. It was like the harder she tried to be straight, the more manipulative she seemed, in a world, as she knew it, that was so used to being manipulated that it seemed suspicious of anything else.
Puppy was triggered by the notion that he could be coerced, a common disposition, particularly of men, who had generally been coerced into performing a belief that they are too strong to be coerced, which ironically makes them much more vulnerable to coercion. He would furrow his brow and get real firm and loud and seem to put his foot down, without consideration, that he was not being manipulated, like, ever, and there would be no conversation to be had on the subject. She knew he was wrong, that likely not a single person in the country could earnestly claim what he was claiming. She knew she could prove it in countless ways. She knew it wouldn’t matter if he wouldn’t look. He held her in a frame of reference that would not trust her input on such matters and she knew of no way to escape without just physically leaving him and his ideas behind. She had these problems with most people, and thought the only ways she could possibly solve them (problems) was with them (people). They so often acted as though the only thing threatening to manipulate him, was her ideas on manipulation, a sort of defense mechanism, within them, but not necessarily theirs.
She thought of all the stories she had heard people tell of people who had been through things she had been through, being targeted, hunted, controlled. Their tellings of these stories, invariably sided with the aggressors, by calling anyone who claimed to face such persecution delusional, without ever actually checking for wolves.
“I mean, she even thought *I* was in on it.”
“Well, you wouldn’t necessarily know if you were.”
Listening to how the average person spoke on such matters, they did not seem to know that the narratives they regurgitated were in service to something that they were unaware of. They had pulled it from media and the group think it propagates, they had no concept that anything that sounded so convincing could be coercion, when coercion always is. They were not thinking critically, or thinking much on their own at all, they were just essentially reposting memes without even knowing the source or purpose.
It’s true, people subject to the unseen unnamed forces that keep this country in line, often end up blaming the wrong people, as our brains desperately try to understand what is happening in a world full of imposters to be spotted. But blaming the wrong person, even for crimes that aren’t covered by the stats, doesn’t make a person crazy, it just makes them wrong, but it wasn’t based on nothing, it’s based on a culture which itself has morphed to take the shape of its masters. The tendency to call anyone who questions or doubts or criticizes you “crazy”, is an abusers move, and very few people left resist this script. There are infinite reasons for being wrong about a person. X thought that realistically, mental illness was the least likely explanation of all, though it had been highly sensationalized and popularized.
It complicated her to hold this belief both in how she regarded others as well as how she was regarded. She tried her best to question her beliefs about people and events with the knowledge of how often she had been wrong and others wrong about her. Very few others seemed to withhold judgement in this way, all the while, her mind, hypervigilant from extensive relational trauma, was churning out judgements to analyze at an abnormal rate. When others were wrong about her, she forgave them, humbled by how wrong she’d been, and though it matched her ethics, she seemed to others to enable the misinterpretation and mistreatment.
She thought of her mother saying,
“The more you try to prove that you’re innocent, the more guilty you seem.”
“But, what are innocent people accused of guilt supposed to do?”
“Just ignore them. You can’t do anything about it.”
“Well, that sounds set up by guilty people who like to take it out on the innocent.”
And it was, but they’d done such a good job sealing it that the fact that is was true was nothing to the lies which had been better marketed.
She thought of a new friend saying,
“You can never trust a person who says they’re honest.”
“Well, what are honest people supposed to say when they’re treated like the rest of the liars? I’m an honest person. I’ve earned that. I have no problem proving it. I’m honest enough to be honest about the fact that I’m not always honest, and I don’t think that anyone is supposed to be, but I’m honest enough to qualify as honest, especially relative to the people I tend to meet. It’s concerning to me that there’s so much stigma around claiming one’s own better qualities, like we’re all supposed to hopefully wait to be discovered and valued through a fog of degradation, where anyone who does not degrade themselves will be degraded by degraded masses. Who does that serve?”
X walked with Puppy, uncertain at times why she kept talking to him about things that she knew he wouldn’t understand but for the hope that she could be wrong again,
“I’ve been thinking about your friend who proclaimed that I was an undercover cop and made a veiled death threat, and that guy in treatment who believed for three months that I was deep cover there to fuck with him, and how often in my life people have believed themselves to catch me out for some suspicion or another. Really it’s even in my earliest memory of my parents, busted for seeming so guilty, I must be it. I’ve been blamed for the wrong things people think of me so much, it’s a wonder I’m not more used to it, but even how used to it I’ve gotten seems further proof that the boot fits.
When it comes to the deep cover accusations, people usually have just gone for the narrative of just calling the accusers crazy, but I don’t actually think that’s fair, I wouldn’t want to be treated that way if I had befallen such a harrowing misconception. These guys are not the first and they won’t be the last to suspect me of something like this. It’s worthwhile to wonder what it is about me that gives people this impression, especially now that I understand that I was groomed for my whole life and I still don’t certainly know how or what for, because I didn’t know it was happening. I’m still trying to reprocess 34 years with way too little to go on. So, it’s worth it to wonder, what about me makes people so suspicious of me?
I was at the venue earlier and was checking myself for it – I’m awkward, like I’m hiding something. I’m always looking around for stuff to look at, like I’m casing the joint, or trying to busy my attention while I eavesdrop. I’m hyper aware of movement in the room, getting out of the way of others without ever needing to look at them. I came from nowhere, brought in by this sweet trusting guy on a “chance” meeting that I tend to cling to, almost hide behind. I usually don’t say much, probably ask too many questions, like I’m not really revealing much about myself while always trying to get more information. When I do talk it’s probably suspicious for others reasons, I’m usually so uncomfortable while trying to seem comfortable that I probably read as contrived, fake, which I kind of am, but not in the ways or for the reasons people think. I left my bag behind in the green room, coulda been a recording device in there. My tattoos are nondescript and look like they’ve been drawn on with a Sharpie. It’s probably not common for people who aren’t under cover agents to worry about being accused of being accused of being such. I get it. Someone scanning for spy’s could suspect me. It’s not unreasonable. I kind of fit a profile. I mean, even me saying all of this to you, it’s probably what I would do if I was deep cover, to probe your response and improve my cover by seeming so open about it, that I couldn’t possibly be hiding anything. That, too.”
It occurred to X at this time that accusing someone else of being an under cover agent is also what she might do if she was one, something she had wondered about of those who had accused her, whom she had at one moment or another felt some inclination to accuse after being so accused. She thought of her mother admitting that she had always responded with suspicion to anyone who mistrusted her, a reflection of the abusive culture that had forged them.
I’d caught a similar feedback loop with The Raven and Narcissism. Like, they said in the groups that victims of narcissism will often reach a phase where they begin to question if they themselves is the narcissist, as a result of how a narcissist has treated you, and that if you ask this question, you are probably not a narcissist. So, I thought, if I was a narcissist, I would intentionally ask this question to disprove that I was a narcissist. Another friend had simply said you can just know someone is a narcissist by just asking them if they experienced empathy, seemingly ignorant that a narcissist would either lie, or believe that they do and so honestly claim that they do even if it perhaps wasn’t true, or it may be that narcissists actually do have empathy, but it’s just harder to access and understand than a person who hasn’t been abused in the ways that a narcissist has. I realized that my answering this way could have seemed like delaying an answer, not just that my answers are always as nuanced and complicated as I believed them to be. This was when I began to realize that definitions around narcissism, or, what is generally suspicious of a threat, had been laid out by people far worse than the illusions they had us chasing. and, that might just be what I would say if I were a narcissist. Depending on what that word actually means, it could be quite narcissistic to suppose that I don’t have any narcissism to reckon with.
A similar feedback loop is set for mental patients who are coerced into calling themselves delusional so they don’t seem as delusional about people and events that will never actually be investigated for truth, but profiled as false, automatically, based on authority. Coercion. It’s everywhere. It’s normalized. Its systemic. It’s institutionalized. It’s dominant. It would take serious dedicated effort not to be “in on it””
She could tell she was rambling in a manner that would be hard to follow for anyone outside of the rich inner world she had built for herself in plain sight isolation.
She lived to try anyways, resisting the currents seduction to slip her deeper into lonesome lost languages, hoping to be wrong about as many wrong things as possible.
Solve for x 
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