Another person who gets why we blog about our abuse/stalking experiences

I’ve been reading this blog about a woman who was stalked by her neighbor for some time.  Because of how some people responded to me posting here about Richard and Tracy, and especially my husband telling me they’ll stop stalking me here if I stop posting about them, this part resonated with me:

I was on a bit of a moral high horse, then. Thought Cyber Friend’s posts lacked discretion. Violated Internet Rule #1: keep your private life off the Internet. Weren’t her posts goading him? Taunting him? Putting fuel on the fire, giving him more to get enraged about?

By the way, I received similar accusations from people in my neighborhood, after they learned that The Neighbor declared war on me. Karma?

Of course, my moral quandary wasn’t enough to stop reading the awfulness Cyber Friend described. Who can resist taking a second, then a third look at a train wreck?

Cyber Friend never wrote about her fear, only her frustration and tiredness. The extreme tiredness that comes when you just want something to end, but have to keep going. Trying to hold onto your life, because the awfulness just might never end.

I now understand the tiredness she described. Never knowing when my dinner, my sleep, my attempt to go to work, to come home from work, to go grocery shopping, to entertain friends, or to just watch Doctor Who in peace, would be interrupted by a barrage of screaming hatred.

My new filter also allows me to realize that Cyber Friend was asking for help. Hoping for advice or comfort.

She was also building witnesses to her stalker’s obsession. Practicing cyber self-defense. Fighting her stalker as openly as he was attacking her.

Keeping a public record, so if anything happened to her, at the very least, her cyber readers could attest to her harassment.

Exactimundo!  This is why I kept posting everything my stalkers, Richard and Tracy, did, even when they passed me twice on the street and freaked me out last January.  I knew they would read that, maybe laugh, but I didn’t care: I wanted that public record.  They’re hardly the only ones who read that post.

I knew that Richard and Tracy were both crazy enough to attack me, because Richard once told me Tracy almost killed me one night (back in 2008), because I saw her raging tirades, because Richard was a former Mafia thug who had been convicted of choking one of his kids, and because he once told me he was going to assault (sounded like kill) the woman who evicted his family.

If they could do these things in other situations, or contemplate them, then I had reason to fear when seeing their van pass me a second time in one hour, as if they’d been waiting for me to finish my errand.  In case anything did happen to me, my blog would serve as evidence so that they would not get away with it.

I recommend the above blog, by the way: It is very well-written.  [Update 9/24/15: The blogger let the original blog expire.  For now, her old posts can only be found through the Wayback Machine, which I’ve used in my updated links here.]

Also, earlier I mentioned that my husband disagreed with some friends, and I wondered if his own trauma from the Richard/Tracy crap led to him making the disagreement seem worse than it was.  That is indeed the case.  He finally sorted out the issue with the friends.

He and I both felt, and we also told these friends, that the Richard/Tracy trauma has had such an enduring effect on us that he feared the same thing was happening all over again with new people. 

So he freaked out and thought the friendship was over, that the new friend was a narcissist, etc.  This tells me that he, too, was traumatized by Richard/Tracy.