my side of the story
Sep. 18th, 2019 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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nameseekingI didn't really want to write this. Life sucks that way.
Content notes: discussion of emotional toxicity, suicidality, substance abuse, and sexual assault.
In August of 2017 two friends helped me move out of my apartment in the South Sound suburb of Kent; it was in very bad shape, as I'd been intensely depressed for months at my terrible job, and it had been left in bad shape in the first place by the ex-roommate who had bailed and left me holding the lease.
"These friends saved me" was the narrative, I suppose. Anyway, I went to live with one of them, Mei. She had a condo her mother had bought her on the downtown Seattle waterfront, which was awesome, and I'd been told I didn't have to start paying rent until I was on my feet again. Then we could figure something out.
It was impressed upon me that Mei had once had a very toxic, abusive roommate called Ry who had somehow sucked her trust fund dry while generally treating her like shit and never paying for rent or expenses. Everyone was anxious for her to have a better roommate with me.
It wasn't perfect. The room I was living in wasn't a real bedroom, nor was it even really legal to rent it to me. It was a den in the back of the condo, fairly small but not tiny--however, it had no windows and the "door" was a set of sliding panels that blocked out no light or noise. Mei also never closed her own door (to the actual bedroom) because that would bother her cat, Freya. She didn't seem to have any concept of privacy, actually.
I got a job working at a "toxin-free" dry-cleaning service. For a while it was okay. I even paid a few months of rent, though it only amounted to about five hundred bucks before things got bad at the job. They understaffed horribly and put an absurd amount of responsibility on me for someone not in a managerial role and, also, making minimum wage. I started self-harming behind the counter, so I quit.
Mei was the first to suggest that I could quit and rely on her for a while.
Eventually I got a seasonal job at the store up the hill, CostPlus World Market.
There were fractures by the end of the first year. Mei was much tidier than I was, better at keeping up with most chores, and bothered by how messy I was--a fact which was not helped by my small space and lack of storage. I talked about getting better storage but never seemed to have the money to do it. That was another thing--I was bad at managing money, which stressed Mei out terribly. She had had experience being poor as a child and by her admission knew how to manage her money as a result, by which I mean she simply decided to almost never buy anything unless it was food or she couldn't live without it. My lack of impulse control with regards to spending frustrated her. She would at times mention things Ry had done and compare them to what I was doing, talk about how my actions reminded her an awful lot of Ry, though she always assured me that I wasn't anywhere near as bad as Ry.
The lack of privacy was wearing on me. Without a bedroom door, I couldn't seem to figure out a good system for signaling to Mei that I wasn't available to chat, and telling her "I just had a full day of work in customer service/retail, I can't socialize" was only so effective before she forgot about it and started chatting at me again. But it was okay. Like our mutual friend Olivia (who had been one of the ones to help me move), Mei was very invested in helping me fix my emotional issues. She was vaguely fascinated by them, remarking on how many more issues I had than her, on how much less mature I was than her despite being five years older, on how she could teach me to be a better adult. She was proud of her psych major background which allowed her to determine all this.
We argued, though, about my inadequacy as a roommate. I had a tendency to crash over Mei's boundaries. I felt like I needed these things laid out explicitly for me to understand and obey them, and she felt like that was an unfair request of her. It was very hard for her to express her boundaries in words, and I was refusing to learn to read her so that she didn't have to. "Your problem is that you only ever learned how to read your abusive father," she told me. "I'm not your abusive father."
I told her in late 2018 that if I couldn't learn to be a better roommate by the end of next year, I would move out somehow.
Life proceeded. I lost my job after the holiday season and failed to get unemployment due to a mixup involving my deadname, but after a couple months of stressful poverty I got the job back. I had other problems. I was smoking too much weed, vaping too much nicotine, drinking too much alcohol. I tried to cut down but the stress was overwhelming. I didn't really think much about the psychological effects, although I knew by this point they were deleterious.
I kept trying to go on with my life. I was going to a gay dive bar in Capitol Hill to do karaoke once or twice a week, sometimes less if I didn't have the money, but I loved it. I tried to get involved with events among my local social circle, but it was awkward. I didn't feel like I fit in with these people with their high-paying IT jobs who usually preferred to meet up at expensive restaurants.
Mei and I began to argue more. She felt, she told me, like a nagging wife. She resented my continuing money problems, my inability to perceive and respond to her emotional needs, my paranoia about our social circle--that is, my anxiety that this very social-justice-minded group of people would find out about my flaws, put up call-out posts, and ostracize me. She thought this feeling was absolutely absurd (at first--towards the end she began talking about "self-fulfilling prophecies").
In May things went from bad to worse. I talked about it in more detail in a locked post and I won't repeat everything here. I will tentatively say I got sexually assaulted by a Grindr hookup. I was stupid and didn't take care of my safety; I feel like I should say it's my own damn fault. He didn't use protection, so I was terrified, but I played it all off to my friends online as delightful fun (it had been physically amazing and an enormous salve to my dysphoria) and didn't mention the lack of a condom or his rough abrupt manner, instead letting them assume that of course I used protection, of course it was totally consensual. But I was hazy from dissociating, scared as hell, emotionally a mess on the inside.
More importantly, Freya wasn't doing well. She'd been wheezing and losing weight, and Mei was fretting terribly about her beloved pet, struggling to figure out how to help her.
One Wednesday in early to mid-May, at night after I'd been up since 5:30am in order to stock liquor at CostPlus, Mei casually said to me with a sigh, "I think all the incense you burned before I asked you to stop gave Freya asthma; I should've asked you to stop sooner, now my cat is going to die and it's all my fault."
Exhausted and emotionally fragile, I freaked the fuck out with horror and guilt. Vivid images of suicide were flashing through my head, overwhelming me. I tried to restrain myself, knowing that it was wrong, knowing that it was abusive to say anything according to our social circle--I tried to panic to friends online instead who wouldn't be as hurt by it. But she was urgently pushing me for some kind of soothing response; I couldn't just dash away to my room and cut off contact, because she needed comfort now. Hey, at least she hadn't run into my room after I'd told her I wasn't up to comforting her, insisting that she needed it--that had happened once or twice before.
Still panicking, wide-eyed, I said, "I'll kill myself quickly."
We argued. I tried to explain my position. I apologized anyway.
The next morning she told me she'd told Olivia what I said. Online, Olivia snapped at me, told me I'd said a horrible thing and I needed to center myself on Mei's needs right now. So I tried. When Mei took Freya to the vet and texted me in the middle of the appointment that she needed me to bring her new clothes because Freya had peed all over her, I grabbed her dress and walked across downtown to the vet in South Lake Union, arriving around close. Mei was vaguely annoyed that I hadn't used a Lyft to get there sooner.
On Friday afternoon, Olivia contacted me again, abruptly, asking me to come with her to an Al-Anon meeting around sunset when I would usually be starting Shabbat prayers. I misunderstood, thinking she wanted to take me to Alcoholics Anonymous rather than its sister program for family and loved ones of alcoholics, so I was upset, and when I snapped at her as a result, she turned and ripped into me about how she'd been ignoring bad behavior from me for a while and I needed to stop and think about how good I had it with Mei before I lost that. We stopped talking to each other, more or less, at least about important things, although we would trade spiky, poorly-thought-out confrontations a few more times online.
Things got worse. My living space got messier. I was constantly stressed out and on edge. I started looking both for new jobs and a new place to live. This clearly wasn't working out.
Mei and I started arguing regularly. She was frustrated with my inability to attend to her emotional and physical needs, she was annoyed that she did so much for me and I couldn't do that for her. She sheltered me rent-free, she paid for groceries when I couldn't (I usually could, but certainly not always), she got me takeout, she cleaned up after me, she was basically my mother, so she said. And I couldn't even learn to read her mood and needs--it was a problem, she repeatedly said, that I only did things for other people when explicitly asked.
In retrospect, I don't actually believe it's true that I only do things for other people when explicitly asked, but I wasn't addressing all of Mei's needs without her having to lay them out for me, so that's how she perceived my flaws.
I began to worry that I was abusing her--I tended to raise my voice when distressed. I never touched her or belittled her verbally or called her names, but I did drag her into upsetting circular arguments about my low self-esteem.
She tried to start discussions about my issues, about how I could become a better roommate and attend to other people's needs better and be happier myself all the same; she used her psych degree to analyze me and offer me advice, saying she was just looking for a solution. I started shutting down and becoming avoidant about these discussions, which irritated the fuck out of her and caused her to start refusing to let me disengage from conversations no matter how distressed and incoherent I became.
I felt like I was throwing mantrums while she was calm and collected, and my self-image worsened.
At one point, with me frustrated and confused and overwhelmed, I let slip another suicide threat. She rolled her eyes and kept calmly psychoanalyzing me, telling me that no, she was right about what was going on in my head even if I denied it. Frustrated beyond belief, I stomped off to have a smoke and think seriously about throwing myself in the Puget Sound. I didn't want to go back to her, so I hung out in one of the building's lobbies for a bit, but I got a text from her saying she was calling the cops if I didn't come back, because she was worried.
I went back and had to reassure the cops that I hadn't really been thinking about suicide so they didn't drag me off to some shitty hospital.
I was actually thinking about suicide a lot. I started self-harming after our discussions.
At the end of June I finally got tested for HIV and received a negative, so that was a load off my mind. I finally told Mei about the sexual assault, and she expressed concern and sympathy; she also thanked me for not telling her until I knew the results of that test, because otherwise she would have stressed herself out worrying.
We still argued, though, and I still self-harmed afterwards. I didn't tell anyone about that; I knew that doing so would make me an abuser. But at least Freya was mostly getting better now that she was on asthma medication (it turned out asthma is usually manageable in cats rather than a death sentence).
I got a better job, albeit one with very patchy hours, as a tour guide on Bill Speidel's Underground Tour. I started looking for and applying to new apartments, hampered only by my bad credit and questionable rental history. Actually, that's a hell of a hindrance in Seattle's housing market, but I kept looking. I found a dump in Belltown renting for $850 a month and put in an application.
It was August 2019. I was trying to quit nicotine entirely at this point, and also cut down on both pot and alcohol. It was hard but I was making progress, especially on the smoking. Then Mei abruptly got sick with terrible food poisoning.
The next morning I went to work at CostPlus as usual, noting that Mei still wasn't up yet after her illness, but then again she was almost never up this early in the mornings. While I was at work, I received a text message from Mei asking if I could pick up ginger beer and applesauce for her. I responded saying I knew I could get the ginger beer and would see about the applesauce. She responded: thanks.
After work, I was tired, in nicotine withdrawal, and overheated; the thought of walking through Pike Place Market (one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world) in that state in order to get applesauce from Target was exhausting. I got ginger beer, went home, and gave it to Mei. She thanked me--she explained she was still really sick. I read a little of her posts about it and understood she was still really sick. I wasn't sure why she'd needed applesauce in particular, though, when we had plain white rice that could be cooked pretty easily in her InstantPot.
Forty hours later she came to me and gently scolded me for not getting her applesauce. She had been so sick, and because I hadn't gotten her what she asked for, she'd starved for thirty-eight hours, and it had been horrible.
I was prickly and frustrated and told her I wished she'd been clearer about communicating that; she snapped at me that I was deflecting blame. I apologized and said I'd try to support her better next time, and she said that was all she had wanted. Also, she'd really needed that applesauce, because her bread had gone moldy and we were out of plain white rice.
I pointed out the bag of plain white rice on the counter. "I thought that was sugar," she said. "It's in a bag like sugar." She hadn't been wearing her glasses. She almost never wore her glasses around the house.
I heard later that she'd complained to her friends that I hadn't gotten her the applesauce. I guess that may have been why Olivia blocked me on social media; in any case, learning that someone who I had once considered a good friend had blocked me on social media upset me, and I argued with Mei again.
I finally said, "I feel like you expect me to be your nursemaid but won't let me say it." She wouldn't let me say it because Ry had used "I'm basically working as her nursemaid" as an excuse for never paying for rent or groceries. So yeah, it was kind of a shitty thing for me to say, and definitely a shitty way to phrase it.
She told me to leave the apartment. I could come back in two weeks when her finals were done, but my presence and the way I constantly had been "picking fights" with her was too stressful right now.
Bemused, but not totally surprised (I had kind of seen this coming for a little while now), I packed a couple not-very-large bags with whatever I could think of and left.
I went to my psych clinic and asked for their help; they started putting together resources for me. Meanwhile, I went online and asked everyone I could think of for a place to stay. Nobody had one for me. A friend in the Bay Area who often helped me out with money in a pinch tossed me some dollars for hotels for the weekend, at least. I wound up staying in a hotel in Kent for Thursday night, an hour and a half from my workplaces by public transit.
I said some shitty things about Mei and her friends on private social media.
Finally, a witchy friend in Vancouver invited me to go camping for the weekend outside Coquitlam with zir and zir husband and friends. $250 Canadian would cover the whole thing and that was just within the budget my friend had given me. It was also significantly cheaper for a long weekend of shelter, food, company, and entertainment than anything I'd ever find even close to Seattle.
I took a bus up to British Columbia the next day. But first I stopped in at Mei's place to get my passport and some more clothing. She was annoyed that I'd dared come back without her permission and made me hand over the keys. She also said that several of our formerly-mutual friends, including Olivia, her roommate Jeva, and another friend called K, thought it was fine that she'd thrown me out, and in fact said she should have done it sooner. I told her everyone who I had talked to had been shocked and upset. She said, "Have you talked to anyone who knows me, then?" She got mad and told me I should stay with our mutual friend Katy (who I had already asked about housing me, and who had said she could not) after "making her think [Mei was] a bitch."
I went to Canada.
Pirates & Fairies 2019 at Lake Sasamat was delightful. Then, on Saturday, I got a text from the property manager of the sketchy apartment I'd applied for. I could rent the apartment if I could bring the deposit now; otherwise he would have to keep showing it.
Desperate to find a solution to this whole mess, I frantically started searching for people who could bring the money to him in Seattle. Nobody, nobody, nobody. Finally, I gave up and texted Mei, thinking that maybe she would be okay with helping me if it was entirely about getting me out of her hair permanently and into a new place.
I took a terse, somewhat cranky tone with her in the text asking for help.
"I'm busy with finals," she replied. "Do it yourself."
Things escalated from there for a few texts, and I called her a spoiled princess in anxious frustration. Shortly she told me, "Your farce of a tenancy ended when you gave me the keys," and declared that she would mail me my stuff (which was "legally abandoned property" according to her) free of charge because she was so generous, and also I could arrange with one of her friends to retrieve my cat.
I started freaking out (which unfortunately alarmed the other campers at Sasamat; I'm very sorry about that). I told her she was "literally telling me to die." I wasn't thinking about suicide then and there, with the new place so close I could almost put my foot through the door if only I could clear this one hurdle. Instead I was thinking about all the homeless people I'd seen huddled in blankets in corners and crannies while walking around downtown Seattle. I was thinking of dying from exposure, illness, assault, accidents, any of the unlimited number of things that could kill a homeless person in this society.
She said she had not once told me to die. Then, after I'd put the phone away and stopped talking to her, she texted me some more about how it was pretty obvious that the new place was a scam. (I had seen the new place, as well as its condition before being cleaned out by the handyman/property manager, in person. No scammer would show that shitshow to their mark.)
I frantically worked out an arrangement for a friend of a friend in Tacoma to take a check in the next day. This check wound up serving as a kind of reserve until I showed up with the cash, and I'm very grateful for that.
I went home on the Greyhound redeye Tuesday morning, dashed to work, and then afterwards I took the money for the deposit (all the money in my possession at the moment, just about, and with that my more generous friends were pretty much tapped out of donations and informal loans) to the property manager. He showed me the roughly-cleaned but livable new place, and I signed the lease.
Around this time I got a text from Mei's mother, Dr. Zhang--now my ex-landlord. She had been informed of the situation and would be coming this weekend to help me get my things, since Mei could not be in my presence anymore. Over the phone, she spoke to me about how unhappy Mei was, how terrible it was that I hadn't gotten her that applesauce, how many months I'd lived rentfree in that condo.
On Thursday night, a week after I was first thrown out, I picked up my cat from Dr. Zhang and took her back to my new place. She was extremely glad to see me.
At the time I picked Portia up, I saw that my former room had been roughly straightened up, the majority of my mess shoved into boxes and garbage bags.
At Dr. Zhang's request, I fetched large packing boxes from CostPlus and brought them to her at the condo. She would be the one to use them to pack. I was not allowed back in the place except during very limited periods when Mei was not there but her mother was.
On Saturday a friend drove up from Portland to help me move everything over in her SUV. As I was heading to meet her at the gate of the condo, I received a text from Dr. Zhang telling me to bring $150 for damages and $240 to pay the fee for the "packing/cleaning service" (which she would later explain was provided by her generous hours of work--did I have any idea how valuable her time was?--and the tireless efforts of Mei's friends). She refused to let me retrieve my things until I promised to leave some anime figures and various media (books and DVDs, mostly) as collateral.
As my friend and I fetched my things, whenever I was alone with Dr. Zhang, she spoke softly to me of how she and her daughter were the victims here and this would go very poorly for me in court if it came to that.
In the end, we got almost everything--we didn't quite have time to move my dresser, so I had to leave that. Eventually I will replace it with some plastic drawers.
When I got home it finally dawned on me, as I examined the bins and boxes and bags, that nobody had taken any care with packing most of my stuff. The kitchenware had some very basic wrappings of plastic bags and the occasional bit of paper, the dishes and mugs and such--but absolutely everything else, from expensive statuettes and action figures to delicate jewelry to my electric Menorah with glass bulbs, had just been tossed unceremoniously into a container of some kind.
Luckily, very little of it was broken, but I had no idea where anything was and after checking all the larger spaces where they could be, I still couldn't find my idols of Freddie Mercury and Aphrodite. I began to worry--I had no idea what my former friends were thinking at this point, and Dr. Zhang had been hesitant to take collateral that didn't look very valuable to her.
Reluctantly, I sent K a private message asking if they knew where these figures had been packed. They snapped back that they'd had nothing to do with packing, and then they told me it was obviously there, because there was no way I could have gone through my entire "bug-infested hoard" in this short time, and also that if anything was broken it was my own fault for storing all my worldly possessions on the floor in the first place.
I did find the statues later, tucked away between books or at the bottom of a huge box, so K was right about that part, at least. From that conversation I also found out that someone on my private account's friendslist had been funneling information to K and the others from me.
After a conversation with the former friend who'd been leaking the info where she talked about how I manipulated people with suicide threats whenever things didn't go my way, I disabled both my plurk accounts.
Shortly thereafter I noticed people distancing themselves from me on Discord, and I got suddenly kicked out of a Fate/Grand Order server. I checked with some former friends, who were now deeply mistrustful of me, and they said some semi-private callout posts, non-replurkable, had gone up explaining all the abuse I'd dished out to Mei. It was very reasonable, I was told, that people were distancing themselves from me--I had to understand, a lot of them had been in abusive relationships in the past and drew a hard line at making suicide threats.
I also learned that people were sharing pictures of my messy room, making fun of my plans to do magic to get some resolution on the situation, and turning my private texts to Mei into a meme.
I'm not making any memes. I'm just stating what happened as I experienced it.
If anyone cares, I haven't had a cigarette (or vaped nicotine) since September 5th. I'm proud of that, at least, or I've been told I should be. I'm actually pretty wiped out right now.
Comments are disabled because of the above immense psychological exhaustion. If you want to talk civilly, you presumably know where to find me.
Content notes: discussion of emotional toxicity, suicidality, substance abuse, and sexual assault.
In August of 2017 two friends helped me move out of my apartment in the South Sound suburb of Kent; it was in very bad shape, as I'd been intensely depressed for months at my terrible job, and it had been left in bad shape in the first place by the ex-roommate who had bailed and left me holding the lease.
"These friends saved me" was the narrative, I suppose. Anyway, I went to live with one of them, Mei. She had a condo her mother had bought her on the downtown Seattle waterfront, which was awesome, and I'd been told I didn't have to start paying rent until I was on my feet again. Then we could figure something out.
It was impressed upon me that Mei had once had a very toxic, abusive roommate called Ry who had somehow sucked her trust fund dry while generally treating her like shit and never paying for rent or expenses. Everyone was anxious for her to have a better roommate with me.
It wasn't perfect. The room I was living in wasn't a real bedroom, nor was it even really legal to rent it to me. It was a den in the back of the condo, fairly small but not tiny--however, it had no windows and the "door" was a set of sliding panels that blocked out no light or noise. Mei also never closed her own door (to the actual bedroom) because that would bother her cat, Freya. She didn't seem to have any concept of privacy, actually.
I got a job working at a "toxin-free" dry-cleaning service. For a while it was okay. I even paid a few months of rent, though it only amounted to about five hundred bucks before things got bad at the job. They understaffed horribly and put an absurd amount of responsibility on me for someone not in a managerial role and, also, making minimum wage. I started self-harming behind the counter, so I quit.
Mei was the first to suggest that I could quit and rely on her for a while.
Eventually I got a seasonal job at the store up the hill, CostPlus World Market.
There were fractures by the end of the first year. Mei was much tidier than I was, better at keeping up with most chores, and bothered by how messy I was--a fact which was not helped by my small space and lack of storage. I talked about getting better storage but never seemed to have the money to do it. That was another thing--I was bad at managing money, which stressed Mei out terribly. She had had experience being poor as a child and by her admission knew how to manage her money as a result, by which I mean she simply decided to almost never buy anything unless it was food or she couldn't live without it. My lack of impulse control with regards to spending frustrated her. She would at times mention things Ry had done and compare them to what I was doing, talk about how my actions reminded her an awful lot of Ry, though she always assured me that I wasn't anywhere near as bad as Ry.
The lack of privacy was wearing on me. Without a bedroom door, I couldn't seem to figure out a good system for signaling to Mei that I wasn't available to chat, and telling her "I just had a full day of work in customer service/retail, I can't socialize" was only so effective before she forgot about it and started chatting at me again. But it was okay. Like our mutual friend Olivia (who had been one of the ones to help me move), Mei was very invested in helping me fix my emotional issues. She was vaguely fascinated by them, remarking on how many more issues I had than her, on how much less mature I was than her despite being five years older, on how she could teach me to be a better adult. She was proud of her psych major background which allowed her to determine all this.
We argued, though, about my inadequacy as a roommate. I had a tendency to crash over Mei's boundaries. I felt like I needed these things laid out explicitly for me to understand and obey them, and she felt like that was an unfair request of her. It was very hard for her to express her boundaries in words, and I was refusing to learn to read her so that she didn't have to. "Your problem is that you only ever learned how to read your abusive father," she told me. "I'm not your abusive father."
I told her in late 2018 that if I couldn't learn to be a better roommate by the end of next year, I would move out somehow.
Life proceeded. I lost my job after the holiday season and failed to get unemployment due to a mixup involving my deadname, but after a couple months of stressful poverty I got the job back. I had other problems. I was smoking too much weed, vaping too much nicotine, drinking too much alcohol. I tried to cut down but the stress was overwhelming. I didn't really think much about the psychological effects, although I knew by this point they were deleterious.
I kept trying to go on with my life. I was going to a gay dive bar in Capitol Hill to do karaoke once or twice a week, sometimes less if I didn't have the money, but I loved it. I tried to get involved with events among my local social circle, but it was awkward. I didn't feel like I fit in with these people with their high-paying IT jobs who usually preferred to meet up at expensive restaurants.
Mei and I began to argue more. She felt, she told me, like a nagging wife. She resented my continuing money problems, my inability to perceive and respond to her emotional needs, my paranoia about our social circle--that is, my anxiety that this very social-justice-minded group of people would find out about my flaws, put up call-out posts, and ostracize me. She thought this feeling was absolutely absurd (at first--towards the end she began talking about "self-fulfilling prophecies").
In May things went from bad to worse. I talked about it in more detail in a locked post and I won't repeat everything here. I will tentatively say I got sexually assaulted by a Grindr hookup. I was stupid and didn't take care of my safety; I feel like I should say it's my own damn fault. He didn't use protection, so I was terrified, but I played it all off to my friends online as delightful fun (it had been physically amazing and an enormous salve to my dysphoria) and didn't mention the lack of a condom or his rough abrupt manner, instead letting them assume that of course I used protection, of course it was totally consensual. But I was hazy from dissociating, scared as hell, emotionally a mess on the inside.
More importantly, Freya wasn't doing well. She'd been wheezing and losing weight, and Mei was fretting terribly about her beloved pet, struggling to figure out how to help her.
One Wednesday in early to mid-May, at night after I'd been up since 5:30am in order to stock liquor at CostPlus, Mei casually said to me with a sigh, "I think all the incense you burned before I asked you to stop gave Freya asthma; I should've asked you to stop sooner, now my cat is going to die and it's all my fault."
Exhausted and emotionally fragile, I freaked the fuck out with horror and guilt. Vivid images of suicide were flashing through my head, overwhelming me. I tried to restrain myself, knowing that it was wrong, knowing that it was abusive to say anything according to our social circle--I tried to panic to friends online instead who wouldn't be as hurt by it. But she was urgently pushing me for some kind of soothing response; I couldn't just dash away to my room and cut off contact, because she needed comfort now. Hey, at least she hadn't run into my room after I'd told her I wasn't up to comforting her, insisting that she needed it--that had happened once or twice before.
Still panicking, wide-eyed, I said, "I'll kill myself quickly."
We argued. I tried to explain my position. I apologized anyway.
The next morning she told me she'd told Olivia what I said. Online, Olivia snapped at me, told me I'd said a horrible thing and I needed to center myself on Mei's needs right now. So I tried. When Mei took Freya to the vet and texted me in the middle of the appointment that she needed me to bring her new clothes because Freya had peed all over her, I grabbed her dress and walked across downtown to the vet in South Lake Union, arriving around close. Mei was vaguely annoyed that I hadn't used a Lyft to get there sooner.
On Friday afternoon, Olivia contacted me again, abruptly, asking me to come with her to an Al-Anon meeting around sunset when I would usually be starting Shabbat prayers. I misunderstood, thinking she wanted to take me to Alcoholics Anonymous rather than its sister program for family and loved ones of alcoholics, so I was upset, and when I snapped at her as a result, she turned and ripped into me about how she'd been ignoring bad behavior from me for a while and I needed to stop and think about how good I had it with Mei before I lost that. We stopped talking to each other, more or less, at least about important things, although we would trade spiky, poorly-thought-out confrontations a few more times online.
Things got worse. My living space got messier. I was constantly stressed out and on edge. I started looking both for new jobs and a new place to live. This clearly wasn't working out.
Mei and I started arguing regularly. She was frustrated with my inability to attend to her emotional and physical needs, she was annoyed that she did so much for me and I couldn't do that for her. She sheltered me rent-free, she paid for groceries when I couldn't (I usually could, but certainly not always), she got me takeout, she cleaned up after me, she was basically my mother, so she said. And I couldn't even learn to read her mood and needs--it was a problem, she repeatedly said, that I only did things for other people when explicitly asked.
In retrospect, I don't actually believe it's true that I only do things for other people when explicitly asked, but I wasn't addressing all of Mei's needs without her having to lay them out for me, so that's how she perceived my flaws.
I began to worry that I was abusing her--I tended to raise my voice when distressed. I never touched her or belittled her verbally or called her names, but I did drag her into upsetting circular arguments about my low self-esteem.
She tried to start discussions about my issues, about how I could become a better roommate and attend to other people's needs better and be happier myself all the same; she used her psych degree to analyze me and offer me advice, saying she was just looking for a solution. I started shutting down and becoming avoidant about these discussions, which irritated the fuck out of her and caused her to start refusing to let me disengage from conversations no matter how distressed and incoherent I became.
I felt like I was throwing mantrums while she was calm and collected, and my self-image worsened.
At one point, with me frustrated and confused and overwhelmed, I let slip another suicide threat. She rolled her eyes and kept calmly psychoanalyzing me, telling me that no, she was right about what was going on in my head even if I denied it. Frustrated beyond belief, I stomped off to have a smoke and think seriously about throwing myself in the Puget Sound. I didn't want to go back to her, so I hung out in one of the building's lobbies for a bit, but I got a text from her saying she was calling the cops if I didn't come back, because she was worried.
I went back and had to reassure the cops that I hadn't really been thinking about suicide so they didn't drag me off to some shitty hospital.
I was actually thinking about suicide a lot. I started self-harming after our discussions.
At the end of June I finally got tested for HIV and received a negative, so that was a load off my mind. I finally told Mei about the sexual assault, and she expressed concern and sympathy; she also thanked me for not telling her until I knew the results of that test, because otherwise she would have stressed herself out worrying.
We still argued, though, and I still self-harmed afterwards. I didn't tell anyone about that; I knew that doing so would make me an abuser. But at least Freya was mostly getting better now that she was on asthma medication (it turned out asthma is usually manageable in cats rather than a death sentence).
I got a better job, albeit one with very patchy hours, as a tour guide on Bill Speidel's Underground Tour. I started looking for and applying to new apartments, hampered only by my bad credit and questionable rental history. Actually, that's a hell of a hindrance in Seattle's housing market, but I kept looking. I found a dump in Belltown renting for $850 a month and put in an application.
It was August 2019. I was trying to quit nicotine entirely at this point, and also cut down on both pot and alcohol. It was hard but I was making progress, especially on the smoking. Then Mei abruptly got sick with terrible food poisoning.
The next morning I went to work at CostPlus as usual, noting that Mei still wasn't up yet after her illness, but then again she was almost never up this early in the mornings. While I was at work, I received a text message from Mei asking if I could pick up ginger beer and applesauce for her. I responded saying I knew I could get the ginger beer and would see about the applesauce. She responded: thanks.
After work, I was tired, in nicotine withdrawal, and overheated; the thought of walking through Pike Place Market (one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world) in that state in order to get applesauce from Target was exhausting. I got ginger beer, went home, and gave it to Mei. She thanked me--she explained she was still really sick. I read a little of her posts about it and understood she was still really sick. I wasn't sure why she'd needed applesauce in particular, though, when we had plain white rice that could be cooked pretty easily in her InstantPot.
Forty hours later she came to me and gently scolded me for not getting her applesauce. She had been so sick, and because I hadn't gotten her what she asked for, she'd starved for thirty-eight hours, and it had been horrible.
I was prickly and frustrated and told her I wished she'd been clearer about communicating that; she snapped at me that I was deflecting blame. I apologized and said I'd try to support her better next time, and she said that was all she had wanted. Also, she'd really needed that applesauce, because her bread had gone moldy and we were out of plain white rice.
I pointed out the bag of plain white rice on the counter. "I thought that was sugar," she said. "It's in a bag like sugar." She hadn't been wearing her glasses. She almost never wore her glasses around the house.
I heard later that she'd complained to her friends that I hadn't gotten her the applesauce. I guess that may have been why Olivia blocked me on social media; in any case, learning that someone who I had once considered a good friend had blocked me on social media upset me, and I argued with Mei again.
I finally said, "I feel like you expect me to be your nursemaid but won't let me say it." She wouldn't let me say it because Ry had used "I'm basically working as her nursemaid" as an excuse for never paying for rent or groceries. So yeah, it was kind of a shitty thing for me to say, and definitely a shitty way to phrase it.
She told me to leave the apartment. I could come back in two weeks when her finals were done, but my presence and the way I constantly had been "picking fights" with her was too stressful right now.
Bemused, but not totally surprised (I had kind of seen this coming for a little while now), I packed a couple not-very-large bags with whatever I could think of and left.
I went to my psych clinic and asked for their help; they started putting together resources for me. Meanwhile, I went online and asked everyone I could think of for a place to stay. Nobody had one for me. A friend in the Bay Area who often helped me out with money in a pinch tossed me some dollars for hotels for the weekend, at least. I wound up staying in a hotel in Kent for Thursday night, an hour and a half from my workplaces by public transit.
I said some shitty things about Mei and her friends on private social media.
Finally, a witchy friend in Vancouver invited me to go camping for the weekend outside Coquitlam with zir and zir husband and friends. $250 Canadian would cover the whole thing and that was just within the budget my friend had given me. It was also significantly cheaper for a long weekend of shelter, food, company, and entertainment than anything I'd ever find even close to Seattle.
I took a bus up to British Columbia the next day. But first I stopped in at Mei's place to get my passport and some more clothing. She was annoyed that I'd dared come back without her permission and made me hand over the keys. She also said that several of our formerly-mutual friends, including Olivia, her roommate Jeva, and another friend called K, thought it was fine that she'd thrown me out, and in fact said she should have done it sooner. I told her everyone who I had talked to had been shocked and upset. She said, "Have you talked to anyone who knows me, then?" She got mad and told me I should stay with our mutual friend Katy (who I had already asked about housing me, and who had said she could not) after "making her think [Mei was] a bitch."
I went to Canada.
Pirates & Fairies 2019 at Lake Sasamat was delightful. Then, on Saturday, I got a text from the property manager of the sketchy apartment I'd applied for. I could rent the apartment if I could bring the deposit now; otherwise he would have to keep showing it.
Desperate to find a solution to this whole mess, I frantically started searching for people who could bring the money to him in Seattle. Nobody, nobody, nobody. Finally, I gave up and texted Mei, thinking that maybe she would be okay with helping me if it was entirely about getting me out of her hair permanently and into a new place.
I took a terse, somewhat cranky tone with her in the text asking for help.
"I'm busy with finals," she replied. "Do it yourself."
Things escalated from there for a few texts, and I called her a spoiled princess in anxious frustration. Shortly she told me, "Your farce of a tenancy ended when you gave me the keys," and declared that she would mail me my stuff (which was "legally abandoned property" according to her) free of charge because she was so generous, and also I could arrange with one of her friends to retrieve my cat.
I started freaking out (which unfortunately alarmed the other campers at Sasamat; I'm very sorry about that). I told her she was "literally telling me to die." I wasn't thinking about suicide then and there, with the new place so close I could almost put my foot through the door if only I could clear this one hurdle. Instead I was thinking about all the homeless people I'd seen huddled in blankets in corners and crannies while walking around downtown Seattle. I was thinking of dying from exposure, illness, assault, accidents, any of the unlimited number of things that could kill a homeless person in this society.
She said she had not once told me to die. Then, after I'd put the phone away and stopped talking to her, she texted me some more about how it was pretty obvious that the new place was a scam. (I had seen the new place, as well as its condition before being cleaned out by the handyman/property manager, in person. No scammer would show that shitshow to their mark.)
I frantically worked out an arrangement for a friend of a friend in Tacoma to take a check in the next day. This check wound up serving as a kind of reserve until I showed up with the cash, and I'm very grateful for that.
I went home on the Greyhound redeye Tuesday morning, dashed to work, and then afterwards I took the money for the deposit (all the money in my possession at the moment, just about, and with that my more generous friends were pretty much tapped out of donations and informal loans) to the property manager. He showed me the roughly-cleaned but livable new place, and I signed the lease.
Around this time I got a text from Mei's mother, Dr. Zhang--now my ex-landlord. She had been informed of the situation and would be coming this weekend to help me get my things, since Mei could not be in my presence anymore. Over the phone, she spoke to me about how unhappy Mei was, how terrible it was that I hadn't gotten her that applesauce, how many months I'd lived rentfree in that condo.
On Thursday night, a week after I was first thrown out, I picked up my cat from Dr. Zhang and took her back to my new place. She was extremely glad to see me.
At the time I picked Portia up, I saw that my former room had been roughly straightened up, the majority of my mess shoved into boxes and garbage bags.
At Dr. Zhang's request, I fetched large packing boxes from CostPlus and brought them to her at the condo. She would be the one to use them to pack. I was not allowed back in the place except during very limited periods when Mei was not there but her mother was.
On Saturday a friend drove up from Portland to help me move everything over in her SUV. As I was heading to meet her at the gate of the condo, I received a text from Dr. Zhang telling me to bring $150 for damages and $240 to pay the fee for the "packing/cleaning service" (which she would later explain was provided by her generous hours of work--did I have any idea how valuable her time was?--and the tireless efforts of Mei's friends). She refused to let me retrieve my things until I promised to leave some anime figures and various media (books and DVDs, mostly) as collateral.
As my friend and I fetched my things, whenever I was alone with Dr. Zhang, she spoke softly to me of how she and her daughter were the victims here and this would go very poorly for me in court if it came to that.
In the end, we got almost everything--we didn't quite have time to move my dresser, so I had to leave that. Eventually I will replace it with some plastic drawers.
When I got home it finally dawned on me, as I examined the bins and boxes and bags, that nobody had taken any care with packing most of my stuff. The kitchenware had some very basic wrappings of plastic bags and the occasional bit of paper, the dishes and mugs and such--but absolutely everything else, from expensive statuettes and action figures to delicate jewelry to my electric Menorah with glass bulbs, had just been tossed unceremoniously into a container of some kind.
Luckily, very little of it was broken, but I had no idea where anything was and after checking all the larger spaces where they could be, I still couldn't find my idols of Freddie Mercury and Aphrodite. I began to worry--I had no idea what my former friends were thinking at this point, and Dr. Zhang had been hesitant to take collateral that didn't look very valuable to her.
Reluctantly, I sent K a private message asking if they knew where these figures had been packed. They snapped back that they'd had nothing to do with packing, and then they told me it was obviously there, because there was no way I could have gone through my entire "bug-infested hoard" in this short time, and also that if anything was broken it was my own fault for storing all my worldly possessions on the floor in the first place.
I did find the statues later, tucked away between books or at the bottom of a huge box, so K was right about that part, at least. From that conversation I also found out that someone on my private account's friendslist had been funneling information to K and the others from me.
After a conversation with the former friend who'd been leaking the info where she talked about how I manipulated people with suicide threats whenever things didn't go my way, I disabled both my plurk accounts.
Shortly thereafter I noticed people distancing themselves from me on Discord, and I got suddenly kicked out of a Fate/Grand Order server. I checked with some former friends, who were now deeply mistrustful of me, and they said some semi-private callout posts, non-replurkable, had gone up explaining all the abuse I'd dished out to Mei. It was very reasonable, I was told, that people were distancing themselves from me--I had to understand, a lot of them had been in abusive relationships in the past and drew a hard line at making suicide threats.
I also learned that people were sharing pictures of my messy room, making fun of my plans to do magic to get some resolution on the situation, and turning my private texts to Mei into a meme.
I'm not making any memes. I'm just stating what happened as I experienced it.
If anyone cares, I haven't had a cigarette (or vaped nicotine) since September 5th. I'm proud of that, at least, or I've been told I should be. I'm actually pretty wiped out right now.
Comments are disabled because of the above immense psychological exhaustion. If you want to talk civilly, you presumably know where to find me.
