[6/8] Part of a larger story that starts here.

All of this was ultimately too much for me, these people were twice my age, and it was my first time trying to find a safe space outside of an intensely controlling household. I couldn't confide in anyone in my own home about what had happened.

I attempted to take my own life. I survived the attempt as I started feeling sick to my stomach halfway through and opted out of taking the rest of the pills. Brenda found out about my attempt but didn’t seem to show concern or care in the slightest. One night, at 2AM, I went over to her house and called her from outside the front door, assuming she was still awake as the light in her office was on. She opened the door and I asked to be let in because I wanted her to hear me out. She said okay, and opened the door wider to let me in, which came as a shock to me because she had told me to stay away from her previously, although she said I could message and she may or may not read or reply to them. I didn’t expect her to open the door and I thought I would just go home, but I wanted to try again to plead my case. I had the Lyft driver wait, because I expected her to not let me in and I wanted someone there to see if she did let me in. Once Brenda let me inside, I called the driver and told her that she could leave. I thought Rose was also home, perhaps asleep in her room but I later found out that she wasn’t. Brenda and I spent a few hours talking but it was mostly her venting at me, and admitting that she knew I wasn’t some sort of sexual predator and that she knew that what Adam did was far worse than the time I broke a moving boundary of hers. She had asked me if I wanted her to leave Adam earlier on. I told her that I wanted her to do the right thing. This time I told her yes, if she wanted to support me, I wanted her to leave him. She balked. “Well, even if I do (leave him) I’ll never get with you in a million years.” Something I already knew, because she didn’t care (she never did).

 I went home in the early hours of that morning, feeling some kind of closure. This sense of closure vanished as I heard from mutual friends that she tried to tell her roommate Rose that I broke into the house or that I “shouldered my way past her” despite her opening the door for me. She again changed her story to Spike, later admitting that she let me in.

Everything seemed to settle for a few months, and I went to therapy to deal with the events of the last few months. I was dumb enough to think that maybe Adam had felt bad and that maybe it didn’t come across in text. That Brenda never fully heard me out, and I wanted to give Adam another chance. I contacted him and gave him 15 minutes to decide if he wanted to be heard out. He didn’t reply; instead, he immediately went to his roommate Rose and told her that I contacted him (knowing that through Rose it would go to a mutual friend and I would be told to “back off”), she did in fact tell a mutual friend, and I later found out (and was told to stay away). Adam told Spike (who I was close with at the time) that he thought I was targeting him “because his girlfriend rejected me”, trying to twist the story and paint me as some “predatory lesbian”. I knew then that either Adam was spreading lies or that Brenda had lied by omission about what had happened, as she didn’t “reject” me. Things with Brenda really broke after Adam’s sexual harassment of me and my refusal to forgive either of them. I sent her an email telling her how I really felt and that she shouldn’t contact me. She replied with a “no-contact” of her own, even after I told her I would be blocking or diverting her emails. After stating that I broke a boundary by showing up at her house, she never seemed to respect my own boundaries. 

Brenda claimed that I viewed her as a sex object, despite her initiating the sexual conversations as I tried to spend time with her and get to know her as a person. I find this ironic and disappointing, as her fascination with my cultural Indian heritage seemed to not be out of respect, but more of fetishization. I think I appeared to be exotic and exciting to her, but not worth her respect. The first thing she did to let me know that she was also interested in me, was attempt to “sext” with me. If we’re going to accuse others of viewing us as sex objects, we must not treat others as sex objects ourselves. I was dismayed to learn that someone I had held in high regard, did not seem capable of self-examination or to turn her gaze inward, but seemed fully capable of being a hypocrite. 

According to a mutual friend, Adam then started spreading rumors that I was somehow trying to sabotage the local hacker community. He tried evoking pity from Spike and from his roommate Rose, who had previously told me that Adam had made remarks about her body that made her uncomfortable. Adam also reacted to a comment of mine on Slack after what he did, not seeming to feel bad for his actions and once again not respecting my set boundaries, seemingly with the intent to intimidate me. I called Adam out on my old Twitter account, posting screenshots of what he said. While they didn’t get retweeted, they did receive a few hundred views and result in both of my abusers blocking me (which I found hilarious).

Read more: https://skwid.ink/twisting-the-truth/