straight from central casting

06 Jun, 2026

CN: just me trying to get to the bottom of my childhood DSED, which has persisted into adulthood. It’s a very exhausting read because it’s a very exhausting type of brain injury.

CW: if you’ve been using trauma bonding, forced teaming, boundary testing, predatory caregiving, or other interpersonal manipulation tactics, this is sure to send you into acute psychological crisis. So just don’t read it. Sorry, I don’t make the rules

Shortly before my 30th birthday—I wrote about it at the time, askance—I ended up with a houseguest who would not leave. In retrospect, I was hosting a hipster grifter sort.

She’d emailed the Chicago writers’ group. The married couple she’d been living with, who were both writers in the group (and both very talented, I knew and liked them both), had just experienced a massive relationship rupture. Now she was stranded outside, scared and alone in the middle of the night, emailing all of us from her phone. I was the only person apparently checking my email, and the young woman had no other takers, so I drove out to an intersection and picked her up. She was standing under a streetlamp with a couple bags, looking very small. Later I would go with her to pick up the rest of her stuff from the couple’s house.

On that first night I gave her my bed and I slept on the couch—an arrangement that, once established, never changed—and it quickly became apparent she had no intention of leaving. She often reminded me that I was about to turn 30; only 23 herself, she still had her whole life ahead of her. She had a Kewpie-doll face that she intended to capitalize on while she could: she was a true survivor, the protagonist of an Emma Cline story. I, however, was already dead. For my birthday she presented me with a mug she’d thrifted, shiny black with morbidly humorous gray gothic lettering, “29 and Holding!,” like a little headstone with a little epitaph on it. I smirked and thanked her.

She ate everything in my kitchen. I was going broke. “I really need you to start looking for your own place,” I said to her, increasingly uncomfortable. (“The saxophones are getting louder,” as the kids say on TikTok.) I took her to look at Robyn’s second bedroom, which was in need of a tenant.

“No way,” Robyn hissed at me in private, irate that I was asking a favor. “Absolutely not. She is a user.”

Like a drug user? No, like a con artist. “How can you tell?” I asked Robyn, astonished. It didn’t even matter, because Michelle didn’t like Robyn’s spacious, centrally-located apartment. It was a no.

I drove with her to look at another apartment. I waited outside; I should’ve driven off, but she’d left her phone in the passenger seat. I went outside and shouted her name, staring up at the windows, unsure which building she’d disappeared into.

She hopped into the car two hours later, buckling her seatbelt silently, no apologies or explanations. I was sweaty and upset, having imagined she’d been upstairs getting murdered. She explained she was just hanging out, watching a movie with the apartment’s roommates. Unfortunately she had determined the apartment just wasn’t a good fit for her—another no. An entire, feature-length film: God, I really should have just driven off. I remember an officer approaching my car and ticketing me while I was waiting for this same girl outside the School of the Art Institute. I’d been feeling guilty lately, wrestling with the creeping suspicion she wasn’t even enrolled there.

She would tiptoe into the living room, which was now my bedroom, coughing melodramatically. “Could you put out your cigarette?” she would ask me.

“No. You don’t live here. Please leave,” I pleaded.

I’d noticed I hadn’t been able to write anything since her arrival. I began threatening to call the cops to have her removed. Didn’t I understand she had nowhere to go? She left, but only for one night. She returned the next day. “I stayed all night in a shelter,” she said to me angrily—a shelter for victims of domestic abuse, at that—before whisking herself away to my bedroom, to throw herself onto my bed where she sobbed at my heartlessness, my pointless cruelty. I was beginning to see how the couple’s marriage might’ve fallen apart.

How did this all end? Well, my mother was dying, so I was leaving town and taking all the keys with me. If I returned to find any of the young woman’s belongings in my home or car, I warned, I’d be throwing them out. If I found the young woman still squatting there herself, I warned, I’d take more decisive, grueling action. Just lock the knob behind you when you leave, I commanded. She did.

My mother died. I emailed the young woman a poison-pen letter. She magnanimously replied that she was not taking any of it to heart since I was obviously under a lot of psychological stress. Thank you, Jane Eyre.

At one point, back during the halcyon days of Twitter, I posted something about resenting being dragged into “drama.” Don’t fall for it!! A game designer and writer I respected responded: dismissing the topic of the day as mere “drama” was a way of ignoring the real damage and human cost of interpersonal violence.

I’d been shamed into silence, an obvious villain in this minor, public morality play. I wish I were talking about GamerGate, here; I’m actually talking about some other grievance between two people, a piddling beef that everyone else wanted in on. Zero recollection of what it was.

But it is drama, insofar as all drama is manufactured. You don’t even realize that everyone is casting roles for the melodrama of their own lives. You might even answer a seeming crisis with a rescue mission, not realizing someone is about to pivot and make you into their new favorite villain. Well, you wanted to rescue me, didn’t you? Now you’re my new mother. Oh shit, not the mom issues.

I was seemingly in trouble with administrators of a chat client. You know, the application with servers and communities and streaming and voice calls and stuff—like fun Slack. I messaged my friend D to warn them I was nuking my account. We exchanged up-to-date phone numbers (“yes text me all the time,” they said to me lovingly).

Two days later I was back in the chat.

“D I fell for a complete SCAM,” I wrote. I’d received a very convincing message out of the blue from what seemed to be a very convincing account, telling me to confirm receipt and to friend a support agent.

“oh yeah that’s a scam,” D replied.

“Well I’ve never been in trouble before so I’m like ‘maybe this is just how it works’,” I messaged.

“there’s a thing in your settings,” D replied, “where you can check your account for being in trouble.”

“lmaooooooooo,” I replied.

“I should have said this before but I was really tired,” D said. “I’m sorry.” Sweet, but highly unnecessary. I should not need a chaperone to navigate the wilds of Being Online.

“Well there’s an important lesson here,” I began. Here was the thing: I’d immediately started confessing to a total rando. “Hello, I assume this is about—” and then confessing to anything that could be considered incriminating. “Just like spilling it, blah blah blah,” I concluded.

“WOOF,” D replied.

“So the ‘agent’ asks for my birthday and login email”—I surrendered this information easily—“and then I’m like hold up how do I know this isn’t a scam.

“and the agent provides a screenshot pretty immediately, showing that they’re a real support agent with a support rating. and I’m like oh sure sure.

“and they’re like ‘we’ve received complaints of—’”

“I’ve seen a video about this scam,” D messaged.

The ‘agent’ followed this entire preamble with a firehosing of complaints against me, which were easy enough to recognize as untrue, mixed in with real-world legalese and the platform’s verbiage, which I’d found simultaneously interesting and suspicious.

“and I replied, hmm

“am I old?

“I seem to have fallen victim to my own guilt and shame, confessing to violations that may be in violation of TOS rather than things I’ve actually done.”

This scam is the same scam as GamerGate itself: a firehosing of the charges levied against you, spaghetti against the wall. Will you allow yourself to be put on trial? Will you answer these charges?

“in retrospect,” I continued in a parenthetical aside, “preemptively uh whatzit. When you’re in an authoritarian hellscape and you comply preemptively, building your own case against yourself.” Anticipatory obedience.

“oh yeah like talking to cops without a lawyer,” D replied.

“Sadly yeah we are old,” D messaged now, “BUT I think it has more to do with vulnerability than with age.” Then: “scammers prey on people the same way narcissists do.”

“yeah,” I agreed, “the initial panic and ‘fawn response’ instead of taking a clear, slow look at the facts and asking for more facts.”

I continued my story.

“and now I said why is the official account in a shared server with me.” I was only just noticing this.

“and the agent goes ‘that’s the server where the complaints originate from’”—a prepared explanation for everything.

“and I said ‘but why can I mark the message as spam’”

IIRC you have to mouseover the bar to get the “report spam” button to appear in the UI. Or maybe not? Maybe I just didn’t see the bright red button.

“and the agent goes silent,” I continued.

“and I said ‘also, in this screenshot, the language should be ’satisfactory’, not ‘satisfiable’, and we’d usually say ‘very good’ even though ‘very well’ is more grammatically correct.”

“lmaoo,” D replied, “slapping them in the face with the style guide.”

Now I noted to the ‘agent’ that the only way my credentials could be stolen in order for all this stuff to’ve happened would have to be through a third-party software token, except that I use a physical passkey to authenticate, so it’s extremely unlikely.

This was actually a slight bluff: I wanted to make myself a more unsavory target, someone who is easy enough to socially engineer, but who nevertheless lives in an impenetrable data fortress.

“I like that you owned them with facts and logic,” D said.

I wasn’t really owning them, though, since the ‘agent’ had gone completely silent a while ago. I was probably talking to a wall now.

“and then I said, honestly, I’m not even that mad about someone trying to defraud me out of my account or my privacy by asking for way too much identifying information, since that’s literally what this platform is considering doing to its own userbase,” I concluded. Like, the scam is predicated on the actual shape of the hellscape.

“could have been worse,” D reassured me.

Then I’d deactivated my entire account. Then I’d thought, wait, that’s not right, reactivated it, changed my login email, changed from multifactor to physical-passkey-only (making my previous bluff into a wholly true statement), left the shared server in question, deleted my self-incriminating messages and personal info I’d supplied, and reported both accounts for spam/fraud and blocked them.

My L.A. friend recently read Fawning by Dr. Ingrid Clayton, after I told her I’d started reading it. She finished the book, whereas I’d stalled very early on.

My friend has warned that it will be very triggering for me to read. But she’s also been telling me a little about what the book contains. (She also texted a few unnecessary apologies to me—saying she wished she had read it earlier, that she might’ve been a more understanding friend at times. Ho ho! She is more compassionate toward me than I am.)

N was most deeply amused by the author’s confession that she struggles with such guilt, it becomes difficult—emotionally taxing—to click “unsubscribe” when she finds herself the recipient of unwanted spam.

The most interesting idea N mentioned, though, is “clean pain” versus “dirty pain.” Dirty pain is when you gently ghost away from others, speaking indistinctly, all loose threads and maybes and unarticulated pain and resentment, and continuing to suffer in isolation long after the fact.

Clean pain describes plain, tidy speech, with clear messages and, often, clean breaks.

The man was in love with the woman, and she with the man, but it just seemed impossible. Having reached an impasse, the two had stopped talking to each other entirely. Well, there is nothing to really discuss, I remarked. Now mad with grief, the man had been reaching out to former girlfriends; my friend N was very worried about him.

“Well, it isn’t impossible,” I told N, “it’s just that neither of them wants to do what would be required. He needs to clear his plate so he has time—”

My friend was looking at me scared.

“Not you,” I exclaimed. “You are not the problem. He doesn’t have time for you, either.” I laughed ruefully.

“There was a New Yorker cartoon in my one-a-day calendar,” I was telling her now. “It was a man and a woman. I don’t remember who was leaving whom, but one was left standing there while the other walked away, staring down at their phone. The caption was I’m leaving you for the Internet.” I paused.

“Their issues aren’t with each other,” I said to N, “because their respective issues are fully internal. To give attention to the people we actually care about, validation must, must come from within.” It is an internal sense of security and worth: no more making oneself useful to everyone’s mother and her dog.

“As for the object of his affection,” I said. I trailed off, lost in thought. I frowned. “She probably needs to be alone for a while,” I said at last. “I don’t think she’s ever taken time to figure out what she actually wants.”

I wished the pseudonymous Internet stranger well. They told me it was “going to be like trying to get toothpaste back into the tube.”

“Ok,” I replied. I muted the conversation and archived it, hoping we were done forever¹.

I reopened the app the next day to discover several more messages, I think eight of them, buoyed to the top of my contact list. I felt my blood pressure spiking.

“I wasn’t kidding before,” I replied, “I really do have a big thing coming up.” I have worked too long, too hard, at regulating my nervous system, to blow it all on a stranger, an Internet user with no name and no face, who has been in my messaging app simultaneously scaring me and boring me. “I don’t want to talk about A.I. or conspiracy theories anymore. I’m closing this chat now.” I blocked them. I opened social media and shut down my DMs, making myself unreachable to even my loved ones.

Yep, I’m the villain, a mean, nasty lady. It’s fine. I don’t appreciate being trapped in a constant game of Internet Werewolf, don’t like talking to the Smoking Man from the X-Files. It is, quite literally, nothing personal.

I sat there trembling, so stressed out by the finality of unsubscribing. At that instant my good friend Sam messaged about some stressors in his own life, and I became even angrier at myself: I no longer had the emotional resources, the “bandwidth,” to spend on an actual person I know and care about.

I told Sam sorry, I was down for the count. Then I sat there fuming.

I was still livid as I washed my hair the next morning. Days earlier the stranger had coaxed me off social media and into a secure messaging app “for [my] own protection,” the online equivalent of inviting me into a white van. They were nuts; who isn’t? I’d been up for some light reality-checking. (I’d also offered unsolicited advice: “Don’t burn yourself out.” “Don’t get too attached to a certain idea.” “We can speculate, but we really don’t know anything.”)

I scrubbed my head with an inexpensive vinegar pre-rinse, using a sharp pokey circular scalp comb. I’m not usually so inured to people’s claims of acute mental crisis, I considered. Ultimately I was irked because they were insinuating I’m at fault for instigating said crisis. All I’d done was sit there captive, then blog to myself about not liking that feeling. It’s nothing personal. I don’t know this person.

This isn’t obviously malevolent behavior. But it is emotional panhandling: so deprived, the individual no longer cares who’s sitting opposite them or how that person’s nervous system is handling it. It’s just a casting call, an audition, testing how long you can tolerate unhinged behavior. Uhh, not long. My window of distress tolerance has narrowed, just like all my other wallets. Try the next person!

And look, I get it. Making friends as an adult is hard²—even harder when you won’t use a static name or face. I appreciate that people want to experiment online with their sense of identity, thinking of social media as a sort of MUD. But if your identity is transient and fleeting, your relationships will be, too.

Now I was locked in battle with the ghosts in my head. What is this persistent demand for good-faith engagement, full unwavering trust in others and what they’re saying, when I’m the only one wearing my own name and face? I’m sorry, but I have no idea who you are. Like, why would I ever put full faith and trust in a stranger, totally unearned? “You have to give me the benefit of the doubt!” Wasn’t GamerGate harassment entirely predicated on this imbalance in the first place? What it is, is a fucking scam.

And don’t we always give others the very thing we always wish others had given us? And then we get all resentful when other people don’t—

Suddenly I realized I’d squeezed half the contents of a brand-new shampoo bottle over my head. Like, just standing there frozen, emptying a bottle over my head. I’d only noticed now that the medicated shampoo was dripping into my eyes. My eyes were burning.

“Argh!” I said out loud. “Fuck!” I couldn’t see anything. I fumbled around trying to put the bottle back into the shower organizer. Then I faced into the stream, shivering in frustration because I cannot afford to use up a whole bottle of medicated shampoo—idly squeezing it, glitched out, lost in thought. Imagine if I blamed someone else for me standing in the shower thinking my own thoughts, I thought to myself grimly. I’d literally brought my shampoo upon myself. For a full moment I seriously wondered if I could get the shampoo back into its bottle.

Also, I can’t be sure that I don’t know this person, I thought, a little fearfully now. In every meaningful way the stranger had sounded like the ghost I’ve been trying and failing to avoid off-and-on for the past decade—a somatic memory the body always holds. “Block her immediately,” someone told me the second they saw us interacting 12 years ago, “she is obsessive.” Whoops, too late, the person was already in my DMs. I remember the frisson of terror I felt as the person informed me she’d been discussing me in therapy. But we don’t even know each other, I’d thought to myself in a blind panic.

Well, I was being cast, of course—cast in a role I never wanted, had never intended to audition for. I’m so sick of being set up for a villain arc: manufactured crises, manufactured conflict, melodrama, individuals who don’t want to understand they don’t get to be the main character in others’ lives. You get to be your own main character in your own life and then that’s it, you’re done. Really, this is about consent.

When strangers try to wring me out, to datamine me, to bully me into confiding in them, I become irate. I tell them I’m not interested in confiding, that I do not want for any friendships and, if I did ever have a secret feeling to disclose, I’d choose from among an array of actual real-life friends, whom I treasure and prize. People can tell I’m getting upset, that I’m actively hostile: they’re getting something out of this. Some people love to see you get all dysregulated and then plead ignorance as to why.

I massaged the way-too-much-dandruff-shampoo into my scalp thoughtfully, trying to use it all up.

While I was packing to move out of L.A., my elderly neighbor enlisted a new friend, a woman my age, to visit him and tend to him. He joked that he’d already found my replacement: information I found lightly irritating, but also heartbreaking and also somewhat amusing.

I met my replacement by accident, a sitcom scenario where the two of us were waiting for the old man at the same time, like two girls realizing they have the same prom date. The old man was sheepish as he invited us both in. I was taken aback because the woman had already redecorated.

The woman described, in detail, lancing one of the old man’s boils. I was feeling a lot of ugly feelings. Envy, perhaps? Well, she does certainly put your caregiving skills to shame, I thought to myself sardonically. Shame? No, that’s not it, either. I examined the two of them closely, trying to locate the source of my discomfort.

The woman was reeling at something the old man had just said to her, putting her hand on her chest, aghast. “Is he always this mean to you?” she asked me—looking for an ally, a co-conspirator.

“No,” I said in surprise. No, this was new.

“This is elder abuse,” the old man half-joked.

I was mystified.

He issued both of us orders, putting us to work, and we both lugged heavy, spider-infested cardboard boxes to the dumpster for him. I couldn’t remember my relationship with the old man ever having involved this much hard manual labor.

Later, as we both waited for the old man outside, the woman turned to me. I guess she’d noticed, in me, an air of skepticism, and I think she wanted to assure me that her interest in the old man was not some sort of grift. She explained she had family in the Midwest, a father or a grandfather, someone she couldn’t get to as regularly as she’d like. She was all alone in L.A.—except for all her friends and coworkers, obviously, who were plentiful.

“Okay,” I said, baffled, because my family is deceased. I considered sharing this with her—that my family is deceased—but I didn’t, because it didn’t seem especially significant or germane.

“He has no one to do for him,” she insisted now, trying to convince me of… something. Ah, now I understood. She believed he was all alone. Which was patently false. The old man had perhaps misled her, might’ve deliberately allowed her to believe this.

I’d discovered, early on, that the old man is surrounded by family. I’d confirmed my suspicions with him. I’d asked about a specific woman; she was his niece, he admitted to me, but only after several long moments of visible internal struggle. I’d never thought of this as a lie-of-omission before, but it was true that I’d dug the truth out of him by accident. I’d been keeping his family support a secret, so in this moment I decided to let it continue being a secret. The woman may have wondered why I was squinting at her now, my face scrunched up in pain. Oh, well.

I’d been grinding conditioner into my hair and scalp with my circular comb. I idly thought, now, about pseudomutuality versus genuine reciprocity. The old man had always wanted the respect, the validation, the nurturance, of the women around him. The woman my age was looking for someone to execute her perfect caregiver fantasy on. They were both casting roles—pretty strict gender roles, actually—for a reasonable facsimile of an actual missing person.

But people aren’t interchangeable, I thought to myself, rinsing my hair out. If there’s one thing I’ve learned…

Face-blindness. Looking for commonalities. The benefit of the doubt. A big, bleeding heart.

Now I shouted it aloud to myself in the shower: “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that people are not interchangeable!”

I jumped out of the shower and slipped into my shower sandals. I raced to my desk in a robe, drying my hair with a towel.

I will scoot things around my plate for you, I messaged someone irreplaceable.

It’s great that I’d picked that exact moment to try modeling healthier love. Now I just sounded like my own DM stalkers, agitating for inappropriate intimacy. Call the time of death, the date, the hour.

Probably the Universe’s reason for the all the DM stalking—“how do you like it, you freak”—was to hold the mirror up to how kooky or overfamiliar my own DMs might tend to be. Noted.

Anyway, there wasn’t time before my dental appointment to block or ban all the people I wanted to block or ban, so I’d have to do it when I got home. If Heaven is, too, then I guess I’m my own St. Peter, checking IDs and silently judging what people decided to wear here.

“Do you think I’m too trusting,” I asked my best friend one day on the couch, “or not trusting enough?”

“Too trusting,” my best friend said. Like, she did not need to think about this.

It was true, I’m too trusting of strangers. But perhaps I’m overly wary of my own loved ones, which was why I was asking.

I think, after the belated realization, in my mid-20s, that I couldn’t accurately determine who is safe and who isn’t, I’d resorted to, not literal roles, but certainly assigned columns: friends and loved ones; peers and colleagues; acquaintances; family members you tolerate; total strangers; warm bodies. Instead of actual personal boundaries I had been using compartments, self-protectively and not consciously. Lately I’d been panicking as these compartments were coming unglued.

In many ways my default baseline trust in strangers has paid dividends³, I explained to my best friend later, lost in thought. Yes, I absolutely resent that, wherever I go, others can tell I’m too available, the weakest link, the one with the most permeable boundaries, the most vulnerable or robbable, a bleeding heart, with the survival instincts of a dead bird.

But I also appreciate how, if someone is shit out of luck and experiencing a total crisis, when they search the vacant faces of all the strangers around them, they will inevitably head straight for me. They are right to.

Most of my nicest and most exploitable traits come from a really dark place.

That night I apologized to Sam about the night before, about not being present. There was a specific reason my nervous system had fried, I told him. I explained my recent interactions from the top.

“That was a chatbot,” Sam said firmly, of the stranger.

Well, no, it wasn’t, but I understood why he’d think that.

“GamerGate tactics,” Sam said. “Unleashing a chatbot on… not someone like me, but someone like you.” A chatbot with endless manic resources to expend on depleting mine. In a way, Sam was imploring me to think of the stranger as an NPC, even when I knew they weren’t.

But sure, I understood. I know it well: a time-eater, a vampire, who thrives on your dysregulation, a zombie that keeps coming at you like Yul Brynner in Westworld, who doesn’t have to even be sentient to completely fuck you up. I get it. Plenty of fodder for screenshots, too, especially if you’re pushed past your limit and freak out on someone.

“Don’t talk to strangers on the Internet,” Sam told me, as firm as before.

I promised him. I would be making big changes for sure. “It’s theft,” I told Sam now, “stealing my precious time and attention and care, my gendered labor,” and I smirked at him and rolled my eyes, “away from the people I actually know and love and trust.”

I shook my head, remembering the moment someone first tried to teach me to not talk to strangers. I’d made a conscious choice to blow this lesson off, because up to this moment I’d been living with complete strangers, was occasionally rescued by random strangers. I’d recognized, as a little kid, that oversimple, all-or-nothing decisionmaking was not going to work for me. I was going to have to evaluate people case-by-case.

“You know,” I said to Sam now, “I never learned Stranger Danger, because my own parents were the most dangerous people I knew.”