Para-social Relationships Are Hard
It's a very weird experience having the lowly barnacle on the bottom of the boat level of internet notoriety. I'm not as noted as the "Horky-Porky Kid" but thanks to my ten years writing and editing a daily column at a media site I have the glimmer of the very extremely worm's belly low, shudder, gasp, fame. What that means is that para-social relationships can sometimes be tricky to navigate even now. For many years folks reached out to me in private messaging to talk about their trauma surrounding the issues of spiritual abuse and recovery. Very difficult conversations to have. Eventually some just took it way too far and I started to feel like a nursemaid to nincompoops, an unpaid therapist substitute when it was obvious real serious mental health sessions needed to happen with a therapist. Again, I'm not a therapist!
So about four years ago in the middle of the pandemic I started pruning off people doing this. The strangers were far easier to enforce those boundaries with, I wrote up a nice little few paragraphs talking about what I was doing and pointing folks to my writings. A very impersonal nice "I am washing my hair ad infinitum." Some were offended. Like one man that ran around social media spaces saying I was a heartless phony because I refused to let him trauma dump on me. I only have so much emotional energy as a disabled person and he wasn't getting it.
Had a couple of friends I had to cut off, the rehashing of ten, twenty, thirty years of emotional hurt was just too much on the daily. I hated doing it but it was time. I lost a few friends that I came to see were not friends at all. I was enabling their bad behavior. Boundaries firmly in place now. Are you still with very long winded me?
I have had a ton of great para-social relationships too. People I now dearly love and deliberately go out of my way to see when I am traveling. The funniest one was a girlfriend of mine I knew from way back, pre-writing career, exchanged gifts with, hung out with. This lady Miss L ended up in a messy divorce and moved back in with her parents. She got up one morning only to hear her parents discussing me (by name!) and what I'd written that very day. She had no idea her parents knew at all who I was.
Then this happened. Some months back I met another gringo through a former work thing who seemed pretty okay in most respects, somewhat shy and ditsy but perfectly fine. Spent a grand total of two days in her presence. I failed to notice her eyes light up when we were introduced. I do remember her telling me she'd read my column occasionally through the years. I think nothing of it, breathe in, breathe out, move on, as the Jimmy Buffett song says.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago. This lady and I had linked up Facebook right after meeting. I am up at 2:30am with a bout of insomnia caused by pain from the mrsa infection in my armpit that no pain pill seems to touch. Intractable pain seems to do that. This woman messages me in the middle of the night to ask if she can come stay at my guesthouse. Now, I have hosted scads of people, so it's not too odd to be asked. Where the odd comes in is that she starts to tell me a tale that makes no sense with copious cursing thrown in for fun. I ask her where she is and she names a nearby bigger city here, in a hostel. She tells me three different stories about how many days she needs to stay and the why..... I think of this quote and I might just be badly mangling it....
"Talk to three different squirrels, get four different stories"Tell this woman I'll talk to my husband and we'll see what we can do. Explain it's the same day that my son is arriving so this might be tricky. I already have a very bad feeling about all of this.
Next morning. My husband and I have spoken about the weirdness of her approach. He tells me he's indifferent. I explain between my pain and fever I'm not in much shape to host a mere short acquaintance, but guesthouse needs a mere dusting and sweeping to be ready. I tell her yes, since she's in a bind she can stay. Then it all goes pear shaped in a hurry.
What follows is some tales of walking out of an ayahuasca inner eye healing week after a few hours and needing to replace it with stuff to do here. Sooooo that's sort of odd! I ask why and she says it's due to the cult leader nature of the guy leading the grupo. She talks about the fun we'll have, and I point out again that my son is here and I'll likely not see her. I tell her at what point I'll be back from the airport and that I cannot provide transport. This rattles her, as she asks me where the nearest bar/hotel is so she can wait after arrival. She continues on with her best friend plans for her glorious week here. I point out again I am sick and I have family.
I tell the husband we need to cancel with her because these conversations are just getting weirder. He agrees. I tell her it's not going to work. She reacts better than I thought she might.
The very next morning I get up, and my messenger is exploding. She tells me that she's my biggest fan, pointing out all the different names she's used everywhere to comment on my stuff. I'm taken aback. There are clearly big old issues here, and I'm getting frightened by this latest bunch of messages. Radio silence on my part.
Fast forward two or three days. Picking son up at airport. He has bags in hand, we're preparing to head to car and my 'biggest fan' pops out of the terminal with her bags in hand, comes up to hug me. Whut? She's clearly just arrived by plane. Now didn't she tell me that she was nearby in this airport city already? So much making zero sense! We leave immediately. I don't hug her, which is odd because I'd run into two or three people I knew and there was some hugging, just not with her.
Now she's here. In my town. Posting beaucoup photographs from all the places I hang out here and it's freaking me out. The true test comes tonight when I show up at my usual spot with my pals. If she's lurking I may freak out. I think I might just have a stalker that is not a member of the NIFB. Will have to rethink yet again how I am doing things here I guess. I see I'm going to have to pull up the castle moat bridge and deploy the rapacious crocodiles.
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