Before I go any farther, I should point out that the events I'm about to describe happened two decades ago and I will no doubt get some details wrong. In fact, I need to go back and edit the one about getting my husband arrested because I finally found my old paper journal from that year and it turns out I got some dates wrong. But my intention here is to be as truthful as I can manage. Any inaccuracies or omissions are unintentional.
I mean, this story is stupid enough. It doesn't need embellishment.
You kiddos reading this won't remember but, back before there was Facebook, there was this free blogging website called LiveJournal. I say "was" like it's gone now but last I looked, and that was pretty recently, it still exists; in fact, I had to delete a few sock accounts from it that I'd forgotten about for years. (Far as I know, none of my accounts exist there anymore. Hopefully, I got them all.) If you wanted to be social and chatty with other bloggers, it was THE place to be. It was an early internet-based incubator for authors, in fact, particularly of the sci-fi/fantasy ilk. I think George R. R. Martin is still there. The Very Secret Diaries got their start there too. (Day eleventy-billion: Okay, now he's king.)
There were things I loved about LiveJournal (LJ) and there were things I preferred about solo blogging. The social element at LJ actually made things weird for my personal life because if you think zoomers are touchy now, Gen X being told that no, they're NOT the most special people in the universe were even more embarrassing back then. They'll never admit it to you now -- too busy blaming Unicorn Syndrome on millennials and zoomers -- and they'll call me a liar, but I was there. I saw. I ran away screaming. The fact that I've probably had something like a dozen usernames at LJ over nearly a quarter-century but only maybe two or three domain names for self-hosted personal blogs (think "online diary"), the latter only because I wanted to reduce the risk involved with being googled (I no longer care), can only partly be explained by the price difference. Especially these days.
So, as you might expect, LJ played a large role in me losing a lot of "friends."
Not all of them were people I had never met in person, but one in particular was.
I don't remember when or why, but at some point a woman with the handle "karnythia" friended me on LJ. She seemed interesting, so I friended her back. (It wasn't like Facebook; no one needed your permission to add you to their friends list. You had to block them to make them stop.) That went on for a while. I did not initially know her real name; I seem to recall she was trying to avoid a former partner who had abused her. At some point I figured out (or she said) she was black, but I didn't keep her around for "woke points"; that wasn't even a term back then. I knew she tended toward the feminist, which was points in her favor as far as I was concerned; even back then I thought women who said "I'm not a feminist but" were beyond pathetic. (I still think that, just so you know.) But I also tended to really like women who were gutsy smartasses (still do), and karnythia was. We vibed. It was nice.
I am pretty sure karnythia friended me well before Matt kicked me out and, as we went along, the situation with Matt got worse and worse. She stuck around for him cheating on me with a woman named Yvette and my sharing his embarrassing chat logs where he bitched to Yvette about me behind my back. (Said behind-the-back bitching is a practice referred to in the polyamory community as "triangulating," and they advise against doing it. Matt did it a LOT, and not just to me.) She stuck around for our mutual "friends" excusing away everything he did and then starting a special LiveJournal account for discussing all my shortcomings. She stuck around for my sudden relocation to Weinland Park, a neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio which twenty years ago was not what you'd have called a nice place to live. And she was there on my friends list when Thea was born.
And karnythia was there when Matt -- who was in a polyamorous marriage -- was caught out by his wife, Marti, who had insisted he stop having sex with me and then found out he hadn't and was lying to her. No one had told me about Marti setting this condition for continuing the marriage until after Matt had already gotten caught violating it. The fact that everyone had been taking the piss out of me for having previously been a victim of his lies and sneaking around was completely lost on her, of course (many years later she finally apologized to me, but only because she had been through postpartum depression by that point and therefore "better understood" -- so she was still arguing that I had been crazy, not that she had been wrong to defend her wasband's behavior), but the line had been crossed, so Marti walked out on Matt.
Matt was inconsolable and went into an emotional tailspin. Among other things, he threatened to kill himself and then said something about wanting to harm our daughter, too, who was about four months old at the time.
Oh hold the fucking phone. Oh hell no.
I went into a panic, told my internet friends what was going on,
(this will be important in a few paragraphs)
called the police (regular line) to ask for advice, was advised to not let him back into my apartment since we weren't living together anyway, and then told my ex-mother-in-law what was going on, since she and I were staying in touch pretty regularly at that point. Cheryl went into Instant Rescue Mode and started making plans to move me to Florida.
Nobody was at their best in that situation. Matt walked back the threat to our daughter, saying he was trying to scare me off so I wouldn't be around when he died, which obviously he hadn't. Thea suddenly developed health issues which at first had the doctor thinking "telescoping intestine" (I forget the term for it and am not online right now), which Matt's mother had had in childhood, so everyone panicked. Turned out later she had a UTI, which led to a completely different diagnosis that we then had to contend with for the next two years. Cheryl showed up right before Thea started showing symptoms and was exhausted, which basically turned off her inner censor, so I wound up finding out that the reason she'd adopted my son was because she and Bob, her second husband and not my ex's father, had never been able to have kids together. (Thanks?) After the ER festivities, Cheryl was at my place sleeping and I didn't want to bother her so Matt took me and the kiddo back to his place and we talked about things. He insisted he'd never wanted to hurt Thea and had basically lied again. I made him promise that if he ever did feel an urge to hurt her, that he would go get help instead. He agreed to that.
I still wasn't sure whether I wanted to stay in Ohio or go to Florida (I did want to be near my son; I did not want to be near his father, and my ex-in-laws were no prizes either when they weren't in Rescue Mode), but I slept at Matt's overnight and then went home in the morning and Cheryl started badgering me to make up my mind RIGHT THEN. I finally snapped and told her I was staying, just to shut her up.
As you might imagine, there was a lot of fallout from all of this for a good while afterward. So it took me a while to notice I wasn't seeing karnythia in my LJ friend-post feed anymore. The first notice I got that things had gone south with her was when a woman I'd never heard of commented on one of my posts talking shit at me.
I put two and two together, went over to karnythia's journal, and saw her gossiping about me with her LJ friends. I had been demoted to human garbage for endangering my daughter. On top of that, according to them, I also happened to be a shitty writer so well rid, really. (Do what?)
I felt hurt and outraged. That whole time I'd been going through hell, Cheryl was the only one who actually wanted to help me in the situation, and I put that down to a momentary lapse on her part because usually I was next door to Satan in her book. Everyone else sat on their fucking hands tsk-tsking at what a fuckup I was, and never mind that I was responsible for another person's life and her fortunes were tied to mine. I was navigating the best way I felt able to navigate with me being poor with no job or car and everyone around me also being fuckups and this was their take? If they'd given Matt half as much shit for actually harming me as they did for me coping badly with the fallout, I wouldn't have had any fucking fallout to cope with.
So there was a good bit of passive-aggressive public posturing on both our parts there for a little bit. I think karnythia even joined the talk-shit-about-Dana community going on at the time. But eventually everything died down and we both went on with our lives.
As many of us do with people from our pasts, one day I got curious about her again and went and looked her up, and was surprised to find she was now maintaining her online presence under her real name: Mikki Kendall.
I don't remember much after that revelation so I probably didn't think much about it until one day in Barnes and Noble, when I saw a book with her name on it on one of the table displays.
Yup. The same lady whose first response upon believing a little girl was in danger was to talk shit about and then unperson that little girl's mother is now branding herself a "feminist author."
The insults about my writing ability suddenly made a lot more sense.
None of my radical feminist acquaintances reading this will be even one little bit surprised that Mikki Kendall (1) publishes books that look like they're marketed to teenagers; (2) dumbs down her political analysis into street slang and poorly-constructed arguments; (3) is pro "sex work"; and (4) thinks that some women have, or have ever had, dicks.
The more I developed my own politics, the more this discovery became a revelation to me because when a woman brands herself feminist, you kind of expect her to stick up for women and girls, right? I could have accepted her having a go at me -- because she was right about Thea, I shouldn't have accepted Matt's walking-back after the mountains of evidence that his word was worth jack shit -- but her entire basis for trashing me was that I had endangered Thea, and there she was with the ability to take further steps to get Thea safe but she wanted to sit online trashing me instead. It no longer surprises me that she's also okay with grown men with dicks using women's restrooms in the stall right next to a little girl and with easy access to a camera. She's one of those people who uses politics to establish her place in the pecking order, not to make life better for people in general. That was the revelation to me: that a lot of what is fucking up the feminist movement is that so many of its alleged adherents are just playing power games, and not against our oppressors either.
I don't only blame her for what happened back in '05. I blame every single woman who saw what was going on with me and their first impulse was to watch me struggle and then mock me for it. Too many people, women and men, do that in general. They think other people's suffering, not just the genuinely bad people's, is funny. Then they complain society is going down the tubes.
And so many of the people I knew who did this sort of thing to me also claimed they wanted to make society better. I suppose it was just another form of "identifying." And now you have a better idea why I'm so hostile to that.
It's just as well. If she hadn't sent me up back then for not taking Thea away from Matt, she'd have sent me up later for calling Thea my daughter. What the fuck can you do.