In My Villain Era, Quite Involuntarily (But It's Fine)

It's been an interesting few years. On the one hand, I think I got canceled. On the other, I'm happier than I've than I've been in a long time. And in a weird way, I think I'm as happy as I am because I got canceled.

That's a weird thing to say, obviously. Like, first off, you think you got canceled? Yeah, I can't be sure. When you're canceled locally, it's both obvious and not all that easy to confirm. Like nobody's sending me nasty DMs telling me how awful I am; I'm not getting piled on on Twitter. Nobody will tell me shit.

But there has been a chill towards me in the queer community. More than a chill. People have been vicious. Back in the fall of 2022, some people I barely knew invited me somewhere and then hung me out to dry, middle-school-cafeteria style. A total ambush. In the months that followed, I got weird looks from complete strangers.

It's like I'm Mr. Darcy in Hertfordshire in the first act of Pride and Prejudice.

In April or May of last year, I was out at trivia with some new friends. Upon my return from the restroom, someone I was with told me, "When you came into the bar, some girl looked at you like you had gone on a date and never texted her." When this person was pointed out to me, I didn't recognize them at all. We were not acquainted. I didn't tell my teammates, but I was like, "Ah, yes, probably my haters at work again." By this point, I had shared the details – or what I could surmise with the very limited information available to me – with several close friends, which was helpful and made it less awful to bear. I even found it kind of funny. These people – their identity and number a mystery – all up in arms over little ol' me.

So who's my Mr. Wickham?

There are two suspects, one more compelling than the other. The first is a girl I went on three dates with back in the summer of 2022. We seemed to connect but she went silent for several days after our third date; when she reappeared, she was cold and resentful and eventually told me she couldn't see me anymore. I was very disappointed and confused but didn't think much beyond that disappointment. Historically, dating has sucked for me – just regular helpings of exactly this type of banal shittiness – so it was par for the course. And I don't think I'm special in this regard – this is just dating in the post-pandemic era. Regardless, "respectfully takes no for an answer after being treated quite cavalierly" seems an incredibly weird basis for a smear campaign. After all, one of the few consolations of being left on read and blown off is that, typically, no one is incredibly mean to you about it.

This brings me to my ex. One of my bullies – a key participant in the middle school cafeteria incident – knew the girl I had gone on dates with and also worked with my ex. They probably heard some incredibly one-sided rumors (given the vibes, I'm guessing outright lies) about our breakup.

Now, if the source of this is my ex (and I genuinely struggle to believe this vitriol could all be over some aborted romance – and not aborted by me – that lasted three dates), then this smear campaign has had a long time to do its work. We broke up in 2019. The pandemic started less than three months later, and I spent the next two years happily holed up in my apartment, oblivious to any rumors that might have been swirling about me outside. Which is also pretty funny? Imagine you start a smear campaign against someone and they don't even notice because they are so happy to be free of you and your manipulative bullshit. A certain group of dykes/educators all up in arms about my supposed perfidy while I peacefully learn French, watch Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and make quiche.

Me, in the midst of a smear campaign I don't even know is happening:

Jokes aside, that obliviousness was obviously a blessing, if the smear campaign exists and originates with my ex. (And I legit have no idea!) In the immediate aftermath of the breakup, I would have been too delicate and exhausted to have withstood this type of social censure. I also had no real interest in going around telling everyone what she had done. I thought that would be...not particularly fruitful. I'm re-reading The Trauma of Everyday Life by Mark Epstein and he mentions how the Buddha, after his enlightenment and six years of self-imposed exile, was hesitant to share what he had learned with others because he felt they would not believe him. The Buddha said he saw "vexation in the telling."

I, too, saw vexation in the telling.

One application/lesson of mindfulness is to decide what aspects of your life – what thoughts, emotions, and events – you are going to deem meaningful and what meaning you are going to assign to them. Most of them aren't meaningful at all. They're just part of the flow of experience. In the words of meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, they arise and pass away. With those that are meaningful, however, you have choice in what meaning you give to them, in what overarching narrative you create for the course of your life.

For me, it would be easy to make a pretty sad and upsetting story, especially when I look at that relationship. To have spent five years of my life with someone who treated me so poorly and who, once it was over, wouldn't even cop to her terrible behavior but instead painted herself as a victim. I could do the same with the unpleasant events of 2022 which may or may not be another consequence of that relationship's end.

But, instead, I see all the ways that relationship set the stage for my current happiness, how even being bullied led to better things for me. (You're forced to not really care what others think of you when people invent a completely imaginary version of you to hate.) This is another aspect of mindfulness, the idea of "trusting the universe," that I've found very helpful. It does not mean that everything happens for a reason (obviously not – all of this clearly sucked) but that, no matter what happens, you don't know what the meaning of a given story will be, because it's not over yet.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote: "No mud, no lotus." But I prefer something Joseph Goldstein, which counsels both curiosity and acceptance: "Don't waste your suffering."

Many of the seeds of my current happiness were planted during some of the shittiest times of my life. I found my way out of that relationship as a direct result of my ex's manipulations. One day, she didn't come home from work at the usual time and did not appear for more than two hours. She did not notify me of her whereabouts and was completely unreachable (I texted a couple of times, called at least once). Once the hour arrived when we would normally be sitting down to dinner and there was still no sign of her, I decided to go see if her car was still parked at her office five minutes away. As I pulled up to a stop sign to turn left onto Congress Street, I spotted her car idling at the nearest intersection, waiting to turn left to come toward me. Even from a distance, I could see her look of mocking disbelief. You came looking for me?

She did not have any explanation, and was not at all sorry, but rather dismissive and belittling, telling me that I needed to "go to therapy for [my] anxiety." In hindsight, she obviously wasn't being serious. It was just a way to turn it back on me. But I took it seriously – one of the discoveries of this past year (see below) is that I am probably autistic and I can be very literal, particularly when agitated – and... so I dutifully went to therapy as directed. After telling me I needed to go, even in cruel jest, she couldn't then tell me not to.

Through therapy, I got access to an outside perspective that had otherwise been denied to me. It's not even that therapy gave me the perspective I needed to see that she was mistreating me. I was still so convinced I was the problem that I barely discussed her. (I recognized a lot in Anna Kendrick's interview on that podcast with the terrible name, about her abusive relationship, and how he made it seem like she was abusing him.) But this is where I was introduced to meditation and mindfulness and through that, started to build my self-esteem. Eventually, I decided that, even if I was the problem, even if I was too sensitive, even if I was difficult to live with, it didn't matter. This sucked and I didn't have to keep doing it. I had stopped going (my "anxiety" was well under control) but went back once I determined that the relationship needed to end. I knew it would be ugly. (She had bragged, for years, that she was never friends with her exes.) When she learned, during our breakup confrontation, that I had returned to therapy without informing her, she was livid.

"And what did she tell you?" she hissed.

I now find this very satisfying. Not only did the very qualities that made me susceptible to manipulation – my lack of boundaries and general naivete – also set me up to escape a manipulative partner, but my ex's abusive behavior created the conditions for her own undoing.

If we hadn't have broken up when we did (eighteen months to two years after the incident recounted above), who knows if we would have at all. If I had, as I had planned, held out until the New Year, perhaps I would have lost my nerve. Or I would have waited too long and the pandemic would have made it impossible. But she chose to pick a bizarre fight with me in the wee hours of a Friday morning, and it quickly escalated to the end of everything. It was over three weeks before Christmas.

Because it ended when it did, and as abruptly as it did, that meant I was single and free two months later, when I went with a couple of friends (out of the few that were also actually mine) to see an advance screening of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I went to another advance screening a few days later, on Valentine's Day, at an arthouse theatre in Waterville. I downloaded Duolingo and idly entertained the idea that I would learn French, just in case I ever encountered Adèle Haenel in person, or just so I could read her interviews in French publications. Six months later, I finished all the French content on Duolingo and reached out to someone I followed on Tumblr, a woman who lived in France, about starting lessons. I've now been taking them for more than four years. I speak pretty decent French.

There is no universe where my ex and I are together and I am allowed to take those French lessons. She didn't like me giving anyone else, and certainly not other women, my attention (she once ruined a Basia Bulat concert), much less a woman with whom I spoke a language she could not understand. It would have been out of the question. She would never have forbidden me from doing it; she would have simply made it so unpleasant – by being resentful of the time they took, or disruptive of the lessons themselves – that I would have stopped voluntarily. This tactic was why I slowly, over time, stopped even asking to see my Boston friends, and stopped pursuing certain hobbies or activities – like yoga, for instance – that she had no interest in. (She once got mad at me for not considering how she would pass the time in Old Orchard Beach while I ran a four-mile road race.)

And those French lessons were helpful far beyond learning the language itself. Learning a language is all about discomfort and being okay with being consistently and humiliatingly wrong. You spend the first couple of years straining to pick out anything from what seems like nonsense or noise. (For instance, it would take me 45 minutes and an enormous amount of effort to transcribe a one-minute episode of a web series for small children called "Un Jour, Un Question.") This feeling of not understanding is deeply uncomfortable and frustrating. But it's very helpful to get used to it.

I also saw what was possible if you simply persisted at something. Like, you could become better, different, in a way that was both so gradual as to be imperceptible and shocking in its suddenness. Like, one day, after months of trying, you could do something you couldn't before.

It also does not matter how "good" you are at languages – you still start as a baby. Struggle through the months or years when you have something to say but cannot say it to save your life. Enduring that time, and seeing it pay off, helped me be more willing to return to this child-like, vulnerable state in other areas.

To wit: I had been meeting with Victoire for not quite two years when I embarked upon a little online dating experiment. Following yet another unpleasant experience (see above) that was reminiscent of previous unpleasant dating experiences (and this was before I got bullied for it), I decided that I needed to take a radically different approach. To an extent, I tried to apply Buddhist principles to dating apps. To survive on the apps at all, you need a very healthy tolerance for discomfort, for annoyance, for frustration, for boredom, and for disappointment. I'm not sure I had that healthy tolerance yet (I was still feeling quite wounded), but the foundation I had built through those French lessons (and the therapy and meditation) allowed me to persist even when things became unpleasant or awkward. I stayed on the apps – not always active, but "on" them, not deleting or deactivating – for nearly a year straight, and had a couple three-month cycles (I paused again last June and deleted completely a couple of weeks ago) in the year after that initial period ended.

This experiment hasn't led to great romance – I have gone on more than two dates with roughly three people, and dated one of those people for a couple of months in the spring of 2023 – but it has been incredibly useful and, as Instagram influencers say, healing. I feel more at ease with myself than I ever have. I'm more aware of my triggers and more able to predict and manage their appearances. I feel more ready for, and more open to, a relationship than I've probably ever been, and, at the same time, I'm not stressed about it. I know that the worst thing I could do is consent to something that isn't right or accept less than I deserve. I have more confidence in my ability to navigate thorny situations and in my value as a partner. Obviously, all of this is much more useful in the long term than a girlfriend would have been.

Contrary to the experiences of that summer and fall (and to my previous stints on the apps and in relationships in general), the people I've met have been very responsive and kind and were very clear about how much they liked and valued me (romantically or otherwise). I've made some friends. I barely even got ghosted. Obviously less exciting but much less distressing.

Most of the skills you learn on dating apps or through dating (if you learn any at all) are not dating exclusive. They are helpful in pretty much all areas of your life. (I had to rebuild my entire social universe following the breakup and the pandemic and, ya know, being canceled by an indeterminate number of people.) I now have a pretty decent network of friends – ones who know about both my ex and my bullies.

I've been writing and reflecting on the dating app experiment since I started it. It was only recently though, in looking back through various drafts, that I noticed a pattern – I do love patterns – in how I discussed my interpretation of the behavior of others and how I determined the correct response. Mentions of "scripts," and "templates,"– for instance, the girl I went on dates with had used "the brush off template," which is apparently not a concept others are familiar with – and "protocols." I once described certain guidelines I set up for engaging with people on the apps as, like "IFTTTs, but for your own behavior." I noted that I came off, in my own words, "like a guileless alien researcher, earnestly trying to understand human emotions."

This, along with some other things I had been noticing (one of which was being viciously bullied for seemingly no reason) made me wonder if, maybe, I could be on the autism spectrum, something that's come up a few times over the years but that I had mostly dismissed. I talked to a friend (who I met via Tinder) who is on the spectrum and they were like, "Yeah, I don't think we've ever made eye contact." I told Victoire I thought I might be on the spectrum and she said, "Oh, you didn't know that?"

This, of course, has allowed me to reevaluate almost everything I've already discussed and given me particular insight into the challenges I've had in the queer community and in romantic relationships. Like, oh, this is why it's been so hard. This is why I regularly have no idea what's going on. This is (one of the reasons) why I stayed in such a shitty situation for so long. (Autistic people are easy targets for manipulation – and bullying – because of their difficulty reading social situations.) It's helped me make peace with my natural solitariness but also opened up the possibility for community with more like-minded people.

The bullying stuff and the dating stuff have also been excellent preparation for re-engaging with my family of origin following a pandemic-induced separation. My ex and my mother have a lot in common, and setting boundaries with the latter has required withstanding a lot of criticism and judgement from others, as well as the discomfort of witnessing her hurt and displeasure (and the acting out, the passive-aggressiveness, etc.).

And, like, come at me, bro. You think you can hurt me? I got bullied by a bunch of people whose whole shtick is being the Kindness and Community Brigade and quite possibly for getting my feelings hurt, ending an abusive relationship, and having a neuro-developmental disability. I ain't scared of you. Yippee-ki-yay, motherfuckers.

Was all this worth the shitty relationship and the bullying? I mean, honestly, yes. Absolutely. 100%. But, even if it weren't, it doesn't matter. I couldn't control any of that. Almost every bad thing I've recounted is the result of choices and assumptions other people made. Obviously, it would have been preferable to avoid the manipulative partner entirely, but a relationship like that was probably always going to find me given certain things about my childhood. I'm glad it's (hopefully) out of my system. Should I have predicted that my ex would poison the well against me? Yes, that was always inevitable. I was just in (protective) denial about it. But would acknowledging it have helped? I couldn't have stopped it and any attempt to do so probably would have made things worse. Trying to counter a false narrative or impression will only confirm it in many people's minds.

And, like, I do wish I hadn't been bullied, but, if people want to bully you, they're going to bully you. If people want to make a lot of unfair and untrue assumptions about you – instead of considering the obvious conclusion that you were acting reasonably with the information you had and based on your previous experiences – and pass them off to others as facts, they can do so. (To bring it back to Ms. Kendrick, in that interview, she said, "If someone decides to harm you, they can harm you.")

If you focus too much on the injustice of it all, you'll go mad. It's like if a tree fell on your car. Obviously, you wish that hadn't happened. It's not fair of the universe. But, like, a tree did indeed fall on your car. You just have to deal with it. You need to call someone. File a claim with your insurance. Can't waste your time cursing the heavens.

We like to think that things involving human decisions, unlike accidents of nature, are more in our control, but they really aren't. Write off those losses, learn any lessons you can, and keep it moving.

Whatever you do, don't waste your suffering.