“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
Plato
Then came the blocking.
Another closed door.
Another place where I was trying to speak and somebody else had decided that I wouldn’t be heard.
Following everything I wrote about in Parts 9 and 10, this became another escalation in something that was already deeply distressing. I tried different avenues to communicate with Paul because I couldn’t live with the misunderstandings that had been left between us. I needed him to understand that there was another human being on the other side of all of this, with a history, feelings, memories and a life that was affected too.
(See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/07/once-we-repaired-things-part-9-midnight.html and http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/08/once-we-repaired-things-part-10-photo.html ).
But the avenues kept disappearing.
Blocked.
Blocked again.
And the more I was prevented from speaking, the more pressing the need to speak became.
That’s something I don’t think people necessarily understand.
Silencing somebody doesn’t necessarily resolve anything for the person being silenced. Sometimes it does the opposite. This was serious.
For me, being unable to correct what Paul had misunderstood became tormenting. I was already trying to protect myself psychologically while everything else in my life was happening simultaneously. I was already overwhelmed. I was already frightened. I was already trying to survive circumstances that felt increasingly surreal.
I wasn’t trying to play a game.
I wasn’t playing a game at all.
Dating was never a game to me. Relationships weren’t a game. People’s emotions weren’t a game. My life certainly wasn’t a game.
And I hated the humiliation.
——
Humiliation Upon Humiliation
I have always hated being humiliated or shamed. See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/01/my-personal-story-part-1.html regarding who I was as as child. And those who know me from childhood, would know this to be true. Perhaps that’s why, as an adult, I found myself to be a target of whatever this is. But I also believe that God doesn’t see us the way the world sees (or perceives) us. That’s a story for a future post.
I also know that sadly, in life, we can’t always escape harm and humiliation being inflicted upon us, whether intentionally or unintentionally. But the last several years of my life, this harm has been next level, overwhelming and, as I mentioned, very surreal.
I have tried throughout my life to treat people with kindness, dignity and respect. Yet during this period I’m writing about, I increasingly felt as though my kindness was being taken for granted everywhere I turned — as though other people somehow had an entitlement to decide what I could endure, what I should accept and when I was allowed to speak.
Paul may have believed something completely different was happening, and I accept that. In his mind, he may have constructed an entirely different explanation for why I kept trying to communicate.
But that was precisely why I needed a conversation.
He’d reached conclusions about me without allowing me to explain my situation. (And I myself wondered if his own past influenced his own judgements - see http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/02/once-we-repaired-things-part-2.html).
Every attempt I made to correct those conclusions seemed to reinforce whatever conclusion he had already reached.
It became a trap.
The more I needed to explain, the more I tried to communicate.
The more I tried to communicate, the more I was blocked.
The more I was blocked, the more distressed I became because I still hadn’t been heard.
And then that distress itself could be interpreted as justification for refusing to listen.
Where was I supposed to go with that?
——
I Had a Story Too
There were things Paul didn’t know.
There were things about my history with men that he didn’t understand.
There were things about how I approached dating that he didn’t understand.
There were things about what had happened between us that I experienced completely differently.
There were things I needed to correct.
There were things I needed to say.
Because I was a person too.
My life was involved too.
My history mattered too.
My dignity mattered too.
My voice mattered too.
That became particularly painful after the message Paul sent me about himself and an ex-girlfriend. Whatever he intended by sending it, its impact on me was devastating. What compounded it was what I experienced as the absence of concern afterwards for how any of this had affected me.
(See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/04/once-we-repaired-things-text-that.html).
I remember becoming extremely distressed. I became frightened for my own valid reasons.
But underneath that distress and fear was something very simple:
Would you please listen to me?
——
His Fears Were Human. So Were Mine.
There’s something else that has stayed with me.
Paul had spoken about his own fears.
He feared being alone.
He had also watched his father deteriorate with dementia, something that would frighten and distress almost anybody who loved a parent.
Those fears were human and I understood them.
But loneliness frightened me too.
Loss frightened me too. See my own story about how I lost my own dad - http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-night-i-lost-my-dad-to-suicide.html.
Watching life disappear frightened me too.
And somehow, while his fears were allowed to be real, I was living through circumstances that were leaving me profoundly alone while being denied the opportunity even to explain what was happening inside me.
That contradiction still hurts.
I would never deliberately do to Paul what I experienced being done to me.
I couldn’t knowingly watch somebody I’d cared about become increasingly distressed because they needed to tell me something crucial and I kept closing every door.
I couldn’t do it.
Whatever I thought they wanted, eventually I would have to ask:
Why is this person trying so hard to speak?
Maybe I have misunderstood something.
Maybe there’s something I don’t know.
Maybe I should listen.
——
The Parallel Was Becoming Terrifying
And this was happening while another extraordinary struggle was unfolding in my life.
At work, all I had originally asked for was a psychosocially safe working environment.
I couldn’t continue carrying what had effectively become two high-level jobs for the price of one person.
I asked for help.
What followed became years of trying to navigate an increasingly fragmented system.
Again and again, I found myself saying:
I am one person. I cannot carry all of this alone.
I was trying to:
- Protect my employment.
- Protect my home.
- Protect my finances.
- Protect my family from having to witness what I was going through.
- Protect my health.
- Protect my future.
And somehow I was also expected to navigate insurers, regulators, lawyers, government agencies and administrative processes while repeatedly explaining the same fundamental problem.
Listen.
Please understand what has happened.
Please do something.
Then, in my personal life, I was experiencing another version of the closed door.
Paul, please listen.
Please understand what happened.
Please let me speak.
Different circumstances. Different responsibilities. They should not be conflated.
But psychologically, for me, there was a terrible parallel:
everywhere I turned, I felt unheard.
——
Nowhere Felt Safe
That’s perhaps the hardest thing to articulate about this period.
I didn’t feel safe anywhere.
Everywhere I turned to try to reason with somebody seemed to become another place where I felt less safe.
At work.
Within the systems that were supposed to respond when something went wrong.
Within my personal life.
Eventually, even my home ceased to feel completely separate from everything happening outside it.
I don’t want to revisit everything that happened with police here because that belongs elsewhere in this story (and I’ve already written a post about that - http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/08/when-even-home-wasnt-safe-june-2022.html). But the progression is difficult for me to comprehend even now.
I had asked for a safe workplace.
Eventually I found myself feeling unsafe even inside my own home.
How does somebody psychologically process that?
Where was I supposed to put the fear?
Where was I supposed to put the humiliation?
Where was I supposed to put everything I wasn’t being allowed to say?
——
What Trauma Does
I’ve had nightmares on and off since this began.
There were periods of shock and disorientation. My memory and concentration could become affected. Acute trauma doesn’t necessarily arrive neatly packaged as sadness. It can overwhelm the very cognitive processes somebody needs in order to explain what’s happening to them.
And yet explaining yourself is exactly what so many systems — and sometimes people — demand when you’re at your least capable of doing it.
Be calm.
Be concise.
Move on.
Accept it.
Stop talking about it.
But what happens when what you really need in order to regain some sense of agency is to finally be heard?
What happens when the suppression itself becomes part of the torment?
——
A Psychological Thriller I Never Chose
There were too many parallel stories unfolding at once.
Sometimes I have struggled to describe what this period of my life actually feels like.
The closest description I have is still this:
a surreal psychological thriller in which I’m the main character in a genre I never chose.
Except there’s no audience watching from the safety of a cinema.
This has been my life, and I’ve been alone inside it.
Other people could finish work, go home, have dinner, watch television, make plans for the weekend and return to the ordinary problems of ordinary life.
I couldn’t switch mine off.
This followed me into my home.
It followed me into my sleep.
It followed me into my finances.
It followed me into my relationships.
It followed me into my sense of who I was.
And the cruelest part was that the more frightened and overwhelmed I became, the more difficult it became to make anybody understand the scale of what was happening.
——
What Kind of Society Are We Becoming?
These years have forced me to think about something much larger than my own circumstances.
When did we become so comfortable with simply shutting people out?
When did blocking replace difficult conversations?
When did administrative processing replace actual problem-solving?
When did protecting ourselves from discomfort become more important than asking whether somebody else was being harmed?
When did listening become such an unreasonable request?
Technology has made it extraordinarily easy to make another human being disappear.
Block.
Delete.
Ignore.
Move on.
Perhaps sometimes that’s necessary.
But we should also be capable of asking whether there are circumstances in which another human being deserves to be heard — particularly somebody with whom we have shared history, trust or vulnerability.
I was raised with strong family values. People mattered. Relationships mattered. Responsibility mattered. You didn’t simply discard people when things became uncomfortable.
Maybe that makes me old-fashioned.
I don’t care anymore.
I don’t want to live in a society where treating human beings as disposable is considered progress.
——
I Am Still Here
There’s another reason I’m writing all of this now.
I hope Paul finally reads it.
These posts can’t recreate a conversation that should have happened years ago.
But I finally get to finish my sentences.
I finally get to explain what he wouldn’t allow me to explain then.
And perhaps he’ll finally understand that what he thought was happening wasn’t necessarily what was happening inside the person trying to speak to him.
People are reading my story now.
Pieces of it, at least.
They’re learning things they didn’t know.
But even people who read it can eventually close the browser and return to their lives.
I still have to live mine.
That’s the difference.
The workplace story is still unresolved. The financial consequences are still real. The personal consequences are still real. The things that were unlawfully taken from me still require resolution and, where legally required, restitution.
And underneath every one of these parallel stories is something extraordinarily basic.
I asked for safety.
I asked to be heard.
I asked to be treated with dignity.
I asked for the same humanity and respect that other people expect for themselves.
I’m still asking.
And perhaps these are the questions I have been trying to articulate all along:
Where does the humiliation end?
Where does the silencing end?
Where does the abuse of power end?
And where, finally, does compassion begin?
