on forgiveness (working draft)

On Forgiveness, Humility, and Self-Surveillance
 - notes from an ongoing process -
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A few years ago, I wrote up an essay in which the opening paragraph acknowledged the profound difficulty I'd had in writing that piece - the hardest thing I'd ever written, I believe was the gist of it. When it comes to difficult subjects, it has been the case for me that they are the ones closest to heart and thus must difficult to step back from in order to gain necessary perspective and separation. This first section of writing I'm posting - along with some supporting data files (bear with me - the two parts are inseparable) - has taken me two years to work out. In that and just about any other metric, this writing has required more of me than anything previous.

The same can be said for the underlying experience: it's tested me, and taken more from me, than anything I've experienced before in my life - by a good, long ways.

Looking back, in terms of the writing, there's been several core challenges that have stopped me in my tracks whenever I set to work on saying something useful about this topic. One is the deeply personal nature of these happenings - not only for me (as an author, I'm choosing to open up) but also for others closely involved. Some of those others... well, it's clear they've left behind any claim towards having their "privacy" protected a long, long ways back. For others deepy entangled in all this, however, they do have legitimate privacy expectations - and those are expectations I've bent over backwards to honour. I will continue to do that. In doing so, I know I won't be able to square the circle of protecting those privacy concerns fully whilst still saying something constructive about what's been going on. And that second goal - speaking the truth of this, and telling of what it's been like to walk this path for the past two years - is important enough that I'll make the circle just as square as I possibly can. It's the best I can do.

Right alongside that insoluble privacy conflict is the fact that, even now - more than two years down this path - there's so much I either don't know, or know only in vague and poorly-supported fashion. And this deep welter of uncertainty - one I don't expect will ever fully resolve, to be blunt about it - has absaolutely shut down my efforts to talk about, let alone write cogently about, in absolutely pure form. Yes, over time that uncertainty has lessened; it has lessened in tiny steps, and sometimes grown back to be more than ever before... with each tidbit of objective knowledge earned through more tears and heartache and misery than I care to remember, let alone speak of in detail here or anywhere else. Even so, the fact pattern - imperfect, incomplete, and still in some significant areas utterly baffling to me - has slowly and gruesomely come into focus. It's still fuzzy in places - really fuzzy - however the overall structure is now inescapably clear.

That's where the attached files come in. Because, whatever approach I take in writing this up - however well I winnow down years of pure chaos into something that feels inevitable and obvious in hindsight - this thing is, in its primal essence, unthinkable. There's no clear prior categories in which I can slot the experience - and the depth of wrongness that's come visible as time has passed is really so tragically profound that... that the only way I've been able to slowly bring myself to face it head-on has been to proceed through an equally unimaginably tedious, time-consuming, exhaustive process of gathering raw empirical data - mostly in the form of electronic surveillance captures, which I'll be sharing as this story unfolds. Without those data, and without forcing myself to winnow through those raw data (many, many tens of gigabytes of tiles... even excluding the large body of materials lost in the process), there is simply no way I could have thought - in purely hypothetical terms - of this thing that's happened, let alone actually sit with myself and acknowledge that yes it's happened - is still, in fact, happening as I write this first segment.

Without the raw empirical data - imperfect, and frustratingly thick with distractions and dead space - this story wouldn't exist. Without the files - without dozens and dozens and dozens of them, spanning years of time - the consistency of the underlying pattern, and the reality of the underlying experience, would never be something I could accept as part of this world I inhabit. And without these scratchy, noisy, always-incomplete empirical findings there's no way anyone else would ever - not ever, no matter how dark their preconceptions may be - accept this thing as a part of our shared reality.

With the empirical data... well, with the empirical data it's just not possible to pretend that this hasn't happened. It's certainly possible to ignore it, or to turn away from it in disgust and rejection - those are both very healthy reactions to an impeccably unhealthy digression from how life organizes itself otherwise. Had I the luxury of doing either, I'd have absolutely done so - and early on, I did try both those approaches. Unfortunately, those two escape hatches are really only available to spectators - not to protagonists. Irrespective, it's the hard and well-documented reality of the thing that keeps us from simply pushing the idea of it aside as disgusting, or beneath our consideration, or as just something that bears not thinking about.

Even in the raw factuality of the included data set - in the 1s and 0s of hundreds of hours of recorded audio and hundreds of gigabtyes of technical materials - there's a core of warped truth: in this, nothing is or was as it played out able to be taken at face value. Every layer of discussion and every statement captured in these recordings exists bound up in a matrix of deceit, dishonesty, betrayal of trust, and manipulation of expectations and deepest hopes. So, really, it's not the individual words, themselves constituted into sentences which are spoken (largely) by one person to another. Rather, it's the totality of the "shape of the lies" - to coin an awful phrase - that tells the story of what's actually happened.

And, in order to understand what's happened to me - and to everyone I love, everyone close to me, and anyone caught up in the shrapnel this thing has been generating for months and months and months of grinding development - I had to finally stop listening to the words themselves and, instead, listen tht deeper structure that would need to exist for those words (or words like them) to come together in the way they have. Like looking at a shape in the dusk out of the corner of one's eye - when looking directly gets nothing but a blur of unknown - it was through turning off my all-too-human desire to hear words and <i>take those words to have some connection to a reality</i> that I, finally and slowly, made sense of what's happened.

I don't know how to describe that analytic capability: learning how to not hear, but rather to feel the underlying shape of an ugly and secretive thing. It's, essentially, an anti-human skill. We're wordy creatures, and this thing has been able to take form precisely because we hear words as something that provides useful meaning to us - however imperfectly and indirectly, it often may be. Here, however, words act as false lures - as wires that pull us into misery and alienation and death. Here, words are pure venom: not as descriptors, but as active agents of harm and dissolution. My description is amorphous bordering on useless - bear with me, please, if you hope to see something solid and specific under all the generalities. The solidity and specificity are there, no question; it's just that I don't have the skill to be able to package them upfront and fill in backwards from there. For me, the best I've been able to do is start this off by pointing vaguely in a direction - down, towards the dark and the fears in all our deepest souls. As the writing unfolds - and as the embedded raw forensic data narrate in their own ineluctable way - the clarity comes. Unfortunately, yes... the clarity comes.

Finally, in terms of an introductory note, let me be intensively clear that I'm speaking - well, writing - from a perspective that's limited to my own path through this thing. Almost without exception, I can't speak in any reliable way about the experiences, or intentions, or motivations of the other direct protagonists. Yes, obviously, it's possible to impute some or all of those as the story fleshes out - indeed, it's probably impossible not to do that, to some degree. However, I caution that doing so can quickly mask the reality of what's going on here. Even the most basic assumptions might - and, sometimes, have proven to be - entirely, flat-out wrong. Having learned that in a heavy cost, during these two years, I will make no apology for avoiding in my own writing any imputation of motive, intention, or experienced reality by those others enmeshed in this terrible thing. I can talk to how it's been for me, to what I've sought (and almost completely failed) to accomplish along the way. As to the others, well... they are purely alien to me, and always will be. I can see their actions and learn to predict their paths forward; in doing so, I'll never understand the why, or what it is that comes out of this that has served as a tangible motivator for them to keep going, and going, and going.

Enough of all that. As I unpack the events themselves, some of those paragraphs above will help fit together the overall picture being set forth here. Meanwhile, I hope they at least serve the purpose of tightly bracketing expectations: I don't have all - or even most - of the answers. I can't say, really, why it's happened and continues to happen. I'll never understand how someone could actually create this monstrosity - intentionally, actively, passionately. And I can't tell you how all the pieces fit together; some parts of this ugly puzzle don't (for me, anyway, not yet) fit anywhere. It's all incomplete, and imperfect, and unfinished.

And yet... and yet, it's real. And it's carried itself forward for <i>two years running</i>. This isn't, as the phrasing goes, some teenage prank gone awry. No, it's not that. It's something else, something that uses words to destroy, and in doing so slips and slides out of the grip of words to describe. That's where the raw data attachments fill in the gap: they are captured fragments of the actual, physical, tangible reality of what's taken place. They're (mostly) words, yes... words as destructive, corrosive weapons. They - the spoken words - are the left-over, the bloody and battered, weapons from this one-sided war in which I've been living for two years running.

The words, unfortunately, cannot be ignored.

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For this first chapter in what I fear will be a not-short story entire, I've chosen to let the rawness of the captured data take front and centre stage. The data files I'm attaching to this post are, all of the, quite recent - within the past few months, and many from recent weeks as of this writing. They're also not edited down to the "good parts" and - largely - have not been through any technical clean-up that makes the substrate of whispered, slitering words at their core easier to hear and to understand. In following posts, I'll have examples of cleaned-up files - indeed, of files that have been professionally and independly transcribed. The transcriptions are useful: they're compact, and tangible, and don't require sitting in a quiet room with good headphones and a willingness to listen very, very carefully to things being said that should never be said. As transcriptions, however, they lose the depth of evil that can only be experienced by listening to the spoken performance: the meanace, the passion (that word again)... the absolute investment in having those words accomplish their most destructive possible ends.

That's the experience in which I've lived, for these dark years: whispered words, words that can't actually have been spoken but yes have showed up on actual recordings, just as remembered originally, words pushing and pleading and threatening and demanding... all in the service of corroding the will to live. In some segments of this experience, I've lived under the dark torrent of those whispered words all but 24 hours a day for days at a time: in my home, in my truck driving to work or to run errands, and at least once in my workplace where I'd have them sticking their corrupted needles of hatred into my ears as I took each breath, each step forward in my day's life. Those words buried me, damaged me, ground me down to less than nothing.

Those are the words you'll hear, if you listen patiently and closely to these recording in this first post. They set the stage. It's an ugly stage, yes - a stage nobody should ever experience firsthand.

Let's start with an audio capture from the summer of 2017. It was this recording that marked a definitive turn for me, away from dreamy fantasies that things were all going to be ok if I just pretended nothing was happening. These words - the people speaking them, the things they say - shook me out of my then-lethargy and, almost certainly, kept me alive a bit longer. So this is, for me at least, an important snapshot in time. Remember, however, that the surface-level truth of the words is not something I'm vouching for. In fact, a good bit of what's said in this recording - as in all the others - is actively dishonest, intended to confuse and misdirect their target. That's not what's important about what's said on this recording.

Rather, it's the fact that <i> otherwise civilised, sane, adult human beings are speaking these words</i> even if - or especially if - the words are not true, but rather are meant to trick someone overhearing them into thinking they're true. Without any prior explanation of backstory, that reality of these things being said gets us right into the thick of the profound sickness animating the entire process unfolding over two years' time. Below, I identify the voices in the recording - who they are, where they were physically when these words were spoken, and what social connection they had (if any) to me and my loved ones at the time. Later on, there's times I'll be aggressively vague about certain events and specific people - that's my perogative, as I set forth above.

Here, however, no names have been changed to protect the guilty. They're big kids, clearly able to speak - to use words - if it suits their needs. If they want to reply, and explain how these impeccably-real recordings of them saying what they say are innocuous, or in jest, or... I can't even guess what sort of lies could be told to try to wrap this ball of shit in something presentable to the world of healthy human beings. Whatever the case, they can use their words to justify these words, if they choose. Or not.

We all get to make choices.

Without further ado, here goes...