Talking Stalk

My wife and I started watching some show on Netflix called "Baby Reindeer", which is a supposedly true(ish) story of a person who was stalked by a woman. We are only a couple of episodes into the limited series, but it brought up some memories of my own stalker experience back in high school, though it was far tamer than that of the show so far. However, it might have been tamer for a reason.

For me, it was a friend of friends who was kind of on the outside of the groups, quiet, quite overweight, and likely from a poorer family. She was nice enough, though I hadn't really talked to her about anything that important, it was more just casual conversation. As one of the only people with a car, I had given friends a ride home and she was there also. As she lived closer to me than the others, she was also the last one I dropped off home, and we drove, me talking light nonsense.

This was in the lead up to the senior dance, and I heard (after the fact) she was going to ask me to take her while we were driving but chickened out, as she had developed some kind of crush. However, even if she had, I had already asked a lovely girl to accompany me and she had said yes, and we had already started dating anyway.

The crush girl was crushed.

And ended up spiraling a bit, following me around the school, sitting down staring at my now girlfriend and I as we ate our lunch, and kind of just being like a shadow wherever we were. My girlfriend was at first kind of laughed it off, but it got to the point that something had to be said to stop it. So, I said to the girl that while I understood she had a crush and that she is disappointed, she was behaving poorly and should stop.

Remember, high school.

But I was never cruel, or mean. Which I think just spurred her on more and it continued, where I constantly felt like she was around, and my girlfriend started to feel like she was in some kind of danger, especially since there was a fair size difference between the two, though my girlfriend was pretty kick-ass fit and could probably hold her own.

It was a couple weeks before the dance, and I ended up in hospital for about a week with pancreatitis, one of about six times I was in there for that. And while hopped up on self-administered morphine, people would come and go from my room, friends visiting and me talking in ways I could barely grasp, and the stalker. No one knew of course she was a stalker, she was just another friend coming to visit. But she wouldn't come in and talk, she would wait until I was asleep or in the bathroom, and would then leave little presents, like teddy bears on my bed.

I didn't keep one of them.

In the end, school finished exams were over, and I never saw her again, but as said, it was a different time. It could have been much worse than what it was, as if it had been ten years later, it would have been at the start of Facebook times, where people were connecting digitally on social networks and cyber-stalking became a more formal thing. The ways to track people, follow people, know where they are and who they are spending time with became far easier. And, in the early days the security and visibility wasn't as robust as it is now, though I haven't used Facebook in many years, so it might be different again.

But, there is more to it than just access to the object of affection, it is also a gateway into building up fanciful ideas and feelings for someone who might not even know the stalker exists. We see this with celebrities often, but it happens to normal people also, where perhaps through some innocuous interaction, an infatuation begins and then there is content and opportunity to keep building it in the background.

The estimate is that 7.5 million people are stalked online annually in the US alone.

Most of these cases are probably where the people are in relationships (probably not healthy relationships) with the victim, where one of the couple are extremely jealous. And, now of course there are all kinds of stalkerware available to monitor activities. Our digital lives on screens, create a clear vector for potential abuse, and I suspect that part of the reason for the amount it happens, is also tied to the degrading mental health and emotional capabilities of people these days. Combine emotional frailty with a mix of loneliness and entitlement, and it is pretty obvious that it is going to lead to some pretty bad outcomes, especially for relationships.

Even if there is no real relationship at all.

I haven't thought about my own low-grade stalker experience for a long time, but I do remember how uncomfortable it was, and I had no physical fear for myself. It must be quite terrible for the people (especially women) who have all the discomfort and also have to fear for themselves physically. There is never an excuse to intimidate people, yet the level of entitlement seems to be playing a big role, where people have been told to do what ever makes them happy, and some are using force to get what they want.

Sometimes, I just feel that humanity is doomed because despite how much potential we have, we also seem inclined to keep creating unnecessary problems for ourselves. Some of these things might be unintentional, but they end up leading into a dark place, like the internet itself. Once hailed as the answer to knowledge sharing and access to level the informational playing field, it has devolved into a for profit ad model, designed to bring out the worst in us, to polarize us, to isolate and break us. And as it does its job, more instances to polarize us further are created, and amplified.

Anytime there is a channel to share an image, fucktards will send dick pics to strangers.

We have degraded as a society, going backwards, turning the random perverted flasher, into just another day on the internet. We have told people to brand, had celebrities put their lives online to generate hype for their projects to generate more wealth, and then have them complain because they attract the attention of the wrong people. And we do this to ourselves to.

And we have an alert and notification to keep us updated constantly.

Perhaps we should be developing more notifications for our own behaviors, instead of tracking the activities of others so closely. Maybe then we will see how far we have fallen below the standards we used to hold dear.

I get tired of hearing about all the violence in the world. It is bad enough when it is because of the power-hungry governments driven by profit-hungry corporations, but it is even worse when it is done by ordinary people to other ordinary people, just trying to make the best of what can be a pretty shitty life. More and more I see broken minded people unable to build their own happiness, find ways to keep happiness away from others. The outliers of course, end up in the news.

But it happens out of the spotlight too.

Personal pain is never a reason to inflict pain upon others.

But the entitled seem to disagree.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]