I’ve been working on / writing / re-writing / debating whether I ought to post a much longer, more detailed version of these events, and seem to have chosen a very brief but still reasonably accurate (and not silent, as I have so often ended up with) route:
Yesterday at lunch I was out in public and was suddenly accosted by someone who threatened several times to kill me if I ever went near his friends again. ((In actuality, he is upset about me doing something which not only did not involve me going near his friends, but that was a course of action specifically chosen to avoid conflict, or even the implication or appearance of myself being a threat to anyone, but which apparently he is not aware of the factual details of.)) When I clarified that not going near his friends was exactly what I had done, he called me a coward and threatened to kill me again. When I tried to express my confusion regarding his anger and to state what I know to be the truth (based on actually being present during my own life experiences) – that I never threatened or intended harm to anyone – he called me a rapist and threatened to kill me again. I replied that if he threatened me again I would contact the police and he said he hoped I did. This is presumedly because he believes that I am a stalker and a rapist and a threat to his friends, and he believes that the police would fall on his side. I tend to believe that since I haven’t done anything I wasn’t explicitly either authorized to do or asked to do, none of which puts me legally in the wrong, that my own interests (versus his repeated death threats) would be protected.
This has left me somewhat shaken-up, paranoid, anxious, and otherwise generally stressed out since then. A couple of hours later there was a calming ray of sunshine in my day when Sara called me out-of-the-blue, which was nice and put me in a relatively good mood, considering that there’s now this threat hanging over my head and not less than one irrational person quite eager to act on false information to bring me to harm. I keep approaching my car carefully, looking for lurking people, slashed tires and the like. I am quaking a bit, all the time, and today when a moderately stressful thing happened in the office, I reacted with an unreasonable level of anxiety. I promptly put my headphones on and induced a hypnotic state low enough to quell my stress-response without preventing me from doing my job. (Yes, I can do my job literally in my sleep.)
This is the short version. I just thought I’d let y’all know why, if I seem stressed out right now, I’m stressed out right now. Sorry, Sara, for not mentioning this. I didn’t want to upset you and I hope – I hope, I hope – this is the last I’ll hear from these people. Heck, that was the whole point of my recent activity which apparently roused this young man to homicide; to clear out the last remnants of something (that happened a time and a half ago) out of my home and send a message that I didn’t want them in my life under the current status quo. I’ve closed that door; I was just making sure that the appropriate person knew the password to open it again if they ever want to. I’ll try to post semi-regularly to let you know I’m still un-murdered.
