This Has Happened Before and It Will Happen Again

This is not an essay. This is a scream.

What happened to me at Writers Blok has happened before and it will happen again.

I keep trying to find different ways of saying this, trying to casually drop it into conversation, “Oh, and by the way—”

If I had known that this had happened to other women — to multiple women — I would’ve responded differently than I did. For one thing, I wouldn’t have let my friends fight for me. Fuck that shit. Fuck other people getting hurt too. But I didn’t know that a version of this had happened before. I didn’t see the pattern. But I do now. When it happens, you feel like you are the only one. But you very rarely are.

This has happened before and it will happen again.

I was sitting in downtown Culver City eating pizza with a friend when I got the text. My friend’s membership had been put on hold until she met with the founder. I knew then that my friend was going to get kicked out of Writers Blok for trying to save me. I panicked. All the stress that I thought was on its way out came flooding back. I was in fight or flight again, but I didn’t know what to do or how to save her. I felt powerless to stop what was about to happen.

Fuck this. Fuck other people getting hurt too.

I went on a camping trip last year and met a guy that I almost instantly disliked. I couldn’t stand him. He seemed drawn to me at first, so I avoided him. Every time he opened his mouth I hated him even more. But there was nothing objectively wrong. He just gave off douche vibes.

Later, he got kicked out of the group for his inappropriate behavior with several women. I was right. I called it. At first, I felt vindicated, like I had dodged a bullet. I was very impressed with my own gut instincts. That could’ve been me. I was right and I called it.

Later, I realized I probably knew the people he hurt and in an instant I was overcome with indescribable rage. I wanted to kill this guy for hurting people that I cared about. But on the heels of rage, guilt washed over me — that could’ve been me, that should’ve been me. Why wasn’t it me instead?

I didn’t want my friend to meet with him, but she wasn’t going down without a fight. I told her over the phone that her safety was more important than anything else — even her emotional safety: Your friends care about you and don’t want you to get hurt.

There’s that feeling of desperation — that this time, this time will be different. The outcome won’t be the same. I can save people. I can prevent this from happening again.

Now I wonder if the only reason he made her meet with him is so there wouldn’t be another email floating around canceling her membership for no reason and wishing her best of luck on her writing journey.

I also wonder if he never put his threats about “doxxing” in writing because he knew they wouldn’t hold up.

This has happened before and it will happen again.

Of course I feel the need to interrogate my motives at every turn, of course I doubt myself every single second of every single day. Why do I keep writing about what happened to me? Am I driven by trauma to endlessly repeat the past?

I do this thing where I go over the timeline of events to figure out cause and effect. I can’t help myself.

Tuesday: Kicked out
Friday: Meet with him
Saturday: He sends her the email
Tuesday: He kicks her out too

Maybe If I hadn’t walked away from him like I did on Friday. Maybe if I had let him feel like he was in control, he wouldn’t have sent that email, wouldn’t have kicked her out too. Maybe it could’ve ended with me.

He’s planted this fear in me: That if I reject him, he will hurt someone I care about in retaliation. How am I supposed to know what the trigger is? What if it’s me, what if I’m the trigger?

You only have to do it once. You only have to kick out one other person. Once is enough to create a climate of fear. There’s an odd efficiency to it.

This whole time I’ve been holding my breath. Still. It’s not bravery. It’s desperation.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. She wasn’t supposed to get kicked out too.

Fuck other people getting hurt. This has happened before and it will happen again.

We judge people for repeating their trauma. We judge the person who leaves one abusive relationship only to get into another. Why don’t we judge the abusers who repeat their trauma by abusing one person after the other? For repeating the same exact story, just with someone new?

I justified letting my friends fight for me on the basis that they were really fighting for their own sense of safety, for their community. If they didn’t fight, they wouldn’t be able to feel safe again, not really, not knowing that something like this could happen, did happen. There seemed to be no alternative.

But when I started to share my story publicly, it became clear that this had happened before. I wasn’t the exception. I was the rule that proved it. I don’t know if people who cancel other people consciously choose their victims, but because something very similar had happened to me before, I almost instantly saw this as part of my pattern. Years of internalizing abusive behavior made it easy for me to see myself as exceptional. Of course this would happen to me. It always does. Maybe it always will.

But this has happened before and it will happen again.

In reality, I don’t know if we share that much in common—the people whose stories are not mine to share—other than this: At some point, we were all very invested in Writers Blok. We believed in it. We saw it as our community. And at least on some level, we felt safe. Makes total sense. Purge the people who really want to be there.

I keep being afraid of writing too much, of saying too much, of jeopardizing any chance I have at being believed. But nothing I say or do will erase what happened, to me or anyone else. This is actually profoundly upsetting — I am powerless to change what happened, powerless to save anyone, including myself. Nothing I write can change any of this.

You could try to use my own personal trauma blueprint to discredit me, but then you have to do the same thing to the next person, and the next person, and the next.

This has happened before and it will happen again.

I’m trying not to write out of a sense of desperation and guilt, but I know those things are driving me. I feel guilty for not being able to save anyone, even though I know it’s not my fault. I still have this wild belief that I am to blame.

I feel guilty that he treated other people worse than he treated me. I know this is a fucked up thing to say, but I feel guilty that he didn’t bully or emotionally abuse me. I mean, he did try to bully and intimidate me, but it wasn’t that bad™. He was smiling the entire time. It feels all wrong. Don’t you know who I am? Can’t you see the word MARTYR tattooed across my forehead? This was not how it was supposed to go down. It was not supposed to happen like this.

Fuck other people being hurt.

I’m beginning to recognize the contours of some ancient trauma, of witnessing violence committed against people that I loved and was powerless to save. I don’t know how to heal that kind of guilt, rooted so deeply as it is in total powerlessness and total responsibility. Rooted too, in this idea that I did not suffer enough, can never suffer enough for what I witnessed, for what I allowed to happen and did nothing to stop.

I’m writing this for the next person. So she will know that she is not alone and that it wasn’t her fault.

Because this has happened before and it will happen again.

Related posts:

Starting with A Stock that was Climbing consistantly over 1 year period.. “My Simple way of How I increased my Profits.” is published by Mitchbguitars.

Last week while on my weekly date with my mother, she shared with me a story about a friend’s recent declaration that democrats were child-eating pedophiles and that Biden had stolen the election…

URL Categorization API classifies a site into a content category. It takes a URL as an input and assigns it to the relevant industry. There’s a lot of Company Logo and Categorizations API available…