[Crazy_Charlie]

Ok, that was the wrong title, but I don't have a clue what to call it.

I'm here to say that I don't think I will be posting much more, and I'm not sure how to explain it without sounding paranoid, childish, or plain selfish. I just want to say that it is not this boards fault, or anyone in here. Thats why I will try to tell this very non interesting story... it is very complicated, and since I find the case boring myself, I will tell the very short version, and if anyone needs to know more please feel free to ask.

In 2001 I split up with my husband. We stayed sort of friends and had unfrequent contact for several months after the breakup. We talked about some difficult things and kind of shook hands on being friends for ever (etcetc). But it was more no-hard-feelings-now-getting-our-own-lives than friendship really. I got a new boyfriends, he got a new girlfriend not long after that. She had a child from beforehand, which I babysat a couple of times. I met her a few times, I didn't initiate any close friendship with her, I would feel that a bit awkward. I didn't mind her, she seemed nice enough, I just couldn't bother. I was on my way to move abroad, I was pregnant, my ex talked about moving to the US, besides- she was my EX new girlfriend.

At some point I suddenly got this RUSH of negative feelings from my ex husband. That I had manipulated him (though later when I asked him how I had manipulated him he got angry because I suggested he could get manipulated), stolen from him (I asked him what, so I could give it back, but he never told me), that I never loved him and just used him and whatever you can think of in those lines. I know my ex very well, the break up wasn't easy for any of us, and all this hurt me immensely. I stopped approaching him totally, accepted that there was no friendship anymore.

Of some reason, his girlfriend (his now new wife) kept keeping in touch with me, and I let her simply because I didn't have anything against her. We had a kind of polite contact through the internet. Then someone made me aware that I might start looking a bit at what she wrote online. I found that she wrote several hints toward me in her weblog (she had herself made me a member of the same weblog unit and made sure I could read her journals, as well as she could read my journals- I was aware of all this). If I was talking about something I liked it my weblog, she would the next day have written several reasons why she hated it in her her weblog. She kept talking about things that made me feel like my ex had told her things about me and that she was refering to my private life in special. She would be criticizing whatever she knew I liked, whether it was music, persons, styles, homepage, parenting style, you name it. But I could never really confront her about it since it was always indirect, she would just be "oh so sorry I didn't know that you...". While she kept posting nice replies in my journal. Oh yeah, only when I had a bad time. If I wrote about something positive she would be mute.

To shorten down, I jump a couple of months ahead in time. My sister in law tells me that my exs new wife has told her that my family is incestious (both my sister in law and this woman is from US, so they had some contact), that I used drugs in front of my child, that I did not know who the father of my child was since I was attending so many orgies in Amsetrdam when I got pregnant, that I had been hitting on my ex hubbys best friend when we were married. Things like that. That sort of ended it for me, I told her what I thought about her. She refused, claiming it was my sister in law who had been saying all these things. Trying to make me feel selfish by saying that not everything she writes in her hournal is about me- that was not really my point either. My ex contact me and accuses me of being mean because I simply can't forget him etc. After that I did not contact her, nor look for her online in a year.

Then I talk with my mother on the phone, and she had met my ex hubbys mother. I knew his family, and espescially his sister very well. I started thinking a bit about that, and figured all the bad things happened a long time ago. I just peered around a bit online, looked at his website etc. Dumped into his wife's website, and saw that she was pregnant. I knew they wanted children so I though that must be a good thing. Knowing that she is following very closely who is looking at her website, I knew she would probably see that I had been there. I left her a "con gratulation with the pregnancy" greeting just to be nice and showing that I don't hold any grudges. I also see that she has started a new journal that anyone can read if they want to. I look at it, but I don't bother reading much.

Then I find PsychoBabble. And somehow I started feeling like someone was following my steps online. I'm not that active online when it comes to message boards etc, but something triggered a paranoia in me. I had once read in her journal that she had read something about herself in Norwegian on the internet and did not apreciate that. That was the day after I had been quoting her saying to her four year old daughter "if you don't sleep now I'm going to kill you" on a message board discussing bad things to say to your children (no one there knew who I was excpet for my username Charlie, and I did not say who this person that I quoted was). But that time I felt ridiculously paranoid, and reduced my activity online for a while. She did not really speak good Norwegian, and there was really no reason she would be on this message board for pregnant, Norwegian mothers. She had earlier called me once (!) because she had found something she didn't want to know about her husband, and told me then that she had been searching for his name online. She keeps giving me those subtle hints, like this, that at some point triggers with another information she is giving. The reason I mention PsychoBabble is that someone there has made it look like I am posting after I got blocked, and all I know is that this Sad Sara person is not me, and that this happened just around the same time as I started looking at this womans journal. I have tried contacting dr Bob to hear what e-mail adress the person is using since he think it is me, but he doesn't answer, and I guess he can't really answer because of the privacy law. All I know is that whether it's her or another prankster, if they found me there, they can find me here too.

The incident made me look closer at her open-for-everybody journal (I couldn't help myself, I had to do something about my suspiscion, I just wish I had done something to reduce it). First I notice that it quite some time between her posts, then I realize that everytime I have been looking at her page it is a new post there just after. Usually that post contains some kind of trigger. For example the day after I took some pictures of myself in a flanel shirt she is writing a whole story of why she hates flanels shirts, how stupid it is she find that people take pictures of themselves and use as userpictures if the pictures shows that you are tired or that you are not sexy. How she hates the letter K because all the people she dislikes has a name starting on K (like my real name, but she is of course making sure it's not my name that is used as an example).

She can continue with picking on something we have been discussing before, and where she knows she is hitting a sore point in me. She is constantly hinting about her husbands "awful past" (she says for example that he would like to pretend that he had been drunk all the time before he met her to have an excuse for being so stupid- in the middle of a story about her own sexual history and not blaming it on being intoxicated).

This didn't get so short after all, I'm really sorry about that. I just know that when things like this happen, I'd rather retreat than start a fight. But I really don't want it to look like I'm someone that just pops by for a week or two and never return. I might be reading but I don't think I will be posting. I have a life outside of the computer, I don't want to do anything online that upsets me. I don't miss my ex husband, though I do feel bad about all the bad feelings he has towards me and the life we had together. We had seven years together, it feels a bit like I have lost the right even to have positive memories from that period.

It is easy to dismiss most of it, being so many miles away from my own country, but internet sometimes makes distances small. I do not wanna watch my back all the time, or my words for that matter. It's not that much that I write that can be used against me, but if you are drama queen enough, or mean enough, there is always something. In either way, I'm going to stay at my own homepage for whatever comments I write, so I have a certain control over pranksters. And otherwise stay to my e-mail. As it is now I just don't feel good about it otherwise. Why continue an activity that in the end turn out bad for you. I do not blame her for this, I should have known better than to look at it. I know that I seem just as obsessive about their life as she seems to be about me, but really, this is just minor things in my life. I hardly think about my ex, but I havent wiped out the past from my memory. Many things happened during those years that are important for me still, and I have no negative feelings towards those years. I simply forget that it's not like that for everyone. I just wish I knew what on earth made this take off like this?

If things changes later, I might come back to post, I really liked it here. Goodbye, and good luck to all of you!

Charlie

[Wants2Fly]

Hello Charlie -- This is an interesting story about how the internet can make us feel connected, as well as open us up to negative things.

I hope that you will find a good support system in 3D to help you through this. It sounds as if the 'net has been an important dimension in your life, and that you may need other kinds of social interaction to replace it. Just as when people get sober, we often have to replace the social interaction of being in bars and night clubs with going to AA meetings so that we don't isolate.

Good luck with your decision.

[Crazy_Charlie]

Lol, yes, you are probably right.
This thing probably looks a bit blown out of proportions. The last half year I have hardly been online at all, and strictly speaking I don't really tumble about thinking about it as much as it looks like. I only choose to retreat because I know that if I start up any discussion with this woman she's gonna say things about me that hit me just for the fact that she seems to know what is dear to me (and that is not things she has heard from me).

In general, internet has for me been a place to gain knowledge and to keep in touch with friends that live far away (as well as trading bootlegs earlier), but I don't regard it as a social activity. My 3D world is luckily very stable and supportive, so I haven't had the need to search for sociability on the computer. I found this board interesting because I am a clinical psychologist, and this is a good way of learning for me. But thank your for your concern. I will be retreating mostly to protect my private life from a past that I don't have a problem with unless it comes in form of a twisted mind.

Thank you for reading my post and taking the time to reply. This will probably be the only thread I am responding to ahead, but I will probably be out of here completely at least for a while at some point. I don't feel like attaching some kind of drama here, and if my paranoia has a good reason I might do that unintentionally. This board is for those who need help primarilly, and not people like me.

-C-