January 2nd 2023

Well I’m in my new apartment in a bleak heavily gentrified and industrialized area with hardly a scrap of nature to be seen. Yet I’m close to the water and I keep the window open and can smell the fresh salty breeze wafting in and feel the elemental power of the nearby harbour, which trumps the shitiness of the hastily constructed condominiums all around me.

I guess I forgot to get the hydro switched into my name, as the heat doesn’t seem to be working, so I’ve got the oven on with the door open to try and warm things up a bit in here (UPDATE: I just don’t know how to use the thermostat).

I’ve been crying a lot over the past few days. The holidays are over and I’ve realized that my work actually fucking sucks. I hate that I invested my heart into a place that doesn’t give two fucks about me and now it’s very awkward to have to keep working there.

It sucks to have all of the scabs peeled off of my wounds from grade school bullying. But it’s also reminding me of how strong I am and how I endured so much; and how every time I had to deal with another episode of violence, verbal abuse etc... that I was fighting back, and most of the time: I won - or scared the bullies away enough so they would leave me alone.  And a lot of the time I was being targeted because I would speak up and I would stick up for myself and others and I didn’t tolerate abuse and I was very independent and strong-willed.  I also  grew up witnessing and experiencing a lot of violence, so that left me quite vulnerable to further violence.

I had a complex personality in that sometimes I could be painfully shy, awkward and bookish and completely alone for hours on end, and at other times be extremely loud and opinionated and socially bold. I wanted to be cool and popular and have lots of friends and sometimes that would happen for brief periods of time but I often ended up being rejected and scapegoated and I was a pretty big geek in ways that I didn’t fully appreciate until I was older. And sometimes I was overly defensive and ended up lashing out at the wrong people and occasionally I picked on others as well, which I feel super shitty about.

I wish I could have loved myself more in my formative years and spent less time trying to fit in with too cool friend groups and more time hanging out with other sensitive nerdy types.

Also, my memories are patchy, and as more comes back to me and as I slowly repair the damage I did to myself through excessive substance use, I realize that ya my childhood was fucked up that’s for sure, social services would never let that shit go down these days, but it was also interesting as fuck and I experienced a rare kind of freedom. On a soul level I don’t think I would have tolerated the kind of cookie cutter middle-class life I often longed for.

For a time I wondered if I had done some terrible things in my past lives that warranted the level of abuse that I was experiencing in this lifetime - then it would make sense to the binary parts of my brain. Yet it turns out that it was the opposite: apparently I have a good soul and karma isn’t that simple and each of us has our own unique lessons that we’re trying to learn during our incarnations here.

I’ve had quite a few friends throughout my life who were also brutally bullied throughout grade school but never fought back and they instead internalized everything, and near the end of my grade school years I also started to turn in on myself and shut down inside. I guess it’s the whole fight or flight dichotomy, and I really don’t know what is best way to deal with being abused by another person. It seems that neither extreme is ideal, and that there’s a place in between the two where one can stick up for oneself and have strong boundaries, yet also be compassionate towards those who are abusive, as they have often been victims of abuse themselves - not to react, but respond.

This came up for me when I was doing Vipassana meditation, and it was difficult for me because I would go into these retreat centres and become very spiritually open, but then I would leave feeling very vulnerable and I ended up in some unsafe situations.

Because Vipassana is so focused on passive observation it was difficult for me to know how to take the lessons and translate them into action. The last time I took a short course I asked the teacher about how one was supposed to respond to violence. He said to me that we’re not meant to become completely passive in our lives, and that we’re often compelled to take greater action after becoming more spiritually aware. The difference is that when we do take action that it comes from a place of peace and love. We still defend ourselves but not with anger in our hearts. I was like “okay so basically I pause briefly and feel the love before punching someone out?” He laughed.

Where was I heading with all of this??? Oh ya, basically I’ve been all fucked up because I got hardcore bullied and harassed at work and they decided to let the customer return and didn’t even tell me and she comes in every day and it’s super shitty. After screaming at me and the owners daughter she screamed at the owner for 10 minutes straight, disrupted the whole restaurant, security had to be called and then she called back the next day putting it all on me. When I came in that day no one told me about the conversation they had had with her, though I felt a subtle sense of something being off in my interactions with the owners. I was in complete shock to see the customer return that evening. This is all after one of the owners told me that restaurant was “like a family.”

After I left my work super upset no one called to see if I was okay or hear my side of the story. I really wanted to quit on the spot but I wasn’t in a position to do so. I just moved and my life is in too much disarray to go through the whole process of finding work again and settling in with new co-workers. It would just be too much upheaval all at once.

To make things more complex, when the woman, who I'll refer to as Lilith, came in that night, I remembered that I had met her previously when I was volunteering with Food Not Bombs and she had become very abusive towards me then as well, and I ended up leaving the situation. I was pretty messed up around that time as I had just found out that a family friend had taken his own life and had been crying a lot on the phone with my mom. I thought that it would be a good idea to do some volunteering to take my mind off things and I knew a couple of people from the group so figured it would be a safe space. But Lilith was so horrible to me and lashing out at me with everything I would say. I realize with some distance and perspective that she’s a deeply unhappy person and was looking for someone to dump on and relieve her inner suffering and likely she was picking up on my vulnerability, and I would have been better able to deal with her and not get sucked into her manipulative head games had I not been so raw that day. but it really wasn’t cool at all.

I was trying to understand how I didn’t recognize her as the same person. Part of it might be stress and trauma, though I’ve also read that poor facial recognition is a common trait among neurodivergents. Either way, I’m not sure that the owner believed me when I told him that I truly didn’t recognize her as someone I had had a previous negative experience with. When she phoned him to rant about me she told him that she knew me already and how horrible I was, which is so bizarre as she was the one bullying me. It really sucked to be so targeted and so unfairly represented. I was initially happy to meet her and very friendly with her at Food Not Bombs and left without incident in spite of her verbally abusive behaviour. That she somehow found a way to demonize me is hard to understand. And in an ongoing theme throughout my life, she came from a privileged background and was extremely entitled and arrogant (in that regard the owner or the restaurant at least agreed). The solution presented by the owner was that I hide in the back of the restaurant when she comes in.

In the big picture, every time some shit like this happens it helps me see the reality of a situation, and in this case, it’s that this job isn’t as great as I fooled myself into thinking it was. I also realize that I need to have better boundaries and to be more discerning and cultivate a greater sense of how to navigate the complexities of human relations. I really just don’t get it and don’t want to get it, but I’ve been avoiding this my whole life and now I have to learn how to hold my head up high and not fall apart. It sucks being so naive and it sucks being 43 years old with the social skills of a teenager. It sucks getting bullied and it sucks having to change jobs and move so often because nothing ever works out or feels right. But I know part of the issue is that I won’t conform. And if the vast majority of the people on this planet stopped conceding to narcissists and bullies and billionaires, we would be living in a much better world.

I like my rebellious spirit. I sleep really good at night.

I do actually feel bad for Lilith as I know that her reaction to me has a lot to do with her own insecurities and I’ve had this kind of reaction from many women throughout my life. My difficulties in relating to women has led me to having a lot of male friends and I relate pretty well to dudes, but then that can anger insecure women even more. At times the girlfriends / wives of my male friends have forbidden them to have any contact with me or have lashed out at me in a similar manner as Lilith did, even when the friendship I had with their mates had only ever been purely platonic and had gone back many years.

I hate that I trigger these insecurities in women. It’s never my intention and I’ve always wanted to have more female friends. And I want women to love themselves and accept themselves as they are and not feel the need to keep their partners around through manipulation and control. It’s really sad. But I’m also not okay with being straight up fucking abused.

I took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that many women are jealous of me. I’m not saying this to be egotistical. My self esteem has been so low for most of my life that I was constantly thinking that there was something wrong with me or I had done something to deserve being treated so horribly, even when I was going out of my way to help a person (in the case of many female friends I’ve had). I’ve often felt like it’s my responsibility to help women feel less insecure around me and that if I keep them happy and make myself small that they'll be kind to me and I can avoid drama. And in the process I lose myself.

On the flip side, I've sometimes challenged bully women or reacted to their abusive behaviour and then experienced severe backlash and gas lighting where my reaction to their behaviour ended up more highlighted than the shitty behaviour that inspired it. I've had women spread false rumours about me, gang up on me and assault me, steal my shit, prank call my house and lie through their teeth just to put me down. Many of these women acted as if they were my friends and then used personal information I shared with them against me. I've had to learn that my reactions are the only thing I can control and I was giving them way too much power.

I’m in the beginning stages of shedding away all of this garbage and taking my power back. It feels really good and I feel the tendrils of my self that I let uncoil from the yarn spools of my inner sanctum winding themselves back up and becoming plump again.

I had a really intense dream last night where I was in a medieval setting akin to that of the world within the Golden Compass books and I was at a small school in a remote area. I was becoming part of the inner circle of the school, which was led by an older woman with thick brown hair and sharp features who was somewhat rigid yet also very inspiring. I was travelling down a country road in a horse drawn buggy with her and a group of other young girls and they were having me practice dance moves where I’d spread my limbs out into the windy space alongside the carriage. I was flailing out into the wind like a starfish and clutching with all of my strength to the wooden frame of the buggy. Everyone else was jovial and indifferent to the mortal danger of my practice.

As we were riding along full of life and talking loudly amongst each other over the noise of the wagon wheels and the horses clopping I started to notice a dark spectre haunting us. It was a geometrical glob of pixelated black clusters and was materializing in and out of the physical realm. The presence was dense and vampiric and the entity would hover around each person and then disappear. When we returned to the school yard I saw a friend of mine who I know in real life and he was a younger version of himself as well. My whole dream was in the heightened state of pre-pubescence and my friend periodically switched genders, from male to female and then back again, yet I recognized his soul and knew who he was in all of his forms.

I watched the black entity enter into my friend and be became possessed but he didn’t know it. I stayed close to him and explained to him what had happened and he agreed that I could do some magic work to free him from the demon.

We were sitting on some wooden bleachers together that framed a small grassy clearing and I started casting a magical circle as I held my right hand out to each direction of the compass “BY THE EARTH THAT IS OUR BODIES, BY THE AIR THAT IS OUR BREATH...”

My friend abruptly stopped me and told me that he didn’t want to do the magic after all and he started panicking and getting really upset and then I started feeling very self conscious about what I was doing and like I shouldn’t continue and like I should be careful with my magic. But then I realized that it wasn’t him talking, it was the demon, and the demon didn’t want me to continue because my magic was powerful and it was working and it was going to cast him away. I looked into the eyes of my friend and the black eyes of the demon looked back at me. He then started running and I ran after him and stopped in the middle of the small grassy clearing to finish my incantation, keeping my eyes fixed on my possessed friend: “BY THE FIRE THAT IS MY WILD SPIRIT, BY THE WATER THAT IS MY LIVING ESSENCE, BY ALL THAT IS ABOVE AND ALL THAT IS BELOW...”

He stopped and then turned around and looked back at me as I screamed out with all of my breath, “THE CIRCLE HAS BEEN CAST!!!”

I woke up and darted out of bed knowing that the dark creature was gone from my friend.

I’m remembering now that in the dream I was telling him how important he was to me and how he was one of my best friends in Victoria and I didn’t want to see his soul get eaten out by some demonic fuckhead.

I’m so much nicer to myself these days. The last time I went into a horrible spiral of self destructive thoughts, I stopped myself and said THAT ISN’T TRUE. Because the mean things I was saying to myself based on the shitty behaviour of others really weren’t true. I deal with a lot of shit from a lot of customers every day and I am very patient and kind, but the level of abuse this woman was directing at me was completely unacceptable. Thankfully the other customers in the restaurant who witnessed the whole interaction could clearly see that I was being treated beyond horribly and one very kind man even came up to me afterwards and gave me a hug.

It sucks to spend nights crying myself to sleep over all of this reliving so much pain and wondering if I will ever feel okay.

Work sucks. We are all slaves. Fuck You.

I will keep fighting.

A day came where I had to go into the back of the restaurant and hide from Lilith. I sat for a while in silence and choked back tears. If I could have unpeeled my skin and crawled into the centre of the earth I would have.

UPDATE: March 18th

This bully woman, Lilith, has been coming into my work every day. At first she would buy her food and leave but now she gets a full meal and sits in the restaurant. Sometimes I run into her in the street and she glares at me as if I just killed her puppy or something. Today I did my usual hiding in the back and I noticed that the owners were in their office so I sat down and talked to them about how I was feeling. The main owner told me he had no idea that she was coming in every day and I got more details about the conversation he had with her. The other owner is from Cambodia and told me about her own experiences of being abused by customers and also dealing with racism because she's ESL and sometimes customers don’t understand her. She said that she has been brought to tears and also hides in the back when one particular man comes in. She also told me about how in Cambodia it’s even worse and that servers are sometimes physically assaulted.

In a common theme in my life the owner had no idea how upset I was or that Lilith was a regular customer that I was having to encounter every time I worked. He commented on how strong I seem as a person and I know that many others see that in me as well. It’s true that I'm a strong and resilient person but I'm equally sensitive and I often break apart in private. 

It was humbling to hear the Cambodian woman tell me about her home country and some of her experiences since moving and she has previously shared with me other experiences where she has struggled to fit in and has been ostracized, and I can imagine that to be very true.

The main owner was open to putting up a sign saying that abuse of employees won’t be tolerated. He also acknowledged that he didn’t handle the situation very well and apologized. They both really listened to me and were very kind.

So I take back some of the venom I was spewing however righteous it was in the moment. One thing that's really great about this job is that because we serve such a huge amount of customers each day, and even though the tips are shared with everyone, it’s still a pretty decent wage.  And now that I somehow scored cheap rent I can live off of working 2 days a week and have so much free time for writing and other creative pursuits.

Also: I was being bullied for a time by another co-worker and he must have gone through some kind of personal transformation as he’s very kind to me now and I’m very thankful for that. 

The owner who’s from Cambodia also told me how the longer that she worked as a server the better that the better the regular customers treated her and that’s something I’m noticing as well.


UPDATE: More and more bullshit kept coming up and I was harassed by another customer who was a member of the Whites only Asatru Church, The Asatru Folk Assembly. He ended up sending me a book to my workplace with no return address on it. I showed the owner the letter and he was pretty non-chalant about it, even though the dude was talking about the global Jewish conspiracy and how I shouldn't be ashamed to be White (which is what the whole book he sent me was about). The owner tried to speak for his BIPOC family members saying that he thought they would laugh it off and that Victoria was "pretty liberal" and he wasn't aware of them having experienced any racism. I knew this to be bullshit because his wife had opened up to me about racism her and her daughter had experienced, and when the co-worker who was bullying me stopped bullying me and we started talking he told me about all kinds of racism he's experienced here in Victoria. He also told met that everyone at his tofu Factory was BIPOC, which I guess he thought would show that he was an ally, but it just made me think that he's probably exploiting them and that's why the tofu is so cheap. I also tried to talk to the owner about why he didn't have any kind of Land Acknowledgment on his website and he said that he didn't understand them. Then he started to talk about the "wokists" and I was like dude, why does woke culture bother you so much and racism and Indigenous rights not concern you at all? It was a long conversation that didn't really go anywhere. I had also got together a huge document about a whole bunch of things that could be done in the restaurant to make it more environmentally friendly cause it was really silly how the garbage bins were filled up all day long with takeout containers that never got taken out anywhere and the restaurant was actually very wasteful in many ways despite plastering some commitment to environmental sustainability on their website. The suggestions I made were presented clearly and kindly, but he wasn't open to any of them. He seemed annoyed. Finally after sending it to him again (with more updates) and then following up with him in person he told me that he had a guy who's specifically addressed these kinds of things, but why wouldn't he have told me that months previously??? I wasn't doing this shit for fun. It's cause I was watching ecosystems gets annihilated all around me for 2 years living out in the bush and I kinda care about animals and the future of humanity and all that so I have a hard time watching so much waste all day long in a restaurant that has so many customers, that could just make a few minor changes and have a huge impact. Maybe they felt like I was trying to have some kind of power in the restaurant, but I really didn't want to do anything beyond my simple tasks, but I can't help it that I'm a neurodivergent freak who's gonna notice all kinds of details that other don't and that I think people should make real changes that will actually have an impact on the power structures and ecosystems around us - or take your little virtue signalling statements off of your website and just be the greedy, wounded capitalists that you are. The guy drives a fucking Tesla and his kids go to private school, while I'll be saving up for the next two years to get dental work done. Ugh!!!!!!

UPDATE: I left the job finally at the end of June, and it was more over bullshit with the owners daughter - though there was a pervasive feeling there of having to deal with a lot of passive aggressive bullshit and just pick up on all kinds of subtleties, which I can only handle for so long, so I tried to have a direct conversation with her about scheduling because it made no sense, and they were just giving me the shifts that no one else wanted and giving people who were hired after me better shifts. My text message was ignored and then I was pretty much scheduled out. So it's sort of like I quit but more like she found a way of pushing me out, which is super lame and hurtful but also I needed to get out of there. The owner finally put up a Land Acknowledgment and sent me a message about that and he also sent me a couple of other nice messages thanking me for my hard work and said "it's not the same without you". I don't think he knew what was going down between his daughter and I and I never said anything to him or anyone else there because I definitely didn't want to get involved in any kind of intense internal family stuff

Pretty much it was all just a replay of the kind of crap I deal with anytime I go into a group situation. Oh also, one of my co-workers had offered to support me in pushing for a land acknowledgment and then flaked out. It was pretty gross because on the day I sent her the email, she said she would read it over on her break but didn't or if she did she never responded, but I saw her talking to one of her Indigenous friends joking around and acting all buddy buddy, yet she didn't message me back until weeks later. I really don't understand why, maybe because she realized that to confront the owner would put her status in the workplace in jeopardy and create tension. I also brought up the issues of environmental sustainability at a group meeting we all had. She had previously offered support in that. I offered to send my letter to anyone who wished, but no one took me up on it even though everyone agreed about the problems I was trying to address. I think one of my other co-workers was studying "environmental science". I just don't get it.