#also horrendously tragic but that’s totally unrelated

[yourstrulynameless]

Look at these FREAKS

Original sketch :3

[delcat177]

The Lamp Posts: Lies and Cancer

“Have you asked yourself what profit [E] might have in lying?” --My therapist, to my wrestling with doubts

“Munchausen by Internet usually manifests in the late teens or early 20′s. It's often preempted or accompanied by other psychological issues, most commonly personality disorders... ...The lies escalate slowly, which makes them harder to detect. Someone might sound like a walking textbook when talking about their symptoms, or they may be quick to duplicate the symptoms of other people around them. The lies are intricate, detailed, engrossing. Terrible setbacks are followed by miraculous recoveries. And if someone else becomes the center of attention, their condition will dramatically worsen or they will become the victim of a sudden tragic event. Some people even invent tertiary characters—friends, siblings, a concerned mother—to jump into internet threads and corroborate their stories. The lies slowly escalate, pile up, and create an improbable whole. Then one day, you realize you're friends with a 15-year-old chronic migraine sufferer online who also happens to be a fourth-year medical school student who plays drums in a band at night—despite those crippling migraines—to pay his med school tuition because his [D]eaf mother and alcoholic stepfather have no interest in his baby-genius education. Oh, and since he's not yet old enough to drive, he skateboards three miles a day to get to class.

And on that day, you feel like a total schmuck.” --The Lying Disease

--My idiot ass

Continues after cut

Like I said in my last post, there’s a lot to this.  A lot a lot.  It’s tempting to take the advice of the King of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland and go from the beginning to the end over a series of posts, make it a narrative because narratives are easier and, let’s face it, more glamorous and attractive.  But I think that would detract from the point of the thing, which is dealing with my own shit.  And in my own shit, keeping it to a narrative would make it way easier to avoid saying the things I’m afraid to say.  It’d give me as much time as I wanted to put the scary stuff off, and I would do that--put it off.

It’s better for everyone to get it over with.  Once this post is over, I can stop going “I can’t say that, only a monster would say that”, and people can decide whether or not I’m a monster.

So.  Monstering away, I guess.

I do want to preface this with a note that dates are going to be hard.  At a friend’s suggestion, I deleted the chatlogs I had because I was torturing myself with them, so I have to go by a few handfuls of stuff still remaining and crucial events in my life.

I met E in 2014 through a mutual friend of the time, who I’ll call N, again because it’s a common letter and has nothing to do with them whatsoever.  N and I were working on an ongoing project, which E had expressed interest in.  I agreed that E had good contributions to make, and the three of us formed a group chat, first on Skype, then on Discord*.  Aside from maybe a page or two of direct messages on Discord and some back and forth on Tumblr, all of the communication I had with E was in the group chat.

E was very open about their situation, and it was as bad a situation as it gets.  They were a racial minority.  They were a survivor of horrendous abuse--emotional, physical, verbal, sexual.  A relative had spent years victimizing them and selling the recordings to a kiddie porn ring.  Their immediate family was collectively neglectful and violent, and blamed E for making trouble when they testified against their predatory relative.  Their only income was their husband’s paycheck--the PTSD and CPTSD alone made it impossible for them to function day to day, and even if it hadn’t, they had severe ADHD and depression, and on top of it all, they had cancer--childhood leukemia.

I want to stop right here and say that this is a situation that happens.  And it’s awful, and horrifying, and we should all be more aware of that.  I also want to say that there was more to their situation in terms of difficulty, but I’m leaving a few things out that may be just unique enough as to identify them.

These pieces of information came out a few at a time over the first couple of months that I knew E.  I did what I could, talking with them, trying to cheer them up when they were down, giving advice, trying to help with the cost of living when I could, reblogging posts suggesting people donate to or commission them.

I felt immense sympathy for this struggling, long-suffering warrior, and I talked to friends, family, and my therapist about them frequently, asking if they had advice for someone who was in a seriously bad way.  This was nothing new--I’ve had friends in rough spots more or less since I’ve had friends, and my mom was a social worker--specifically, a Hospice worker for end-of-life care.  I used to walk into the computer room at home and see Mom triumphantly getting one of her clients the prescription they needed through a discount website, or sit in the living room and hear her tirelessly talking to an insurance company for the 427th time that week getting the heat turned back on for someone in the dead of winter.  It wasn’t just that I admired her work, it was that I knew she knew things, and that knowing things could change a person’s life for the better--she had helped me help friends with bills and prescriptions before.

At this time, cancer was especially important to me.  Mom had been diagnosed with skin cancer several years earlier, and one or two rogue fucking cells had made it to her liver despite all efforts.  She died in February of 2015, and the enormity of my grief is one of the reasons I failed to see a lot of warning signs in my relationship with E (the biggest reason, as my sister puts it in relation to dramas we watch together, is “[I] never think of deceit”).  It also made me all the more determined to help E get the help they needed.

E’s cancer was, at least, mild.  Their doctor believed that chemotherapy would cause more problems than it solved, so they were spared that ordeal.  However, they were actively being denied a marrow transplant because of their depression and suicidal ideation.  I knew the state and general area they lived in, so I asked two of my best friends/extended family who were in nursing school together what could be done.  I also brought them the name of a particular drug E was taking because E often talked about not taking it because of the bad taste, something that terrified me after Mom’s passing but not something I could talk them out of--there had to be something more palatable.

My friends responded...cautiously.  It was, they said, illegal to deny someone a marrow transplant on grounds of mental illness--unlike organ transplantation, marrow can be grown and harvested from a living person, so the standards for receiving a donation aren’t as rigorous.  One of them is particularly familiar with the process because their child had had childhood leukemia themself and owed their life to a marrow donor.

I was confused.  Had E gotten it wrong?  Or was E actively being discriminated against because of their class and race?  Or maybe I had gotten it wrong myself?  I certainly wasn’t the brightest apple in the barrel.  I must have misunderstood something.

I said as much, and asked about the medication.  Like I said, one of them had had a child with the same cancer as E’s, and they had been must younger at the time, so they must have been familiar with how to alleviate bad-tasting medicine enough for someone to stomach it.

I quickly learned I must have gotten something wrong again.  The medication I stated the name of was IV-only.  There was no possible way for it to taste bad.

While I was checking the chatlogs and confirming that I had gotten the name of it right (I had, maybe E had gotten two meds mixed up? Surely that was it...), the other friend asked me if E had a pick or a shunt line for their IV.  I responded that I didn’t know, and proceeded to forward E what I had learned, and asked them about the IV as well.

We had been out shopping at the time, and it was late when I got home, so I didn’t check for a result until the next day.  E hadn’t responded to the question, and instead, E had chatted with N about something unrelated.  When I questioned them again, they asked me not to go to friends about their health anymore.

Guilt rushed over me.  I had gotten so wrapped up in trying to help that I hadn’t considered E’s feelings.  They had given me permission to ask about things, yes, but they were so frequently tired--what was I doing dragging them through this with strangers?  I apologized, and promised not to bring it up again.  I chalked the odd disparities up to E’s (by now notoriously cruel and uncaring) doctors causing trouble.

E cut ties with me in July of 2016.  

It was then that my friends approached me and gently told me that they knew I wouldn’t be able to accept it while I was friends with them, but E had lied.

E wasn’t being turned down for a transplant.

E didn’t have bad tasting medicine.

E couldn’t even say where their IV line was, because they didn’t have one.

E didn’t have cancer, and never had.

This was the truth.  I had been taken in by it because I couldn’t fathom anyone lying about anything as serious as cancer, especially to someone who was actively mourning a family member and best friend who was taken by it.

In the time that I soaked this in, half-arguing with my family still in shock, I had four primary thoughts:

1) If E had lied about this, I couldn’t trust anything they had ever said.  How could I?  If they had lied about having cancer for attention and money, what else would they lie about?  Their stories of abuse, childhood pornography, visits to the hospital, their family killing pets, testifying about their relative--suddenly, I found myself simultaneously doubting every word they’d ever said and hating myself for ever doubting an impoverished CSA victim with cancer that they didn’t have wait.

2) I had no evidence.  I knew what was happening now, that I had been caught up in an immense and terrible lie, and probably more immense and terrible lies on top of that, but there was no way I could prove any of it.  If I even said I suspected them, especially so soon after they had told me off and left, I would look like a monster trying to frame them of the Worst Things in the Worst Way.

3) My mutual friend was closer to them than I was, still caught up in the lies, and because of 2), I had no way of warning them or explaining myself.

4) Cue the music.

It turned out that not only was Friend A in nursing school and not only had her kid had cancer, she had become part of a cancer hoax watchdog group years ago because of a similar incident in her support group.  A parent had claimed one of their children had cancer to gain sympathy and funds from the group, then become suspect after another child had fallen ill, then pushed it too far when both (fictitious) children and the (fictitious) father died in a (fictitious) car accident.  It happens all the time, but no one wants to talk about it.  Everyone in my family had known, but they had been right--I wouldn’t have accepted it while I was still in the relationship.

It’s still not easy to talk about.  I still have doubts about my doubts, and the only thing I’m sure wasn’t true was the cancer.  Everything else is...mixed up.  It’s not something I want to believe about someone I thought of as a friend, even if I never was a friend (this is a very small portion of how Bad things were, and they would only get worse).  I don’t want to ever doubt someone’s experience, and the worse someone’s experience is, the less inclined I am to question it.  Terrible shit happens.  I know that far too well.

That having been said, there is a logical part to me, and while it doesn’t have the warmth I like to afford people, it does things like remind me that I have an almost addictive nature when it comes to studying about psychology, and that when my mind isn’t clouded by sentiment, it knows the signs, motivations, and methods of pathological lying.  In that, this was only one place E sent up massive red flags.

I’m frankly expecting my follower count to drop for this, and I’m not blaming anyone who walks.  I don’t know if I’d believe me if I wasn’t me.  But please read the article I linked at the top of the page (here again for your convenience), and know that I’m only speaking to the best of my knowledge.  Maybe I’m wrong.  I’d like to be wrong.  And I am fairly certain that on some level, E truly believed everything they said.

I don’t have a good wrapup for this.  It’s 4:31 AM and I’m tired and trying really hard not to just delete this entire thing.

Back to you Achewood.

*ETA: Telegram.  It was actually Telegram and not Discord.  I spaced there because I was talking to someone on Discord right before writing this.  Not technically important, but I want this as clear as it can be.