#esp when they're not clear employer/employee situations

[variousqueerthings]

as someone who was working as a live-in au pair for an only somewhat well-known performer (as in, not internationally famous multi-millionaire, but has sway in a certain sphere and whom i looked up to when i first went to work there in my early 20s and who promised to help me out with various things) who went from calling me a friend and a peer (so we didnt need a contract) to becoming verbally and emotionally abusive and got me into a situation of being briefly homeless

the whole gaiman and palmer thing really is. yeah. i can see how that could have happened to me if i'd been less lucky and that person had been even worse. all the behaviours those women are talking about in themselves, the not knowing how to approach the situation, the wanting to smooth things over/feeling guilt for causing a fuss, the worrying about money and what to do without this person, not knowing even what was real and not being able to frame it in the way it really was at the time they were living it (i had a sheet of paper i carried around for years where i had started documenting what my employer was saying and doing, because i felt genuinely mad, both at the time and looking back at it without that anchor)

and i was waaay less affected. and this person had waaay less power overall. and i had much better support structures. i can only imagine how intense it's been for them having to try to remember it, having to figure out what the contexts for their own decisions were in order to survive it, making sense of any of it might be, because it took 8 years or so for me to sift through all of my stuff

all these women's decisions make perfect sense to me, who only lived through something fractionally as bad, and i hope that people won't try to say that this has anything to do with bdsm or that they'd be above this, because it's not at all difficult to see how this happened, and how it happens to many people in many different ways (not all of them including sexual assault)

i hope people will be able to protect themselves when famous/people in the fields they want to work in/people with power over them make these overtures of "friendship" (especially in relation to you working for them in exchange for them helping you with... ???, but you're still definitely friends!!!) because really, it can happen so easily. soooooo so easily