Something happened to me in that moment of realization.

It hit me all at once. The sadness. The betrayal. The anger. The confusion. The fear. The disgust. The shame. The heartbreak. The disappointment. The distress. Horror. The shock— the impact of two years of your perceived reality being steamrolled by what was actually real.

What happened to me in that moment of realization?

Data. An overload of data. That is trauma.

The impact of that shocking data will disorient you. The sudden confusion of not knowing what has been real or not for years— this is the product of gaslighting. We tend to define it poorly.

Gaslighting is more than just lying to someone. It’s a network of lies constructed with intent to feed a person a false reality.

Let that sink in. Gaslighting is a crime of tampering with entire realities & timelines.

The effects of gaslighting can be horrific. A false reality you invested in crashing down will break you.

Both the health of our world and the health of our minds relies on an understanding of what is real and what isn’t. This is how we define sanity. In this system, the actions of gaslighting spreads the disease of insanity.

Gaslighting not a trivial or accidental occurrence. Next time you see a victim acting oddly and you question their sanity— are they really crazy or were they just infected?

[ding ding all abord — train]

After the events of March 7th 2022, I left on a trip. It was unplanned, as this particular trip usually is. You can even say something took me. That something was trauma.

Before we get to March 7th, we need to go through the events of March 6th.

Quick Warning— The next 4 slides are gonna be dense text, so be warned. Go read it on the pooper or something :)

—because everything that happens March 6th & 7th is crucial to the rest of the series. I’ll put the text from the slides in the caption in case it’s easier to read it there.

If you’ve ever wanted to see behind the veil of a narcissist, we’re going there in this series. We just need to set the ground work first.

[google docs]

(This will be long, sorry — The MGT)

This was the inciting incident. I had broken up with Nic on Jan 5, 2022. She was resentful that it was the day before her birthday, but I couldn’t do it anymore. I had reached a limit. I cited disrespect of boundaries, and issues around sexual consent as my reason for breaking things off. I did still care for her even though I felt increasingly disrespected. Which was weird…because she was rarely ever disrespectful outwardly. She just never listened to your boundaries. For a long time I blamed myself for this, but now I know better. We stayed in sparse contact after the breakup. She would often reach out to me, at one point to suggest friends with benefits. I would deny her. In Feb 2022 I would look back at old texts and realize there was a lot of manipulation occurring I didn’t catch at first. This…frightened me. This was the beginning of me realizing this person wasn’t who they projected to be. I would tell her several times that I didn’t feel safe around her. Why? My sixth sense kept telling me that something didn’t feel right. Like there was a trap a head. In early March I’ll go out with a friend who I had introduced to Nic multiple times. She would comment that she was happy I broke up with her because Nic would give out awkward details of sex life.

“That…doesn’t sound like Nic.”

She would go on to say that Nic would would say disrespectful things about me whenever we were all out and I’d excuse myself to the bathroom or to go grab drinks.

“Wait, that definitely doesn’t sound like Nic.”

I felt deeply unsettled. Conversations I’d have with Nic around disrespect of consent, issues with boundaries, isolation, and many other things came pushing to the surface. I’d always bring up my discomfort with her about certain things but those were maybe just communication mishaps. It’s not like she would intentionally create scenarios to bypass my consent and boundaries right?

Right?

I was filled with a slow dred. Even though I distanced from Nic, she was one of the people I respected the most. Always kind. Always considerate…and ally…yet something subtle would…huh…

Things began click and a haunting realization started to fall upon me. “I feel like I might have been tricked. Or something. I don’t feel right.”

That night I could barely sleep. Nic was the most important part of my last two years…. “If her persona was just a facade, was there a space she’d show her real self so I could confirm it?”

I asked myself this and realized there was a forum we were both members of that I recently left. I rejoined with an unsettled stomach….

The morning of

[back to phone]

“Oh there she is…wait, why is she asking about “mediation” for both of us. I never asked for that. That’s weird.”

I would only feel increasingly unsettled.

These comments will veer into a lane that some may not notice, but as a Black man I’m particularly sensitive to.

You see, when you live in the margins you become sharply aware of your identity and how others handle it.

And with that you become sharply aware of how your identity gets stereotyped. And while other wouldn’t see it, I’ve had enough time on this earth of a Black human to know exactly what this was.

First, look at every adjective used to describe me, it paints certain picture. Brutish, slow, dumb, damaged, incapable. Nevermind the outright lying to deflection here.

At first, I told myself she had to have gotten hacked, at first. Because I was in so much disbelief. This was…far from the person I knew. What I witnessed here was an entirely different persona. A mask falling off. This is the beginning of what traumatized me. Lied to, in bed with a stranger, who took joy in covertly harming me, for two years. This person I put so much trust and adoration for. I shattered like glass.

And sadly as you go on to dissect this whole thread and it’s massive subtext, what you’ll find is Nicole Block teaching a master class on how to utilize bias. You see, she’ll say just enough without really committing to the thing she’s suggesting. Here she does a “wink wink nod nod” trying to make me seem abusive. But she stops short. Why? Cause you stop short in the vicinity of a commentor who has actually suffered abuse like this one here, and you play off their emotions and suffering. The vector she’ll pluck to get the response she wants is gender. This survivor was targeted by an abusive man in her past so it’s easy to to cast me as an abuser through my identify in maleness. In this moment a survivor becomes an instrument of an abuser.

And if you go through this thread she does this all throughout. She’ll bait people and “sorta” suggest something. Then she’ll step back and let the bias of people do the rest. She’ll do this later to criminalize me as the “scary Black man”. It will give you chills when you see it.

Now, what this there’s a couple of things we need to recognize. Besides being totally evil, this shows the level of manipulation my abuser is working on. It also shows she manipulates through people most sensitive emotions and experiences. Their trauma. This is sick. And she’s fully aware of what she’s doing.

There’s also something else that this is—

This is a lynching.

Not in the sense of a noose and tree but if you look at what Nic is doing, it has all the parts that make up a lynching. It’s the intent to incite a mob based off stereotypes directed at a marginalized individual in an attempt to diminish that persons narrative at best or have others act out violence against the target at worst.

When I see these posts, something in me let out a shriek. Literally. I can’t explain it till this day, but I heard a scream in my head which was both inside and outside my head. And that happened because something deeply Black in me recognized exactly what this was. I will spend two months in acute trauma transfixed on the history of lynchings. And I will find myself in these stories.

Btw, I will later confront her about this telling her she tried to lynch me and she’ll use this as evidence to deem me crazy and this is how she starts to criminalize me. She’s trying to do it in small steps. I’ve been fighting a slow and silent war against a racist psychopath who is very good at manipulating people.

As this post continues Nic baits the posters to into tearing me down. And funny enough a post that started as “boo hoo I want help for me ex“ turns into a literal tear down of my character. Funny how it took that turn. There’s an additional thing that irks me here. Nic and I shared couples photos in this forum. All the poster have access to the fact I’m Black, and a few of them I’m sure know that I’m Black. And wow, they do not hesitate to turn me into an abusive drug addict, criminal, mentally disordered, angry Black man. In record time.

And again, I know my history…and there’s not that many coincidences out there. They have made me into the brute caricature that Black men are often stereotyped as.

Oh, and as these people tear me down, does Nic deny any of it? No. She just laps it up. She revels in it. And I will show you in another post, she gets so much joy for tearing me down because I denied her sex. Because she was offended of my own agency and choice over my body. This gives her joy, along with her loving the attention.

Oh and btw, it’s interesting how she so quickly dives in to say that I’m weak to strip any good or power that could be applied to my name. If you know abuser behavior, this act will read very clear to you.

I can’t understate this.

And would always assume I was taken seriously. But now, in here I realized I wasn’t. It was something more like a game.

And I knew it was no accident that one day Nic would try to speak with so much knowledge and empathy on race, and the next she’d be using the exact same tactics she’d condemn the day before.

Nic masterfully moves through online spaces, plucking the strings of discord, bias, and prejudice to manipulate a crowd and point their ire to a marginalized target. Folks, that’s Hitler level. And while it’s not Hitler level exhaustively, that is definitely Hitler level potentially.

All that Hitler packed into a nice white lady who just can’t do any harm?

OMEGA LEVEL THREAT PEOPLE.

In your backyard. This is DEAFCON people.

And I can’t believe it…I was fucking the fuhrer.

And she’s just walking the Brooklyn street causing mayhem.

The spotless moonlight eternal

I think in every abuse situation, there’s a shared moment of trauma that comes from the horror that someone you trusted is hurting you intentionally, and they enjoy it. Knowledge of this will change you.

For any identity, being made into a caricature of what you truly are is a hurtful thing. We’ll get into this later but a stereotype serves a purpose. For those Black…

[train tracks, phone horzontal and then clopuds above]

And that’s no coincidence or mistake for her to have this information. Because throughout the 2 years of our relationship she consistently always reminds me to tell her everything. Everything. Especially the most traumatic parts. My abuse was no accident. It was intentional and she knew what she was doing. The realization that someone you love is slowly harming you is a dark realization to face.

During our two years, I would share with this person my insecurities, my past, my pain, my sadness, my trauma, my hopes, my fears— in the two years time we are together I will give this person all of me, and she’ll turn it into this—

[minstrel show]

In [year’s] Get Out by Jordan Peele, Peele introduces the concept of the Sunken Place. In “Abuse is—” I pose the question, what does one become if they reside in the sunken place too long?

[good good boy]

Btw, most of these minstrel animations i made when I was knee deep in trauma and falling apart. It’s like Nic’s stereotype narrative of me was trying to infect me and I needed a way to get it out of me. So I made art and I made these guys. Aren’t they cute?

Later she’ll use this deeply personal information to try and make me seem dangerous and criminal, to turn me into this—

[incarcerated black men — regan era drug poster]

Or, we have a more succint term for what she turned my identity into.

[nigger definition]

the person i trusted most, and devoted myself to for two years…would turn me into this.

[toni morrison quote]

A bit later I’ll speak more on the knowledge one gains from trauma. and while I may not cover this in “Abuse is—“ I did learn an interesting truth I’d like to share. On my journey I learned what nigger actually is. I won’t reveal it here but I will say this for all my design friends.

Nigger is a concept.

where did I go?

[nwa this is what they think about you]

The pain I felt after that day in March can only be described at ‘generational’. Because I felt it. The same pain the many Black people have felt before…working hard and building yourself in spite of the adversity and prejudice— only to have them throw that label on you, render all you’ve worked for to dust, and spit in your face.

These people and their stories…there is a frequency which travels through space and time that is uniquely Black on which the stories of these injustices travel.

I know it exists, because I felt it.

It’s a collective sorrow. I connected with it. In that moment they saw me, and I saw them. And none of us were different from the other. I knew them. And I cried. For nights and nights I cried. Trauma is an overload of information.

I sat with that information the same way I sat with them as I cried each night. Because I promised them their stories would not go unheard by me. This period coincides with the state of what I’m calling “acute trauma“ which would last for maybe two months.

[reference the man not]

[strange fruit]

I think this was always a subconscious fear of mine. To be trapped in that role, with that label. And you tell yourself your not that but when you see that mob, in person or otherwise try to put that noose around your neck, it will change you. My fear was realized on March 7th, 2022. This was a pain that’s very hard to describe. And it’s taken me this long to coherently talk about.

[story of OJ intro]

lmao, “ok”.

As with the manipulation…and moment like..whatever the fuck this was.[show nic saying to only listen to her] Who says that? A manipulator.

And we’ve not even gotten to the sexual assault yet. I’ll speak more in another post, but it was this traumatic moment that led me to the additional trauma and realization that I was assaulted. That’s right, many survivors may not fully digest nor process their assault when it happens. Sometimes much later people realize this. This happens often with young assaulted boys because of a misconstrued idea that being a rape victim as a male counts for “getting lucky“.

Another vector that can cause a later realization to occur is intent.

Break out that Jonny.

[without intent you can’t consent]

You technically can’t consent to an act without proper knowledge and scope of the intentions of another person. Things like “stealthing” exist in this range. In my situation, learning that Nic hid her entire persona in order to get access to me for sex? Honestly the whole thing now feels like a 2 year rape. It’s gross.

All the previous stuff was March 7th, 2022, the inciting moment of trauma. Something broke in me. And after that breaking, I couldn’t access myself anymore. It’s like that main part of me went offline and also vanished elsewhere. That’s how bad this broke me.

[phones goes offliune - tarnsition to notebook]