Lumardy Case | Summary

Here, I will republish the 700-word TL;DR I wrote, so that everyone knows what happened from my side, with my essential accusations (bold) and feelings (italics). Every claim is proven in the main doc with evidence (and I think the main doc is more lucid reading, but it is 7k words so I understand skipping it). Then, I’ll republish Lu’s response thread of 14 tweets.

My TL;DR

• After a year of a rotten friendship in which Lu took advantage of me to get close to someone else and was negative in many ways that interfered with my other friendships, I end things. I start talking to him about his behaviours, and he becomes really apologetic and keen to fix things with me. After errors on my part in handling this resolution, Lu starts venting to people, including friends of mine, about his legitimate anxiety.
• However, he presents completely different pictures to them than he did to me, including accusing me of forcing him to fix things with me the day after telling me I’m a friend and he “put [his] foot down and said no more” to his bad way of handling friendships (→ §2d: Creating False Narratives).

• I immediately face bans from Discords run/modded by Scatter and Awesomocity0, including a friend group I was very active in (10k messages and 30h of calls), and the reasoning given is a bunch of bullshit, the kernels of truth of my errors blown far out of proportion. Since Lu’s cut contact with me, I have no idea whom he’s talking to and feel the acute anxiety of walls closing in on me.

• While I try to atone for those errors, Lu tries to keep the venting a secret, and to get both mutual friends and random people to side with him and not talk to me (→ §2e: “Psycho Shit”). Lu and I then do a successful private reconciliation, where Lu genuinely apologises for everything.
• However, for 3 weeks, Lu keeps it secret from me that he had vented to an additional 7 people and so turned that entire friend group against me, and ironically vents to me about how he’s afraid of me turning people against him, despite the fact that, during the first week, I disclosed whom I’d spoken to and led the convo to where he had to do the same in order to be honest. He privately shows he understands the implications of this (→ §3d: Venting Cover-Up).

• During these 3 weeks, Lu understands my motives, yet doesn’t correct any of the deceptive pictures he painted to those people, and manipulates them into continuing to believe those things by avoiding discussing the things directly, instead implying indirectly that they’re still true, and using a narrative that he’s close with those people and I only “feel” close with them to justify them, again, not talking to me (→ §3b: “Updating” SDLL).

• When I push him on this, he reacts by telling the friends I was closer with to “look out for a DM” (a DM one goes on to ignore), and by organising a mediation in which he falsely implies (again) I’m forcing him to do it, and with no context on why mediate in the first place (= to correct lies) (→ §4.1c: The Point of Mediating). I then clarify to him that I expect him to correct his slander that lost me friends.

• He tries to convince me directly that I’m coercing him into an ongoing resolution by holding the threat of an exposé over his head, and after I tell him I’ll expose him regardless, he not only gives up on correcting the lies to others, but, in 7 separate tweets/threads spanning 2 months, starts telling deliberate lies (about us never having been friends, about mutual friends not thinking his behaviour was abuse, and more) (→ 4.2b: Actively Spreading Lies) about me and harassing me on public Twitter to try to shut it down. This, combined with the lack of support I get from my friends who don’t comprehend Lu’s manipulation, leaves me in darkness for 3 months, needing to speak up but not being able to until now.

• I remain banned from that friend group, whose owner still believes the same lies. The loss of two entirely-positive friendships puts me in a state of permanent fear of someone destroying my friendships, and makes me lose faith in having friends while still yearning for the bonding, leaving me on the edge of living.
• Awesomo tries to cancel me with a sexual harassment allegation based on Lu’s venting to her (partly from jumping to conclusions and partly from being manipulated by Lu), and does so behind Lu’s back, which Lu debunks, leaving Awesomo surprised and in hiding.

Lu’s Response

Original tweets: link (they were publicly available for the first 6 days).

I would like to apologise to @shoutpolenta for all the wrong I caused throughout moments in 2020 and for a majority of 2021

I’m not going to make this a long bullshitted apology that is committing to improvement and doesn’t deliver on it because I wanna be real (1/14)

but theres definitely some things im going to go into

i wont address anything particular in the document, i think the length speaks for itself that a lot of shit stuff happened between us, and even though i feel like shout perhaps did do a couple things i didnt like, (2/14)

a large amount of those things stemmed from a situation that i caused and are understandable when i was pressing him for seemingly no reason (i never gave good explanations for my anger in most instances) (3/14)

a HUGE consequence of all of this is that a lot of time was lost

had i have not been a coward and checked myself a lot of this could have been totally avoided, and this has been ongoing in my life for multiple years

most of my fall outs have spawned from being impulsive (4/14

most of my shit responses to shout throughout 2021 came from feeling a pressure to respond quickly, which is my biggest downfall

it’s embarrassing to see things ive said and think “this isn’t me” because its literally right there in evidence (5/14)

yet why do i find myself feeling unfairly judged? because quite clearly, it is fair

its because i need to address multiple serious issues with myself and get help before this constant mistake continues and i keep being who im not deep down (6/14)

in other words, whilst shout and i’s situation is the most egregious of my bad tendencies on display, its far from the first time its happened and its my duty to make sure its the last

i cant say sorry enough to shout that it came to this for me to attempt to make changes (7/14)

i totally understand that a lot of people will be disappointed with me and perhaps not totally satisfied with this apology, but i felt it would be best to own up the mistakes and not try and make any excuse, and admit that i have flaws that need tending to urgently (8/14)

i have a few friends who i have spoken to who understandably want to look out for me and think that i should just ignore and move on, but isnt that the literal root cause of all of this? letting a situation fester and then impulsively dealing with it poorly down the line (9/14)

i read a lot of the situations shout brought up with me completely wrong, and through my impulsive behaviours i would often update those who i was discussing it with around me without carefully trying to see what he was saying, which caused a lot of misinfo to be spread (10/14)

i had the tenderness of a brick hitting a glass window for the majority of his grievances and it exasperated his feelings in the situation constantly, and it kept feeding back into itself over and over again (11/14)

I’m not going to ask for any kind of forgiveness because I know it isn’t that simple, I wouldn’t simply forgive any of the people who have found themselves in similar cases or even myself for that matter

All I can say is I WILL do better (12/14)

To round this off I again want to reiterate that I am deeply apologetic to most of all you, shout, and I’m sorry I failed you

I’d like to apologise to mutual friends I hurt along the way, as they musn’t go unnoticed, thank you for being there for shout when i wasnt (13/14)

I’m going to take quite some time out to kick my life into gear and be a better person… it’s funny that a big thing holding me back from that was worrying if I was a good person or not and being self absorbed… anyway

I’ll see you when I see you

(14/14)