Lu Case | Venting Account (A+B)

This is to provide full explanations to defend any accusations Lu made that I know about (there are some I don’t know about).

This page will handle A and B. C is at:

→ Venting Account (C)

A. “Psychotic” Doc

Summary

It’s true that the way I was bringing up my grievances (the “doc”) was overwhelming Lu with anxiety, and it was harmful and avoidable. I’m happy to label it “psychotic”, and demonstrably know better now (comparing with the way I brought up my grievances later and the successful reconciliation that resulted).

However, I didn’t do it deliberately, and Lu misled me by giving no conscious indication that the doc was causing him unreasonable anxiety; rather, he welcomed it. Furthermore, the doc only took the distorted direction it did because I handled Lu’s crazy emotional reactions poorly. I could’ve read between the lines more than I did to notice the risks, but that’s unreasonable to expect of me.

Finally, I addressed this problem immediately twice. Firstly, when Lu bailed from the discussion, I ended the protracted delay on posting the doc (which was due to external factors); secondly, after I’d spoken to a mutual friend, I deleted the doc in favour of a different approach later.

Dynamics Leading to the Doc

This method of dealing with my grievances resulted from dynamics of our conversation right before the venting started, so I’ll start with that history.

After I’d initially left our conversation about our friendship without giving a reason, Lu got back in touch with me after I posted this tweet.

First, he started ranting at me from the same perspective as in his July venting to Awesomo:

At the time I was less wise to the risks of leaving loose ends, so I reacted by substantiating my position with whatever material I already had on hand – I sent him the 1Ups issue – and left the rest of my grievances for later. That was a strategic error, because the validity of the 1Ups issue combined with the uncertainty over the content of the rest turned out to be the twin seeds of Lu’s anxiety.

The first response in the 1Ups issue doc was his immediate reaction, and is very relevant here. He became extremely emotional and hyper-optimistic about making it up to me.

These messages turned out to be a lie. Lu later explained that he persistently tried to avoid a friendship with me developing the entire time we were friends, and gave this reasoning for the comment I quoted.

But without this context, I took his words seriously and inferred a genuine desire from him to repair the friendship. I thought that he was willing to carefully listen to each of my points, that I should try to be as detailed as I could, both to let him understand how he’d hurt me and to help him learn from his mistakes. Basically, I saw his goodwill, but I didn’t see the nuances of his anxiety.

An exploratory discussion of the rest of my grievances on the same day (19th July) led to a lot of tangled, inconclusive posts and replies, so I opted to write it all down in a doc instead. His stance was positive towards resolving stuff thruout.

Two things went wrong in my approach here.

Hence, the doc was leading into a patronising, controlling thing, rather than what it ended up being when we reconciled, a much more natural “this is what you did and this is how it affected me” thing. So, I accept the original was toxic, too long and likely to overwhelm.

The problem is, the entire dialogue we had about it was positive and gave me no significant indication that anything was wrong with this approach. I could have maybe predicted from his panicked reactions to bits of conversation that he’d react badly, but I was too stuck in my victimhood to consider changing my approach, and also too afraid to reason about his chaotic, visceral emotionality. Rather, I hoped things would hold up and tried to reassure him every time he was anxious, as noted in the screenshots. Even so, it’s pretty unreasonable to expect me to anticipate his reaction. Notably, he said this (during his combative phase on 19th July):

Entitlement/Favour Accusations

I think my main doc built a compelling case that Lu is by far the most dishonest person I’ve ever spoken to, and chapter 2 (Creating False Narratives) showed how he described my conversation with him to other people in a way that completely contradicted how it looked to me. That’s likely to be the explanation for how the above was spun into this:

Entitlement:

The difference [between me and Lu] is that you seem to feel entitled to a discussion with them that will harm them as much as it helps you.

or insisted that you have a conversation to work it out

Favour:

i advised them not to make up with you because it was clear they didn’t want to and your constant refusal to accept it was wearing heavily on them mentally

they were basically resolving it as a favor to you

The favour accusation is directly debunked in the main doc (chapter 2, Creating False Narratives), which shows starkly how Lu’s duplicity resulted in the accusation. The entitlement one is more nuanced and I’ll comment on it at the end of accusation B, after discussing the supposed threat of public outing.

Venting

While cutting contact with me, the last thing Lu said about this was:

He said to Awesomo:

His attitude in both of these is very different to his attitude as said to me before the escalation, and I didn’t hear of this change until after I couldn’t respond. The “3 weeks” comment also lacks important context that I’d given him for why it was so slow. Again, the basic point he made about the doc being psychotic was valid, and needed addressing.

My Response

The important thing to notice here is my actions, not just my words.

I immediately addressed the toxic doc delays by guaranteeing (and following thru on) finishing the doc the next day. I hesitated to send it because of my deteriorating mental state, and spoke to a mutual friend of ours about it. At this point, I was adamant about sending it because, in my victimhood, I was (rightly) entitled to tell him what he’d done and how it’d hurt me, but I was (wrongly) too entitled in not caring about the format and the emotional impact it would have. That’s where the mutual stepped in.

Within 10 minutes, I’d promised to delete the doc (after making notes on it for myself), then did so at the end of that day. Lu received a transcript of this conversation with the mutual.

When the time came to reconcile and address this properly, I wrote this doc in the healthy manner we’d agreed, and wrote an intro justifying that.

  • i’m not (and never was) entitled to further discussion. i just need(ed) to tell u what u did and how it made me feel; the rest is up to you.
  • i’m gonna keep my letter short, focus the topic into a single overall idea, and cut out everything except the basic facts and my brief feelings (the rest is stuff i can go into in future if u wanna hear it, and [name redacted] has already read my philosophy on this stuff).
  • no build-up in waiting for me to reveal info, and no further info from my side unless u want to hear/discuss more.

I posted that intro at the same time as the doc, and it all worked out in the end.

B. Overhanging Threat of Public Outing

Summary

This threat was essentially imaginary, and stemmed from Lu’s chronic paranoia about what others think of him. I sowed the seeds for it by alluding to it once while I was distressed and unguarded with my emotions, then I said I thought it wasn’t the play, and reassured Lu each time he mentioned it. After Lu’s venting, I explicitly said I wouldn’t talk publicly if we did a mediation.

There’s some nuance on what I think is right to discuss in public under what circumstances, which I had to figure out slowly as the situation unfolded. I’ll explain this in the last subsection, but I do now disavow my original action of alluding to the idea with Lu at all.

What Was Said

This is all that was said in our DM before Lu vented:

There’s basically nothing there. I did threaten it in the first place, not as a deliberate play for control but because I was being way too loose with my feelings. I was contemplating whether Lu’s interventions in my friendships until that point (particularly the 1Ups issue) merited public scrutiny. But being so open with feelings that threaten someone was absolutely my mistake.

The rest of it is me reassuring him, firstly saying I did think there were better ways to handle things, and secondly clarifying that my motives for a threatening part of the “creepy” letter (explored in accusation C) were not about public exposure but rather me trying to get him to be honest with me about something related to that accusation, which you can see me here implicitly disavowing in favour of a different approach.

There’s a point where Lu says I said it wasn’t going to be public, which I didn’t afaik. I think he vibed it out from my generally understanding tone. Either way, I think the way I reassured him should’ve been more explict – I didn’t relinquish enuff agency over what I could say in public to properly reassure him. But fundamentally, there’s clearly no serious threat in what I said.

Venting

Yo, after checking, one of my mods took the initiative to kick you last night following some stuff you had threatened to do if things didn’t go your way I don’t know the details but I trust my mods

– Papaccino

You threatened lu to where he’s terrified. Like absolutely terrified.

Forcing lu to think about you by trying to scare him into outting him is sick. Leave him alone. Let him heal from you.

– Awesomo

if you hadn’t… threatened to post all their wrongdoings publicly… it would have been left there

– Scatter (as late as mid-September)

My Response

Lu said nothing about this while he was disengaging from talking to me; I first found out about it from a mutual friend:

but the temptation of posting it at any time could come back to bite you

my worry is that with the way things are going, things could get worse before they could get better as long as you have this looming threat hanging over lu

i have to reiterate again that the fallout from this could be so much worse than what lu actually deserves to have coming to them, you never know how a community will spin a document like this

This was about the essay – clarification: I never intended to post that essay publicly – which I went on to delete, but I then deduced that the threat of outing in itself was toxic, so I also addressed that when talking to Awesomo on 11th August, which she showed to Lu.

Ultimately, I was within my rights to talk about Lu publicly given the nature of the wrongdoing (more on this in a bit). But I recognised that I’d taken my agency unreasonably far and should’ve taken stronger measures to protect Lu given we were en route to talking things thru.

Conclusion
I accept that I had a responsibility to not talk threateningly about public discussion, and to consider his emotions, which I failed when I brought the idea up initially, and then did only half-committedly in later discussions. I’m sorry about that and the pain it inflicted. However, I gave Lu enuff reassurances for this to rationally not be a legitimate threat.

Philosophy of Outing

I’ve addressed the way I communicated about the issue, but I want to also explore the idea of publicly outing bad behaviours itself, and whether the perpetrator should have any control of that. Again, I only understand this with the benefit of hindsight.

What I said to Awesomo (end of last section) still implies that I would only guarantee not exposing Lu if we had a mediation. At the time, I didn’t completely understand the right way to handle this. I was not entitled to having a conversation about my grievances, but I was entitled to Lu reading my grievances (what he did and how it affected me) in the first place – objections about their format aside. I completely reject the idea that Lu can just cite “conversations, which we’ve had” as a way to not allow me to even raise what I consider instances of abuse within the friendship, particularly the counts of interference in my relationships with other people.

If Lu had not listened to me at all then I think I would’ve held him accountable by talking about it in public. I think that’s right, but it was wrong to threaten to possibly do it regardless of Lu’s actions. Given the nature of the complaints within our friendship, and given we did talk everything thru in a mature way, talking publicly about it was not the right thing to do. However, given it implicated SDLL, they did need to know about it, and their refusal to listen (treating them as a single entity owing to Scatter’s control over them) resulted in me addressing the issue in public and anonymising Lu. I could’ve handled this better, by first talking to Scatter and making the diplomatic consequences of not listening clear, but given my mental state and weak position (being ostracised) in the situation, I think I’m not to blame for that. Only once I solved the manipulation case around Lu did I unanonymise him, and the public case I made was about that and not the original friendship issues.

Regarding Lu, I reiterate the conclusion of the previous subsection. Beyond that, neither he nor anyone else has the right to police what I say in public about him and to hold me to ransom over my handling of the situation based on it. People have the right to talk about self-perceived abuse, and what Scatter and Awesomo did by enacting consequences based on this amounts to abuse apologism and victim-blaming in my opinion.

Entitlement to Conversation

I addressed this multi-faceted issue in these subsections:

Beyond that, there’s one final nuance I need to bring up.

I posted this the day after my reply to Lu cutting off contact to start venting to others, where I implored Lu to not cut communication. I feel like this can also be seen as an entitlement to conversation?

I want to draw attention to the emotional pain of enduring a dialogue that consistently went one way for weeks suddenly flipping – contrasting Lu’s attitude to me on 9th Aug with his venting starting later that same day, and the duplicity I’ve already proven within that.

That’s an extremely rare and extremely harmful reaction that at the time I was not able to anticipate, since Lu had never tried to cut contact with me before. When I revisited how to bring up my grievances with him ahead of our reconciliation, I mentally prepared to have him instantly cut communication, and had some of my philosophy of outing (previous subsection) in place ahead of that. But by contrast, I was extremely vulnerable to this on 9th Aug, hence my desperate reaction to try to de-escalate the situation.

Pretty much every reaction I got from Scatter and Awesomo denied the emotional reality of the situations I found myself in, and that’s something I won’t forget.

Reminder that Scatter accused me of messaging Awesomo to try to continue this conversation I was entitled to. I actually DMed her to get unbanned from Papaccino’s Discord and anticipated that the reason behind the ban was Lu’s venting.