No cycle, please

December 11, 2014

I woke up suddenly, my stomach clenched with fear.  Thoughts like "The cycle is starting all over again" were inarticulately churning through my mind.

"Horse cookies," he's offering people now.  I guess it could be worse.

I'm quite serious about things I say about the issues over which I battle with the conglomerate.  It upsets me a lot when I think I have, through my interactions with people, given the conglomerate a chance to portray me as not being serious about those issues.  One interaction can decimate weeks, months, years of work that I have spent arguing my side of these issues that are problems around the world because of the conglomerate.  The conglomerate likes to portray me as mercenary, a flake, a liar, a slut.  It never stops looking for what it considers opportunities to call me those things.

There is also the question of my being civil at all to people who have participated in hurting me about things that are personal to me.  I am entirely serious about the adjectives SICK, SADISTIC, and ILLEGAL when I'm describing the videotaping of me in situations that are supposed to be private, over the past few years.  

Although I never thought of videotaping people in bathrooms and never promoted things as evil as what the conglomerate promotes, I went wrong for a while in my life, when I was much younger.  I understand why I did, and I have taken responsibility for it and tried to grow out of it.  I don't know if I would have grown out of it if I had had a conglomerate around me that was also wrong but that was so powerful that it could make total strangers think I was right.  There are things about my painful past that I can, with perspective and the distance of several years, be grateful about, not because of the things themselves, but because having to work through them gave me the ability to distinguish right from wrong and how those important concepts are real and not arbitrary or about impressing people or contingent on my feelings.  

Right and wrong are more important than my feelings.  When I finally understood that idea, it meant that I had started the maturing process of setting my feelings in line with concepts of right and wrong, so that, most of the time, if I know that something is wrong, my true feeling is that I don't want it to happen, and that feeling is stronger than whatever other feelings I might have about a particular situation.  My feelings when I realize that there is something that I can't have because the situation won't allow it morally, or tactically because of moral considerations, are usually sadness and acceptance.  My feelings are almost never the annoyance or sense of being wronged that I think less disciplined people probably feel when they are not able to get something that they'd like to have that they should not have.

Also; I really don't want people to hack my phone.  Please, would everyone who's doing that stop doing it!

That's the first part of what I have to say.

John Mayer.  My hesitations about you are:

-All of the above

-You are really famous.  If things move past the essentially indirect Internet interactions, I will be drawing more of that attention toward me with every closing of the distance.  Although my actually getting to know you might quiet some of the rowdiness of people who think I'm being abused because I'm a celebrity wannabe whom all celebrities despise, it will also probably accelerate the public knowledge and viewing of the horrible videos of me.  I haven't found those videos on the Internet; I also haven't looked for them that much.  Either they are there or they will be, I'm sure.

-I don't want to be in a contest with other women over you.  I HATE stuff like that.  I don't have the right to tell you what your feelings about me or other people have to be, and I have a few, ever-fainter or undeveloped feelings about other people.  I'm telling you, though, that I DO NOT want to be bashed by other women over you or for them or the media or the rest of the conglomerate to try to create and exploit a contest between those women and me.  I know that you don't have control over what other people do; neither do you have to feed the frenzy.  

I can't overemphasize this; I DON'T want to be in a contest with other women.  If you and I were totally unknown, if we had met in a nonvirtual situation and there were no chance that anyone would ever hear about us, I would be just as uninterested in that sort of contest as I am now.  

That being said; there are no guarantees about what we would be like if we started to get to know each other.  We are people, not characters in movies that each of us is directing.  There are not scripts called "John Mayer and Lena Kochman Fall In Love" and "John Mayer and Someone Who Is Not Lena Fall In Love" for us to decide about.  I am not trying to control your decisions; I'm asking you please not to try to think of me as a contestant in a "Who Gets John Mayer" game show or to encourage other people to think of me that way.

-I don't think that I can "date," per se, you or anyone else, right now.  I am in transition, looking for housing and thinking about what to do next for work.  I also can't pretend that the stigmatization that the conglomerate has mercilessly inflicted on me, with its constant, sexual battering, has not affected me.  A person can know that someone who attacks her every day for more than four years is wrong to treat her that way; her knowing that it's wrong doesn't prevent or heal her injuries.  I can't predict what I would be like to date.  When I feel that trauma has caused me to be unable to predict what I'll be like in a situation, I think that a slow and cautious approach to the situation is what I should take.

If I think of other hesitations, I'll mention them.

Copyright L. Kochman, December 11, 2014 @ 5:41 a.m./copyright notice edited @ 5:48 a.m.