La La La Lies

So -- let me tell you a little story.  It's about me.  That is, it's about my sudden understanding of something I've known for years and was just never actually aware of.  I don't know whether these small epiphanies that I keep having as I age are standard human behavior, and therefore nothing I need to worry about, or whether I am showing myself to be a strikingly obtuse individual who merely thinks she is intelligent (also, no doubt, standard human behavior.)

This is an example of how a person with a fully functioning brain can go through life looking at fact A, and also at contradictory fact B, and merely whistle a happy tune.

You may already know the story of the stalker I had when I was young and living on my own for the first time. It was a very frightening thing for me, also for my Loved Ones, and resulted in my moving several times in rapid succession, in nailing my bedroom window shut, and pushing my dresser in front of my bedroom door every night. It wasn't until my third move put me on the second floor of a lovely old building with only one outside door and very creaky stairs, that I calmed down enough to put the butcher knife (under the edge of the bed) back in the kitchen drawer.

Okay. So after I had moved from the second location, and was busily pounding nails into the woodwork, a young woman (we'll call her Shmeesa) whom I had known from her babyhood but hadn't seen in many years, turned up at my door with my sister Rose. It seems that Shmeesa was also being stalked and it seemed to be by the same person. He had apparently told her on the phone that he was someone who had known me since my childhood. This sent the whole thing suddenly from “Random Nutjob” into “Beyond Terrifying Psycho”, especially since the childhood we had shared had been a rural American Christian one, and Religious + Wacko = RunRunRun. It's one thing to have voices telling you what to do, but when that voice is the Supreme Being, it's a whole other ballgame.

Anyway. Shmeesa ended up moving in with me for several months, bringing me up to date on the strange and dramatic life she had led, and confiding in me about her rape and her brain tumor and her car accident. She convinced me that since the police were not "doing anything" about the stalker, we should get a private investigator (and that's a whole other story, o my god) and just generally kept me fearing this obsessive psychopath.

Fast-forward several years, to me finding out from three or four independent sources that young Shmeesa was a Dreadful Liar. That she had no brain tumor. That her claims of nights spent in the hospital were no doubt merely nights spent on the tiles. That no one else seemed to think she had been raped. Etc, etc, etc. This was, to some extent, corroborated by Shmeesa herself. ("Oh, yeah, I guess I lied a lot when I was younger.") I was pretty much stunned, but eventually allowed myself to accept it and move on.

This all happened about thirty years ago. And yet! It was only last week that it dawned on me, in an absolutely shattering way, that this also meant my stalker was merely some random guy on the telephone who finally broke in to my house, and was then stymied by my moves. Frightening, yes. Years-long psycho-religious obsession carefully nurtured over time and finally acted upon, rendering every relationship I had ever had with any male potentially life-threatening? No. NO!

So -- I guess this is a happy ending. I'm mostly feeling stunned chagrin, but I will probably feel happy about it eventually!