Jim C. Hines, who is awesome, has a blog post up about reporting rape, and how fucking hard it is to do so, and you have to go read it, because it is all true. Even if you’re someone relatively sympathetic who keeps jumping up and down on the victim’s feelings by saying, “You have to press charges! Sorry, I won’t be there or otherwise support you and will advise you against your will even though I don’t know anything! But you hafta!”

I also have a couple of long comments, I don’t know entirely why, semi-on-topic about violence against women (or whoever) and stalkers and the awfulness of court and how many things fall apart there, and you don’t get good results for rape trials most of the time, or even restraining order trials (the latter of which I’ve experienced; not the former, but I can somewhat imagine how much worse the former is, and it’s likely worse than what I can think of).

And yeah, I talk about changing identities. I know how to do it across a couple states even! And even that is horrible and painful, and automatically disqualified me from quite a high-paying government job where I could just code all day on really neat projects. ((Although that would probably all get funneled into weapons anyways, so… yeah.))

And I also reveal that I have not always blogged under this name. And to tell the truth, the electronic trail isn’t perfect, and the paper trail is less so, because the law requires you to put your name change in fucking papers. And you can’t change your SSN, so my parents could always commit fraud (and the federal government doesn’t allow SSN changes unless you can prove fraud has been committed).

Really, a lot of the law is not about protecting victims, but protecting the possibly guilty. Arguably it should be that way, but I wish it wasn’t quite so harsh on the people who did get hurt.

I was raised to be honest, even if it was in a household where all kinds of abuse was regular (and I was even beaten for lying even when I told the truth). And everything in the past years since I separated from my parents makes me feel worse. Like, I can only tell people so much truth, and so much of it is now basically lies, because I can’t tell people who I really was, all those years ago. And even now. Even now.

I realize that blogging about this may lead to some smartass or private investigator or friends of my parents (yes, they have born-again Christian friends, ye gods) or whoever to find out who I am, because I can’t obscure the trail completely.

But I’ve been not myself for so long that it seems pointless to try to hide (much), and if a final stand happens, let it happen, because it’s been over 30 years now, and I can’t take it anymore. I’m not completely stupid, but then again, I sort of am right now.

And anyways, the people I’ve been don’t live here anymore. That hurts the most. Who am I, really? At the moment, I’m the person who started this blog 2.5 years ago. I am only that old. I plan to get older for the rest of my life, even if it eventually kills me.

Buuut at least I don’t have tantrums! ((RAAAEEEGGG!!!1!!1!!))

Yrs,
S∂

P.S. scrapers and sploggers: there is fucking nothing here you can use for ads, so don’t even fucking try.