Please Think. (Alternate title: I'm Too Nice)

On June 11th, 2019, my best friend (a cat) of 11 years passed away from fluid buildup in his heart and lungs. He was my son; my baby. I loved him like a human child. I still cry when I look at the memorial altar I put together for him on my windowsill for too long.

Then, around November, one of the neighbor's "barn cats" (who was really just a domestic cat that was banished to the wild outdoors) started showing up on our porch. He would crawl into my car through the window and make biscuits in my lap after I got home from work.

We had a dog at the time that he was afraid of, but on the day after Christmas, she was gone and the cat came inside.

I named him Ned P. Stark after my favorite Game of Thrones character, with the middle initial P. standing for either Pumpkin or Puddin', depending on your preferences. Later, as he stayed with us for longer and longer periods of time, I noticed different personality traits, like the fact that he didn't like Greenies very much but he would eat them anyway, and the fact that he wasn't very smart, which earned him the secondary name Winnie the Pooh, aka Pooh Bear; the tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff; the bear of very little brain.

The neighbors really only lamented over the fact that they had a rat problem again, and not at the fact that he was gone. After all, the name they had given him was simply Orangecat, and they had told us that he was probably around four years old.

We loved him the way he wanted to be loved. We kept him inside when it was cold and windy and wet out. He slept on my bed almost every night -- my navy blue comforter is still covered in his fur.

All of this to give context to how devastated I had been when, on June 13th, 2020, Ned was taken to the vet very suddenly with a severe thrombosis in his back right leg. Other cats with similar conditions had about a 5% survival rate with constant treatment and medication, and those that did survive never fully regained movement in their legs.

Ned was still an outdoor cat. We couldn't let him live with such a lowered quality of life when the outlook of plain and simple survival was so low. We have coyotes in our woods; he had to be able to run.

So we put him down. We buried him the next day.

That was two days ago.

Last night, at 3:30am, I couldn't sleep because of hallucinations. So I took my antipsychotic, and as I was waiting for it to kick in and thus for me to get sleepy again, I decided to look through the memory card on my camera to see if there was anything I missed or had forgotten about.

There were. In fact, there were quite a few pictures of Ned that I had forgotten I had taken about a month prior. So I fixed them up in Photoshop, and decided to make a return to Facebook to make a little memorial post for him.

I rarely use Facebook anymore. I am formerly an avid poster, but in recent years, I've decided it brought a lot of judgement and negativity into my life. People were pretending to be my friend because they were curious, or just wanted to be entertained by the shitshow that is and always has been my life. It took me until recently to realize that not all attention is good attention, and I would rather be lonely than looked at as a less-than-human piece of performance art.

So, when Bruno Griffiths (an alias for the sake of anonymity), a guy I went to high school with and never spoke to (keep in mind, I was only in high school for two years), sent me a friend request about a year and a half ago, it took me around a month to accept it. I saw it, I just hesitated. Part of me hoped it would go away. Because, not only did I never speak to him, but something about his presence always made me uncomfortable. It definitely was somewhere between the fact that he would cosplay anime characters at school literally every day; the fact that he was a very tall bright red ginger with shoulder-length hair and his voice was very loud, deep, and intimidating; and the fact that the abrasiveness of his personality and the pure intensity of his presence was just plain unsettling to me.

Something I remember about Bruno was that, in high school, he seemed to hover around my general vicinity a lot. It could just be me being paranoid, but I remember him scaring the shit out of me in my freshman year of high school, when I finally decided I hated the friends I was with (which I very much did) and was sitting at a lunch table alone, with no lunch. He crashed into a chair next to me, and said something I can't remember clearly because I was so off-put by this behavior that I got up and left. I think I just wandered around the school campus for a while until class started, but from then on, he seemed to always be in my periphery, and I'm truly not sure if it was intentional. In sophomore year, I had Algebra II with him, and he used to talk endlessly about the anime Death Note and Bleach. Not even necessarily to me, just to anyone. I'm sure now there was probably ADHD or autism in there. That's fine. It didn't make me any less uncomfortable, because I simply don't feel good being around that kind of bombastic and weird energy.

So then, when he sent me a friend request out of the blue a year and a half ago, and his profile picture featured him with cropped short hair and a shirt & tie, I was... weirded out. Understandably, I'm sure. He always made me uncomfortable, from day one. So why would now be any different?

The first tick in the "Too Nice" column goes here, because, after a month of deliberation, I accepted the request. I didn't look at his profile. I thought, What's the worst that could happen?

Things were pretty innocuous for a while; he reacted to some of my posts, and that was about it.

Then I made the memorial post for Ned.

The wound was still very fresh. The dirt was still loose. He left a like on the post.

What he didn't have to do afterward, was leave the "wow" reaction on a picture of my Pikachu cosplay I wore for Halloween one year, a picture in which I look hella cute if I do say so myself, and also a picture which was intended for my actual friends who like Pokemon. That picture has been in my featured photos since featured photos have been a thing on Facebook. Why he didn't notice it until now, I couldn't tell you.

And, what he especially didn't have to do immediately after that, was send me a DM saying, "Hi, what have you been up to?"

Most cis men will probably read that and shrug or scoff. "It's just a friendly message, he didn't even say anything creepy."

Folks who were raised female know it's a Trojan horse. A way to get into your mental space and destroy it by draining your energy. They usually don't do it on purpose. But the context, the behavior directly beforehand, is the sneeze from the soldier inside. These messages, if you respond, will almost always end in them asking you out, or asking to fuck, or sending an unsolicited dick pic. Or, almost even worse than all of those, they'll shower you with slimy compliments about your physical appearance and decorate them with nasty emojis.

It didn't help that I was still mourning.

It also didn't help that I was in the midst of being gnawed on by the voracious jaws of depression.

The second tick in the "Too Nice" column comes with the fact that I didn't immediately block him. Because I thought of what my dad would say. My dad, who's a cis man, and as much of an ally as he tries to be, will never truly understand. His imaginary advice of, "Give him a chance, he's only being friendly," echoed through my mind as I sat on the notification, not daring to open it and show him that I read it, thus opening the floodgates to "Hello?" and "fucking bitch" that were most likely to follow later, when he saw that I left his message unanswered.

I deliberated some more. I wrung my hands. I worried for six hours about what he would say, whether "he" took the form of my father or Bruno.

I complained to a female friend of mine, one of my best friends, over chat, but she didn't seem to be around. So I posted to my Snapchat story, knowing that six out of seven of my friends on Snapchat are women and might offer up advice. (The seventh is a man and truly does not care.)

A different one of my best friends answered the call. They gave me a few pieces of very sage advice, which, although strangely enough coming from Snapchat messages, immediately changed my way of thinking.

One of those things was, "'Mean' is part of a bullshit politeness contract we all sign in this life that we are not obligated to follow."

It's true. I'm going to use plain binary language here, but I think women especially are brought up to believe that they are automatically everyone's caretaker, and that others' feelings come before their own. They are brought up to believe that if a man's feelings get put on hold so that she can take care of herself first, it then becomes her fault if and when he does something drastic, because men of course can't control themselves or what they do in response to negative emotions. This is a damaging image for both parties; women are seen as unbreakable emotional load-bearers which is exhausting on the daily, while men are degraded as weak, simplistic animals. Plus, it's interesting to me to think about, in this light, the fact that there has been so much propaganda in relatively recent history, especially pre-1920, that women are the ones that are weak, when the unspoken expectation seems to be the other way around.

The other thing my friend said was, "Stop caring about hurting the feelings of those that didn't care about yours to begin with."

This is also true, but I think it's going to be even harder for me to unlearn this.

My dad -- and yes, it always goes back to my dad, go figure -- constantly tells me, particularly while we are amidst the throws of the Black Lives Matter movement, that he is glad that he raised me to have empathy and to care about other human beings. Yes, I agree that is a good thing... to a certain extent. I think it is possible to have too much empathy, however, and I often feel like I do, including toward people who could not give less of a shit about how I feel. Bruno could have led with expressing sympathy for my loss. But he didn't; he was too distracted by how hot I looked in plush yellow ears, red lipstick, and a tank top. He didn't care. No matter which way that conversation could have gone had I responded, whether it was friendly or not, the fact that I had so much of a feeling that it was going to end with him demanding material to jack off to was, in and of itself, a red flag.

When I was thirteen, would I have given the grown men in the giant black pickup truck with the fuck-you back-woods headlights the benefit of the doubt as they blocked traffic to crawl alongside me and yell at me to take off my panties because they wanted to see how fat my pussy was?

Probably not.

It really doesn't matter if I was just being paranoid. Sometimes, "innocent until proven guilty" will get you caught in a really bad situation with someone who's incredibly guilty. In this era, with the people I've seen and talked to and witnessed in my life, it's better to be unsparing with whom you block, for your own safety and emotional well-being.

I blocked Bruno without guilt.