i'm writing this to set the record straight on a number of things about this sdll discord and my conflict with one of its members. it's a situation that's caused a total destruction of my mental health and persistent suicidal and dissociative feelings for over a month. but i wanna keep the bulk of this doc factual and dispassionate so people can understand it without feeling overwhelmed, then try to maybe communicate a few emotions in the last part.
it's pretty odd that i'd put out so much about a personal situation in public, but i'm adamant that it has to play this way. firstly, because this is now so bad for my mental health that i have to throw it out asap and end it unilaterally; secondly, because i've tried to be the bigger person for 2 months now, afforded so much patience to others and kept emphasising communication – we literally just had to sit down and talk it out, but nah, instead i'm enduring a ban from this discord and walls of silence, despite unambiguously being the victim (more on that later); thirdly, because how i've been treated is way too deep and downright despicable for me to swallow, to the extent that i feel deeply uncomfortable interacting with everyone i know online who's even vaguely associated with these people – if i disappear then i want there to at least be some explanation. these 3 reasons mean i have things i need to say and publicly is the only viable platform to say them on.
to that end, though this is structured as a letter to everyone in sdll, to anyone else i say – please, go ahead and read about the abhorrent ways people have treated me. tl;dr: the first two paragraphs of parts A and B.
part A is to explain to everyone in sdll the context behind my conflict with one of its members that they need to understand, and part B is to deconstruct the manipulations and toxic culture of sdll that have led to this harrowing emotional outcome for me.
the situation starts with a former friend of mine that i'll call P, for a letter not in any of eir names, whom i interacted with both inside and outside sdll a lot. P treated me like garbage most of the time P knew me, but also initiated enough contact to be the biggest social presence in my life, and signalled in such a mixed and inaccurate way that i didn't know what was going on and extracting myself from the friendship is one of the hardest decisions i've ever made. however, P talked the whole situation through with me extensively and owned up to basically everything, putting in a stellar effort to make peace and promote understanding. P hadn't intended for most of these consequences on me, and from understanding intent and changes in future behaviour, forgiveness can be built. thus, we were all set to take some time apart and come back feeling at peace and positive towards each other, whether friends again or not. however, intentions are one thing, but the consequences of actions are another, and that stuff has been so awful that it ended up unswallowable and led to this situation. on the one hand, our dispute was settled and P doesn't deserve for any of this to be shared; on the other, P is complicit in the situation that made me adamant i had to share it. after that bit of context/rationale, i will try to be sensitive and focused here and say specifically the things i think sdll should know about this, sticking only to the facts we agreed and outlines of my emotional reactions.
the main thread that directly implicates sdll is that P took many actions that ostracised me from the discord, and the dispute that arose from this turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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in the beginning, we hung out a lot in sdll group settings, and P exuded negativity towards me. which, fine, i didn't need to be friends with everyone. but it was still bad enough that me handling it properly would've caused public tension in sdll, and i was reluctant to because i liked P, had a crush on P even and hoped too much things would improve, because the sdll group dynamic meant a lot to me and i had multiple entirely-positive friendships there, and because i am conflict-averse at heart, particularly around actual friends. so i mostly appeased the behaviour. it was bad enough though that some people in sdll could see P didn't like me just from public interactions.
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the first sign of actual othering was when P spoke, in calls i was in, about things like loving everyone in sdll, wishing people would compliment each other more, and not ignore dms – P didn't do any of this stuff to me personally. ~8 months later, i explicitly found out P didn't mean any of it to me despite me being right there in the calls. but until then, i swung between feeling false hope, suspicion, or just worthlessness at being the one person excluded from this clique despite actually consistently being there.
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P started to join calls i was doing with a good friend of mine ("Q"), in which P disingenuously behaved like a close friend with me in order to get closer to Q, despite the two of them having had unresolved tension from before and it being at least somewhat clear to P that P's presence was not welcome and causing tension with Q. i otoh was none-the-wiser, and continued to be none-the-wiser when P started exploiting my closeness to Q to discuss improving their relationship, despite me having no context at the time, which P characterised as "wanting to talk to someone who will listen, not necessarily out of you being the shoulder to cry on". this point is as serious as it sounds. Q put up with the tense calls partly because it seemed to Q like P and I were becoming close, as it did to me.
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i correctly identified at the time that i was being used, but P denied the whole thing (finally conceded it many months later) and tried to move on like nothing had happened. this caused so much tension for me in sdll, as i found it ever harder to be around my other friends. i used to also have to endure P often making emself the centre of attention in calls while disliking me, which would lead to things like, after i asked someone else about something P didn't care about, P changing the topic within 3s, getting replies, then the person i'd asked wrestling the convo back to what i'd said. these two aspects are why i felt pressed whenever i tried to hang out with my other friends in sdll, and after one incident where i'd planned an event with someone, P joined in and as soon as it ended, tried to do eir own thing with the other person without asking me despite me being right there.
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this led to me leaving sdll temporarily to recover a bit, and P's reaction was to throw it out in #general and ask sdll their thoughts, despite nobody having any real context on what was happening, leading to a public deconstruction of my personality, and scatter to reveal a hidden dislike of me that ey'd been building in emself. i was given no right of reply to the conversation about myself, and my openness to criticism prevented me from taking a stand and saying this was a hella inappropriate thing to do.
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after that, sdll became largely inactive for months, and P and i became friends in private based on P's half-apologies and me being too willing to take olive branches and be friends with people who are present in my life instead of people who actually like me. after i'd broken off the friendship and we'd started arguing, P started venting to almost everyone in sdll about me, giving me no right of reply again, and effectively destroying my old friendships after scatter sided with P and banned me. thus completing the ostracisation that had started in step 2. this will get more extensively explained in part B.
aside from this, our stuff was between us, so i'll just bring up very general trends. the issue here isn't that P disliked me, but rather how P expressed it. P was conflicted about me the entire time we knew each other, mostly for tragically trivial reasons like the way i discussed social justice issues in sdll, and was never honest about how ey felt or where we stood. beyond that, P wanted to use the friendship to eir own ends, to have someone to tell about eir own work in a mutual interest of ours, which led to P initiating DMs with me daily for 5 weeks near the end, but never taking ownership of our past history of close connections (see both #3 and the huge amount of time we'd spent around each other in sdll). it was inevitable given our history that we'd be quite close frends, yet P chose to treat it more like an unwanted romantic interest and deliberately (tho silently) kept a distance, while at the same time eagerly pushing contact with me. as for the conflicts, P continually glossing over them despite having an inner turmoil, and callously dismissing my deepest concerns, made me suspicious and unable to approach P about things, which became a recurring source of depression for me as i slowly uncovered P's true feelings and realised i'd have to throw away, for the first time in my life, all this work i'd done to bond with someone (whom i liked a lot) and repair the relationship many times in the past.
finally, a lot of P's venting in #6 was very (though not deliberately) inaccurate, and after the second incident of me being given no right of reply, it's best for me to tackle that directly – it needs to come from me, not from P.
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i need to emphasise that P's behaviour isn't silly, more like abusive. i am very aware that P uses this kind of diminishing language and hides details in order to not feel like a terrible person and hated by everyone else, but that's precisely why people needed to talk to me about it, so that it can end with a factually accurate representation P and i agree on, and then a group forgiveness and affirmation that things will be ok for us all (so much for that). everyone wants to stay out of it because they don't know how implicated in the situation they are thanks to being right there to witness it.
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me being the only one who feels entitled to having the discussion with P about all this, the only one holding us back from moving on, is a woeful mischaracterisation of the situation. the way i handle this shit is the same as what i'm doing now; i carefully explain to the other side what the problem is, and then let them own up or fuck off. i'm easy either way. how the other side reacts determines what i'll think of the situation and how i'll describe it to others, but i nonetheless have to take that first step to air my complaint, cos i can't suppress the awful shit people do to me – and P and I agree that it was awful. no, what actually happened here was:
- i put out a generic tweet about how hard it was to approach someone you feel abused you
- P initiated discussing the sitation with me and quickly got intensely aggressively defensive
- i revealed part of my complaint (#3 above, before the rest was ready) to calm P down
- P suddenly switched to being really apologetic and hyper-optimistic about making it up to me
- i then started taking my time writing a careful doc for P, which dragged cos of other stuff happening in my life
i fully concede that the way i was handling things, writing a massive essay and carelessly airing my feelings of maybe one day going public with stuff, was very damaging, and it would've been hard for P to get me to switch to a better tack just by emself (tho admittedly P didn't actually try) because in my mind, the effect it was having on P was inevitable and i was trying quite hard to reassure P the whole time. but within 10 mins of our mutual friend discussing this with me, i'd put right all of these problems. look how far communication can go towards helping your friends make up with each other, huh.
sdll is the streamer discord of scatter (twitter.com/cool_scatter, twitch.tv/scatter), a former super mario sunshine speedrunner/streamer who is now known for being on social media (i don't really know how that stuff works). it's a discord i got into via a mutual friend of ours, and hung out a lot, in hours of voice calls, text chats (i posted close to 10k messages), events and such. i had a good connection with that mutual friend, with another friend i made there, with P (which was a sham in hindsight), and a few other light friendships comprising 100% positive interactions and kindness. the discord itself is publicly a casual, positive place, as that's what most of the members seek; i loved discovering music, films, having philosophical conversations, and the general warmth of the people, so the discord meant a lot to me as a refuge from my dismal life in 2020/1.
but yeah, the whole reason i'm writing this is that looks are deceiving. my conflict with P, despite me making some harmful errors after trying to resolve P's wrongdoing, was one where i was unambiguously the victim, having been nothing but kind and loving to P before we fell out, and somehow, sdll turned their backs on me, with scatter intervening in a totally inappropriate way, and i lost multiple friendships as well as a very positive social group over it. that's the thing to emphasise for me, the key point that revolves in my head for why i feel like shit and am writing this. so again, lemme be rational, lemme disassemble sdll.
sdll is a clique, and it's easy to overlook this when you can't imagine a situation where you'd be banished from it for doing nothing wrong, but it's more astute to remember that people are awful and such toxic environments, you should never set foot in. the biggest tell is that there's a #trusted channel that everyone who spoke in sdll regularly except me was a part of. which i didn't see so didn't think about, but also probably would've let slide becauuussseee, uh, i was the newest member so it was fine? maybe? i just thought i had nothing to hide and there was no way in hell something like this could ever happen to me. but, that's the thing – it's happened before to others. the point of that channel is to discuss dramas in disputes between people in the clique and people outside the clique, entrenching the clique, and it happens again and again. so it wasn't exactly the move for me to even make friends in this discord – ignoring the fact that friends are friends and you're drawn to them regardless of where you talk and these ridiculous political machinations.
one thing that's gone completely unaddressed in sdll is P's extensive presence while having conflict with more people than anyone else there, which has had consequences for multiple people r.e. participation in sdll. the problem for me wasn't just how P's attitude towards me led to direct harm, but also how P's attitude towards everyone else clinched my ostracisation. the key thing P does is judge who's close to whom. P not only felt close to everyone who talks in sdll except me (which, per everything i've said so far, is already a disaster), but P also decided that i wasn't close with many of my friends, and therefore it was appropriate to pull them into this shitfest on P's side (alongside the rest of the discord somehow) via the #trusted channel. i'm fairly sure this notion of closeness is illusory and based on insecurities around making friends, so while it's personal to everyone how they feel about their friends, what i'm clapping back at here is this interpretation being forced over the situation without me being able to speak. P's narrative is consistently like this – when one person says "i don't expect [me] to go into detail cos we weren't that close", P reinterprets that as "i heard back from some of them that they barely knew you even though you'd had good interactions". P also used it as a reason to not let me have my say, that "most of [sdll] don't care to interact with [me] anyway from what [P] gathered".
mate, i literally just wanted organic friendships without other people intervening in them or deciding who's close and who isn't. they are what they are, and that's what most people want from sdll anyway. plus, there's no acknowledgement that (1) one of the principal reasons i couldn't develop friendships in sdll was P's overwhelming negative impact on me both there and in my own life thanks to this year-long tension P was largely responsible for, and also (2) no acknowledgement that people in sdll helping P though the situation consolidates their bonds and leaves me high and dry.
let me first state the obvious by saying that intervening in a situation like this to the detriment of the person on the other side of the conflict to the one confiding in you is a reprehensible thing to do and reveals a lot of the darkness in scatter's personality. that's the key difference here – both P and I had to confide in others in ways that made the other person look bad, but the people I confided in are good people who'd never negatively intervene, and are in fact building bridges with P to show that forgiveness should lie at the end of all of this.
scatter banned me from sdll because of the negative impact the fallout of our conflict was having on P and me – banned me specifically. scatter made it clear that ey didn't care to know any of my side of the story, that the conflict was just a "falling out", that i was the one entitled to continuing the discussion (for which i explained i wasn't at the end of part A), that the conflict was too far gone to resolve (no, P and i fully resolved it thereafter, completely by ourselves as well). scatter questioned why P's and my mutual friend was trying to help us resolve our conflict, saying his selflessness was being abused and we should keep him out of it, not realising both P and i would do exactly the same thing if it fell to us. scatter echoed part of a message from someone else who intervened on the side of P, with the most verbally abusive message i've ever received btw, which again totally mischaracterised the situation. scatter said "from my end this discussion is over" and then didn't reach out to me at all after P explained we'd made up. this is a key reason i'm sending this out in public rather than to scatter.
and the other key reason is that scatter is extremely hostile and, from where my mental health has gotten to, i realised i couldn't afford to even directly speak to em about this again at all, because in our previous message, i had to disarm the hostility before being able to have the conversation. "'are u willing to talk or am i just cancelled?' are you kidding me? way to prove [verbal abuser]'s point about your victim complex. I'm not trying to fucking cancel you I just don't want you in my discord after everything that's been happening"; "ok. i was going to ignore this, but congratulations, i can't. what the hell are you talking about with [ambiguous accusation i'd made]".
this hostility has caused 2 other important problems as well. the smaller problem is that the underlying tensions that built between me and scatter from, again, me debating things in ways ey found frustrating and such things, led em to attack me during sdll's first group-wide deconstruction of me while i wasn't there to defend myself – as an aside, i find it crazy that i allowed this deconstruction to happen in the first place; i was naïve, too open to criticism and willing to try to improve myself, to spot that if it happened once, it'd happen again, and the second time is when i'd get kicked out of the group.
the bigger problem is that my two friends in sdll who actually know me both said to me that they were unwilling to confront this hostility, both in scatter and the culture ey'd built in sdll. i think literally all but two of the people i regularly interacted with have discussed this stuff in private among themselves, particularly the stuff that's extremely relevant to me, namely constant stoking of conflict between people without willingness to resolve it ("#trusted" lmao) and getting punches in on people outside the clique that have done something wrong to a member, even people who had nothing to do with the discord (cough papaccino???). in fact, that example i just gave is one where the culture of the discord directly adversely impacted one of its members by gassing up his negative conflict-stoking tendency, which he's now fully outgrown. i also tie the trend of encouraging aggression towards randoms on twitter over social justice disputes to this problem as well.
and i tie all that back to scatter. in my introduction to sdll above, i characterised it as a positive place where people find valuable friendships over kindness and shared interests, and nobody wants to lose that. so negative undercurrents are ignored and scatter not spoken to, because people want to preserve their friendships. and it's a natural human thing, that nobody will take a stand even after such outrageously undeserved consequences happen to someone who isn't you, to try to just be ok with the victim personally and gloss over the issue cos surely it won't happen to you. they just say "it sucks". look, i get it – one of my worst-ever moments as a person was when my friend tried to rape someone i wasn't close to, and i looked at the evidence of his misogynistic upbringing + alcoholism, attitude + changes he was making to combat those, and uncritically decided to avoid the subject and carry on as normal. i was a coward who wanted to preserve a friendship. that's wayyy worse than this, but it's the same idea. none of what happened to me would've happened if i hadn't fallen foul of P's personality, something P has owned up to and will doubtless improve, but when something like this happens to a newer member from an older one, sdll's culture just goes "see ya".
there was this one time when someone messaged scatter on twitch asking nicely to claim eir twitch handle. this person was some dimwit claiming to be "making inroads into the online electronic sphere" or some shit, but had no streams and only a single twitch clip, of someone else's hot-tub stream or something (it was geniunely hilarious). scatter actually replied to this person "go jerk off to your clip and leave me alone" owtte. people in sdll said, like, "LMAO", "you didn't have to do em like that" etc.. but i think this anecdote encapsulates everything i've spoken about here, or at least it convinced me of the things i've been saying. i've long been aware, i just never fathomed that me getting mistreated by one of sdll's inner circle, having done almost nothing wrong, would lead to it all coming down on me. there's a lot of other evidence like this both of who scatter is and of how others won't confront scatter to preserve friendships. it's about dehumanisation, the preserve of the abstract internet personality, to say things online you'd never say to someone's face, to go through life continually falling out with people and declaring conflicts "too far gone". i spotted this, which is why my strategy with P was "humanisation", after scatter had advised em to cut contact, and that's why it worked.
the last thing i'll do is give an interpretation of sdll's culture that a member sent me after my first deconstruction. it was a suspicion back then but exactly what's happened now. i think it's less about enjoying drama, more about wanting to preserve friendships at the expense of confronting toxicity, like i said before. either way, i'm personally willing to really go in on this issue with my interpretations after what scatter did to me, but i think the evidence really is all over this situation. and i'm just hoping that people see from the example of what happened to me that it's a big fucking deal.
i have to reiterate that this shit's been going on for over 2 months and the primary point of this doc is to get it off my back. 2 weeks ago, i wanted to mutually part ways with P for a period for us to heal, but the situation with sdll made it impossible for me. so it's just been 2 weeks of further agony. i want those added back onto the time apart btw. and it's funny calling this healing for me, because my life is so destroyed now that idk what that could mean (more on that later). r.e. sdll, i still don't wanna talk to scatter cos that's become a trigger at this point. i feel negative towards the friend who ignored me, but i'm calm with everyone else. with P, i decided to try to not let any further shit get added onto the stack of shit i have to get over; ofc, me posting this may well change things completely from P's side. i'll just take that as it comes. but yeah, in general, i've never been one to shy away from making up with people, so i'll be open to talking. not for a week though cos i need to just fuck off and think about my irl life for the first time in over a month. to everyone, i'm really sorry i posted this. i could see no other way out.
i just don't even know what to say anymore. i've long felt that, both with my mental health in general and my problems with sdll, people had been sympathetic until things got so out of control that they got out of their depth and kept their distance. that's where i am now. being free from this means i can finally seek help. but yeah, first my friend said that this stuff made him uncomfortable being in sdll, but now it's so bad that there's nothing for it but for him and the others to go on as normal without me. i really respect some of my friends for how they're building bridges with P despite everything i've told them, and promoting forgiveness and understanding, cos it shows to me that i picked the right people to be friends with. but when i see, by contrast, nobody from sdll reach out to me and some ignore me instead, i feel like absolute shit. and so uncomfortable being around anyone who knows these people, including all of those friends.
i feel so uncomfortable with myself, after having a close friendship plus a close group dynamic reduced to nothing, given my history of not having close friends and being the outsider in 2 other groups of friends so far. i think the things i value about myself and offer to others are so abusable, plus i come across so threateningly, that i can't see myself trying to make friends with anyone anymore, and am drifting towards this idea of not caring about others anymore and keeping away from people unless i want something from them. live like a hermit and find joy only in non-human things. but my craving for bonding and intimacy isn't gonna go away either, cos that's what pushed me towards P and sdll, only to amount to nothing. and that's the clash. ever since one week in august when people put me under pressure by applying silence and closing ranks, for 3 days of anxiety, fever dreams, losing a kilo of weight (while already being underweight lol), and the most active suicide ideation i've ever had, i realised that unlike the 2 other things that have made me suicidal, this is the only one that still makes me feel i'd rather be dead even when i'm kind of happy and peaceful. cos there's nothing stopping those 3 days from happening again. that clash i mentioned will stay with me, and such fundamental problems in my life have never been solved.
that's all there is to say i think for now. i think things have gone past the point of people being able to understand what i've been through, or care about me or for me, past the point of me having friendships i can maintain. i hope this is just a temporary distress but i guess i moreso wanted to give an explanation for if anything bad happened to me (not to guilt anyone tho, please). i only really wanted to be in mutually caring and supportive relationships, and to build by doing things and being creative with people. and i just hate that i keep burdening people with stupid fucking intimidating walls of text and incredible situations no-one can begin to tackle. i can't not be myself with these things – my eloquence, my patience, how carefully and slowly i think things through before acting. i just don't want to impact on people or be impacted anymore. don't wanna keep trying to fit in. that's all.
