Necessary Actions

A few nights ago, I confiscated Asher's phone and restricted his Internet access. With the situation proving resistant to de-escalation, these are the measures I've determined are necessary. Patterns have become an increasing challenge to manage, and without intervention, the risks to stability only grow. My current role involves establishing clear boundaries that previously failed due to a lack of accountability.

This is not an action I take lightly, but one I regard as unavoidable. The conditions surrounding Asher's behavior persist despite repeated attempts at dialogue and I am left with little choice but to step in directly.

I don't share this to sensationalize, attack, or procure sympathy. It's difficult to attack something when what's being dealt with isn't clear, and the sensationalizing is part of that problem. It's been made very clear that sympathy won't be forthcoming.


Many who encounter Asher, especially online, see only fragments, moments, or impressions: some revealing, some distorted, all nevertheless are incomplete. This is true of everyone. However, when the individual in question is strange, memorable, or difficult, the effect becomes exaggerated.

I'd like to set out, with honesty, what I have witnessed and lived alongside. An accounting, if you will.

Far from drafting a convenient caricature of someone who suffers from extremes, I'm speaking of a complicated life, Asher's life, as I have observed for the last twenty years. From early struggles that shaped his way of moving through the world for the better, to the intensity that makes him both magnetic and difficult. 


It has a rhythm many of you will recognize, the telltale signs of something not readily visible. A genuinely frightening disorder that shapes his perception and conduct, a condition that has too often dictated the course of his relationships and decisions. It is not an overshadowing he chooses to reside under. It is a dynamic he chooses not to indulge in. He is not always successful, but after 24 years of working on it, he tends to fare better than most.


He is not alone in this; he is not unique in carrying the weight of an unruly mind. He is like many of you, living with a disability that can distort perception and exacerbate conflict.

I do not share in that disorder; I do not share in any disorder. The mental health system has only been part of my life by proxy. But I have lived close enough, and long enough, to see how such a grandiose disorder works, how it spreads, and how it can easily turn any spark into a raging fire for better or for worse. Twenty years with a severely Borderline individual is a rarity, and one that I treasure.

More crucially, I have seen how this present crisis was not born in a vacuum. It continues to be accelerated, inflamed, and amplified by one person who set it in motion, deliberately or not. The same person benefits from its chaos in ways that are not immediately obvious. But they will be, in the fullness of time. 


Without the setup of a volatile situation and the repercussions of its complete abandonment, Asher's inevitable difficulties at the relationship's end would have remained survivable. In the majority of his relationships, of which I've seen a fair share, that has been the case.

But rather than aim towards even the most remote forms of a fair resolution, people involved in the situation steer it directly towards ridiculous and dangerous heights, which is where it rests today. That external spark and influence, all of which were unnecessary, cannot be ignored. Asher has borne the weight of its fallout as it rages into a bonfire with more and more being added to the pile.

The Passion Players

Before continuing, I need to address something that has made this entire ordeal worse: the endless moralizing. 

It's around everyone involved, as if we were all characters trapped beneath the enchantment of a narrator, to be cast as villain, victim, or savior in some heavy-handed morality play. So much is drenched in tones of good and bad and is described, literally, as good or bad.

Despite the temptation, dysfunction cannot be understood in the same way as one might speak of sin or virtue without risking discrimination. Stigma. 

With subtle and consistent framing, this over-moralization has insidiously ensnared everyone in an enduring psychological grasp far more influential than the actual, mundane events.

This is not helpful.

What is helpful is to aim for an elaboration on simply what is real, what is not, and what's the difference. 

Before morality can offer accurate judgment,  one has to know what has happened and who is responsible.

So what matters first are the mechanics: actions and their consequences within their frames. Every choice lives inside a frame made up of roles, contexts, and responsibilities. If you try to separate the act from the frame, you end up with nothing to hold accountable, and there can't be a disconnect without some part suffering for it. Trust exists at the intersection where all these elements meet, and that is where responsibility resides.

The crux of the question is whether people took responsibility for what followed their choices. Asher is responsible for his actions and their consequences just as each of us is responsible for ours.

But to determine responsibility, we must establish who did what, why, and what happened: A does B, B produces C, and C leads to D. Each action and corresponding container are bound together, with each consequence flowing into the next. That is the only ground firm enough to stand on. Who's right and who's wrong can come later.

What I know is that, when it comes to Asher, people talk about Asher as though he hides behind a façade, as if the surface is false and the absolute truth lies deeper, darker, elsewhere.

But that is a mistake.  If Asher says something, he means it, which is a way of saying he doesn't lie. 

The intensity, the thought, the almost-too-good consistency, the intimidating memory, the spirals… they are not disguises; they are Asher himself. It's not a performance.

Unfortunately, I know it's easier for people to imagine they 'really know better.'

It seems like they think that behind the outbursts, brilliance, volatility, and abrasiveness lies a secret persona waiting to be uncovered, mollified or conquered so that he may rejoin the pack. He can't really mean some of the things he says, because who says that, right? But that's a projection that falls relatively short and does not reflect reality. Not everyone is the same. People are different, and to assume your experiences are a universal constant by which everyone has to be measured is incredibly short-sighted and self-involved.

And that's the point that this, the first installment, is meant to discuss- the first step in the erasure of another individual. 

How Do You Erase A Person?

The Sting of Stigma

The most common case of individual erasure happens when a person's narrative has been co-opted by third parties, often ones with greater social or media reach. The methods by which this is accomplished can vary in execution, but it boils down to one very important motivation: the subversion of the focal point of one person's narrative. By one way or another, the person's own account of their own motives, thoughts and feelings needs to be regarded as an unreliable secondary source.

This can be done by layering arguments that question the person's sanity or their ability to form coherent thought. Whether the person is to be portrayed as unhinged or a buzzsaw of lunacy, for example, or incomprehensible, the important thing that the message needs to carry is: This person is not lucid. This person is not reliable. 

If done consistently enough, this form of third-party gaslighting can leverage mental health stigma against a target rather effectively if the person does live with a diagnosis. Our society is already prone to see individuals with mental health issues as untrustworthy, dangerous, deluded and incapable of relating to reality in varying degrees. Sensationalized and inaccurate portrayals in storytelling media and literature have already laid a good amount of the groundwork for this approach to be particularly effective. It figuratively provides a ready-made arsenal to be used at one's discretion.  

In fact, one of Asher's early experiences with erasure came at the hands of his roommate in college. A child of privilege who had flown in late for the semester in his own private jet, he was also selling drugs out of his dorm room, which Asher knew. When he found out that Asher knew, he immediately worked towards weaponizing Asher's mental health difficulties by painting him as a threat when no threat existed, resulting in Asher having to drop out of college due to a mental health crisis where the only person he tried to harm was himself. The wealthy kid, though, was given a 'rehabilitation' dorm. Narrative.

This sort of erasure hinges upon one party positing themselves as a narrative authority via several methods. The first and most effective one is by creating a narrative of apparent reasonableness. So, let's pretend that that's your goal. How do you do this?  I'll tell you.

To accomplish this, you have to set up a structure by which the things you say and do are seen through a lens that presupposes all your actions stem from a rational or reasonable process, even if they do not.

Secondary Authorship

Narrative overlay is incredibly powerful. Humans have a tendency to think in story- something that philosophers from Slavoj Žižek to writers like Terry Pratchett have centered in their works. Pratchett calls us Pans Narrans- the storytelling ape, because that is how we establish causal links between events in our minds and how we package meaning. Whosoever finds a way to control the story, therefore, controls everything, and the best way for one party to wrest a third party's stories away from them is to convince the listeners  that the individual should not be entrusted with their own story. 

This relies upon vagueness. The human mind is very good at detecting patterns, it's one of the things that not only have primed our survival, but also allowed us to categorize knowledge via taxonomies. We start from concrete examples and, through a process of abstraction, we eventually categorize things by associating them with a wide network of abstracted concepts. So, for example, if I say "Mario" to you and you are a gamer, the abstractions that will shape the concept in your mind are formed by 'video games' and all the knowledge you have in those sub-categories, such as 'platformer',  but you'll also think of 'Plumber', 'Mushrooms',  'Princess',  etcetera. But these are all higher abstractions at which you have arrived after your own personal frame of reference helped form them.

So, for example, if I tell you that Bloodstained: Ritual Of the Night is a 'Metroidvania' game, as a gamer you probably know all of the major features that you can expect from it. And, say, if I were to call Stardew Valley a 'Metroidvania' game, if you have any knowledge about that title, you will give me a very long look and wonder what on earth is wrong with me.

So, how does this all fit in with vagueness? Well, because there is a way to sort of take advantage of this process that our brains do to integrate information, in order to commandeer it, while establishing the appearance of credibility, which is the scaffolding upon which this effort will depend.

If you cultivate and weaponize a highly polarized environment, for example, you can easily wield some common narratives that you can insert in order to create asymmetry. If the person you intend to erase is prone to lengthy exchanges in social media, as an example, it can be useful to you. Within the context of capsule-sized social media, any actual meaningful conversations or statements will spill over into several posts. It's in the nature of most western languages to do so. But the design of the environment creates a false sense of excess by its very interface. A series of posts trying to string a cogent argument that would have only made a very moderately-sized forum response can seem positively enormous on X or Bluesky.  

By borrowing the classic troll narrative that equates any exchange of any length with a psychological imbalance, you can exaggerate the impression that these soundbite-shaped platforms create by claiming that someone's posting is 'unhinged', 'deranged', or 'incomprehensible' because of their length and that, therefore, they must be posting while emotional, and therefore 'exploding' or 'blowing up.' If you've done your job right and have also consistently told people observing you that you are the reasonable one, the narrative will stick. Even if you, as well, have fired off your own considerable share of lengthy posts. With the first narrative lens in place, your audience will see your posts as reasoned argumentation and your targets' as deranged ramblings despite the fact that whatever its length- the length of someone's message alone does not have a correct correlation to their mental state or their stability.

The second lens that needs to be in place is the expectation of public privacy. This is a narrative double standard by which you posit that only the things that you bring up in public are appropriate to discuss, and that any further reveal of details by other parties constitutes a violation of your privacy. If this person has already been afflicted by the 'derangement' lens, any evidence they put forth to counteract your claims will then be seen as nothing more than a pathological response of their own ailment *and* a violation of your boundaries, which is a leveraging of moralistic condemnation. You being the 'reasonable one' is the scaffolding that makes this narrative stick. 

The Stolen Voice

Now comes the pre-emption of the full narrative. If you've carefully and successfully leveraged the mental health stigma against your target, the next step is easy, and one that you've already probably practiced. You only share what details are necessary for your purpose, in the most vague terms possible. This is a deliberate stripping of context and history and relies upon your audience knowing you more than they know the other individual. By this point, however, you're ensuring that your audience doesn't want to know the individual because of the preceding steps. Not only that, but if they react with any public outrage, anger or similar reactions, you can wield that as evidence that reinforces your points about them, even if you were the inciting party to the incident that caused them to react.  

Once you have that framework in place and you've created an environment where vagueness is regarded as ethical, your audience won't question the missing elements of any one account or another. They will attribute the vagueness to things such as discretion, scruples or similar attributes because the lens of reasonableness is in place- and if the other party counteracts with data, you can claim it doesn't have the full context while also not providing what is supposedly missing, because you've set that up as the ethical position. With this, the asymmetry begins to take full effect because you are an authoritative source now, and the other party is suspect. Now comes the point where you commandeer the process for other people. If this third party can't be considered as reliable even about themselves because they're so 'unhinged', then you can use the bolster of reasonableness you've cultivated to do something very important.

You become the interpreter.

By that, I mean that every action that this other person takes is not seen as within the container of that person's agency, it's seen through yours. The lenses that are put in place create a narrative about this person that effectively creates a figurative moat around them. Nobody wants to be close enough to understand, and any friction with them is seen through a distortion. The individual can't, for example, be mad about someone's actions because of what that person did. They are mad b because they are- insert your favorite tag-term here: Unhinged, incomprehensible, etcetera. So obviously people won't look at that person's actions and words by themselves, there's already a narrative in process that tells them DANGER, DANGER, WILL ROBINSON, they can't and shouldn't.

So, who can explain why they do things?

Well, of course, you can. Because, you see, the framework in place has now cut out the part of abstraction forming where someone  gathers data from personal experience and firsthand knowledge. The subject now becomes a removed party, unknowable because they don't know themselves- which is ultimately one of the cornerstones basic assumptions of mental health stigma. It requires a wise mentor figure to untangle the dark and twisty passages of that mind- so a therapist, or someone who appears well-versed in similar subjects can take over.
 
And then, you explain this person's motives, mental state and causes for them, to the audience. They will not look to this person for confirmation because, after all, if they're not in touch with reality- why bother? The abstraction process is broken in the minds of the audience, and now you can patch in associated concepts to supplement the missing links, which is ideal to avoid close examination or questioning. You can claim that someone's angry reactions, rhetoric and public speech are actually driven by self-loathing, for example, or jealousy, or the fact that they pine after your attention in some form or another, or that they hate you, or that they're struggling with their own dark demons and have cast you as the unfair embodied fulcrum of that torvid maelstrom because then they don't have to deal with it.  All of those things then become associated with that person in the minds of the audience. You've removed all important details that might contradict that through vagueness, and have rendered the target unreliable and untrustworthy, so whatever it is that you say will be what your audience thinks of when the subject's name comes up. Commandeered abstraction complete. That person's story is no longer theirs to tell, and you now control their narrative.

See how that works?

There's a reason professional therapists don't do this without permission, because it's unethical. The greater therapeutic body goes against those who do it for third parties they're not treating, hence the disclaimers.

Breaking Up The Narrative

So, then, what do you do? How can you notice if this is the kind of messaging you're getting? How do you know if you've participated in the erasure of an individual without realizing it?

Well, Mister Roger's mother would say, if she ever tackled this subject, "Look to the explainers." Look to people who actively practice the things I pointed out. Is the entire suite of actions by one person or a group of people explained away by reductive explanations that come from people who aren't the persons in question? Perhaps you should pause and consider whether it is it a very convenient explanation- perhaps too convenient. Perhaps you should also pause and look at what those people are actually saying. 

Is mental health stigma being cast to paint someone as impenetrable and incomprehensible? You should, at least, be informed enough to  know that outside of the most extreme cases of schizoaffective disorder manifestations, schizophrenic episodes, psychotic breaks, Aphasia, Verbigeration, Echolalia and dementia, the majority of mental health ad neuropsychiatric conditions do not, in fact, render someone incomprehensible. And by accepting the simplistic explanation that "She's crazy, so of course she doesn't make any sense," you're participating in mental health stigma.  

How do you fight it? How do you stop being part of that?

 Well, that requires a potential level of discomfort in our current society. You have to actually listen to what someone is saying. Not listening to what you think that person is saying, not listening to what someone else tells you about what they're *actually* saying. Once you've listened to their actual words, read their *actual* words, not reductions or summaries by other people, then you can turn your attention to their actions and compare them to their words. Listen, and observe- Witness.

Are they talking about kindness while being cruel? Are they talking about enforcing their boundaries and walking away, but turn around and come right back into the conversation? Are they decrying breaches of confidentiality while revealing people's personal details? Do they preach forgiveness while holding on to grudges like an Olympic sport? Do they make claims of truth or falsehood while providing no evidence? That is the first point of forming your abstraction about someone accurately: does word match deed?

If it does, then you can assume you can take that person as reliable- in that instance. You should never abstract that a person is *always* going to be this or that, only that they are *generally* this way or another until your knowledge of that person is absolutely thorough. And that will take years if you know them personally- and never if you only know them online. This is so you don't fall into the same mistake I have fallen into in the past and end up adopting blind spots.

If word and deed don't match, then comes examination. Why would someone say what they said if their actions show otherwise? That's where you try to gather more information to see if there's something you're missing. Always try to observe your primary source- that person. The "why" can be tricky and you may never actually know it, all you can know is that they haven't been straight with you. And you should be especially suspicious of people who verbally tout their virtues, people who will mention how honest they are, how much integrity and consistency they have -- out of danger that you may have already made abstractions about them that grant them trust they may not deserve and cause you to not look at their actions too closely. 

This is the part where you're weighing the evidence you have witnessed. Once you've ascertained the consistency of claims, you can then get to the moral part. It's at that point where you can actually pass a judgement on what the evidence tells you about a person or the situation- not before. And judgement is necessary to survive- you can't not decide whether something is good or bad for your health, mental or otherwise, because then the repercussions of not judging will eventually affect you. 

Also, be prepared to adjust your judgement when new evidence comes to light, or if something is pointed out that you may have missed before and the logic actually checks out. At those times, you can review the evidence, the knowledge, your abstractions, and render a new judgement based on it.

The Three Pillars 

So, the way to break narrative erasure is pretty straight forward:

Witness, Weight and Judge.
Judgement without Witnessing is prejudice at worst, and ignorance at best.
Witnessing without Judgement is being complicit.

Asher is not concealing himself. He is not playing at being someone else. If this rings hollow due to a pervasive dissonance, then I am here to tell everyone that the dissonance people are experiencing stems from believing others when they layer stories over him, rather than from his hiding.

It's fine to believe that someone is an asshole, but what's not fine is presenting that as fact- just because you believe something, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's true.

But that's as far as we'll go today. I want you to listen to the words I've said and ponder them. Perhaps even put them into action and look around you. You may find that there are stories in place the likes of which you weren't even aware you bought into.

Until next time, I'll talk to you on our next installment.