The Dark Ledger Of Asher Wolfstein (part 2)

The Awful Truth

Sometimes to his benefit, but often to his detriment, Asher doesn't hide. I've lived in his hometown. I've met his lifelong friends, family, and neighbors. It may sound unbelievable, and it's up to you whether you believe it or not, but from experience, he's always been some form of what you see today with no obscurities.

This is why the dysfunction multiplies: everyone is relating to a phantom mask they believe exists, rather than to the reality that is right in front of them. The containers don't keep cracking under the weight of Asher's deranged force of will, but because people are relating to what is not there.

They act on assumptions, then suffer the consequences of their own invention. It's a cycle that, by design, feeds itself.

What I'm describing isn't new to us. However, what I've been uniquely appalled at now is how unwilling people are to believe him the first time, even though they all admit it's exactly what they should do. Instead, they cling to the mask idea because it validates their worldviews and comforts their biases. It may be possible that someone's inability to believe such an honest portrayal may have some direct relation with how much they themselves may mask, since a good amount of the assumptions going around seem to follow the reasoning that 'that's not how people work... because it's not how the questioner in question works, and generalizes that condition to the entirety of human experience.

So now we've moved onto the the Disqualification of Direct Speech

This is the second stage of erasure: the point at which words stop being heard as words.

When Asher speaks, his language is treated as a clue to be decoded, as a symptom. The act of speaking is instead transformed into  proof of something hidden: volatility, compulsion, illness, take your pick.
 
A desire for precision becomes obsession. Accurate recall is tinged with the suspicion of pathology and painted as 'holding on' to things. If he's consistent, then it must be fixation.

The very attributes that make him reliable in one sense are flipped into proof of unreliability in another. What would normally be strengths like attention to detail, honesty, clarity - are treated as signals of instability.

This is how erasure accelerates.

Once you declare someone’s words unreliable, someone else steps into the vacuum. That is the interpreter.

The interpreter doesn't need evidence at this point,  only the authority to say: “What he really means is…”

Every perceived contradiction, spiral and act of blunt sincerity becomes theirs to explain. It's a stripping of authorship that eventually leaves the person as inconsequential- their presence isn't needed anymore, because their fictitious counterpart is now planted firmly in his place.  Contrary to what many people believe, Asher is hyper aware. Regarding this, he's said to me "it's like I don't even need to exist, like I don't even need to be there anymore." That sentiment is profoundly disturbing to someone with a borderline personality disorder who was given reason to believe they were in a close friendship for five years- talk about abandonment.  

What happens afterwards, in this situation, it is even more disquieting:

Because the narrator now controls this fictitious version of the person, like a marionette, the narrator doesn't only have the power to explain the present, but also has the power to re-write the past. Since no-one is actually listening to the individual, but instead paying attention to the image the narrator is painting, the narrator can recast all past relationship with the person, including their own, in a vastly different light. Actions that the narrator may have a cause to regret can become influenced by the erased individual in some recent or distant past. Past demands and coercion can be alluded to while withholding proof for the sake of privacy.

The erased individual now, and for the foreseeable future, can be a font of new revelations that can be created whole cloth for many different purposes- exculpating the past, explaining the present, or justifying the future. 

People often quote that you should believe people when they tell you who they are. In practice, when it comes to people like Asher, this principle is discarded. Their statements are reclassified as camouflage, their accounts are rejected in favor of someone else’s narrative overlay.

In fact, the same individuals who scold others online for ignoring marginalized voices will, in the next moment, argue that their targets' own words cannot be trusted. The dysfunction is not born from someone hiding behind obscurity. It is born of people refusing to accept that someone could mean what they say about themselves.

The sequence looks something like this:

1. A says X.
2. Listeners decide X is a “mask.”
3. Interpreters declare X means Y.
4. Audience believes Y, dismisses X.
5. A insists, again, X is X.
6. Audience grows hostile at the “insistence.” If A persists, and most people in this situation will persist when there is a matter of truth involved, the audience may brandish mental health stigma by pointing out he is being obsessive or deranged, or dismiss his complaints altogether.

The system sustains itself. The insistence on clarity is taken as proof of deception. Attempting to reclaim authorship can be rebranded as proof of unreliability and an attempt, ironically, at stifling the narrator's freedom of speech.

The only way out of this loop is for people to do the very thing they resist: take someone's words as they are, not as someone else’s performance piece.

Why is this so hard? Because the mask is comforting.

The mask allows people to fit the erased individual into their worldview. It validates the belief that everyone must ultimately conform to a familiar pattern: either broken and in need of fixing, or wicked and in need of punishing. You can try to deny this, but that's very much the implicit framework behind terms such as "good crazy" and "bad crazy." 

If the individual refuses to be categorized as either, the cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable. It is easier to insist that he must secretly be one of those categories, and that his refusal is just denial.

That is projection. And it is projection weaponized:

He cannot mean what he says.
He must mean something else.
And I, the interpreter, know what that is.
The interpreter now becomes a full-time ventriloquist.  

The first symptom of erasure is not silence. It is mistranslation.

The Silence

Once words are stolen, nothing else can survive intact. Actions are reinterpreted and identity itself becomes pliable clay in someone else’s hands. Erasure is not accomplished by gagging a person, it's accomplished by trapping them into such a situation that no matter what they might say, their words are the only ones that aren't heeded.
 
So where does that leave us? With the same triad as before: Witness, Weigh, Judge. 

Asher does not hide. He never has. The phantom mask is what others bring to him, not what he wears. And until that is recognized, the cycle will repeat: words dismissed, masks imposed, stories stolen.

That is the second step of the awful truth.

The question that follows is simple, and far more uncomfortable than most will admit:

If his words are not permitted to mean what they say, then whose words are? And is that subject to change? And who decides that?