flâneur

I was not acting like me, are you acting like you?

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About two years ago, someone betrayed me socially in a deeply violating and novel way. It was a betrayal that I couldn’t have expected, because I’d never heard of anything like it. Everybody who heard the story was like, “What the fuck, that can happen?” Funnily enough, I actually had an intuition about what was transpiring, before I found out—I thought, okay, wait, did person X do bizarre thing Y? It was a ridiculous enough possibility that a therapist friend told me that such paranoid thoughts evidenced a state of emotional activation, and that I should be skeptical of my speculation. That was a fair read of the situation. And yet my paranoid intuition turned out to be the truth. The betrayal didn’t cause any material damage to my life. But it did present a novel way in which someone could be untrustworthy, which, in turn, made it clear that I was somewhat naive about how people can act towards me. For the next year and a half of my life, I was uncharacteristically introverted. Usual

About two years ago, someone betrayed me socially in a deeply violating and novel way. It was a betrayal that I couldn’t have expected, because I’d never heard of anything like it. Everybody who heard the story was like, “What the fuck, that can happen?” Funnily enough, I actually had an intuition about what was transpiring, before I found out—I thought, okay, wait, did person X do bizarre thing Y? It was a ridiculous enough possibility that a therapist friend told me that such paranoid thoughts evidenced a state of emotional activation, and that I should be skeptical of my speculation. That…

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