# Meet Concerned Citizen

(*[Here's the post](https://imgur.com/a/EL4XAnV) if you're curious. No idea what this is about? Don't worry, you won't have to dig too deep. You'll be able to follow along without it though, I think.*)


This is Concerned Citizen. CC posed as my friend during a depressive episode I fell into back in March, and after I started to trust him, abused that trust by using dishonest out-of-context screenshots to engage in a month-long harassment campaign against me, drumming up vicious hatred on a server I was banned in and had no ability to respond to. In a class act, he also impersonated my girlfriend (lorelei/Diane) to throw suspicion onto her, and cajoled my other girlfriend (seph/Persephone) into spinning tall-tales about me, only a few weeks after a very emotional breakup.

### Why??

This is what I know at the moment. He appears to be either part of, or sympathetic to a cult who - and I'll admit this candidly - I grifted around $15,000 (current valuation) in ethereum from in 2019 to pay for my HRT and electrolysis back when my then-transphobic parents controlled my bank accounts.

I didn't regret that transaction until two weeks ago, when they sent my full name, my suburb, and my date of birth to every single r/genzedong moderator and threatened to post more in 36 hours unless I returned it. (I lost the private key moving to a new computer, so that's a no-can-do. Still kicking myself over it.)

In other words, very pleasant people with a very noble agenda.

CC is also just a *very* stubborn, single-minded person. You know the kind of guy who thinks he's a crusader for justice and isn't deterred by anything once you set him off in one particular direction? Who thinks in terms of absolute binaries of good and evil? Take that guy and let three manipulative cult leaders work on him for two months. I honestly pity him.

### Isn't this just Very Online internet drama?

Well, uhhhh, you're not wrong. I kinda put off writing up this post for a long time because the claims made about me were so absurd I considered it to be beneath me to bother giving it any airtime. I'm a musician studying to be an industrial psychologist, I have other priorities. That said, I also do competitive debating and the cartoonishly villainous caricature of me that CC constructed falls apart more easily than wet toilet-paper, so I couldn't resist tearing it down.

Maybe you're wondering what the context to this screenshot is.

# 1


Mucho texto.

TL;DR: I was explaining object relations psychotherapy (badly), not commenting on my personal therapy style. Honest opinion? Object-relations is ideological formaldehyde injected into the decaying corpse of Freudianism. I mean, lying on a couch and talking about your mother for half an hour a week works for some people. Different psychoanalytic strokes for different folks. I'm just not a big fan of it.

### But is he *kinda* right? Even a little?

Nope. To me, this whole "Cassia misuses her position as an unregistered internet therapist to mistreat people like some kind of dollar-store MKULTRA programme" narrative is just plain bizarre. It's probably the worst narrative CC could have chosen. It's not just spin, it's a 180 degree rotation from reality.

I have been sympathetic, altruistic, and positive as possible in every server I've been in because I want everyone I know to be better off for having met me. To put it bluntly, I get a good gooey emotional kick out of solving people's problems compassionately and watching them heal, become stronger, and become better versions of themselves. That's the whole reason I'm in this biz.

Here's the mental health server CC is talking about: https://discord.gg/zsmgTpSPAn. I'm annoyed that I'm having to establish my credentials for something so obvious, but go check it out yourself and feel free to DM me.

# 2


### Who is this?

This is my girlfriend. I broke up with her two months ago and then got back together with her. She has BPD (borderline personality disorder) and alternates between hating me and adoring me. I am okay with that. When I first started dating her, I saw that she wasn't perfect and I promised to myself to love her as a person, not despite her flaws, but because of them, and to keep loving her even when things looked bleak. I think that's an essential foundation of every relationship.

She apologised to me for lying in this screenshot and feels incredibly guilty about it. I forgive her, because I knew she was in a bad place after the breakup and just wanted to hurt me to get my attention. I don't blame her because she's done this before and it works every time, so I can't really complain. Still annoyed as hell.

### So which parts are fiction and which parts aren't?

1. For starters, I wasn't talking people out of suicide "nearly every day". She's being very generous to me here. Most of the time people just wanted someone to listen to them vent, problem-solve, or help them navigate around their abusive parents since it was a youth LGBT server. If I had to guess, I talked people out of suicide two times a week at most since I was on the crisis-response team and it's not as difficult as it sounds once you get into the rhythm.
1. (SN: *I'd recommend trying volunteering at a hotline if you're reading this post. It can be a draining experience, sure. But when someone thanks you or tells you they've gotten better because of you, there's nothing that compares to the rewarding glow you get in your chest.*)
2. Sure, I helped her with her bulimia. I'm bulimic too. But most of it was her effort and hard work, and I only supported her through that process. She underplays her role in her own success and attributes it to other people a lot, that's just seph being seph.
3. For seconders, the truth is that the guy with schizophrenia just went offline for a few months and people started making up rumours about him trying to kill his own brother. As far as I know, he did not. I humoured his conspiracies a few times ("Ah, so Bill Gates is microchipping true believers to capture their souls"), along with earnestly trying to help him, but otherwise I stayed clear of him.
4. Technically true. Lyra was panicking and backslid a lot by the time we broke up because it was during the COVID-19 lockdown. Take a guess how an actual, real-life pandemic affects someone with agoraphobia. Not pretty. We navigated her phobias as friends from that point.

**TL;DR: Incredibly misleading**

# 3

I live in the American Gardens building on West 81st street. My name is Cassia. I'm 20 years old. I believe in taking care of myself, and a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine. In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I'll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the ice pack, I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower, I use a water activated gel cleanser. Then a honey almond body scrub. And on the face, an exfoliating gel scrub.

No, but really, does he think he's revealed some dark secret here? Almost everyone knows. I got informally diagnosed with ASPD (antisocial personality disorder) in November after twenty years of wondering what the hell was wrong with me. "Informal" meaning "my psychologist kept no written records specifically because diagnoses are used to extend jail sentences and deny parole". That means by some clinical definitions and not others, I'd be considered a spooky scary psychopath.

Am I proud of it? No. God no. It's not that glamorous. It mainly just means I nearly died playing with fireworks as a child, I haven't paid back my student loan debt because I bought way too much shit on Aliexpress last year, and I usually give up on unwrapping finicky boxes and just punch them until they open.

But conversely, do I hide it? Nope. The prototypical ASPD person, contra Patrick Bateman, is likely to be a person of colour, from a proletarian background, without a high school diploma or a college degree, probably came from a broken family, and is either unemployed or working precariously. So I decided as soon as I realised, that I would work to advocate for people with Cluster B personality disorders, help challenge the decades of entrenched ableist stigma surrounding it, work to combat myths and misinformation, and directly help people with them to make sense of their conditions and lead flourishing lives. As a result, I made the difficult decision to be public about it – online, at least.

That's it.

### Why don't you like it as a label?

Good question. It's almost exclusively used in the U.S prison-industrial complex to justify extended incarceration, or by Hollywood for 9D-chess-playing assassins and serial killers, and I'm too ditzy to be a good assassin. I do like the idea of killing rich politicians for money though. And I'm stylish. If you know any transnational crime-rings, give them my number. I'm poor.

(Oh, if you're a curious person and you want to understand what ASPD or psychopathy really is, here's a write-up: https://imgur.com/a/wgUK4IH)

# 4

The upper apostles were planning on dividing it up amongst themselves. I had control over the wallet in question so I saw the opportunity and simply kept it. Frankly, I needed the money much more than the other upper apostles did. Not going to apologise for this.

# 5

Yeah, I'm more of a cat person.

Okay but seriously? I don't remember this either. I'm 90% sure seph made this up too, haven't confirmed it with her yet. Only 90% because it seems kinda plausible, I did visit her family and I went shopping with them so I could've picked up chocolate. And she's right, I used to think of things in terms of efficient vs inefficient or funny vs unfunny, not good vs evil.

It does seem like a stretch, though. Seph's mum is nice and all, but from this post, it sounds like it was her problem to deal with not mine, and there were obviously less risky ways to go about it. Why would I even bother? Lots of question-marks.

# 6


I don't remember this conversation or hitting a pedestrian in November 2019, and I'm pretty sure I left this server so I don't know why my name is still red. Either I was messing with seph in this case, whoever supplied CC with these screenshots edited them, or I (potentially) killed someone and then forgot about it. The last case doesn't seem very likely so I'm assuming it's one of the first two. Don't have much more to add to this. The only true portion seems to be about how I encouraged a neo-Nazi to commit suicide, which I have zero regrets about. Scum.

Update: my restricted license (the license you need to drive alone in NZ, a step below a full license) was only issued in December so this doesn't seem possible.

# 7


First part is true. We're still working together to figure out how to help her to stop self-harming. The rest isn't. I cleared this up with her below:




Before you ask, it was because he deliberately misgendered seph. I am very vicious when I defend people I care about, and in my opinion the guy had it coming.

# 8


When I got to this section I nearly keeled over laughing. The context for this was the following discussion with rillion / pithecus. We were talking about whether ASPD people feel it's okay to exploit people because they "deserve" it. Ey brought up the example of old people and cancer patients, I took the devil's advocate position. Bad optics, I know. I was thinking of the stereotypical movie example of providing companionship to elderly folks who don't have any close family members to talk to, and them deciding to write you into their will out of gratitude.




# 9


Very deceptive. He was prescribed lorazepam for his insomnia and anxiety issues when we were in high school and started abusing other benzodiazepines around a year ago. I suggested phenibut as an alternative and we've managed to gradually titrate down his dose from 20mg a day down to 5mg. I've been trying to make him quit his phenibut habit but he's from a wealthy family and always offers me so much that I just cave in. I'm also addicted to phenibut, I'm not especially proud of it, and I feel hypocritical telling him to stop when I'm having trouble doing it myself. When an addict with ten centimeters on you waves $200 in your face, it's hard to say no.

# A conclusion (not really)


Let's take a breather. If I'm guessing right, you're probably thinking at this point "so Cassia isn't as bad as I originally thought". But you're also probably thinking "Christ, she's a mess". Yeah. I'm not a paragon of virtue. I suck sometimes and I'm very upfront about that. My life is messy, complicated, and has a lot of rough edges. If you've ever woken up and cursed your past-self for making things more difficult for you, you'll know how I feel. Sometimes it's like I'm just an accumulation of mistakes and fuck-ups. Doesn't help when someone collates them together into an imgur album.

But I don't define myself by my rough edges or allow myself to capitulate to inevitability. Over the last four months, I've volunteered part-time at a hospice shop, assisted six trans comrades with organising HRT for themselves, advocated for and stood by one of my best friends when she came out as bisexual to her family, and helped my brother with his NCEA L3 exams. Not Mother Teresa material to be sure, but I like to think I'm making an impact. I can't undo, but I can redo.

Being harassed and having implausible death-threats sent to me for a month sucked. But I think it also forced me to become a moral accountant and reevaluate whether I'm more of a liability or an asset to the people I love and care about.

## The verdict

If you've made it this far, I can't give you a binary verdict. I can't tell you whether I'm a saint or a sinner. I'm more somewhere between darkness and light, and the grey where we live between wrong and right. (Couldn't resist.)

I'm not a good person, that's for sure. I'm not an evil person, either. I'm just a person who made half a kilo of chocolate cookies yesterday despite being carbohydrate-intolerant and ate all of them. Today I'm headed to the University of Auckland library to scan another 8 copyrighted textbooks and upload them to Libgen just to spite the business department. I've done 20 so far. Next up is the engineering department because they're all pricks. There just isn't any overarching morale to the story or narrative arc to my life.

Oh, hold on. I came up with a few.
1. Focus on what's important to you and your core values, not what demands the most time and attention.
2. Don't believe everything you read on the internet.
3. **Don't scam cults.**