Why Does This Keep Happening?
[January 17, 2026, updated January 28, 2026]
There is a question that has followed me for years, resurfacing every time another friendship implodes, another online community turns hostile, another whisper campaign starts behind my back.
Why does this keep happening?
Before I talk about patterns, accusations, or trauma, there is something that needs to be stated clearly, because it is so often erased from the narrative.
I have repeatedly left platforms because I was being harassed.
In 2016, I nuked my Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter accounts. Not because I was bored. Not because I was dramatic. Because the harassment was constant, escalating, and damaging. Those platforms were not neutral spaces where “conflict just happens.” They were environments where abuse was tolerated, enabled, and often rewarded.
In 2024, I did it again. I left Dreamwidth after sustained hostility and harassment, particularly in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023. Suddenly, being Jewish and refusing to perform the “correct” political script made me a target. People I had known for years demanded ideological declarations, dismissed Jewish pain, and treated any deviation from approved rhetoric as moral failure. Leaving was not a tantrum. It was self-preservation.
In 2025, I left AO3; in January 2026, my partner Andy and I left DeviantArt together.
These exits matter. Because when people ask “Why does this keep happening to you?” the implication is that I stay, provoke, escalate, or somehow manufacture conflict.
The record shows the opposite. Again and again, when spaces became unsafe, I left. Quietly. Completely. At significant personal and creative cost.
And yet, the harm followed anyway.
Why does this keep happening?
Before I talk about patterns, accusations, or trauma, there is something that needs to be stated clearly, because it is so often erased from the narrative.
I have repeatedly left platforms because I was being harassed.
In 2016, I nuked my Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter accounts. Not because I was bored. Not because I was dramatic. Because the harassment was constant, escalating, and damaging. Those platforms were not neutral spaces where “conflict just happens.” They were environments where abuse was tolerated, enabled, and often rewarded.
In 2024, I did it again. I left Dreamwidth after sustained hostility and harassment, particularly in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023. Suddenly, being Jewish and refusing to perform the “correct” political script made me a target. People I had known for years demanded ideological declarations, dismissed Jewish pain, and treated any deviation from approved rhetoric as moral failure. Leaving was not a tantrum. It was self-preservation.
In 2025, I left AO3; in January 2026, my partner Andy and I left DeviantArt together.
These exits matter. Because when people ask “Why does this keep happening to you?” the implication is that I stay, provoke, escalate, or somehow manufacture conflict.
The record shows the opposite. Again and again, when spaces became unsafe, I left. Quietly. Completely. At significant personal and creative cost.
And yet, the harm followed anyway.
In 2020, in Silmarillion fandom, a former friend, Spiced Wine, accused me of being a “narcissistic predator.” Not privately. Not cautiously. Publicly, definitively, and in a way designed to spread. People heard it. People repeated it. People distanced themselves. Doors closed without explanation.
That accusation did not merely hurt my feelings. It attacked my right to exist safely in community. “Narcissistic predator” is not a casual insult. It is an identity-destroying charge. It frames you as dangerous, manipulative, and morally corrupt. It makes people recoil instinctively.
And it worked. Despite me coming with a large amount of screenshot receipts that proved her to be a liar and engaging in cyberstalking and targeted harassment, people never bothered to get my side of the story because she talked first and weaponized therapy-speak.
For years, I asked myself if it was true.
That is the part people who weaponize that language fully intend. I didn’t shrug it off. I didn’t dismiss it as malice. I obsessed. I interrogated my motives, my empathy, my trauma responses. I replayed every interaction I’d ever had, terrified that something about me was secretly monstrous.
Only later did I learn the term DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Only later did I understand how common it is for people facing accountability to flip the narrative by accusing others of abuse. Only later did I recognize that the behaviors Spiced exhibited—projection, lack of accountability, grandiosity, rage when contradicted—aligned far more closely with narcissistic patterns than anything I had done.
But understanding something intellectually does not undo psychological injury. Once someone has put your morality on trial, the echo lasts. It waits. It resurfaces every time harm repeats.
Years later, on a different platform, a similar pattern reappeared.
The harassment on AO3 and the harassment on DeviantArt have something crucial in common: both are creative platforms.
AO3 is unpaid. DeviantArt was, for me, a place where I was actively selling my work. Different economies, same dynamic.
Creative spaces intensify jealousy.
People are not just looking at you—they are looking at your output, your attention, your reception, your visibility. And when someone is doing something distinctive, when their work stands out, when it gains traction, resentment follows. When money enters the picture, that resentment sharpens into hostility.
This matters especially in the context of AI art. The people who harassed me on DA were also part of the AI art community there.
I worked deliberately to make things that did not look like anyone else’s. I developed a specific visual language. That takes time. Prompting is not magic words typed once. It is trial and error. It is failed generations. It is regenerating when the model hiccups. It is compositing, correcting, editing in Photoshop, refining, discarding, reworking.
Eventually, my work was imitated.
And when I didn’t want a flood of clones—when I objected to people copying my themes and style wholesale—offense followed. Not curiosity. Not respect. Entitlement. The idea that because something was AI-assisted, it should be freely replicable, and that my refusal to welcome duplication was arrogance.
That resentment didn’t stay technical. It became personal. Callout posts, which the mods did nothing about, and hate art.
Creative envy rarely announces itself as envy. It disguises itself as moral outrage, ethical concern, accusations of selfishness, or—when pushed far enough—character assassination.
And "just ignore them" doesn't work on a site like DA where some people run multiple accounts to click the like button and comment on their own work to boost the algorithm, and hand themselves Hype badges, which also directly boosts visibility, and will also use their alt accounts for trolling. This isn’t speculation. A couple of people I once considered friends flat-out admitted to doing this, and my friend Nadia and I observed obvious patterns of other people doing this. When people are literally manufacturing applause for themselves, as well as make up fake accounts to make it look like multiple people hate you therefore you must be the problem, popularity stops being evidence of anything except a willingness to game the system.
There is also a lot of undisclosed roleplaying on DA. People interact under fake or semi-fake personas without telling anyone that they are playing a character. Relationships and social standing get built on identities that are not real. You can call that roleplay if you want, but when it is not disclosed, it is catfishing. It creates false intimacy, false trust, and false authority, and when someone points that out, they are treated like the problem instead of the deception itself being addressed.
I bring this up because Lizzy was not the first person to sexually harass Andy on DA: in January 2025 he had a brief creative collaboration with someone, ostensibly female, where it became obvious rather quickly she was flirting with him just to try to get him to buy things, and when he eventually confronted her about this behavior and that she seemed like a made-up AI persona rather than a real individual, she blocked him. Then a month later when she noticed he and I were together she made a public post (since deleted) giving an apology asking to be friends again but also adding "we could be more if we both wanted it", which not only was block evasion but yet more unwanted flirting and complete disrespect of our relationship. And then she kept tabs on me and Andy through a few alt accounts, including one that sexually harassed ME. As soon as we figured out one alt and blocked it, another would come out of the woodwork, and once I made a public post not naming names but remarking on the "bread crumb trail" of fake personas, many of the most obviously incriminating posts from one of the main accounts suddenly disappeared.
This is the kind of behavior I mean when I talk about narcissistic dynamics. It is about controlling perception, chasing attention at any cost, and reacting with rage when that image is threatened. Compared to that, asking someone politely not to copy my style and themes and to come up with their own ideas, or to refrain from making unwanted advances towards me or my partner, is not abusive, controlling, or unreasonable. It is a normal boundary. The fact that this boundary triggered so much hostility says everything about the culture I was dealing with and nothing about my character.
And eventually, Andy and I did the healthiest thing we could do. We left.
We did not escalate. We did not start a public war. We disengaged. And our mental health improved almost immediately.
And then--after we left--Anaflowerheart and others misrepresented events, lied about our behavior, and attempted to poison the well in a community we had already exited.
The reason this pattern feels so familiar is because it didn’t begin with fandom or social media.
It began in childhood.
I was diagnosed with autism in the 1980s—when AFAB children were rarely diagnosed unless it was unmistakable. I spent two years in special education before being mainstreamed, and from that point on I was never just another student. I was that kid from the [r-slur] class.
That label followed me for my entire school career.
In junior high and then high school—pre-Columbine, before zero-tolerance policies existed—I was bullied severely. Not merely teased. Not merely excluded. Physically beaten multiple times. There were no consequences. No protection. No intervention.
And the bullying didn’t stop when school ended.
As an adult, I encountered the same people in the workplace—grown adults still eager to humiliate me. The lie neurodivergent kids are told, that bullies eventually grow up, collapsed completely in 2018 when I was shopping in a grocery store—short hair, masculine clothing, decades older—and someone recognized me and called out, “Hey, it’s [Deadname] from the [r-slur] class.”
Decades later. In public. Without hesitation.
That moment matters because it proves something people don’t want to admit: bullies don’t grow out of it. They grow older.
And age often makes them better at it.
Neurodivergent people are singled out early. Our body language, honesty, intensity, and difference read as “off,” and certain types of people respond by testing boundaries. When there are no consequences, they escalate. When they get away with it, they refine it.
The people who have harassed me, smeared me, sexually harassed me, or behaved in predatory ways over the last decade are not young, impulsive, or inexperienced. They are adults. Older adults.
Spiced Wine is around 60.
Cynthia is in her early fifties.
Brian is 55.
Anaflowerheart is 61.
Sofia (and her network of alt accounts) claims to be around 60.
Lizzy was born in 1982.
These are not people who “didn’t know better.” These are people with decades of practice. Age did not soften their behavior. It sharpened it. It gave them plausible deniability, social capital, and the confidence to assume they would be believed over me.
When you understand this history, the later patterns stop looking mysterious. Online harassment didn’t create the wound. It exploited one that already existed. Fandom spaces and art platforms didn’t invent the dynamic; they replicated it with better tools.
And what played out in Silmarillion fandom and later on DA will be painfully familiar to those of us who were bullied in school growing up, especially in the days before zero tolerance. Where if someone hit you first and you hit back, or even just firmly shoved the attacker away, you were usually seen as the one who "started it" and the attacker will get their friends as witnesses. If the bully is ever brought to the principal's office, the parents will insist their child couldn't possibly do that and the kid will get away with minimal consequences, to do it again this time worse. And the bully's victim is usually the one sent to the school psychologist for counseling—much of which involves treating the bullied kid like they're the one with the problem and if they just mask their neurodivergence and stop being weird, everything will be fine, rather than the obviously sociopathic bully ever being required to get counseling. Of course not, the bully is popular and well-liked, how could they possibly be at fault?
I was marked early as someone who could be targeted. Neurodivergent. Empathetic. Conscientious. Likely to blame myself. Likely to hesitate instead of retaliate.
The question was never why this keeps happening.
The question was why I was ever told it would stop.
And still, the question comes back.
Why does this keep happening?
When harm repeats across different spaces, the brain looks for a pattern. And the most efficient, most devastating conclusion is always the same: the problem must be me.
There is a particular cruelty in accusations that weaponize therapeutic language. Being called a narcissist or predator doesn’t just harm your reputation—it hijacks your conscience. It turns self-reflection into self-surveillance.
If you have C-PTSD, that effect is magnified.
People with complex trauma are disproportionately revictimized. Not because we “attract drama,” but because trauma reshapes threat perception.
We over-extend empathy. We assume good faith too long. We question ourselves before questioning others. We freeze instead of retaliate. And frequently, our abusers told us the problem was us. We were trained to minimize harm, to smooth things over, to be reasonable, to keep the peace. We learned that pushing back was dangerous and that naming patterns would only make things worse. So we hesitate. We wait for more proof. We tell ourselves we are imagining it. By the time we are certain something is wrong, the damage is already done.
To certain personalities—exploitative, narcissistic, opportunistic—this reads as availability.
It’s blunt but accurate: we smell like prey.
That doesn’t mean weakness. It means visible conscience. It means someone who asks “what did I do wrong?” instead of “why are you doing this to me?” And for people who cannot tolerate accountability, that makes us ideal targets.
When we finally set boundaries—leave, disengage, withdraw access—it often provokes retaliation. Smears. Character assassination. Narrative control.
There is another layer to this pattern: I am an INFJ.
INFJs give too many chances. We contextualize harm. We absorb discomfort quietly. We try to fix things internally before ever speaking up.
And then, eventually, we stop.
The INFJ “door slam” is not impulsive. It is exhaustion. It happens when staying would require self-betrayal. By the time we disengage, the decision is final—not because we didn’t care, but because we cared too long.
To people who benefited from our empathy or silence, that withdrawal feels like betrayal. So the story gets rewritten.
Suddenly, we are cold. Narcissistic. Manipulative. Predatory. Our departure becomes proof of our alleged moral failure. The accusation fills the vacuum left by our absence.
This is why the worst attacks arrive after I leave, not while I am still accommodating.
Why does this keep happening?
When harm repeats across different spaces, the brain looks for a pattern. And the most efficient, most devastating conclusion is always the same: the problem must be me.
There is a particular cruelty in accusations that weaponize therapeutic language. Being called a narcissist or predator doesn’t just harm your reputation—it hijacks your conscience. It turns self-reflection into self-surveillance.
If you have C-PTSD, that effect is magnified.
People with complex trauma are disproportionately revictimized. Not because we “attract drama,” but because trauma reshapes threat perception.
We over-extend empathy. We assume good faith too long. We question ourselves before questioning others. We freeze instead of retaliate. And frequently, our abusers told us the problem was us. We were trained to minimize harm, to smooth things over, to be reasonable, to keep the peace. We learned that pushing back was dangerous and that naming patterns would only make things worse. So we hesitate. We wait for more proof. We tell ourselves we are imagining it. By the time we are certain something is wrong, the damage is already done.
To certain personalities—exploitative, narcissistic, opportunistic—this reads as availability.
It’s blunt but accurate: we smell like prey.
That doesn’t mean weakness. It means visible conscience. It means someone who asks “what did I do wrong?” instead of “why are you doing this to me?” And for people who cannot tolerate accountability, that makes us ideal targets.
When we finally set boundaries—leave, disengage, withdraw access—it often provokes retaliation. Smears. Character assassination. Narrative control.
There is another layer to this pattern: I am an INFJ.
INFJs give too many chances. We contextualize harm. We absorb discomfort quietly. We try to fix things internally before ever speaking up.
And then, eventually, we stop.
The INFJ “door slam” is not impulsive. It is exhaustion. It happens when staying would require self-betrayal. By the time we disengage, the decision is final—not because we didn’t care, but because we cared too long.
To people who benefited from our empathy or silence, that withdrawal feels like betrayal. So the story gets rewritten.
Suddenly, we are cold. Narcissistic. Manipulative. Predatory. Our departure becomes proof of our alleged moral failure. The accusation fills the vacuum left by our absence.
This is why the worst attacks arrive after I leave, not while I am still accommodating.
It is well established that people who are abused as children--especially AFAB people—are more likely to end up in abusive relationships as adults. It is also well established that people who end up in one abusive relationship are statistically more likely to end up in subsequent abusive relationships.
Non-assholes understand what that means.
They do not say, “You chose this.”
They do not say, “What did you do to deserve it?”
They do not say, “You must have been a bad kid” or “a bad partner.”
(Although it’s worth noting that one of the therapists I fired in 2016 did ask me, “What did you do to make him hit you?”—so yes, even professionals sometimes reproduce the exact logic of abuse.)
The point is this: patterns of harm do not imply personal defect. They imply conditioning. They imply that someone learned early—through punishment—that mistreatment is normal, that boundaries are dangerous, and that self-blame is safer than anger.
But interpersonal dynamics, especially online ones, are not generous about this distinction.
When someone like me leaves multiple platforms—social media in 2016, Dreamwidth in 2024, AO3 in 2025, DeviantArt in January 2026—people do not ask why those spaces became unsafe. They assume churn equals guilt. Especially if there are people talking shit.
From the outside, it looks like a pattern of “conflict.” From the inside, it is a pattern of escape.
And I have absolutely turned that suspicion inward.
I have asked myself, over and over: Why does this keep happening? Is there something wrong with me?
What makes this particularly cruel is that I can see the answer clearly when it applies to someone else.
The only person I met on Dreamwidth whom I still keep in touch with has a recurring pattern: they get involved in a new fandom, make friends, talk about how great those friends are—and within months, those relationships implode. Every time they get excited about their new shiny friend group, my stomach drops. Every time, my brain produces the image of Charlie Brown running up to kick the football and Lucy yanking it away.
And yet, I know the truth.
My friend is autistic. Their autistic traits show up sooner rather than later. People pick on them. People take advantage. People decide they’re “too much,” “weird,” or an easy target. My friend means well. They are trying to be decent. The problem is not them.
I can extend that understanding to someone else without hesitation.
The reason I struggle to extend it to myself is not insight—it’s damage. It’s the cumulative effect of bullies and abusers training my brain to default to I am the problem.
That damage is compounded by how badly most therapists understand online harassment. Try explaining professional trolling, whisper campaigns, coordinated shunning, or smear dynamics, and you’ll get, “Did you block them?”—as if blocking works when they can generate new accounts like the heads of a hydra. As if blocking stops people from poisoning rooms you’re no longer in and doesn't follow you around all over the Internet. As if the harm is confined to a single screen.
And for years, I kept trying anyway.
Not because it was healthy. Not because it was working. But because therapists told me that wanting a small social circle was “avoidant,” that assuming new spaces would go badly was a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” that withdrawing meant I was letting fear win.
So I kept lining myself up for Lucy and the football.
With that context, asking “Why am I the problem?” isn’t mysterious. It’s exactly what someone conditioned by abuse is taught to ask.
Let's talk about the long-term impact of narcissistic abuse. I have lived with it in more than one form — from my mother, from my ex-husband — and by the time the situation with Spiced exploded in 2020, my nervous system was already primed for harm. What followed didn’t create these wounds, but it tore them open again. Hypervigilance, second-guessing myself, emotional shutdown, insomnia, fear of speaking, fear of being misread, and a constant sense of waiting for the next blow are not character flaws. They are survival responses.
And when the troubles began on DeviantArt in 2025, my nervous system responded all over again, especially when Andy and I both experienced unwanted romantic and sexual advances from other people on the site and they reacted badly to being rejected, which was a very unpleasant reminder of my ex-husband and others refusing to accept "no means no". The feelings of DA being a war zone increased when we warned others privately and they went on being friendly with them and even buying art from them like it was "no big deal" or worse, that we had to be lying because the persons in question put up such a good front of being "nice".
After I left DA in January 2026, I immediately began to feel relief. My mood improved in ways that were impossible to ignore. Some of that was practical. The constant low-level stress was gone. I was no longer bracing myself every time I logged in. I was also able to get back on keto, which my specialist had recommended for my chronic illnesses. In the second half of 2025, the stress from DA had completely derailed that. I was eating far too many carbs just to cope, and it showed in my energy, my pain levels, and my mental health. Once I left, I was finally able to stabilize again.
At the same time, Andy and I finally entered the honeymoon period we should have had in 2025. A month into our relationship, the problems on DA started, and we were dealing with that stress on top of everything else going on in our real lives. Stepping away from DA gave us space to actually enjoy each other without a constant background of crisis. That alone made it clear how much damage the situation had been doing.
A little less than a month later, at the end of January 2026, the emotional fallout finally hit. After I filed a chargeback claim on New Year's Eve, my bank finally reversed the charge on my Max account, since I had left with nearly a year of paid time remaining, and my DA account reverted to a free one. Something about that made it all real in a new way. I started crying a lot. I had sleep disturbances. I was processing anger, grief, and a deep bitterness that I had not left sooner. At the same time, I know why I stayed as long as I did. I am on a fixed income, and I was genuinely trying to make some extra money. That context matters. Regret does not erase the reality of the choices I was making to survive.
Survivors of narcissistic abuse are often expected to “move on quietly,” while the people who harmed them continue to appear charming, functional, beloved, and socially successful. Narcissists are exceptionally good at this. They curate visibility, community, and plausibility. They stay. They thrive. They network. Meanwhile, the person who leaves — who withdraws from unsafe spaces in order to survive — is framed as unstable, dramatic, or suspicious simply because they are no longer present to perform normalcy.
It is not lost on me that Spiced remains active on AO3 and in Silmarillion fandom, well-liked and socially embedded, while I am gone. Nor that people who harassed me on DeviantArt continue to occupy that space, chatting, bonding, and carrying on as though nothing happened. This disparity is often used — quietly, insidiously — as evidence. If he were really harmed, why did he leave? If she was really abusive, why is she still here and so well-liked? But this logic only makes sense if survival is mistaken for guilt.
Abuse victims leave. That is what leaving looks like. I left AO3. I left Silm fandom. I left DeviantArt. I did not do this to punish anyone or to make a statement. I did it because my body and mind could no longer withstand environments that had become actively unsafe. If I were the monster some people imply, I would not have withdrawn. I would still be there, playing the same social games, feeding on attention, rewriting the narrative in real time. Instead, I chose absence over self-betrayal.
I am writing about this despite being done with AO3 and DeviantArt for one simple reason: the internet does not forget. In 2015, I was dogpiled and bullied on Tumblr, including being falsely accused of things I never said and having my words twisted out of context by people who already had an axe to grind. TERFs in particular piled on with enthusiasm. At the time, I tried to defend myself in good faith, but I did not have screenshots of everything, and eventually I deleted my Tumblr along with my responses. I believed that taking the high road and disengaging would make it stop. It did not. The person who targeted me went on to do the same thing to several other people.
When the situation with Spiced began in 2020, I did not make that mistake again. I kept receipts. I documented everything. I did the same with the harassment and bad-faith behavior on DeviantArt in 2025. I learned the hard way that bullies do not magically go away if you ignore them, and silence does not protect you. Silence only leaves a vacuum where other people get to tell your story for you, often dishonestly.
This essay exists not because I want sympathy, attention, or to “play the victim,” but because I refuse erasure. Andy and I still share our work publicly here through our own website, and I am not willing to let that work be quietly dismissed because people heard one distorted version of events and decided I am “problematic.” I am also not willing to stay quiet to allow those who harmed me to do the same thing to others. Naming what happened, and what it did to me, is not an attack. It is me refusing to take abuse quietly. Bullies rely on silence. I am done providing it.
