#not excusing any of the ways she was gaslit and dumped

[just-a-small-snake]

Hello, and welcome to M*A*S*H enjoyers anonymous

Now tell us, why are you here?

(basically just a free space to talk/infodump, be free my sweet cheese)

Oooooh boy.

MASH is a show about war, but also mostly it's about people and how people react under stress. Something to note is that it's about the Korean War, but it's actually about the Vietnam War.

It's got its issues, definitely. It's not particularly respectful to Korean people despite being set in Korea. But it was the 70s so like. Idk, can't expect much. There's a lot to unpack in the way of imperialism. The show is very anti-war, but mostly focused on the Americans, which is pretty damn reductive if you ask me. There is also the misogyny and if one more person calls Major Margaret Houllihan "hot lips" I am going to throw hands. I'm not making excuses for any of this, but it's an old ass show and you can't get too hung up on it. ANYWAY, you asked about the good stuff.

The main character, Hawkeye, is this. Unhinged, sleep deprived, alcoholic surgeon who's just. Unreasonably good at his job. Despite the Horrors of War, he's still one of the kindest, most lovable people, and he only put Frank in a shipping crate one time, so it's fine. And the blood he stole was for a good cause. As was the money he stole and the one time he gaslit a guy into thinking he'd lost his mind. All for a good cause. He's so cool, he's a menace, he's a slut, he's deeply psychologically damaged, he's a little silly, he invented the principle behind Goncharov, he's even bisexual.

Hawkeye's best friend and roommate is Trapper John, fellow manwhore and prankster extraordinaire. He always makes me a little sad cause I think he's Hawkeye's best friend and Hawkeye isn't his best friend? To him, it's all temporary, and he'll get out of Korea and go back to his wife and kids and probably try to not think about any of it ever again, but Hawk's such a ride or die friend, and he depends so much on not being alone and. Fuck, man. He's just like me for real. No shit, I realized this a couple years ago, and it sent me into this huge spiral of wondering if my friends love me as much as I love them and it lasted like. Years. And then I did that thing people do where they tell other people about their feelings? Which was weird. But it was also cool and now I do not worry about that as much anymore. A little bit, because the fears never cease, but y'know. It's cool. Apparently I am also sad and lonely because I am FULLY spilling my guts here lmao. Don't read that. Fuck whatever BJ has going on, THIS is the Trapper Complex.

Also Trapper leaves like three seasons in and is replaced by Blow Job Hunnicut, who keeps saying shit like "man, I bet you sure had fun with Trapper, huh" and "boy this must be just like the good ol days with Trapper" like we get it, you're jealous. He's also deeply psychologically damaged. I don't like him so much, but I also haven't seen a lot of him yet so I guess we'll see.

Okay, now MARGARET. She's amazing. She's cool and fascinating and ALSO deeply psychologically damaged! She's a strong woman in the 50s, she's so angry all the time, she just wants some goddamn respect and also someone to hang out with her to do manicures. She has this fascinating mix of wanting to be feminine and pretty but also needing to be masculine and angry to get respect. She's a hardass, she's obsessed with the rules, she's so mad at everything all the time because she has so little control over her situation, she's just like my mother and I love her so much. She could do any man's job in that camp so much better. I like to think after the war she goes back to medical school and becomes a doctor and gets some GODDAMN RESPECT.

Also she's dating (she dumps him don't worry) this absolute schlub Frank who is. A garbage human being. He's so pathetic and funny but also like genuinely terrible and canonically homophobic. If he were in modern times he would vote for Trump. He's Mr. Patriot. He's the Yankee Doodle Doctor. He's a shit doctor. He's so funny to watch cause everyone around him is so funny and witty and good at snappy comebacks and he says shit like "ohhhh you- you- guys!! >:(" Like yeah Frank. Get em. Don't hold back. He's a real "why I oughta-" kinda guy. Apparently the actor got so much hate mail he quit the show which is honestly so mean and tragic because Frank is such a fun character. I want to watch him fail again and again and again and then cause more problems. He could call me a slur in a Walmart parking lot and I'd just laugh at him and ask him if his wife knows about his girlfriend. She doesn't.

When Frank left, he got replaced by this other guy and I have no idea what his deal is. My apologies to Charles Emerson Winchester III. People like him I guess. He seems boring next to Frank tbh.

Now lemme tell ya about Klinger. Actually lemme show you.

He's beautiful. Gorgeous. Show stopping. He started out as a bit character and the joke was that he was trying to get a section 8 discharge (sent home on the grounds of being mentally unfit to serve), but everyone loved him so much that he became a recurring character and the outfits kept getting better and it went from "haha man in a dress" to "he's a genuinely deep character and this is his coping mechanism and he is so afraid of this war. Also he's the hottest guy around and everyone knows it. Even the priest wants him carnally." Genuinely the best fucking guy. In the early seasons, the laugh track goes off every time he enters a room and it makes me so mad. Take his whimsical ass seriously.

Also I mentioned there's a priest. I'm not sure why they have a priest, but I think that was just a thing in the 50s. He's got too many names. You can find him currently in the Catholic Characters Tournament and it's funny cause the person who runs that keeps getting his names out of order. It's John Patrick Francis Mulcahy, cause they gave him one name in the movie and then changed it in the show like twice at least so. Four names. Anyway, he's the only priest I trust. He literally just wants to help people and he has no way of knowing that he's doing any real good so he wants recognition for his efforts but that goes against what he's meant to be doing, he's meant to be completely selfless, but he wants to know that he's at least doing something, otherwise what's the point. What's the point of everything he's worked for. What's the point of devoting his life to this. To these people and to his god and to being a good person. Because if he thinks of himself, if he wants anything for himself, does that not mean he's selfish? And that's bad, he can't be selfish, but he is because everyone is, that's just human nature to want to know the results of your work. Also he's convinced he's the second coming of Christ or some shit. I can't fully explain this one, but he really does think he's like. God's special little boy. Which is kinda fair, cause he gives fucking EVERYTHING to these people, to the doctors, to the soldiers, even to the enemy, because he just wants people to be okay. He wants people to stop fighting and to heal and to love one another. And he also wants someone to tell him he's doing a good job and that he's making a difference and he wouldn't believe them but it would be something. Also he wants to punch people sometimes. All the time. He could kick anyone's ass in single combat. I love him.

Am I missing anything.

RADAR!!!!! They put a child in a warzone but luckily he is hyper-competent and literally psychic. He makes me sad because he is 19 years old and he has a teddy bear and he is short and angry and eats a lot because he's a growing boy and everyone makes fun of him for having teenager behavior when he is!!!! A teenager!!!! He graduated highschool yesterday!!!!! He's the same age as me and he's in a warzone!!!!!! Get him out of there!!!!! Put him in college and let him work a boring ass fast food job like a normal teenager!!!!! And stop laughing at him for having a teddy bear!!!!!!! He's not even that short, it's just that all the guys in this show are at least 6 feet tall. Anyway, he basically runs the camp because Henry is fucking incompetent (affectionate) so yeah. This child is their commanding officer and the only one anyone respects.

Their actual commanding officer is Henry Blake. He just wants to go home and see his wife and kids again and go fishing and chill the fuck out. He's a good surgeon but genuinely a pathetic army man. But also I love him so much cause listen. He could just fuck off. We see another guy in his same rank and position who just hangs out in Tokyo the whole time making money off this shit. So despite being very afraid all the time, Henry sticks around in a shitty camp 3 miles from the front to patch up kids full of lead. He stays not out of any duty to the army, but a duty to his patients and his people, because he's a good person and a good doctor and genuinely one of the bravest people around. He could've been a coward and hid, but he stayed and he helped people and even though he knew the risks, it just never occurred to him that he could abandon his people to do it all without him. He stayed and he died and he never saw his wife and kids again and he never met his newborn son. He tells his oldest son over the phone to be good while he's gone, to stay strong and keep everything running until he comes back, and he never comes back. I am genuinely crying. Fuck. I hope he's catching the best fish at the big lake in the sky.

Anyway. I'm gonna stop before this gets out of hand. More than it has.

#sorry. you asked. #am i projecting severely onto half of these characters? thats nobody's business #mash #thank you for your service (letting me rant about this 50 year old sitcom with no particular theme) #also for context Goodbye Farewell snd Amen was the finale and its a heart wrenching tragedy of an episode. so yknow. spongedbob.

[goldenrathians]

So, I would like to take some time to elaborate on who exactly has been cyberstalking me for the last 10 months and the context for nearly every personal post i make. I’m doing this because I haven’t ever really directly stated what happened to me beyond “my last relationship was abusive and my ex is not finished with me” and because i know she reads my blog constantly, i figure it can’t hurt to list some of her actions.

this year, i’ve done a lot of healing, gone to a lot of therapy. ive been able to distance myself enough from my ex to realize that not only was her behavior towards me during our relationship emotionally abusive, manipulative, and unfair, but that her behavior since leaving me has been even worse (harrassment, smear campaigns, lying, stalking). it took about 5 months to really even be able to acknowledge that it was abuse while we were together and that the amount of self blame i had been harboring was something she’d purposefully instilled in me. the unhealthy behaviors i’d been expressing while with her (mood swings, outbursts of anger, confusion, difficulty with overattachment) are literally symptoms of a trauma bond and began to go away almost immediately after implementing no contact. i also currently have doubts about the validity of any of her statements concerning her other exes and current partner because i know she enjoys lying and uses it as a tool to turn people against her victims. i also experienced symptoms of ptsd following the breakup that worsened when i began to fully admit to myself the extent of the emotional trauma i’d gone through (for context, i went from an unhealthy relationship with someone far older than me directly into my last one, so it was about 3 years worth of baggage).

i am capable of recognizing that not only was it good for me to be discarded by my abuser but that she only did so because i had become too vocal about my unhappiness with the way she was treating me. we fought pretty much every week because she continually neglected my needs while i tried to cater to hers and whenever i would bring it up she would accuse me of being controlling, violent, or otherwise unhealthy. she has gaslit me before (and oddly enough accused me of doing the same to her to a friend, despite me never having done such a thing) and convinced me briefly that i had undiagnosed bipolar disorder and that THAT was why i was always so unhappy with our relationship. she likes people who make her feel good about herself, and because i was no longer able to do that at a rate which outweighed my criticism of her behavior, she decided to fabricate an excuse to leave me and did so through text and would not allow me to speak about it to her for the next month. she also tried to get me to stay friends even though i had explicitly told her i did not want to do that, and when i told her i would on the condition that i be allowed to ask about the breakup or take time to express grief, she told me that she was “not my therapist” and that i was being unfair. i then cut contact with her, which began the now 10 months long (and most likely will be years long) period of harrassment and stalking.

i have dozens of screenshots saved of our discussions on discord, as well as detailed records of her activity since we broke up (all the times she harrassed me). i have evidence of her talking about me to her friends at the time of us dating in a way that paints me in a very poor light. i have screenshots of a conversation where she forced me to publicly apologize to her friend group after claiming that i was an embarrassment, which was prefaced by the phrase “i love you, so i cut you a lot of slack.”

she used my physical attraction to her as a tool on numerous occasions. first of all, she literally lured me into the relationship with it, as the one i’d had before had left me feeling disgusting and unwanted because of a transphobic partner. she learned how to make me feel whole and then used that to her advantage, because it was instrumental in getting me to stay (i believed no one else would treat me like a person in bed). sex became a bargaining chip and on more than one occasion i was told i was unnattractive or undesirable because of something i’d done, such as expressing the urge to be more submissive in bed. i was also encouraged to force myself on her sexually during a fight (something i am not and was not comfortable doing in reality), which i now realize was her way of using sex to keep me from staying mad at her long enough to raise a complaint about her treatment of me. as a result, i’ve had extreme difficulty with touch and sexual contact over the last ten months because in my head no matter who i sleep with the last person who touched me is her and i can’t escape that.

i constantly felt trapped, because i was aware on some level that people do not treat someone they love in this way, and yet any time i tried to leave she would act like she could change and treat me right. i kept staying around against my better judgement because i thought she would stop lying to me. i felt i owed it to her because she said so many people in the past gave up on her or got mad at her for being depressed. i truly thought she was a good person and that a good person would be capable of reasoning with me and we could both be happy.

she also maintained contact with the person she’d been dating before she met me, which was unquestionably cruel towards said individual. She would say hateful things about this person, yet never give them a chance to truly grow on their own and encouraged them to stay in love with her (i suspect they had a similar attachment to her). After dumping me she returned to this person only to abandon them again three months later to get engaged to someone she may have been cheating on them with.

i have proof of her lying about committments we’d made to eachother as a way to get out of spending time with me, and when confronted with evidence of said lies by people who’d witnessed her make the promise and fail to keep it, she would respond negatively and blame me, telling me i was a controlling person and then giving me the silent treatment. she constantly accused me of using our relationship as a threat in arguments, yet i never once said “if you don’t do __ i will break up with you,” only confessed that it felt like she did not want to be with me because of the lying and the refusal to spend time with me. she expressed desire to physically assault me once while angry, and made repeated comparisons between me and her abusive father, despite my voiced discomfort with being compared to men. when i once said (and immediately regretted) that sometimes i wished i could “shut her up forever” during a fight, she then began to claim that i harbored desire to physically abuse her...despite her having expressed violent desires towards me months earlier. anything i had ever said or done became fair game in an argument if i tried to voice my discomfort in the relationship.

she often compared me to her exes or to her friends as a way to make me feel inadequate or unenjoyable to be around. she would then private message me to start fights while around these friends, then accuse me of starting fights and preventing any further private communication. if i showed signs of distress publicly, i would then be “humiliating” her and she would tell her friends that i was overemotional.

She told me reasonably early on in the relationship (first six months) that she wanted to marry me. She said that since she was going to be in the military, we should marry soon so that we could live together. I was hesitant at first because it seemed strange to marry at 20 or 21. She would continue to bring it up until I said I was okay to do so. She told me in december that she wanted me to buy her a $400 bear and propose to her with it. Every month I was met with the same message of “I want to marry you.” In may, I mentioned that i might propose when she visited in july, since she had said to propose before she enlisted. She told me it was too soon and that she no longer wanted to be engaged to me. I was hurt and responded poorly, and accused her of having once again made a promise to me she had no intention of keeping. I recognize now that as an isolated incident, this was a total, blatant overreaction, but at the time i was feeling a lot of stress due to her racking up nearly $500 on my debit card and her repeatedly agreeing to date nights and cancelling last second while arguing with me if i was unhappy. She then used the military as an excuse to dump me in early june, which i now suspect was a total lie because i know for a fact she has not gone to basic yet and has been theoretically scheduled to for nearly a year. She accused me of being immature and pathetic, and told me that her life was much better without me in it. I asked her if there was someone else, which she denied, but i knew better. I had been suspecting it for a while.

since i told her to never contact me again over the summer she has:

in july, she began dating her ex girlfriend again, and told a mutual friend she had never loved me to begin with. Keep in mind that this ex was the one she’d left to date me, and that I never once pressured her to be with me. I don’t doubt that she never loved me, but not through my own personal failings. Rather, i don’t think she is capable of healthy love. She would repeatedly bring up that she did not ever love me and that I was stupid for believing her when she’d told me she wanted to be with me.

In august, i was still suffering the effects of the trauma bond and was still in love with her despite knowing she was being unnecessarily cruel to me. i couldn’t believe the person i’d loved with my whole being was the same person who was openly insulting me. I tried to ask a friend how she was doing in late july. He told me she was happy with her then partner and showed me screencaps of her doting on said partner with the same “we should be together forever” crap she fed me. I was later made aware that he would mock me behind my back with her. At the time i had her blocked on most social media platforms, but she reached out on a tumblr sideblog to tell me i was an idiot and that i should have known she never loved me and that her then-girlfriend loved her better than i could and that she had always been in love with her.

in october/early november, she dumped that person. she then began dating someone who i know has a history of low self esteem (she picks her targets like that) and purposefully liked a personal post on my blog (knowing that i would take the bait and try to directly engage her). I did. And she told me in the most condescending way possible that again, i didn’t know anything about her and that she was happy with this new person, who was everything i was not, and that i was the person who needed to grow and let go of bitterness. Please note that i had only asked why she was liking things on my blog. I told her i didn’t want to hear from her anymore and blocked her again on discord. She then reached out to me on tumblr (before i could block her there) to say “I can unblock you on my main account if you want to talk.” as though it were some kind of favor to do that to me. as though i had done literally anything besides say “i’m blocking you, don’t contact me.”

Also in november she had her new girlfriend send me messages telling me to stop stalking her, which is ridiculous because i made a rule to myself to not look at her social media back in august and had been reading about what to do with narcissists (no contact rule). The new girlfriend told me I deserved what had happened to me. I attempted to warn the new girlfriend that it was all lies, but then realized it wouldn’t do any good, so i blocked the both of them.

On january 1st, i recieved a discord call from a dormant group chat (unused for nearly a year). It was from the new girlfriend. She hung up and then posted screenshots of her and my ex together, along with a message @ing me saying that they were now living together (from long distance to cohabiting in my ex’s parents’ house) and that my ex had proposed to her. Multiple people witnessed this. It was entirely unprovoked on my part as i had not attempted to contact either of them since november. This was a post designed to demoralize me or upset me, which it failed to do because by december i was out of love and in full recovery. i had acknowledged that my ex was not the person i had romanticized so heavily in my head.

Late january, my ex posed as her fiancee on discord to message someone who was once a mutual friend but who is now only my friend. After he told her he wasn’t interested in talking, she revealed it was her and not her fiancee, made a very pitiful attempt to insult him, and then blocked him.

Early february, she contacted a friend of mine whom she had met twice in real life december 2017. she still had his phone number and snapchat, and reportedly sent him an image of a paypal receipt, which i suspect had something to do with the (expensive) items i’d requested she return to me when we broke up. This could have been innocent, but given her other patterns, i highly doubt that it was anything short of intentional because she knew he would ask me about it. I told him to block her just in case.

Following that, in early march, I recieved anonymous questions on tumblr about my relationship status. I have a brain and am able to easily spot her text speech patterns. I then installed a tracker on my blog to register page hits and responded to the ask, knowing she was bound to check for responses.

Around that time, i was made aware by a friend that someone i used to talk to no longer talked to me because of how i and my ex had treated them. i reached out because i felt like even if it was way too late at least maybe they could know i was aware i’d been shitty to them. we talked and i was told that my ex had pretty much lied constantly about my actions and that this person didn’t like me because they were under the impression that i was the abuser in the relationship. This is not the only time someone has come forth to tell me that my ex used to talk about me behind my back. I have had other friends and acquaintances mention it to me over the past year.

Since then, she has visited my page and looked through my personal tag numerous times a week, ranging from once a day to up to 6 times or more. I have evidence of her every move ever since she decided to start harrassing me back in July. I know she is likely reading this exact post. I also know she isn’t very smart, because a smart person would have stopped trying the first time they were blocked. I know that she secretly hates herself and that she represses the anger she feels because she likes to make people think she’s afraid to hurt them, but she enjoys starting drama and spreading rumors wherever she goes. I know that she probably had some sort of traumatic events in her early teens that caused her to begin serially dating/abusing people, but I also don’t really care at this point. I did a lot of emotional labor trying to humanize her up until I realized I didn’t owe her that anymore. It’s somewhat refreshing knowing that I’m allowed to speak now and that there will be no consequences. There is no relationship to lose. Anyone who wishes to challenge me is totally welcome to do so, because I have a shit ton of proof that supports my side of this story.

#ender.txt #long post