Tag Archives: disinformation

15 Reasons Why I Believe I was Sexually Abused as a Child

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1. A very early childhood nightmare of a cartoon character exposing himself on stage, exposing his girl’s pudendum. I felt horrified and afraid. (Why would a young child create that sort of dream if she hadn’t experienced it herself?)

2. A very early childhood nightmare of my father sitting in the driver’s position on front carriage of an old-fashioned circus carriage train, in a nighttime storm, dressed in black with a tall black hat, whipping a black horse that took us too fast down a bumpy mountain road. Suddenly the train crashed and all the carriages fell over, and I feared the wild animals had gotten out of their cages. I was alone in the dark night, terrified I would be found by a wild animal and ripped apart. (Obviously not sexual, but shows a fear of the night.)

3. When I was 3 or 4, Mom responded hysterically to something I had said, and dragged me into the bathroom, screaming that I should never say anything like that ever again, and knocked a bar of soap around in my mouth, then left me there and went into the kitchen.

I was terrified of her, so waited in the bathroom, but soon my mouth was full of saliva, and I needed to spit it out, but the top of the bathroom sink was at my forehead and I knew I wasn’t allowed to drag a chair in there without permission (and it never occurred to me to spit into the toilet or the tub). Fearful but desperate, I went to the doorway of the kitchen and saw my mother standing there in fury, then tipped my head back to hold in the saliva and asked if I could move a chair. She nodded, and I was able to move the chair to the sink and begin to clean the chunks off of my teeth.

(Obviously not sexual, but I can’t imagine anything other than the possibility of a sexual scandal in the event I would say those words publicly that would make a mother get so hysterical and brutal to her daughter.)

Cropped from photo of me on Mom’s lap

4. A memory of Mom taking me to the doctor and telling him she thought I was crazy because I said “crazy things.” He told her, laughing gently, “No, children just have active imaginations, and sometimes they mix up their dreams with memories.“ But soon she told my aunt, who also laughed and told her no. And I remember when she also told a small group of women who had visited the house and were now in their car getting ready to drive away, and they also laughed and told her no.

All these people telling Mom she was wrong gave me confidence that I didn’t need to take her words to heart.

5. About age 4, I remember being in the den, squatting down and studying the smeared patterns in the linoleum, listening to a man talk to my father, saying, “You marry a Mormon woman, and you get the children too.“ In later reflection, it seemed he was encouraging my father either to engage with me sexually or not feel bad about it if he already was. Much later, I learned that sexual abuse (and mind control) are very common in Mormon families.

6. When I was 8, and we had just moved into our new custom home on in Merced, I heard Dad call my name and came out of the den to find him squatting down to my height, smiling, with Mom standing to the side behind him. I was mesmerized by his smile because I so rarely saw it while making eye contact with me. When I arrived in front of him, he pulled out a steel hypodermic needle from behind his back, held upright, and I stepped back in shock, but he held me there, and I knew not to disobey him. He continued to smile while telling me that it was time for my booster, and he “gave the best shots in town.” He went on to say that I wouldn’t even feel it because he had a special technique. All I had to do was hold my arm really soft and limp, and he patted my arm to help me relax and told me to look away. I followed his instructions and soon he said, “That’s it.“ I was amazed, because I had not felt anything, just like he said.

In preparation for our Christmas party that year, Mom had been calling all the guests, telling them that Stuart Udall (then Secretary of the Interior) would be there. I remember thinking she was bragging, which was something she had told me not to do. At the party, we were supposed to stay in the den and not come out, and I was intent on helping the little ones follow that rule. However, when my littlest siblings tried to sneak out, some woman guest encouraged Mom to let us come out for five minutes, so the little girls burst ahead, winding their way through the crowd, followed by my brother, followed by me.

I was overwhelmed by the crowd of tall people, uncertain whether I really wanted to be there or what to do, so I just followed the other kids and soon saw my doctor talking to my father. The two of them together made me think of shots, so when my doctor had greeted me, and I knew I was supposed to respond with something, I cheerfully said, and loudly over the noise of the crowd,“My daddy gives the best shots in town. He gives me my boosters.“

My doctor looked shocked and immediately swiveled his head around and up toward my father, and I followed, and saw my father look as though he were in deep trouble. There was a third man there also, and the three men all exchanged glances, and the expressions of extreme concern did not go away. Because my doctor was second cousin to Stuart Udall, I assume that the Secretary of the Interior was the third man there.

A few months later, I came home from school to find my mother emptying the kitchen cabinets and packing dishes into boxes. When I asked her why, she answered angrily that we had to move. After we had moved to Paradise Valley, I asked her why we had moved and, while keeping her back to me, she answered that the people in Merced were very snobby and they didn’t want to be a part of that group.

(See 15 below for follow-up.)

7. When I put in my first tampon while squatting over a mirror (as suggested by the instruction sheet), I was shocked to see my inner labia looking very unlike the sketch in the instruction sheet, as mine were long, as if stretched out, and brown, hanging significantly outside the outer labia. I was stunned, but didn’t have the confidence to ever ask anyone about it.

8. Years later, when my sisters and I were swimming naked in the pool and my youngest sister inadvertently exposed herself while hanging on the diving board by her knees, I embarrassed myself by laughing a little hysterically at the sight of her peach-like anatomy, I assume because mine looked so different, but I couldn’t think about it consciously until decades later.

9. When I was date raped the summer of 1970, age 18, I went into an altered state of consciousness in which I could only scream silently in my head, but could not move my body or make any vocalizations.

10. After I was raped, in shock and horrified that I was no longer a virgin (or so I thought), I decided I might as well engage in sex of my own choice, and I wanted to think of it as “my first.” But afterward when I said that to my boyfriend, he repeatedly told me it was OK that I wasn’t and not to keep lying about it.

11. In my mid-30s, having sex with my boyfriend, I suddenly had a flashback in which I was a young child, lying naked on a cotton bedspread with an interesting weave, with a wall to my left, and a few feet away on my right a window with a shade pulled down and bright sunlight coming in thin lines around the edges, and a door in the direction of my feet, and a large blank where I knew a person was standing, looking down at my pudendum.

I felt a sickening dread, but knew I could not leave or stop what was coming, and so I turned my head toward the wall and began a recitation I had previously invented: the wallpaper is gray-green, the flowers are pink with green leaves, in rows that go across and up to the side, and each rose has a frame around it made of white wavy lines, two on each side, and the paint is not laid down evenly, but is thick in some places and thin in others, so the gray-green paper shows through, and I wonder if the workers got in trouble for that.

Then I decided to praise myself, and told myself, “I invented this. No adult taught me.” But that made me almost remember why I had invented this, and I almost came back into my body, so I quickly told myself I had to always stay exactly with the routine and never stop to think about my invention, and I began again at the beginning, “The wallpaper is gray green, the flowers are pink with green leaves….“

Then I was back in my mid-30s body having sex with my partner, extremely shocked by what I had just remembered.

I didn’t know what to call this event, but thought it would be the sort of thing to ask a counselor, but I didn’t want to talk to a counselor about it because I was afraid of what it might mean, afraid that I did not have the time and emotional energy to process it, and also afraid that someone might convince me it meant something that it didn’t mean.

The next day I reviewed my options, again certain I did not have the time or energy or money to deal with this while my children were so young, and I was trying to make a living. So I decided it was important to not think about it, because I might inadvertently change the memory, but I also did not want to forget it. An idea came to me to put the memory into a box and put it on the top shelf of a closet until later when I had time. Oddly, the box I chose was an old-fashioned (50’s?) round, striped hat box.

12. In my late 30s, in the days after the family had gathered for Christmas, a few of us were sitting around the dining table telling stories, while others stood nearby. My brother had just told a story that someone remarked was from a very young age, and I knew I also had a memory from a very young age, so I grabbed a paper napkin and drew while describing the married student housing apartment at UC Davis where my parents lived when I was born:

“The front door was here, and it had a tall, narrow window right next to it with circle-textured glass so you couldn’t see through. The kitchen was right here, and Mom was standing at the stove, and the hood light was on, shining brightly when I looked up. The living room was here to the left, and the linoleum changed to carpet at an angle here. The red leather chair was here.”

At that, my mother said accusingly, “You can’t remember that. You were 14 months old when we left there.“

To which I replied, “But you just acknowledged that I did remember it.“

Mom‘s face was in silent shock, as she pushed away from the table, walked calmly to a window, stood there looking outside, and finally said in a trance-like, singsong voice, “I’ve always said you had an active imagination and you mix up your dreams with memories” - as if she’d said those words a thousand times.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck as I realized she’d said that phrase in those exact same words every time I had ever remembered anything from my childhood, and she’d never said anything similar regarding the other kids.

Mentally scrambling for a reason, I assumed she had done something for which she felt very guilty, and I needed to tell her sometime that my childhood was fine, and she had nothing to feel bad about.

However, driving home from that Christmas visit, I pulled off to the side of the interstate and sobbed over the steering wheel, feeling incredibly sad that my mother had been diminishing me all my life for something she felt guilty about, and my siblings had been hearing these diminishments for their entire lives, and I felt so isolated, so unfairly accused.

Later, I learned this is consistent in families with one abused child.

13. Sometime around age 40, while beginning to cook dinner, I realized I had some memory of someone saying something that I couldn’t understand, but clearly had a distinct cadence that repeated. It came through as a pattern of beats that I had the odd impression had been repeating in my head for at least three days and was associated with a little home in Merced before our custom home.

I told myself I was probably like a “word on the tip of the tongue“ and I’d remember it if I quit focusing on it, so I took down a sauce pan and turned toward the sink to fill it with water, when suddenly those beats turned into someone saying, “You’ve got to stop that soon. She’s getting old enough to remember.“

I had the sickening feeling it was my mother speaking, and whatever it was she didn’t want me to remember was probably not good, probably sexual. I was in so much shock, I couldn’t breathe, and I staggered a few steps to the sink and struggled to hold the pan in my hand because I didn’t want to hear it clatter, but didn’t have the energy in my arms to set it down. I held myself up by my forearms on the front of the sink, and struggled to take in a breath.

14. When I was in therapy, age 41, in 1993, my therapist asked me about my family and what my upbringing had been like, to which I had replied confidently that it was “normal, nothing wrong.” He then asked me to describe some typical interactions with my parents.

To my surprise, I couldn’t think of anything that was nice. All I could remember of my young childhood was of talking to the back or side of my mother’s head,or her being angry at me, or cold and rejecting, like making me stay in my bedroom and not bother her unless it was really, really necessary, and if it was necessary to first figure out how to say what I needed in the fewest words possible, or me sneaking out to sit in the hallway around the corner to listen to her interacting with other people.

The only young memory of interacting with my father was of him being extremely angry at Christmas when he presented me with a wooden child-size stove he had made himself, and I had given it a little attention before being distracted by all the other presents. When I asked about it later, my mother told me he had given it away.

I also remember him taking family photos, and all of us smiling giddily.

I’ve since learned that mothers often emotionally abuse the children who are sexually abused by their father. And calling them liars or delusional is an important tactic to discredit them in the event they ever tell the truth.

15. A few years ago, taking on my mother‘s genealogy work, using ancestors.com, I was prompted to look at “hints” that might be found on their associate site, newspapers.com. I had followed the categories in order, and when I came to “police records,” I expected to find nothing, but clicked anyway, following my habit of orderly progress, and was surprised to see a photograph of my mother, looking very threatened, with narrow window blinds behind her, like those I might have seen in police interrogation rooms on television.

From Police Records, Newspapers.com

I had been efficiently taking screenshots, then clicking for the next item, intending to read everything later, but after I captured her photograph, before I could click on the article, the article and photograph both disappeared.

Because I have documented many events of apparent surveillance on my phone and computer, I assumed someone did not want me to see this and interrupted my access. (I wonder if someone else can.)

I can only guess why her photo was in a police record, wearing her flowered bed jacket and a hairdo like she wore that year in Merced, and wearing such a cornered, silent expression.

…

Today, my siblings have never spoken to me about any of my writing, thoughts, assumptions, or proof, but I’ve learned that they have spoken to my daughter, and possibly my son, about my “mental illness.”

Even though I have openly described myself as a “multiple personality,” I do not consider this a mental illness. When I first realized that I was multiple, I went to the medical library and read everything they had there, and I learned that it should not be considered a disorder or illness. It is simply a creative adaptation to great trauma, and each alternate personality is sane.

But no one in my family wants to discuss this, or hear my opinions on anything. 

I’m 72 now, with a son and daughter who choose not to speak to me any more than necessary, choose not to visit me, even when I tell them I need help, and do not believe I have Lyme Disease or any reason to not to have been cheerful for all of our visits the last decade, or any reason to have skipped some holidays and planned visits.

They seem ready to write me off as “crazy” – just like my mother intended. (And probably just as the mind controllers intended.)

Facing end of life with no strong family connections, but with family ready to discredit my ability to make my own life (and financial and housing) decisions feels like a rather dangerous situation.

And I’m sad, disappointed, scared, and sometimes furious at them for believing what my mother told them all their lives.

Next; Reasons I believe I was a US government mind control subject …

Isolation in Weirdness

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Morgellon’s Disease can be painfully isolating – but I’m used to isolation. I’m a mind control subject, and the controllers have always planned for us to be isolated and discredited – in case we’d ever remember what had been done to us.

Since I was a child, my mother has been telling my siblings not to believe me, and while I witnessed her behavior all my life, I’d been programmed to never object to it or anything else my parents might do.

They were being paid, I believe, to cooperate with the controllers with whom they’d contracted when I was a baby, living with them in student housing on the campus of UC Davis where the Human Ecology Project was launched in my first year, a cover for mind control experiments.

My mother created a lot of disharmony between me and my siblings. When they wouldn’t eat all their vegetables, she’d point to me – cruelly mind controlled to obey regardless of my desire – and say, “Why don’t you just eat your dinner like Jean Ann?” and they’d all scowl at me across the table.

Another phase I heard from her often was, “Oh, I’ve always said you had a vivid imagination, and you mixed up your dreams with memory.” Weirdly, she always said the exact same words, never varied, in a sing-song rhythm, so that one day it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck when I realized she seemed to be going into a trance when she repeated the sentence word-for-word, and in that moment I knew something was very, very weird.

I’d just drawn the floor plan of an apartment in which I had my youngest memory, including details about where the linoleum ended and the carpet began and the glazed tall narrow window by the front door – to which she’d exclaimed, “You couldn’t remember that! You were 14 months old when we left there!” Then her face had trembled at the illogic of her words, and she pushed herself up from the table, walked to the window, and said those same words once more.

The memory I’d described rather thoughtlessly (I’d started enthusiastically before realizing it didn’t put her in a very good light but then I had to continue, so I de-emphasized the difficult part) had been of me fussing for her attention, batting around her hips (I was that small), her frustrated response as she stopped her efforts over the stove, threw the spatula, and screamed, “I can’t take this anymore! I’m leaving!” and walked out the door.

My next youngest memory of my mother was of her “washing my mouth out with soap” for something I’d said.  I have no idea what it was, but I suspect the thing that enraged her was talking about some sexual abuse in the night.  I was so obedient to my mother that after she left me in the bathroom, I followed her, prodding my tongue over chunks of soap stuck to my teeth and my mouth filling with saliva, to get permission to move the step stool so I could spit it all out.

Later, when my baby sister was born, I recall being told to keep my two younger siblings from getting into trouble when my mother took the baby in to nap with her. I was only five and felt burdened to keep two little ones from getting into things they shouldn’t.  Of course, they didn’t want to listen to me, and things didn’t always go well.  But I still have no memories of my mother’s face or her looking at me.

Today, when I describe anything weird to my siblings, they all ignore me in a similar way; they respond to everything “normal” and are absolutely silent about everything else, even the most extreme.

Once, after I’d woken with a Taser burn on my arm, my face looking as bad as I’ve ever seen it, and my physical energy totally drained for days, I crafted a letter to my siblings and edited it for three days until I thought I had something that was as brief as possible, but still well-documented, limited to what I thought they could handle, with a conclusion simply asking for their advice in addressing this common weirdness in my life, of waking with weird injuries and total exhaustion.

Two of my three siblings responded with one sentence each. My brother would pray for me; my older younger sister said she didn’t have any money to lend (I never mentioned money); and my youngest younger sister just didn’t respond.

Years earlier, I’d learned that all my family had met together without me for a special long weekend at the family cabin, and I was never told the nature of the meeting.  I assume they all decided to do something like I’ve heard is done in mental health cases: only respond to what’s “real”; ignore what’s “not real.”  I understand.  Mom did her job well, and my siblings simply believe I’m somewhat crazy.

That’s not really a problem. I could always just live my life without communicating with my siblings.  But one sibling will be executing the family estate one day, and my father’s will has some strange language about money NOT going to anyone who can’t care for him- or herself; and if my brother – who has, as a fundamentalist Christian, chosen to act very hostilely to me in the past, including telling me I’m not in touch with reality as he walked away, waving his hand as if to shoo away any words back from me) – actually believes I’m crazy, then I might get ZERO inheritance – unless I go live in an institution!

So I continue to treat my situation like a good scientist, and document, document, document.  I have photos, testimonies, medical records, police records, and more.  But my siblings want to hear of nothing; they want to continue to pretend I’m crazy, and no sexual abuse or mind control has had anything to do with our family.

Never mind that our family has connections to Masons, Mormons, the Military, and Hollywood.  And one sister hired Madonna’s mother to be nanny to her baby daughter!

One other way I could interpret my siblings’ behavior is that they’re more knowledgeable than they let on, and they know our parents were involved and that I was given into mind control, but it’s best to pretend they don’t know, because it has always been in everyone’s best interests to protect our father (and mother, who passed away last year).

Or maybe it’s to protect themselves.  Maybe they’re also in on it somehow.  Maybe they became Satanists at some point, willfully or accidentally.  Or maybe there’s some other reason.

I choose to believe they were simply encouraged from their earliest years by my mother and father to disbelieve me – because the controllers know that their experiments are not fully refined, and their subjects often “glitch” and realize the weirdness or pain of their lives and want to tell someone.  So to head off that possibility, their subjects are called crazy or not dependable from their earliest days to everyone close to them.

The world tells me I have a good mind; I’ve scored high on college exams, Air Force exams (I never joined), and MENSA tests (also never joined).   I’ve been offered two six-figure salaries; and in college received comments from three professors that my analyses were the most astute and creative that they’d read in their careers.

Last week, one of my sisters learned about the harsh treatment of migrants in our border jails, and I wrote back to say I wasn’t surprised because of how I’d been treated in jail as an activist.  It involved being Tasered and losing 24 hours of memory.  She ignored me.

The sad part is my family and exes seems to have also convinced my daughter to distrust me too.  My son I’ve chosen not to tell much to, so he’s the only positive “real” connection, but I haven’t had the courage to actually be real, lest he turn away also.

So I live with NO acknowledgement of my reality or the pain or anxiety I suffer, except from random friends now and then who’re dealing with something similar.

I worry about my family.  I’d like to protect my kids and granddaughter and some of my nieces and nephews, but the mind controllers have been plotting for decades to keep exactly this from happening.

So I live philosophically.  Each of us has their own lessons to learn, and no one can help another learn them.  We can support and encourage and love, but ultimately we can’t help.

We have our own spiritual Helpers though, and so I pray for my children and grandchildren, and even my siblings and father and mother on the other side, and my nieces and nephews – that their Helpers are doing what’s possible, and I don’t need to worry.  It’s sad, though, never having had siblings to whom I could relate normally.

I’ve enjoyed that sense of family when I’ve connected with the other side.  It’s not very often though, at least that I remember.

I don’t blame anyone.  We’re all mind controlled to some degree, and some of us with the worst of it can see it better and sooner; those who can’t see it have every reason not to look: it’s scary.  I don’t blame them for looking away.

I’m sure life would be delightful if I could pretend this stuff wasn’t real and “make it real,” and I tried that for ten years.  But after a decade of denial, throwing all my life energy into other activities, they were always sabotaged and brought down by mysterious forces, either working in me or working through others.

So I accept that my eyes and ears and good mind are right; I’m mind controlled.  And those around me have been mind controlled to ignore what I’d like to tell them.

I respect mind control.  It’s next to impossible to combat.  At least I can’t, yet.  So I can’t blame others for turning their backs on me.

Hopefully, we’ll talk about it in the afterlife.

Great Podcast: “In the Dark”

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Podcasts let us listen on our phone while washing dishes, walking to the mailbox, driving to town.  Or we can sit on our sofa – away from the computer – lights off, eyes closed, a fine radio production washing over.

“In the Dark” is a quality production worth this attention.  I’m grateful those radio professionals are in the world today.  Each episode makes me hungry for the next.  And it’s all true investigative journalism, told well.

The series exposes suspiciously negligent police work – something some of us need to be reminded happens sometimes.

Season 2 takes on another case, and I’m in the midst of bingeing through the second season now.

It’s satisfying to hear an example of this widespread horror exposed.

 

A Disinformation Story from 2007

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sheep-wallpaper-1Disinformation is finally being better understood and acknowledged throughout the culture, but few people understand its full extent. And understanding and reading reality correctly is an important survival skill for all of us.

Therefore, I’d like to share what I’ve learned, as both third-party observer and victim.  I’ll chose an older story rather than a new one, to lessen the chance the guilty will be recognized – which I assume will lessen the repercussions I will experience for telling.

~

Before I tell this 7-year old story, I first want to tell a little about the concept:  I didn’t know the word disinformation until I was involved with Earth First!, and then I witnessed it a great deal, as our expert-witness scientist supporters from around the world were ignored by the Media, and our peaceful protests, humorous skits, and potluck dinners (at my home) were treated like national security threats in FBI reports (I have copies).

car bombWhen Judi Bari, a non-violence activist and mother of two, was car-bombed in 1990, she was maligned in the world-wide Media as a would-be bomber.  But subtler lies are also told for different effects.

I’d become a thorn in the FBI’s side when, in 2002, I wrote or helped write, almost every day for six weeks, media releases for the Judi Bari v FBI trial.  When I returned home to my desert hermitage, I began to be plagued by frightening bouts of amnesia and immobilization, with physical wounds, including lacerations and puncture wounds to the inside of my vagina (also photographed) – to the point that I considered suicide frequently.

inside

My g-spot (descending bulge) was sliced from back to front and twice more (not visible here) from side to side.

Feeling like a sitting duck in the desert, I sold my remote home on 20 acres and, because I didn’t think I could stand a big city anymore, found my way to Silver City, in great need of friends to surround me.

taser cuUnfortunately, frightening events continued to happen, including third-degree Taser burns and biopsy scoops that appeared on my hands and arms and back with no memory of how they happened – and weird events of disinformation that undermined my reputation and sense of community.

IMG_1725Over the nine years I’ve lived here, my wounds have also included scores of injection bruises, two donut bruises, dozens of other weird bruises, sexual mysteries, and even some healed scars, one of which a doctor assumed was from thyroid surgery.  Most I’ve photographed, and many I’ve shown friends, though few want to hear about them – I gather because it’s just too upsetting to their world views.

cia doctorsI totally understand not wanting to hear.  It took me a lot of years of having this actually happen to me before I could adjust my world view to get over the “freedom and justice for all” mythology and accept what was happening.

If you find this hard to believe, I do understand, and hope you can read on, because this is part of our reality – and properly reading reality is essential to our survival.  Following is an account of disinformation against me, undermining my status in my new community.

~

In 2007, I was a week or so away from a trip to Peru, when someone recommended a woman to stay at my home and care for my cat.  Actually, it was a couple, I was told, a man and a woman, about my age, who were hip and “into community,” and had some circumstances that had stranded them in Silver City, needing a place to stay; the husband was working, but hadn’t gotten a paycheck yet.  I agreed to let them stay in my home, even though afterward I realized that I didn’t like the woman at all, and she had talked a solid streak for 90 minutes, essentially wearing me down, and making me feel sorry and embarrassed for her, as if to say No would force her to recognize she had been obnoxious, which would be hurtful to her, so I couldn’t say No.  Not logical, but defininely my sort of neurotic, self-defeating kindness.

In Tucson, I was supposed to be at the airport at 6 am for an 8 am flight, but I woke at 4 with a severe toothache that made it very difficult to move with any more than a shuffle, so I canceled my flight with a medical excuse.  I would have a root canal later that afternoon.

Mid-morning, when my plane was in the air, I began receiving bizarre emails from my house sitter who assumed I was on the plane to Peru.  She told me my stove was leaking gas, the phone wasn’t working, two crews of repairmen had been in, and my cat was acting ill – all in her first day at the house, and the first day of my 20-day trip.

Even though I immediately suspected this was probably a form of harassing disinformation, it was shocking to think of how very distressing it would have been to be on a plane to a faraway place with this bombardment of distressing news.

Thankfully, I wasn’t gone, and I’d been around enough FBI lies and other tricks that I found it all suspicious.  So I answered her emails without telling her I was still in Tucson.

Her stories continued to hammer on distressing probabilities and were amped up with direct accusations (13 specific, weird accusations against me! in emails still saved) that I was “paranoid” and similar negative assessments – even though I’d been extremely cautious not to say a single inflammatory word, but simply asked calm questions about my home. It was as though she’d intended I become paranoid.

I called a handy woman friend who visited the house and was told by the woman that the phone was repaired.  Since I’d asked my friend to enter and check out the stove and look around, she asked to enter, but the woman refused.  When my friend next called to tell me the phone was supposedly repaired, I was still unable to call home, and was told by the woman via email that the phone was “down again,” working only during the short period my friend had come to the door.

After drilling and filling my tooth, I hit the road immediately to Tucson, calling another friend along the way, who arrived at the house shortly after I did.  The woman was shocked to find me at the door and was barely willing to let me into my own home.  When my friend arrived, we confronted the woman with the crazy contents of her emails, as I wanted to be entirely fair and consider the possibility that perhaps she hadn’t send them, and they were instead sent by disinformation specialists; I reviewed all 13 accusations with her, and she confirmed she’d written them – even as she stammered to explain some of her more bizarre accusations.

We then had to demand she leave, as she was intent on staying in my home as I’d “promised” to let her, and she even had the gall to suggest I leave.  When she continued refusing, we finally threatened to call the police to remove her and she finally accepted our demands.  But as she left, and we realized to our astonishment that she didn’t have anything at the house other than her small purse – no overnight bags, no toothbrush, no food, no nothing, even though she’d supposedly stayed there the night before and her husband was due there shortly and she desperately wanted to stay there again that night.  But the bed hadn’t even been slept in, and the kitchen was unused.  We assumed she wanted us to leave so we wouldn’t discover this, and she was actually there for some other reason.

As we pondered this, my friend’s phone rang, she answered it and heard silence.  After hanging up, she hit the call back button and was greeted with an office name with “Intelligence” in the title.  My friend and I assumed the woman and her husband were functioning as low-level spies, watching the house so that others could come in (under the guise of repairmen?) to do whatever they do to activists and others on federal “watch” lists.  Perhaps they’d used some high technology to identify and call her phone, perhaps to add a bit of warning to our overload of weird information and seeming threats.

The next day, I called the gas company and was told she had called and a repair person had come out, but no gas leak was found, and the stove never did have problems.

I used my cell phone to call the phone company because the home phone still did not work.  When the repairman came out the next day, he worked for two hours and finally concluded, “This is the strangest problem I’ve ever seen in my 20 years of phone repair, and I can’t figure it out.”  And he rewired most of the house.

My cat never showed any signs of illness.

A few days later, another phone repairman appeared at the front door.  I called Qwest to confirm he was legit, and was told something vague I don’t remember, even as I realized the feds certainly have the ability to intercept my call, redirect it to their own office, and have someone pose as a phone company rep, telling me whatever I needed to hear.  I let the guy in.

He checked the phone jacks, then went outside and climbed a ladder to the box attached near the roof line.  I wondered if I’d detect him putting a bug on my line, so I stood beneath and watched.  He talked and seemed to be wasting time, repeating motions, and getting impatient with me standing there looking up constantly.  I smiled and asked him if he was finished.  He looked confused and irritated.  Laughter was close, but I had no desire to mock a fed.  I also knew I couldn’t stop them if they wanted to put a bug on my line, and if he didn’t do it today, they’d do it another day soon, and it might be less fun next time.  So I walked around the corner, gave him a minute, then came back to find him climbing down, looking relieved.  Ever since, my old-style ringer phone makes a little noise a few seconds after every time I hang up, and around 10 pm every night, which I think of as shift-change, and maybe other times I haven’t yet noticed.

The woman and her husband, I later learned, went to live with a young, hip couple out in the Mimbres, whose friends overlapped with mine, but whom I only knew because the husband clerked at a store I frequent, a store central to my community.  Immediately, the man quit being friendly with me and instead acted as though I were a terrible person he could barely be civil to. And in following years, a number of their acquaintances have continued to keep distant even though we have many friends and interests in common.

I assumed the woman had told the young couple poisonous things about me.  But I didn’t know them well enough to try to discover what they’d been told, and my questions might be received as very weird.  It was very weird, and I didn’t trust anyone to accept it at face value without having to reconsider a lot of assumptions and probably wonder also if I was just plain crazy, so I said nothing to anyone except the two friends who each witnessed part of the event.

Every so often, about once a year, people on the edges of my community suddenly act cold or confused around me, as if they’d heard something terrible and didn’t know whether they should even acknowledge me.  I notice quite a few people all change at once and continue in the pattern for some weeks or months, until slowly the awkwardness fades a little, but doesn’t go entirely away.  I just stay away from them, to lessen their discomfort and mine.

I sometimes review the experiences of friendly acquaintances turning away or looking fearful and try to convince myself the events are not significant, but they seem to display a consistent pattern.  And then there’s the other parallel evidence:  the woman at my house with no personal possessions, her emails full of lies and inflammatory accusations, and my phone line mysteriously wired.  And mysterious Taser burns and similar wounds on my very own body keep me from dismissing my total experience as imagination – as some friends, family, and doctors would like me to.

See-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil-monkeys-14750406-1600-1200I’d love to dismiss it as imagination and believe in a different America, but that’s not my experience.  For 8 years now, I’ve been asking my online readers, and no one has come up with any explanation better than the one that’s supported by government documents:  federal agents practice disinformation, harass, encourage divisiveness, and more, under the rubric of COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program).

Recently I learned there’s a name for people like me: “targeted individuals” – abbreviated TI’s, with multiple websites documenting experiences of many others who describe things similar to mine.

Beware of lies.  If you hear something bad about a person, check it with the person it’s about.

Only once in these nine years has a friend checked a rumor about me with me; it was a lie, and she’d believed it for six months (it sounded reasonable) and even passed it on to others herself during that time.  I told her the truth as I understood it and asked her to pass it back onto the grapevine.  I don’t know if she did or how well it traveled.

Disinformation is usually planted in such a way and with people removed from the target just enough that it’s very difficult (and no likely to be successful) for the TI to confront the perpetrator.  Only the people in the middle – those told the lie – can do anything about it – by wising up, and checking.  Thanks for doing that.