THE HIJABI POET

Well, where do I even begin? The right place is to describe the context of my life, and the emotional condition I was in as a result, before getting into this first abusive relationship.

BACKGROUND

If you’ve been following my work from the beginning, you might know that five years ago I had to finish my first book at the bottom of clinical depression. And, if you don’t know that story, here are some reality-checks you’ll need to correctly understand the four stories to come:

1. I didn’t start to write out of depression. Instead, I got the inspiration for that book from the most meaningful and joyful experience of my life – coming back to my homeland.

2. My first book is not a memoir, and it’s not about my depression. It’s a novel, and it does address mental health issues, but the stories of my protagonists are theirs, and they are much different from mine.

3. My depression was not a long period of sadness or a dry spell. It was a clinically diagnosed illness that heavily disrupted my everyday life, my physical health, my congnitive functioning, and most of all, my creative productivity. Yes, the notion that depression or trauma fuel creativity is epic bullshit. People claiming this have never experienced clinical depression and don’t understand what it really is.

4. I never had bipolar disorder or any biochemical failure in my brain that caused my depression. The disorder completely resulted from multilateral trauma in my life that had been happening for more than a decade. And as any “real man”, I’d lived in complete denial of that trauma and my feelings about it before it finally imploded into major, multi-drug-resistant, ultimately terminal clinical depression – because the trauma never stopped happening.

5. Depression made me finally look inwards and name the lies I’d been conditioned to live and believe: lies about myself, lies about my worth, lies about my purpose, lies about the world, and lies about relationships. It brought me face-to-face with the truth about who I was, what I deserved, and what I could contibute to the world. The truth I’d buried and abandoned in my teenage years because of trauma, oppression, poverty, bullying and other adversities happening to me outside of my control. Depression brought me to seeing the abysmal gap between what my life was and what it deserved to be. Depression, on a visceral level, showed me that as huge as that gap was, abandoning myself and my truth was no longer an option.

6. Talent is universal, and opportunity is not. In my particular circumstances, as a person stuck in poverty in an oppressed third-world country, writing that book was the only way to get the breakthrough my life needed and deserved – move to Europe, start over, and lay the foundation for my creative career – the career where I could actualize my truest gifts and make the biggest difference in the world. Yes, unlike a middle-class American millenial, I had no possibility of linear, evolutionary growth in my life. There had to be a revolution in order for me to get access to opportunity, freedom, and even basic security – things that just weren’t possible for me in Russia. The idea of the book, in its magnitude and glory, gave me this life-altering chance. As small or big as it was, it was my only one. Otherwise, there was nothing but misery in sight for me. It was objective, evidenced reality, not a distorted perception induced by depression. In truth, my depression was induced by that reality. For better of worse, even though depression messed up hugely with my creativity, I had to finish the book regardless – because the success of that project was the only way to eliminate the circumstances that caused my clinical depression in the first place and that would keep it burning for the rest of my life.

At this point, if you find yourself thinking that I'm exaggerating or dramatizing or playing a victim, I kindly suggest that you get the fuck out of this blog. If you're one of those "experts" thinking you can understand people's lived experiences better than they do, then a) it's a clear, 100% indicator of your unexplored privilege, and, b) it means your tolerance for discomfort, your critical awareness, and your capacity for empathy suck. Reading these posts won't benefit you in any way. Go upgrade your toolbox somewhere. There are plenty of resources available

As I was finishing the book through the ravages of depression in 2014, new traumatic circumstances came into my life from where least expected. The military conflict with the Ukraine and subsequent sanctions against Western food suppliers exacerbated the food insecurity I was living in. The collapse of Russian ruble follwoing the slump in crude oil prices annihilated half of the savings I’d made penny by penny over five years of working under conditions of semi-slavery in the corrupt, wretchedly underfunded system of Russian healthcare, for no better alternative on the employment market. Then, I got into a car crash where I got minor injuries but my vehicle was damaged beyond repair, with no insurance of course, taking away my ability to commute, or go grocery shopping, or even move around my neighborhood efficiently. In one word, it felt like destiny and God conspired against me.

Excruciating as it was, I did finish the book being at that rock bottom, with no drugs working, contemplating suicide most of the time. Furthermore, in the beginning of 2015, I put up my first Website and made my first outreach efforts still in that condition.

That was one of the decisions I’m most proud of in my life: a terminally depressed, financially broke, unknown guy from a third-world country, with no hot selfies on his Instagram page and no celebrities among his followers, I still showed up with my work in the privilege-dominated arena of the Western creative industry. I didn’t believe in myself at the moment, but I had solid evidence to believe in the value of my work. So I dared greatly.

I didn’t have much professional experience in networking in general or networking on social media in particular. So predictably, my first effort miserably failed. But despite my terminal condition and the deafening voice of depression telling me “to finally put an end to my useless, worthless, meaningless existence”, I persevered. Why?

Because creativity was the love of my life. I fell in love with her when I was 12, and we remained separated for more than a decade. But at 25, embarking on this life-altering project of my first book, I married her. And I meant my marriage vows. I vowed I would stay with her till death set us apart. And, it turned out that creativity meant her vows as well. She stayed with me in my terminal sickness and refused to leave me. She kept me afloat when depression drowned me. Because we already had one baby. And it looks like she wanted to have more.

In March 2015, when I got the first positive feedback for my book from a popular and very privileged American blogger, my almost lost battle with depression finally shifted. I know it sounds stupid and is very indicative of my broken self-worth at the moment, but his words healed me. It felt like someone out there in the world finally appreciated this piece of art and the difference my voice could make. It’s like the universe finally responded to my bid for connection, no matter the disadvantaged and desperate place it was made from. I finally felt heard and seen for who I was. What more than twenty antidepressant drugs, in highest dosages and combinations, couldn’t even slightly palliate, was healed by the power of human connection.

From that moment, my depression started to recede. Slowly but steadily, I owned back my self-worth and my sense of agency. I knew I had a lot of inner work ahead – as depression gradully released its grip on my cognition, for lack of access to professional help, I had to become my own therapist – find, explore, and unlearn dysfunctional beliefs and behaviors that I’d been conditioned into for more than a decade. Difficult as it was to do on my own, it was possible. Growing up amidst absence of opportunity, I learned how to do far too many things on my own. Developing emotional literacy, mastering resilience, achieving clarity of vision, and adopting a new belief system was crucial because now, as I got external evidence about the value of my work, there was a whole new future instead of me. I couldn’t carry my maladaptive, trauma-driven beliefs and behaviors into the life that I knew had to be radically different.

So a while later, I quit my semi-slavery full-time job at the academic clinic where I’d worked since graduation. Instead, I got a part-time position in a private clinic. It offered an even more risible income, but plenty of time for me to focus on healing myself, reading, and preparing for stepping into my new life. I had savings in the banks to subsist for a while. And scary as it was with savings this small, now I had to gradually let go of the career that, aside from keeping me in perennial poverty, never reflected my true purpose.

This healing process took me around nine months – till the end of 2015. It’s not that long, actually, after more than a year of multi-drug-resistant depression, eleven months of daily suicidial ideation, and more than a decade of living in multilateral, uncontrollable trauma. Make no mistake: in that process, I didn’t expect to become a brand new person. My goal was to regain a minimal level of sanity and emotional security before making any next steps with the book. I couldn’t afford to be a quivering mess of nerves talking to privileged Western people about the project that was my only life-altering opportunity. I knew time worked against me and the career I ultimately wanted to make. But those months were a reasonable price to pay for my basic mental recovery.

Little did I know about what was in store for me.

THE POET WALKS IN

In late 2015 - early 2016 I began reaching out to people about my book again. I started emailing the same blogger who had given me excellent feedback back in March – and now, for some reason I couldn’t make sense, he ignored me completely, even when I tried to connect through other channels. Disappointing as it was, it wasn’t able to stop me. My quest was driven by truth and courage. Whatever one particular person thought of me, or communicated to me, wasn’t significant compared to what I knew both about my life and how it needed to be changed, and what I knew about my work and the value it could bring into the world.

So I continued networking, focusing on one particular category of people. Yes, in general I was looking for people interested in social justice, as it could be guessed from their Instagram posts and their tweets. But in particular, I thought that since my book addressed homophobia among its main topics, gay people with should be the first willing to help me with it.

That was one of most fatal mistakes in my life. Back then, I didn’t have the understanding, knowledge, and resources to know better. Just as the culture tells us, I believed empathy was a function of trauma. I believed that if someone was gay, for example, they should be concerned about homophobia and involved in the fight for LGBT equality in the first place – because their lives were affected by the trauma of homophobic oppression the most.

In reality, that is bullshit. First, because empathy has far more to do with our critical thinking, our self-awareness, our spirituality and our willingness to be vulnerable than it has to do with the presence of trauma in our individual lives. Later on, I came to realize how many people I’d seen over the course of my life who’d gone through horrible trauma and still did empathy poorly. Second, real fight for social justice isn’t about having a skin in the game: people shouldn’t be here just because of their individual interest. If they are, chances are they won’t give a shit about aspects of inequality and injustice different from the one they’re personally affected by. And third, I didn’t understand intersectionality – even though people can have a marginalized identity in one dimension, like being gay, their privilege in other dimensions (like economic status) may hugely decrease if not completely eliminate their exposure to trauma.

So those well-fed, well-groomed, well-buffed, and well-clad Western gay men showing off their fortunate lives on Instagram, representing a tiny percentile of the LGBT community while creating most social media visibility, were completely out of touch with what the majority of gay and trans people around the world had to face on a daily basis. Furthermore, blissfully ignorant about their Western privilege, they valued comfort above all (fulfilling one of the major LGBT stereotypes). And when an activist like me reached out to them because they had connections and access I needed to launch my work, guess how they reacted?

At best, they ignored me altogether. But if they didn’t and started to talk, the moment they realized I was from a third-world country and became aware of the unearned power they held in the situation, they didn’t hesitate to start treating me like garbage. Remember, they – not me – had galleries full of hot selfies, nice houses, luxury cars, offers from brands and celebrity friends.

There was an important aspect in those interactions that I can’t afford to omit, even though I feel very vulnerable sharing it. One of the major sources of inspiration for my book was the memoir of an internationally famous American artist of Hispanic descent. A gay man who’d recently came out, in that memoir he gloriously debunked many hurtful LGBT stereotypes. Years ago, back in my adolescence, he used to be a role model for me – an epitome of what I dreamed to achieve. His music used to mean a lot to me. Deep down in my heart, despite all the trauma and scarcity I was living in, I realized that performance arts were my most ultimate, truest calling. Since I remembered myself, music was what made me feel most vulnerable and most connected to others, and that’s how deep down I knew it was my way to go. This truth had been buried under heavy layers of trauma and oppression in my life, but at the age of 25, it caught up with me during my first trip to Spain – exactly where the idea of the book came to my mind, and where my spiritual awakening began. So I came back to the music I’d once held dear, and I found the recent coming out story of that artist. Given that my book had to portray the love of two men and that, with my machist upbringing in Russia, I knew little about LGBT topics in general, I was curious to read his memoir and learn about his journey. At that point, I didn’t doubt the authenticity of his book. And yes, the lessons I made from it reinforced my intention to write my own, even though mine was going to be a work of fiction.

Fast-forward three years later:

Starting my book, I chose to focus on the creative process, treasuring every minute with inspiration. I thought it was too early to think anything about publishing. But finishing my book in 2014, I had to rumble with a tough question: after this work having been completed and polished, how am I going to share it with the world?

Well, it was clear that I needed help and support from successful creatives in the West. Given its size and scope and character, my book wasn’t suitable for self-publishing. It terrified me, but it was fact: this work was too deep and too big, and I had no idea why it chose to be born into the world through me, an oppressed person trapped in a third-world country. It needed a major publisher and a professional promotion campaign that I had no resources, no connections, and no experience to run on my own. Remember, I was a financially broke survivor of clinical depression, with no perspective of getting out of poverty in the stagnating economy of Russia, no matter how hard I would work and where. Then again, aside from this book as the showcase of my talent and my artistic values, I needed to make connections with Western creatives in order to find opportunities and resources for my further career in performance arts. I needed connect to people in social circles far beyond my reach.

Given my book’s inspiration sources, that artist’s LGBT activism, and my heartfelt connection to Hispanic music as the origin of my career vision, I believed that he was the #1 person to talk to about this project. I believed its values would deeply resonate with him. I inferred this from his social statements, clearly articulalted in his memoir. His connections and access were exactly what a work like mine needed, and he could definitely become my mentor in the upcoming perfomance arts career.

For sure, there was no way an underprivileged person like me could directly contact an A-list American celebrity. But I could contact him through other people he was connected with, people who had active profiles on social networks. Make no mistake: I wasn’t looking just for random people, only if they had access to him. First and foremost, I was looking for like-hearted and like-minded folks who shared my values as an artist and the values this particular work promoted – intersectional justice, empathy, and listening to our dreams and hearts before listening to the world.

Therefore, when I reached out to people even in those early years with little expereince behind my belt, I never started communication with crazy statements like: “Hello! It looks like you personally know this celebrity. I have this incredible book that I want him to help me publish it. Please tell him to take a look at my Website.”

This never happened. Instead, first I analyzed the content those people posted. If I had enough reasons to believe they could be my allies, I started those relationships with providing basic information about my book and it mission and finding out if they were interested to support it. Initially, I never mentioned how exactly they could support it. I aimed to first get to know them as people and build relationships with them in a gradual, natural, boundaried way before getting more vulnerable, sharing about the circumstances of my life, and asking for the help they could give me by virtue of their privilege.

And here’s the thing, guys. Over the first months of 2016, as I found and reached out to such people on Instagram, the only treatment I received was ghosting, gaslighting, humiliating, overt shaming targeted at my appearance, my class, my ethnicity, and my artistic legitimacy. Truth has be told: not all of them were well-buffed American gay men. There were women and straight people among them as well. In the majority of cases, they welcomed my reaching out and acted in a benign manner in the beginning. In the beginning, they repeated the value statements they made in public – those value statements that made me reach out to them in the first place. And when with time the conversation got real and off-camera, all those values somehow evaporated. They actively encouraged me to be vulnerable and open, but as soon as they learned my country of residence and my socioeconomic status, all hell broke loose. At the best I got ghosted. More often, the evidence supporting my work suddenly got dismissed. My talent, initially appreciated, got diminished. My personal story got trivialized and rationalized. I got told that I was “crazy and needed professional help”. I got threats like “Don’t contact me again, or this will work against you.” I got called a fraud. Some people openly said, “I was advised to not maintain any communication with you. Good luck.”

Imagine how that felt to me, a person who barely regained a semblance of self-worth after surviving terminal clinical depression. How was I supposed to feel given the power those people held around the only opportunity for improvement in my life?

Of course, I was again shattered into smithereens, with a new attack of depression lurking around the corner. I knew I wouldn’t be able to survive another attack. The truth is that the multilateral trauma informing my life in Russia never disappeared. I just got some hope of getting out of it. And now this hope was crushed again, for no fault of my own.

And then, the hijabi poet walked in.

A HEALING BALM

Ironically – or rather tragically in hindsight – I discovered her quote on the page of one of those people who ghosted me. It was an utterly conscise, beautiful poem about staying true to yourself and knowing your worth when other people make you feel worthless. It was that type of poetry that lifts you up at your lowest and leaves you awed by the power of words. I found her page immediately and started following her.

At that point I didn’t do a lot of critical thinking – I never asked myself why her quotes got reposted by so many people and how they got featured in the @thegoodquote channel. I was led by the impression which, as it turned out, she carefully engineered to create – the impression that her poetry came from her heart, that her talent was unmatched, that she had the sensitivity and authenticity and vulnerability that few people in this world have.

Truth demands to be told: her poetry was like a healing balm to so many people out there. It felt like she of all people knew what it was like to be broken, abused, traumatized, oppressed, and silenced. It seemed that unlike most people, myself included, she could put her pain and her resilience into beautiful words. She expressed clearly and astutely what so many people out there struggled to express.

Since April 2016, I started actively commening on her posts, each of them resonating with me deeply. She had about 30k followers at that point, and unlike other “Instagram celebrities”, she replied to comments people left her, mine included. After months of being dismissed and treated like garbage by people I’d reached out to, how she treated me looked like the evidence of her honesty, empathy, and integrity. This positive reinforcement made me feel heard and seen, and I quickly became the person leaving the longest and most substantial comments on her posts.

Her words helped me regain my own artistic voice and explore new aspects of my creativity. I started writing poetry and putting it on my page. I realized how big and deep of an empowerment words could effect. My poetry topics were exactly the same as hers: self-worth, resilience, authenticity, and vulnerability. As I kept leaving comments on her page, new people came to my page and started following me, also sharing their stories and experiences in DM. Yes, poetry wasn’t directly related to my book, but I clearly saw how much difference my words made and how I quickly gained the skill to write efficiently. After all the trauma in my life, both remote and recent, I had lots of experience to draw upon.

However, here’s when depression and scarcity still heavily distorted my cognition. I saw the burgeoning growth of her page and nearing 60k followers after a month of my following her. I saw her quotes constantly getting broadcast on @thegoodquote and going viral. I didn’t understand what was happening behind the scenes. Instead, comparing it to the humble growth of my page, I believed that she got that much attention, that much fame, and that many followers because her talent was so much bigger than mine. That thought didn’t hurt me, because I didn’t set out to be a poet or a writer anyway. Unlike her, I didn’t have a published book to sell. My quotes were here just to empower and inspire people. And yes, they added significant value to my artistic portfolio – so that new people I would contact around my novel could see what I was about.

In the summer 2016, she took the next step from just replying to my comments. She started following me (which at the time felt like a huge, divine honor given my broken self-esteem) and then asked to help with her page. Aside from posting written poetry from her book, she’d recently started putting out “daily reminders” – short motivation videos filmed in casual settings. She asked me if I could write closed captions (subtitles) for those videos. Of course, I agreed. I thought it an honor to help her spread empowerment and hope and contribute to her work. Somehow, it didn’t occur to me at the moment that doing that was work in and of itself. Let alone the reality that I had my own artistry to share, and that its mission and scope were no smaller than the stated mission and scope of hers, and that it had to remain the primary focus of my time and effort – which was the reason why I still had to subsist in extreme poverty, on a risible part-time salary in a third-world country, unlike her, a person from a rich Arabic family now living in Canada.

However, in our private correspondence she made me feel like she wanted me as a friend and respected me as a fellow creative. This is a classical move abusers make identifying someone else’s vulnerability and the value they can bring at the same time, especially when the imbalance of privilege enhances the unequal dynamic in a relationship. She learned that, with my unpublished book, I was seeking to contact successful creative people in the West, and she communicated quite cleary she might help with that. It was easy to believe given that there were celebrities among her rapidly growing audience. Before making those promises, she didn’t bother me to ask me about the idea of my book, and how it was different from hers, never mind learn my background, the context it was being written in, and the meaning this whole project held for my life. She just saw my vulnerability and immediately bombed me with appreciation, pretty much the same way narcissists do it in romantic relationships. With my lowered guard and my poor critical thinking skills at the moment, I didn’t realize it was an early sign of manipulation, rather than a sign of her authenticity.

However, first drops of critical awareness started to kick in. It occurred to me that the meteoric growth of her following was phenomenal. Her talent was huge, no doubt, but any talent or quality of content wasn’t enough to create this big of community growth and virality within this short period of time. Without assuming anything bad, I wanted to study her case in order to learn some lessons for myself. I already realized that the number of followers significantly impacted how you got treated and seen as an Instagram personality. So I wanted to figure out some techniques I might not know at the moment.

I made notice of how frequently she got reposts on @thegoodquote channel. From their bio, it was obvious that they did paid promotions. So given the apparent trust and friendliness between me and her, I asked her how much it cost to get featured there.

She didn’t hesitate to respond: it was around $300 per one repost, which lasted for 3 hours and then got deleted. Yes, she said, it was a lot but “she had to somehow put her work out there.” Now, imagine how this sounded to me, as a person in Russia who lived with an average income of $150 per month. And, if even I had been employed full-time, not part-time, my income would not have exceeded $600 per month.

That was the price of getting famous in the contemporary Instagram world. It was not talent nor the quality of content. It was hundreds of dollars, for them to display your quote for just three hours. It was the price I couldn’t pay in the absence of privilege, regardless of my talent of my work’s quality.

But at that point, I still believed there was something more than just money involved in her phenomenal growth. I still honestly believed there might be some special techniques she used – maybe some highly efficient hashtags or copy on her posts. So for a couple of days in the summer of 2016, I thoroughly analyzed her Instagram posts, all the way back to January, the point where she claimed she barely had three hundred followers. I didn’t have into hack into her account – I analyzed post contents, likes, comments, and other publicly available data.

And here’s what I found: she had the gratitude post for 10 000 followers very early, around twelvth or thirteenth from the beginning. Literally, within a couple of weeks. I mean, how do you get that many followers that soon? Even with the most beautiful quotes ever? The number of likes and comments on her quotes didn’t correspond to an organic, linear growth of community. They were quite few before that 10k gratitude post. At first, I thought that she might have bought bot followers. There were plenty of such offers at the point. But then, I started reading into the comments. And then, it quickly became clear: commenting on a poem, many people mentioned they found it on @thegoodquote.

Now, the whole thing started to make sense. @thegoodquote had about 3 million followers at the moment. One three-hour-long repost on their page would naturally yield her a couple thousand followers. That’s how 10 000, 20 000, and so on came about. Yes, many people in her audience then spread her quotes to their friends by tagging them in comments. But the most massive follower influx still came from paid advertising on @thegoodquote.

See guys, I hate doing math about other people’s money. But the math was so simple it did itself. She ran promotions 3-4 times a week, which is around 15 promotions every month, each $300 worth. Self-publishing costs paled in comparison with her monthly advertising budget of $4500. Importantly, it was more than she could earn working as a public school teacher, even in a developed country like Canada. Her family’s wealth probably had something to do with it.

Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t see anything wrong about it. I wasn’t envious or resentful. Other people’s privilege per se never pissed me off. I knew they never chose it, just like I never chose my disadvantage. At that moment, believing in her honesty, authenticity, and integrity as an artist, I was glad that she had the resources to promote her work, which, as I believed, made so much difference in the world.

However, there was one fact that already back then left me puzzled. In retrospect, I can tell: these apparently small lies are in fact huge red flags that should never be missed.

In a radio interview published on her Website, dating from March 2016, she said she was “very suprised” that her quotes got viral. In fact, as she continued actively posting excerpts from her book, time and again she thanked her audience for their support and claimed she never expected to get so much attention.

How can you invest thousands of dollars into advertising, and then say you have no idea how your content gets viral?

That was the first sign of her hypocrisy and her fake personality. Who she thouroughly portrayed herself to be, in order to sell her work, and who she really was were two different people.

Unfortunately, at that point, I dismissed this glaring piece of evidence. I believed it was “a small lie”, and “a trick all people have to employ when becoming public”. I noticed her hypocrisy and immediately started rationalizing it.

Now, that was the real red flag. When you find yourself making excuses for someone else's lies instead of talking to them about those — odds are you're already in an abusive relationship.

THE BROKEN WINGS

However, I realized that writing and putting out my poetry still allowed me to slowly grow my own page. With no penny behind my back, I could only count on my talent, and talent didn’t allow you to significantly grow in the money-driven Instagram world. At the same time, I realized how much power people and pages with huge following had. I realized that getting featured or reposted by some of them was the most effective way to build one’s own community – especially when starting out, like I was.

Did I have anyone big in my circles who could do me this favor? No one but her. And, come on, she’d been treating me as a friend so far, right? We’ve known each other for more than half a year, right? She’d asked my help, and I’d been gladly helping her, right? I had all the prerequisites to feel okay asking for her help now. Especially given that she got her following and the power inherent in it by virtue of her privilege.

I started considering how to approach her about that, straight when this happened.

In October 2016 she posted a poem from her book titled “Broken Wings”. I commented on it, because it precisely captured how I felt about my dreams and my career vision after the massive abuse I went through in the beginning of the year. Guess what happened next?

No, she didn’t just reply to my comment, as she always did. She went further and DMed me, wondering about that story in detail.

“Tell me more about this Jorge. I want to understand why you feel like your wings are broken. You don’t deserve this.”

She texted me something like this, encouraging me to open up. That’s what abusers do. They encourage you to be vulnerable to then capitalize on it.

The rub is, until abuse begins, it’s hard to distinguish their behavior from that of an honest person. The lower your self-esteem and critical thinking are, the harder this distinction gets for you. Especially when communication is electronic, happens over long distances, and doesn’t include non-verbal cues.

I remember I started texting her back in DM immediately. I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude seeing that someone – a big person like her, to be exact – cared about my experience. After a couple minutes of typing, though, I realized my message was too long. Longer than Instagram’s DM interface allowed. Yes, my story was big. Bigger than most interfaces and limits allowed. Just like when I was writing my book and initially thinking it would be a short story, I came to the point where I realized I had more to say. More depth. More meaning. Now, my reply to her wasn’t a text. It was an email. I needed some time to write it.

I told her about this, and she responded: “Of course. It’s an honor for me to hear you story. I will be waiting for your email.”

Today, when I remember these words of her literally, it blows my mind to realize what an artful hypocrite she was. It’s also temping for me to think how stupid I was, but in fact, I wasn’t stupid. I was generous. I assumed good about her, because at that point I didn’t have the evidence of the opposite. My huge mistake, however, was believing that my story was so uninteresting and irrelevant that I should feel overwhelming gratitude for anyone who expressed interest in it.

Here's the takeaway #2 — low self-esteem, whatever the reason behind it, makes you an easy target for abusers.

A few days later, writing that email about my “broken wings”, I realized this whole narrative didn’t make much sense without me telling her about the background and context of my journey. After her trust-building signals, I decided to open up to her completely. So I decided to re-write the text. Then again, I checked in with her if that was okay. I told her that my response turned out to be so much longer than I’d originally thought. To which she replied:

“Jorge, it’s okay. Don’t hold anything back. Let it all out. Write as much as you think is necessary. I want to know it all.”

Come on, when someone privileged treats you like that, at the same time preaching about empathy and vulnerability and authenticity through her poetic work, how can you not trust her? How can you not believe that she’ll be willing to help you through their privilege?

Well, that’s exactly what abusers are looking for.

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Because a few days before the “Broken Wings” discourse, as I considered how to ask for her help with reposts, she again texted me asking my help. New kind of help, I mean. She already took for granted that I wrote subtitles for every daily reminder video she put out. Now, she asked me to take charge of responding to comments on her posts where people asked where they could get her book. She said replying to them was “so time-consuming”. Importantly, from the very beginning of our “friendship”, she maintained that image of a highly busy person (isn’t that narcissists’ classic?). She communicated she was so busy with her job at school, her thesis, her Instagram activity and whatnot. In retrospect, I see how she wore that exhaustion, whether or not it was real, as a symbol of status and grandiosity. And now, it looked like she wanted me to get involved with her work. The work she knew I loved.

Now, for all my respect for her artistry, I wasn’t a fool. Managing sales questions meant reading and replying to hundreds of comments every day – at that point, she almost had 100 000 followers. That was a job that could take a few hours every day. I could invest that time, as I was only part-time employed and had put my own creative project on the backburner recovering from abuse. But I wasn’t going to work for free, especially given the fact that she made good money from her sales – by that moment, her book had already become an Amazon bestseller, and she was going to release another one soon.

Technically, she seemed to understand that she was in fact hiring me. She said, “I’ll pay you as much as you need for this work.” However, in retrospect, that was another classic abusive move. Why? Because this formula implies no boundaries and no range. That’s not how normal negotiations are done. What if I “need” $10 000 per one day of work? Why was she making that boundary-less commitment in the first place?

Well, because just like with her other big promises, she was never going to make good on it. At that point, I didn’t know what to tell her about the pay, because I had never done such work for anyone but myself. I didn’t know how much time and effort exactly I would have to put in. I didn’t know if giving it all my available time would be enough to cover all the comments and answer all her potential customers. So I told her: “Let me research the information about the bookstores stocking your book and then try doing this work for a couple weeks for free. Then, as I understand the amount of time and effort required, we’ll talk about the pay.”

She communicated she was okay with that. But in fact, she never came back to talk about the pay. Instead, after around a week after I started managing her comments, spending a few hours every day and successfully getting all the questions covered, the whole “Broken Wings” conversation began. She pretended to deeply care about my story. And believing her, I decided that instead of paying me with dollars, I’d rather her pay me with reposts and possibly using the connections she promised to use. Not in my wildest fantasy could I imagine that she would deny me help. So in fact, after my trial perioed ended, I continued working for free. Instead of making terms and conditions clear, I allowed her to exploit my trust – the trust she carefully built with me over the previous months.

Aside from my low self-esteem and my own poor boundary-setting skills, my lack of privilege paid a crucial role in that abuse. I had a clear strategy about what needed to be done next in my creative journey. I had to significantly grow my following before reaching out to new people about my book. So I wrote new poetry, and instead of putting it out immediately, I stored it to then select a few best poems to repost on a big page like hers. There were no other ways for me to grow the number of followers to 10-20 thousand, which was the required threshold in order “to be taken seriously”. It bothered me to understand how shallow the Instagram culture was, but it was what it was. Just like in real life people’s first impression about us made based on our apperance, on social media it’s made from the numbers at the top of our profile. Given how aligned my poems were with the interests of her audience, and how big of an audience she already had, I knew that three to four reposts would be enough to achieve that goal.

On cue, a few new people to contact appeared on the horizon following my quotes. A filmmaker from New York, coming from a family of powerful and influential creatives. The friend of an actor from LA who was one of America’s most well-known LGBT advocates. The relationships and communication with those people began, but I wanted to build them gradually and naturally. I chose to not proceed to directly asking their help with the book before my page got bigger. My page had to reflect the scope of my work. Both in terms of content and the numbers at its top.

So following the “Broken Wings” conversation, I started writing my story for the poet, with an intention to finish it by explaining my situation, my strategy, and the kind of help I needed from her with the reposts. Truth demands to be told: that wasn’t too big of a help. It wouldn’t require her to move the Everest, spend tons of money, or invest tons of time. It wouldn’t cost her anything basically. And given how much and how artfully she preached about empathy, and how much encouragement she gave me privately, I didn’t doubt that she would be here for me in this.

Putting my story on paper, I followed her call “to let it all out” and “not hold anything back”. In fact, I wrote my first memoir. Yes, I’m not good at estimating time. So instead of a few weeks, it took almost six months. Thirty-six chapters. About my background, my trauma, my joy, my love, my dreams, and my vision. Finished with asking her that favor, so important for me before going further in my networking around the book.

During those six months, I continued living in Russia, subsisting on an average monthly income of $150. Of course, in poverty and food insecurity. Of course, scared everyday that my old car wouldn’t start because of another failure and I wouldn’t be able to pay for fixing it. Of course, having to borrow gas and food money from my savings from the previous years, which weren’t infinite. And, every such day still doing the work she hired me to do – reading hundreds of comments on her posts, replying to her customers and guiding them through the buying process if they had issues. Except she never paid me a penny for it. Watching my activity on her posts, so many people asked me if I was her personal assistant – and I didn’t realize I was. While she was making tens (and then hundreds) of thousands of dollars from her sales, I was being in fact being exploited for free.

I didn’t recognize the reality at that point – her gaslighting had worked perfectly. Her professed care about my story and her commitment to help felt more important to me than any amount of money. So she didn’t get back to the conversation about paying me, and I didn’t confront her about it either. It was logical to believe in her honesty and goodness given that all her poetry revolved around those values. Because almost every week she reposted a poem about people with good hearts: how they’re always here for you, willing to put their priorities aside to lift you up. How few they are and how they stick up with you till the end. With that poem she unambigously aimed to create the impression she was one of those people. A good, golden heart, broken for no fault of her own. A hijabi girl, forced to move to Canada in teenage years when the war broke in her native country. A person who’s been for years looked upon as strange, too sensitive, misheard, misseen, misjudged – a relatable story to many, isn’t it?

I bought into that story, along with with tens of thousands of people following her. Here’s the catch: humans are hardwired for connection, and when things like abuse, trauma, or oppression happen to us, it’s natural for us to try to make sense of our experiences by relating them to other people’s experiences. It’s actually healing to realize you’re not the only one silenced, misheard, misjudged, or misunderstood – especially when you see someone else able to put that experience into beautiful words. The rub here is that these relatable stories, and people telling them, may well be phony. They may leverage the shit out of the human need for connection and artfully wield the power of words going after money and fame, with no actual intention to make a difference in the world.

Prior to that moment, my trauma had been so chronic and multilateral that my need to connect, be seen, heard and validated by someone exceeded critical thinking. Specifically, believing in her public image of “being the voice for the silenced souls”, and very specific statements she made in our invididual communication, I noticed yet dismissed those small flags that revealed her true colors quite early. It wasn’t only about pretending that she didn’t know where her crazy popularity came from, leaving her privilege (and Instagram corruption) behind the scences. It was also about other, non-sensical lies, so typical of narcissistic people. Like, many times she said she’d never planned to write a book, but it was her friends who had encouraged her to make a book out of her Facebook posts. Then, one day she publishes a screenshot of her Facebook post a few years ago where she said she’s starting to work on her first book. WTF?

Also, I missed a huge red flag around her reliability. In November 2016, a month after starting to work as her personal social media assistant, she told me she would send me a signed copy of her recently published second book “as a symbol of gratitude”. She might have thought of me as a hardcore fan who would shit his pants out of joy. Or she might have believed she was paying me off for all the work I’d done – and still was supposed to continue doing for her. Anyway, I gave her my address in Russia. And guess what? That book never arrived. When I asked her about it two weeks later, first she didn’t respond, then she said she was too busy to check it, then she finally said there were some problems at her local mail office. And no, she wasn’t going to figure it out. Because it wasn’t important. Because she was too busy and getting increasignly famous on Instagram. Because I wasn’t important in her world. Nor were my story or my book. I was needed as a free, disposable worker. I only see that in retrospect.

At that time, instead I continued writing the story – in fact a memoir – that she said she would “be honored to read”. I also wrote a lot of new poetry, and anticipated how difficult it would be to pick up just a few best poems. There were all great. The evidence of my creative talent, blooming even in this previously unexplored field of art, caught up with me. It’s not that I started wanting to become a New York Times bestselling author or a Pullitzer winning poet. Fame or wealth as such never interested me, and I still knew writing wasn’t the career of my dreams. However, I clearly saw that my writing wasn’t any inferior to hers – so if I had had access to advertising, as she did, growing my page would not have been a problem. By consequence, the idea of reposting my quotes on her page made a lot of sense, especially provided that the topics of our writing (and our target audiences) were so much aligned. Then again, I wasn’t going to demand regular reposts on her page. Given the size of her audience, just a few reposts would give me the necessary number of followers – and then I could proceed to fully engaging with the people I’d found around my book.

In the spring 2017, as I was finishing that story, she asked me to fix something on her Website. Unlike me, who engineered my social media pages and Website with great attention to detail, mobile UI, and UX, she didn’t have a lot of technical skills. Hers was one of those Websites made from free templates – with poor mobile responsiveness, sucky visual design, and rendering glitches in many areas. Such Website wasn’t effective or converting, neither for her book sales, nor for landing inspirational speaking jobs, nor as a portfolio in general. So instead of fixing it, I suggested that I rewrite it profesionally from scratch. That was going to take a week of almost full-time work. Instead of making a deal, I offered to do it for free, “honoring our friendship”. I was still so deeply gaslighted, and feeling so insecure amidst my absence of privilege and so vulnerable about the upcoming moment of asking for her help with promotions that I downplayed the importance of my own work. Of course, she said “Thank you”, “You’re so sweet” and other niceties. When it comes to words, not real-life actions, abusers never have a shortage of kindness.

Around that time, she already had around half a million followers. Her book sales were skyrocketing, and she told me how big American publishers started contacting her. In a very casual manner, she discussed with me how she was choosing between the deals: should she settle for $100k with that publisher and long-term bonuses or go for $200k with that publisher? Just so you understand, she was three years my junior. Just so you understand, I was living on $150 per month at the moment, and she knew it. You already understand how she manipulated the situation to make me work for her sales for free. And further, she didn’t hesitate to wave her privilege in my face.

Remarkably, in our chats she never practiced the value she mostly preached about – vulnerability. She never spoke about how she felt and what she was going through. She briefly mentioned she had something tough happening at work and in her family, and I encouraged her to tell me more. Make no mistake, I didn’t do it on the second day of knowing her. By that moment, she had done a lot to frame our relationship as a friendship. However, she never opened up. And, aside from the “Broken Wings” conversation back in October, she almost never wondered about how I felt and what I was going through – I mean the depth, the core, the specifics of my life experience. Her Website? Her sales? Her publishing deals? That mattered. But my feelings or my story? Who did I think I was compared to her?

Looking back, I’m shocked to see how I accepted the unhealthy, deliberately unequal dynamic of that relationship. I’m shocked to see how I, despite my gender conditioning, was the one always trying to be nice and pleasing and accomodating. I’m shocked to remember that I offered her help whenever she communicated she needed it – like that time in March, where she said she wanted her first Amazon bestselling book to be translated into Spanish, and I put her in contact with my native Spanish-speaking journalist friend who was looking for a job exactly like this. She never replied to him, just so you understand. She was too busy, increasingly big of a celebrity. And I still chose to rationalize it.

The moment of truth came in June 2017, when after finishing and polishing my story she allegedly wanted to know, I sent it to her. That’s where the most interesting stuff began.

DEBTS COME DUE

There are moments in our lives when our debts come due. When we have to deliver on the commitments we made. When we’re required to practice the values we passionately professed. These are the critical moments where tons of makeup get washed away and our true colors come out.

I packaged thirty-six chapters of my story, concluded by my bid for her promotion help, into an e-book file. Just like I’d done with my novel one and a half years before, I made sure it was free from typos, had professional formatting, and rendered beautifully on iOS and Android and any tablet.

I reread it from cover to cover before sending over to her, and the whole thing took me two and a half days. Sure, I read it faster than anyone else would, because I wrote it. I knew the fabric of that story. However, the number of hours it took me to read the text gave me an estimate of how much time she would have to invest into reading it. And it was an important to consider.

Because time counts. Time is our most coveted and unrenewable resource. As a person feeling how much I was lagging behind in my life, I couldn’t dismiss the value of time – neither mine nor that of other people. So I had to make sure that the story was worth her time. And that the amount of time to invest in it would be reasonable.

And in fact, it was. My thirty-six chapters were short. That memoir wasn’t Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It took me fifteen hours to read it. It would take anyone having fluency in English no more than 30-40 hours to read it. A reasonable amount of time to give someone who’s worked for you for free for almost a year, isn’t it? Especially provided that I let her know that this story was a call to action? That those chapters informed the grounds and context for the request I made by the end of the book?

I didn’t demand that she read it in two days or quit her job and give up on her life to be focused on reading my story. But I expected she would act in alignment with what she professed – those clear statements she’d made back in October. Those encouragements to not hold anything back and write it all out. Those promises she made over the months to contact particular people with connections she now had among her fans. I expected she would have red my story in one month and then proceeded to giving me reposts. The expected growth of my page now blocked my progress in the journey with my book. I still had those two people on Instagram I’d communicated with – one being the best friend of an actor and well-known LGBT activist from LA, and the other being a filmmaker from New York, coming from a family of influential creatives. I’d built those relationships over a year, but I couldn’t proceed to telling them about the book and my ambitious project around it. It wouldn’t be taken seriously with my page barely having one thousand followers. That’s the result yielded by all of my efforts to grow it organically – posting quality content, using relevant hashtags, engaging my audience etc. And the result I needed could only be achieved through reposts on big pages, like hers or @thegoodquote, for which I didn’t have the money.

Given how many times I’d been ghosted and ignored previously, by that moment I’d already had an anti-gaslighting habit – to check in with people after I email them anything. To make sure they received it. To make sure the content wasn’t garbled while being transferred through multiple mail servers. In this case, I had to make sure she was able to open the e-book file on her phone/tablet. In other words, I had to be clear that no technical failure messed up my vulnerable bid for human connection.

And that’s where first clear signs of abuse showed up. Because one of the things you never get in abusive relationships is clarity. For more than a week, as we texted, she didn’t clearly respond if she received the email. She made me keep asking. Then, she said she received it but had “so much stuff going on she had no time to open it.” After another week, she said she did open it but didn’t make clear if the e-book file was readable on her device. Her texts became short and abrupt. At that point, I still believed in her crazy busy-ness. In retrospect, I see that this is how she played with my vulnerability after I finally exposed it.

My gut feeling told me something was wrong, but what gaslighted me further was how she exposed her vulnerability at that moment – not to me, but in public. In her previous writing, she had often mentioned a toxic relationship she was in, and now, in another eloquent post, she finally revealed the details – as she poetically framed it, that story of abuse wasn’t “her burden to bear”. And it was indeed a horrible story, although barely surprising in a system of patriarchy: her abuser was an older man, one of her superiors at school, wielding big power in their local Muslim community. Interestingly, although the story was long enough on her Facebook page, I never found myself questioning if that story was worth reading – unlike I questioned mine. She described in great detail that man’s abusive behavior – gaslighting, silent treatment, sexual harassment – and how she was forced to continue facing him because of their professional relations, and how wherever she reached for support, she got denied it. Some of those details were particular to the Muslim culture, but she told them in such a relatable form that I, as a Christian man, could fully identify with what she felt.

Sharing that story looked like a huge act of courage, only supporting the image she always created. I sent her an encouraging text, to which she briefly replied, communicating she was overwhelmhed and not interested to have a conversation. I was okay with that. Moreover, I thought that if, as a target, she knew so much about abuse, how it worked and what damage it left on our lives, she couldn’t but empathize with my story. Not in my wildest fantasy could I believe she could become an abuser herself.

This situation gave me another few weeks to rationalize her silence regarding my story and my request. She told me she had to move away from her parents’ house into a separate apartment – her family tension increased in the aftermath of publishing that story. She said she was blamed for breaking the silence, and I believed her. I thought it wasn’t appropriate to “press” her about my story amidst that turmoil. I didn’t want to seem intrusive. I thought I was giving her space to get back to mental normalcy. It was lost on me that trauma in my own life never went away, and in many aspects it was worse than hers. It was somehow lost on me that when I had been in clinical depression and could barely function – during eleven months of suicidal ideation – I still didn’t give up on my commitments and showed up for work to take care of my patients. I showed up for my friends who needed help fixing their cars and phones and computers. No matter how miserable I had been, I had been there for people who needed me.

Right around that time, the symptoms of my skin tumor appeared. Two years before, I had learned I had a very high risk of melanoma, and now the grim phophecy fulfilled itself. Even though I had carefully stayed away from the sun, it happened. Even though getting that disease without access to adequate healthcare amounted to dying in my thirties, it happened. It was all unfair, but I had had plenty of trauma in my life to no longer believe that God loved me or cared about me. Led by her example, I summoned up courage and shared my experience on Instagram in August 2017. I didn’t expect to get such a big support from my audience, but I was blown away. With a little more than a thousand of followers at the moment, I got around one hundred comments. Most of them were meaningful, heartfelt words. Many people wondered if they could help, including monetarily, to fund my surgery outside Russia – because I mentioned that with my unlivable income, the project of my book remained the only opportunity to earn the treatment budget I needed.

And guess what I received from her, a self-advertised empathy champion, reposting “people with good hearts” every week? From my alleged friend, making thousands of dollars from the books I helped her sell?

She just commented on my post with a few heart emojis. That was it.

THE BLUE TICK

A few days later, she texted me. No, not to say that she read my story. No, not to ask about my tumor and offer to fundraise for my treatment (which she could easily do with half a million followers at the moment).

No.

She texted me to share she was ecstatic because her Instagram profile got a Verified Account badge – a blue tick next to her name. She said she was “in tears”. Because now, she clarified, “people would take her seriously”.

“Okay”, I said, “My congratulations. You deserve this.”

That’s how the conversation ended.

In retrospect, I see that as a typical experience with a narcissist – she showed up to wave her grandiosity in my face, with zero empathy towards my experience. She didn’t take the trouble to ask me about my newly diagnosed illness and my mental condition. She didn’t take the trouble to think how I was feeling as her fellow creative, because since unlike her I wasn’t able to invest tons of money into advertising, I wasn’t being “taken seriously”. Because despite the same quality of poetry and the same amount of talent, I still had about a thousand followers. In the absence of privilege, my work and my ideas couldn’t get anywhere near the same amount of exposure. And, after more than a year of free working for her, she wasn’t there to help me. She was there to brag about her fame.

Next week, the #MeToo movement hit social media as a viral trend. She quickly took advantage of the situation, writing another poem addressed to survivors and publishing a video about it. It’s not surprising that given her enormous audience size, that video got picked up by The New York Times along with others hastagged. Then she bragged on her page about that. Yes, she was becoming a full-fledged celebrity – that’s where money can get you, and how quick.

She still kept silence about my story. Nine of months of my writing, more than a year of working for free, all these things that she encouraged me to do – now were clearly neglected. I wondered how could it be that she forgot all the promises she made and all the care she expressed? But I was afraid to ask her directly about that

That is another telltale sign you're trapped in abuse -- when you avoid confronting the other person about their neglectful behavior, because you fear you'll see their true colors.

In a few days, she reposted a picture of Lewis Howes – a famous American author, entrepreneur, and podcast host – holding her book. As it turned out he became her new fan and even invited her to fly over to the U.S. for a podcast episode and a speech at his annual event. Yes, her success was burgeoning.

But what about mine? What about my story? What about her once professed commitment to help me? The commitment that in fact, made me work for free for her? Did she see me as anything more than a servant from a third-world country?

I already understood she didn’t give a fuck about my health. I understood she didn’t see any enormity in the situation of a 29 y.o. working man with a university degree not having access to a basic, simple, curative surgery, available and affordable everywhere in the developed world.

But how could it be, given the kind of person she portrayed herself to be from the beginning? The kind of image that allowed her to successfully sell her work?

By the end of August, I texted her on WhatsApp. I asked her directly what progress she was making with reading my story. For an umpteenth time, I said that this story wasn’t just for fun – it was concluded exactly by a specific request for her help. I explained I needed that help in order to move further with my book – which now also became the chance to get funding for my surgery.

Guess what she replied?

Nothing.

My messages were marked as seen, but she replied nothing.

I still couldn’t believe what was going on. I refused the accept reality: she treated me exactly as those people did in the beginning of 2016, first expressing interest in my work and care for my story, and ghosting me when the conversation got real. I refused to accept the possibility that all she’d so eloquently professed, to me personally and to her audience in public, was poetic bullshit.

So one week later, I texted her again. Without polite American formulas, in a straightforward way, I shared my concern about what was going between us.

This time she replied. She said she was so busy before Lewis Howes’ event, preparing her speech, that she had no time to reply to my messages. She added that if I were her, I would do the same.

This excuse already wasn’t poetic. It was feeble and cowardly. It clumisly covered up the reality: for her, who portrayed herself as my friend and ally for one year and took my help for granted, my vulnerability, my story, and even my cancer didn’t matter nearly as much as the possibility to get publicity at an event hosted by Lewis Howes. That’s where her real-life priorities resided. Way outside the values she professed, and made tons of money from professing.

And no, despite her chickenshit excuse, I wouldn’t do the same if I were her. I wouldn’t leave unreplied the messages of a friend going through recent trauma on the other side of the globe. At the very least, I would’ve communicated that I was in a crazy rush and would get back to the conversation as soon as I could. And I would indeed get back to it, instead of giving the person who got vulnerable with me silent treatment and then waiting for them to hit me up again. That’s what abusers do. I had been on the receiving end of this too many times. She said she’d been too. How could I expect her to engage in the same destructive, toxic behavior that she spent one year condemning, recovering from, and allegedly helping others to recover from?

But no, she didn’t stop there. After two months of total silence, she finally deigned to update me on the status of her reading of my story. It turned out she could open the file, and she started reading it but she gave up on it after a few days. Why? No, not because my story was boring or poorly written. But because “it was so triggering for her.”

Now, here’s the reality check. That very person who back in October had encouraged me “to write it all out”, “to not hold anything back”, who said “it would be an honor for her to read my story”, that very person whose poetry and Instagram talk revolved around vulnerability and the importance of being raw and sharing the hard stuff – now, this very person told me my story was “too triggering” so she decided to not read it. And obviously, I didn’t deserve to even be made aware of her decision.

Because it was convenient to keep me as a free worker on her page.

BELIEVE PEOPLE THE FIRST TIME

Maya Angelou wrote: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves far better than you can ever know them.”

The hijabi poet’s true colors, in her own words, now spilt like a venom in front of me. But I still refused to acknowledge them. With the evidence of her hypocrisy and cowardice in front of my eyes, I didn’t choose to walk away immediately. Okay, she didn’t give a shit about my story. And my cancer. It was heartbreaking. But she’d promised to help me. She’d promised to contact certain people that were among her audience for me. It was still lost on me that those promises, like all her words and poerty, were eloquent and big yet thrown around with no meaning and real intention behind them. Well, except for the intention obvious in hindsight: to keep me hooked and working for free.

At that point, it became obvious that her “friendship” and her “care for my broken wings” were lies. She treated my vulnerability like garbage. But what about her professional commitments? The reality was, I still had to grow my page before reaching out to my prospective partners. So now, I asked her directly about giving me reposts on her page. With my target number of followers, and her current number of followers, three to four reposts would be enough. And, it wouldn’t cost her anything. She owned her page. She didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. I said she didn’t have to repost them in a row, but we could take a look into her analytics to chose appropriate moments – also in alignment with her own feed content – so it could be organic and effective.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t think this is a good idea. I can’t just blast my followers with your posts. They will understand it’s staged. I’d better pay for your promotions on @thegoodquote, okay?”

First, make note of the language she used. She used the verb “blast” to talk about my poetry. You blast someone with a weapon – something destructive and toxic. She talked about her poetry as the nectar and healing balm, and here’s how she talked about mine. Do you get how humiliating that is?

Second, make note of the word “staged”. Investing thousands of dollars into paid promotions, she was okay brainwashing her audience with the story that “she had no idea why her words became so viral”. She’d been doing that for more than a year now. And giving me, her fellow creative and assistant, three to four reposts would be “staged”? Well, people see in you what they know about themselves. In retrospect, it was a clear narcissistic projection.

Technically, it didn’t matter for me where my content would be reposted. @thegoodquote would yield me even more followers than her page. But deep down I still held on to the illusion that she was my friend – the illusion she had artfully created. I understood the @thegoodquote reposts cost a lot of money. Not as much money as my work for her actually cost over 1.5 years, but still a lot of money for me, as a broke person in a third-world country, with an urgent health situation looming over.

So I reasonably suggested that if she was willing to spend that much money for me on @thegoodquote, she could as just as well donate them for my surgery and at the same time give me reposts on her page, which would cause her no expense at all. Well, it didn’t occur to me to take her ego expense into account.

“I’m not sure still,” she said. “I’m looking for what’s strategically better for you.”

Somehow, as a self-proclaimed empath, she failed to respect that it was strategically better for me to remove my tumor as soon as possible because it could kill me. That there was no way I could earn the budget for this surgery where I lived and worked. That my book was the only opportunity to get out of poverty and this third-world country in the long term.

The real reason behind her reluctance had nothing to do with “blasting”, or “staging”, or finding a “better strategy” for me. It had to do with greed and ego. In retrospect, it’s clear. She wanted to make sure she was the one who got the attention of The New York Times. The one who got invited by folks like Lewis Howes. The one being offered deals by major publishers and having her books translated into many languages. She wasn’t okay with sharing her audience, her privilege, or her success with anyone.

At the moment, after being gaslighted for more than a year, I still couldn’t recognize her true colors. I said:

“Well, let’s try finding out which strategy is better. Let’s first try doing one or two reposts on your page. I don’t need a lot of new followers. If the growth won’t be sufficient, we’ll switch the reposts over to @thegoodquote. Okay?”

“Sounds great”, she replied.

That’s where the conversation was ended. I walked away from it feeling misheard, humiliated, and basically frauded. And, most horrible, still dependent on her help.

TRUTH CANNOT BE UN-SEEN

Starting from mid-September, she started reposting my poems, but obviously not in a way that was “strategically better” for me. She reposted them not in her feed, but in her Stories – just to make sure they would disappear from her page soon soon. I had no idea why she didn’t like my poetry – greed and envy still didn’t occur to me as obvious reasons at the time. I gave her access to the full inventory of about a hundred poems so she could choose three to four that resonated with her the most. Sticking with the original vision of who she was, that assumption was natural.

Furthermore, once back in spring, without me even asking, she reposted one of my poems to her feed and it gave my page a huge followers boost. In the caption of the repost she mentioned that I was “an amazing person” and she was “grateful to have me by her side from the very beginning.” So my expectations of her help with promoting my page hadn’t come out of nowhere – she had communicated enough signals to make me feel that way. What I didn’t know, again, was that that repost was a perfect abuser’s move – she never really wanted to help me. She had just wanted to keep me working for free as her personal assistant.

Now, in autumn, even with these half-assed story reposts, I started getting new followers. Given her size of audience and my content’s good alignment with their interests, each story mention yielded about 500 new followers. But aiming for 10 000, it wasn’t enough.

So I asked her to try reposting to the feed instead – just like she had done in spring. That would obviously create bigger exposure. Still feeling so powerless and dependent, I thanked her every time after a story mention. And once I additionally texted “Please consider doing a feed repost next time.”

She replied nothing.

One week later, she again did a story repost. In her opinion, obviously, I didn’t deserve more.

Just so you understand: all this time, I continued working for her for free. Reading an increasing number of comments every day, replying to people about the stores where they could get her books. Lots of time. Lots of energy. No payments. No respect. She continued accepting my work for granted, and gave me silent treatment instead.

Importantly, she was aware that time was critical in my situation. She knew about my disease and how it could quickly get metastatic in the absence of surgery. She knew that my U.S. visa, issued under Obama’s administration, was about to expire in January, and that if I didn’t start a conversation with my partners and find a way to travel to America before the end of the year, the visa would expire untraveled and I would have big trouble obtaining a new one, given Trump’s administration immigration policy.

But did it all matter? My trauma and disadvantage were mine, not hers. She cared about her fame and profits. And yes, about talking empathy in public, which allowed her to grow that fame and those profits even more. Who would learn that in real life she carefully avoided practicing what she preached?

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In November, I finally confronted her about the situation.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why aren’t you helping and keeping silence? If you don’t want to do the reposts, just say it. Then switch them over to @thegoodquote, as we arranged. I deserve clarity. Neglecting me isn’t okay after all I’ve done for you. It’s all the more not okay since you’re aware of the time pressures I’m under.”

Here’s what she responded: “Jorge, I appreciate all your help. I don’t appreciate that you’re trying to control how I’m helping you. I don’t appeciate you’re making me feel like I’m not making good on my commitments. I didn’t promise you anything. You’re volunteered to help me from the very beginning.”

That was epic, textbook case of gaslighting. First, I wasn’t trying “to control how she was helping me”. Instead, I asked about her intention so I could make my plans in accordance. If she refused to help me, I would proceed to talking with my partners with my page being as it was. But she never communicated her intention. She kept me hooked in confusion and uncertainty. Second, yes, she was indeed not making good on her commitments. She wasn’t living what she preached in general, but in particular, she failed all the promises she’d made to me, and moreover, she now argued there hadn’t been any promises in the first place. And finally, framing my work as “volunteering” was a huge lie. Yes, I didn’t ask her to pay me for video transcripts. But I never agreed to manage her comments and reply to her customers for free. I suggested I try doing it for free, so I could estimate necessary time investment and the amount to be paid, and then come back to this conversation later. And do you remember how artfully she intercepted it? How this whole “Broken Wings” conversation was engineered to manipulate me into seeing her “care” and “commitment to help” as an imaginary payment?

Here’s the thing, guys. I wasn’t putting up with this abuse. She was the now famous poet, with half a million followers beliving the lies that she artfully crafted, with people like Lewis Howes inviting her for interviews, with major publishers offering her deals. But that entire success was built on lies from the very beginning. Truth was on my side, not hers. And truth demanded to be told. The time and effort required to refute bullshit are an order of magnitude bigger than those necessary to produce it, but I was willing to make that time my final investment into this relationship, ending so miserably, turning out to be another experience of emotional abuse in my life. I wrote her a long reality-checking text about what she said and professed versus what she ended up doing. I wasn’t shaming or aggressive. I just told her the truth.

To which she replied nothing. Because, in truth, there was nothing to reply.

FOLLOW-UP

I lost time and hopes trusting her, but I wasn’t going to lose anymore grieving the loss of that trust. With thoughts about my tumor oppressing me every day, with one and a half months remaining till the expiry of my American visa, with as few followers as my page had, but with truth and integrity in my lion heart, I reached out about the book to those two partners that I’d previously started relationships with.

And both of them ghosted me.

Yes, maybe I was right – they couldn’t take me and my work seriously with a page that small. Maybe, there were the exact same hypocrites as she was. But the reality was, I got betrayed by people who made me feel empowered and seen and heard and hopeful. My tumor was reminding of itself symptomatically every day. And my American visa was expiring, symbolizing the upcoming burial of my hopes for a better future.

In that condition, I nevertheless continued looking for new people. You will meet some of them in the following episodes of this post. But here, in the story about a hijabi poet, there’s still important follow-up information to be shared.

She didn’t respond to my message telling her the truth, but in early January, 2018, she texted me as if nothing was wrong. “Hi Jorge! How are you?”

A typical abuser’s move, right? To count on the victim having forgotten and dismissed everything and being willing to come back? Because she obviously missed a free assistant replying to hundreds of comments about the purchase of her books? Because now she had to manage them on her own or pay someone to manage them?

I replied, “Hi *****. I’m not well.” Which should’ve been obvious to her, by the way. She of all people knew all my circumstances and the reasons why I wasn’t well. And that’s how the conversation ended. She never texted back. I remember that at the time, I found myself wondering if she wanted to apologize. The after-effect of gaslighting and brainwashing about her “good heart” was still there.

However, when people genuinely want to apologize, they do apologize. They start with an apology, not with “Hi Jorge, how are you?”

Interestingly, a month later, she sent me the same casual text “Hi! How are you?” and this time, I chose to ignore her altogether.

As I recovered from that trauma and gained perspective, I started seeing more evidence of her hypocrisy unrelated to our individual relationship. Two big pieces of that evidence had to do with her occupation and her religious identity.

Working as high-school teacher in Canada, many times she mentioned on her blog and in her Instagram posts that “teaching was one of her biggest passions.” That sounded very cool in the context of the public image she was creating. Then, in the spring of 2017, when she told me about another publisher offering her a deal, she mentioned that deal included conditions for her next book. She’d already released two books within a year, and now she had another book up her sleeve. Interesting? I asked her how she carved out so much time for writing given her full-time job. Not answering that, instead she said that if she got a good deal with a major publisher, she would quit working in education forever. Like, it never interested her in the first place. I remember how this double standard struck me: how come she spoke in public about teaching as one of her “biggest passions”, but in fact was willing to quit it provided the deal? Why did she profess that in the first place? Were her other values also negotiable against money and fame?

It got even more glaring with her religion. From the very beginning, she portrayed herself as a devout Muslim. She talked so profusely about the virtues of Islam, and said that her faith was a cornerstone fo her life and part of how she was as a person. Many times, she told this story: because of being visibly Muslim, she pissed off people and even was bullied as a teenager after moving to Canada. She said her hijab was a symbol of her strength and authenticity – she wasn’t willing to take it off to make people around her comfortable. Once on her blog, she even told the story of bringing her hijabs into the classroom, encouraging the myth-busting conversation about Islam with her majority non-Muslim students.

How cool that was? For me as a person of faith, even though not a Muslim, that was the proof of her courage, resilience, and strong spirit.

And then, a few months after I cut her off, I stumble on her picture on Instagram where I see her gorgeous, beautiful hair – as it turns out, she doesn’t wear a hijab anymore. As the majority of my followers came from her page, and I was in close communication with some them, I asked them what was going on. Well, they told me, she just put off her hijab and decided to not explain herself. As she had predominantly Muslim following, thousands of people unfollowed her.

To me, as someone not closely familiar with the intricacies of Islam and the Islamic culture, it never mattered whether or not she wore a hijab in the first place. What did matter, though, was that she went to great lengths talking about how important and meaningful wearing hijab was. It did matter that she built connection and trust with a big proportion of her audience that way, and how now she just dumped what she once portrayed as part of her identity.

Well, maybe, just maybe, it’s because as a self-published author, she already got the money from her initial, predominantly Muslim audience in Asian countries (I knew they comprised the majority because I replied to their questions about where to purchase her books). And maybe, just maybe now she wasn’t interested in that audience anymore. After signing a deal with an American publisher, she was naturally interested to build predominantly Western following. And in America with its increasing islamophobia, she would definitely get more sales appearing without hijab.

That’s how normalized double standards were for her – related to big, fundamental things in life. Her small lies paled in comparison to these.

KEY LEARNINGS

1.

Hypocrisy, cowardice, and greed can be thoroughly hidden behind the most eloquent words, religious talks, Amazon bestsellers, and praises of major newspapers. You don’t get to see another person’s true colors unless you get into a personal relationship with them and go through situations where you get really vulnerable.

2.

Unlike a decade before, in today’s social media, it takes money and sleazy techniques, not quality content or great talent, to get hundreds of thousands of followers over a short period of time. Stories of “overnight success” and “phenomenal talent” keep crucial details behind the scenes.

3.

It’s normal to assume good about people from the start, until you get the evidence of the opposite. It’s normal to believe people are telling the truth about who they are, what they do, and what’s important to them.

It’s not normal, however, when you feel compelled to avoid the situations where another person’s true colors can be revealed. It’s not normal when you notice a behavior inconsistent with their words but are afraid to ask them about it.

If this is how you’re feeling – chances are you’ve already been gaslighted and manipulated.

4.

Just because someone got abused, it doesn't mean they won't inflict the same abuse on others. Past trauma per se doesn't build any capacity for empathy. Empathy has to do with self-awareness, self-worth, and spirituality — and their level can be revealed as the relationship progresses, not when it begins.

5.

When people overcommit and throw around big promises – they well may be hustling for self-worth, not really meaning what they say. If you see them not being reliable around small things, like sending you a book over mail, it’s possible they can’t be relied upon when you need them in big and meaningful ways.

6.

When you see people avoid saying No to straightforward requests, and instead just going on not helping you without communicating anything – that means they have issues with setting boundaries. Just like reliability and integrity, boundaries are an indispensable component of trust. You can’t trust a person who never clearly says No.

7.

Lack of clarity means lack of kindness. It’s one of the inherent featurese of abusive relationships. The abuser will never give you direct answers to the most important questions. Instead, they will wiggle their way out of honesty, choosing rhetoric and politeness instead.

8.

When people try to make you feel like they never said what you have evidence they did say — it is gaslighting. Once you register this behavior, it's game over. Gaslighting corrodes your sanity in very dangerous ways, and it also has a long-lasting effect on your self-esteem and your future relationships.

9.

The imbalance of privilege invariably creates the setting for emotional abuse. Whether or not the privileged party will engage in abusive behavior depends of their self-awareness, their critical awareness, and their values, but the opportunity to perpetrate abuse is present wherever external systems of oppression randomly put one person at advantage and another at disadvantage. The most relevant inequality in the context of a relationship – be it class, gender, race, immigration status, etc. – informs the dynamic of abuse even if other, less relevant inequalities put the abuser at disadvantage and the target at privilege.

10.

Unless you work for a charity, it’s not okay to work for free. Especially when you have to work for a person who holds economic privilege over you. Especially when your work in fact contibutes to them getting even more privilege. Especially when you have to work extra hours. Don’t buy into people’s rhetoric about friendship, “making a difference in the world”, “our calling to make this planet a greener place”, etc. Those are common forms of manipulation. The only situation where doing free work is appropriate is when: 1) you have evidence that who you work for cannot afford to pay you, for no fault of their own; 2) your contribution is vital to their success and you genuinely want them to be successful; 3) you really want to do it for free, for example because of your values or social awareness. So when trial periods are over, don’t hesitate to charge your clients. When payments come due, don’t hesitate to tell your employers. Boundaries should be always kept in place. Being generous is one thing. Being a doormat is completely different, and it’s doing no good to the world or yourself.

11.

No matter how dependent or underprivileged you are, accepting neglect, disrespect or gaslighting isn’t worth any benefits you can get from a relationship. Along with double standards you observe in another person’s behavior, those are major red flags for you to put an end to the relationship, regardless of the value and expectations you once attached to it. More often than not, your expectations don’t come out of nowhere – they are informed by what another person communicates to you. So there’s nothing wrong about having those expectations. But their behavior gives you a great reality-check about whether to keep them.

12.

As Maya Angelou astutely pointed out, believe people the first time they show you who they are. They know themselves better than you ever will. Giving them second chances will not fix them. Assuming the best about them won’t change the reality once you have the evidence. What you assume reflects who you are. They are who they are regardless of who you are.

13.

Have someone from your support network – a friend, a trusted relative, or a therapist – watch how the relationship goes on. Abuse and manipulation are seen so much clearer from the outside of a relationship. Choose wisely who you’re sharing with, and don’t accept feedback from people who lack critical thinking and self-awareness, who run your experience through their lens, who work out their own issues on you, etc. But a constructive, impartial view from the outside will help you detect the moment where your vulnerability is mistaken as a license to abuse you. – and inform you resolve to walk away immediately after.

14.

Resist the urge to reach back to your abuser, or reply to them when they reach back to you again – especially if abuse happened in romantic contexts. If abusing you was possible once, they will always keep that possibility the back of their mind. So giving them a second, third, or millionth chance means allowing abuse to happen on a whole new level. You don’t deserve that.

15.

Don’t expect to get closure from the abuser, and don’t make your healing dependent on them answering your questions or offering apologies. You don’t get clarity and apologies from them because of shame, and you don’t get closure because they don’t get enough of manipulating you. So after recognizing emotional abuse, it’s you who decide: this is closed, once and for all.

The good news: with these key learnings operationalized, you will greatly reduce the chance of getting stuck in abusive relationships again, personal or professional.

The bad news: it doesn’t mean that you will never meet other abusive people, nor does it eliminate the disadvantage predisposing you to become targeted with abuse by those who have unearned privilege over you.