Nancy G., who reads this blog at least 4 times a day – and has since this summer, has an issue with me. You see, we began to chat online during the summer and, quite honestly, we enjoyed emailing each other. This went on for several days – maybe a week or two – and there were no red flags in our conversations. In fact, there was mutual interest to meet and see what might happen. THAT’S when things began to turn south…..

Our meeting soon showed me that there were a few red flags with Nancy – things I will not go into here. Did I think she was a “bad person”? No. But I knew it was a mistake to meet her and there was no reason to continue seeing her. My mistake at this point is I believed her psyche could not take the truth. Am I justifying my actions? Probably. But the bottom line, I did not tell her what I was thinking that night and even indicated that I was looking forward to going to Disneyland the next day. However, driving home from dinner – talking to Rona – I came to my senses. I couldn’t continue anything with Nancy just because I was afraid to hurt her feelings. So I called her that night, thanked her for dinner, and said it wasn’t going to work out. She didn’t answer the phone, so I left it on her voice mail. Maybe that was a mistake, too.

This is when the psychosis came out – it didn’t seem that way at first. Her message back to me was that of hurt and anger, a bit of confusion, and that all was reasonable. She even said she would never contact me again. I understood, in part, her response and I was truly sorry that I didn’t have the guts to say it to her face the night before at dinner. But it didn’t end there – this was followed by call after call, each more angry, each more concerning, each more layered with veiled threats and anger that didn’t quite match the fact we had met only once – that we were still strangers and we certainly did not have a relationship. The messages were followed by numerous emails – tons of emails – and it was getting ugly. I finally decided to respond – to give her what she wanted – the “why” to my decision. At this point I admit that I was angry, that I had been pushed beyond my initial concern for her, and let her have the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Unfortunately, instead of ending the exchange, this created more questions for her and the onslaught continued. THEN, she claimed that I was the one sending tons of emails, over and over. I thought it was my Mac account, I called them, and they checked their servers or whatever. They said there was not excessive traffic to her IP address, so whatever. Yet the emails to me (we’re talking like 20-30 per hour) continued to roll in. Calls and texts did as well. It was truly an onslaught. Finally, I told her I would contact the police and file a report that she was harassing me, maybe even get a restraining order. Thank God the onslaught ended.

However, I could easily see that she would read this blog about 30 times a day. You can go back to earlier posts where I said something like “thanks to the reader in Oceanside who is pushing up my reading stats”. Now, months later, the number has gone down, but she is still an avid reader, hitting the site multiple times a day. I have no problem with that – she can read all she wants, this is the internet after all. I do find it strange that she reads it so many times throughout the day, I do think there is a bit of an obsession or something going on – but whatever, it’s not my problem.

But that “relationship” changed last week, when she started leaving “hate comments” on this blog. She thought is was anonymous at first, she cloaked herself with a generic email address. What she DIDN’T know is that I had her IP address and yep, it confirmed it was her. However, I chose to play the game, to not acknowledge her post. But then more came, and each followed the previous pattern of escalating in anger and hate, and while she basically said I was not nice in judging others, was certainly passing judgement on me (and that’s fine, but it is somewhat hilariously ironic…).

So yesterday, she chose to use my birthday to send an especially direct and hate-filled post to this site (well, two actually). I decided on my 2 hour commute home, to reply and let her know that I KNEW who she was and that she was the one with the issues. Again, we are STRANGERS to each other and I don’t owe her anything. I mean seriously, WE HAD FREAKING DINNER AND EXCHANGED EMAILS FOR A FEW WEEKS. It didn’t work out – MOVE ON!

And yet, I woke up this morning and she was requesting to be my friend on Facebook! Seriously? Nancy, I did not accept your request and, in fact, blocked you from my site.

So here is my message to Nancy:

Enjoy reading my blog – continue to be obsessed with me or whatever the case may be. Feel free to hate me, despise me, think poorly of me, and whatever else makes you feel able to go on with your life. But do NOT leave posts on this blog, do NOT send me emails, do NOT request to be my friend on any social site, or make any contact to me in any way whatsoever. If you choose to ignore this, I WILL take all the emails from our initial interactions, take all the posts made to this site, everything I have, and file them with the police and accuse you of stalking and harassing me. It’s your choice.