what is art, at its core, if not oversharing.
december 7, 2025
the amount of processing i still do about all of the trauma i've been through in my life that i express through art could lead you to believe that i'm a sad and twisted creature wallowing in my misery about stuff that happened over 15 years ago. that's the deceit of art: it gives you an incomplete picture of a total stranger and warps your perception of their life if you allow yourself to believe that simply engaging with someone's art is enough to know them as a person.
there are quite a lot of people who believe that by simply viewing pieces of art, that they not only know someone, but know them accurately. this is also a type of parasociality that you have to be aware of.
why am i talking about this, though? there is actually a reason. i was friends with somebody who i was in a romantic relationship with who manipulated and hurt me very badly at a precarious and vulnerable point in my life. i was dissociating a lot, exhausted all the time, and overwhelmed by everything. he kept pushing me harder and harder, because, i assume, he was growing tired of my weakness and inability to carry the weight of our shared traumas. some people are hardened by their trauma and compartmentalize it in order to survive. i couldn't do that, i've always been extremely sensitive and a crybaby, which made me especially needy at the time. my interpretation of the situation is that he was sick of it, didn't want to take care of me, and was pissed off that i failed at being his caretaker and put him in the position of being mine.
i could be completely wrong, but that's how i experienced the situation. i couldn't take it anymore and i had to end the relationship.
i knew how he would react, because i saw how he reacted to the last relationship he'd been in that ended. i guess i never expected that he would go so far as to break into my account to send himself rape threats and call himself names in order to make me look like a monster so that he could make a callout post about me and try to destroy what was left of my friendships.
that was the most traumatic thing i've ever experienced. not the callout itself, but everything surrounding it. the terror that i would lose what vanishingly little i had after having my trust trampled over like garbage. the realization of how much of our relationship had been built on habitual, pathological lying. realizing the extent to which i'd been used, and the knowledge that he would go on to manipulate, use up, and throw away other people in exactly the same way he did to me (which, obviously, did happen. more than once.).
that event was a paradigm shift so severe in my life, that there is a clear gulf between who i was before it happened, and who i became after. someone who i trusted and cared about demonstrated that he was the kind of person capable of doing something so vile as trying to destroy my remaining friendships and put a permanent stain on my name that could have followed me around for years if people simply hadn't believed me when i demonstrated that my account had been broken into.
but what does that have to do with parasociality? interestingly, it was this person who taught me that you don't know someone just because you read what they post online. i was easy for him to manipulate because i was naive. i trusted people blindly, because i assumed that everyone else was being as genuine and forthright as i was, and i falsely believed that spotting liars was easy. even with all the things he ever said to me that left deep scars, he also said some things that helped me learn some very valuable lessons. life is never black and white, and people aren't only good or only evil. there is much to think about.
these days, however, i don't actually think about it much anymore. it's been such a long time that i've gotten used to who and how i am after being beaten into a different shape entirely. it can be hard to accept that you aren't who you used to be, when it feels like who you used to be was happier and better in most ways. it took me a very, very long time to accept this version of myself.
occasionally i will be hit with a strong sense of clarity, and the feelings i've been percolating and trying to understand finally come together and crystallize into something i can express with words. that's what these moments are. the pain is simply in the background for a very long time, until i can name it. when i finally put a name to it, that's when i can let it go.