What kind of person reads someone’s private diary without their consent?

Dear Reader:

This is an online diary.  What does a diary mean to me?  A diary is a private place where I can express my innermost thoughts.  The act of writing is clarifying.  Sharing “publicly” with people who don’t know me offers me two things: the chance to hear feedback, both in line and against my own thinking…and the chance to be heard…a diary with ears.  The best of both worlds.

But it is a precarious place, balanced on a knife edge.  It is a sacred space.  Its sanctity depends entirely on those boundaries—first among which is privacy.  There are two things that can break that privacy, shattering the stillness.  

The Doxxer

The first is for a reader to Doxx me, to try and figure out who I am.  Why someone would want to do that is beyond me, but I have experienced this once.  He was a kinky young cross-dresser, who was a self-described sissy, and he trolled my posts for details, strung them together, looked at my gift list, my photos, and anything else he could find—yup, I give him an A for effort.  But it got a bit creepy when he had me pinned down to an area and wrote to me that it was just a matter of time before he figured out what building I lived in from some of the photos I posted.

He was a “client” in the sense that I had been engaging with him in kinky talk, which was mostly me listening to him expound on all his kinky thoughts, and then encouraging him in one way or another.  It was during a period a year or so ago where I wanted to see what it was like to be a Domme, to see if I could do it.  Could I?  Nope.  I actually sucked at it.  I just wanted to “fix” all the blokes who wrote to me, rather than wanting to let them indulge in their kinks.  It certainly gave me a lot of respect for how much hard work it is to be a Domme IRL.  It certainly isn’t in me—and don’t you go scoffing around saying, “well, you are a submissive after all…”

Anyway, I don’t know what he hoped to achieve, or why he even told me that he knew this, that, and the other about me.  It was just creepy, and I told him so, and told him to go away.  Thankfully he did.  This was not the case with my own early experiences with catfish, but that is another story.

What felt most wrong about what this man was doing was that he was trying to breach the veil—trying to know just exactly who girlieboy was…and frankly, since he was effectively a complete stranger, known only by what thoughts he liked to masturbate to—and why do so many men think that knowing what they like to masturbate to makes us intimate with them?  Anyway, I felt my privacy was violated, and I didn’t like it…and it made me worry for my blog, for me, both online me and vanilla me.  It was just like someone snooping around in my room looking for things that were private, like a diary, and is a total violation.  But you find what you look for; the energy you put out is what comes back.  I don’t get why people do that.

The Snoop

When I was eight years old, I snooped in my mother’s room.  We had a terribly tense relationship at that time, and I found her diary.  I can’t remember whether I looked for it, or was looking for something else, as it doesn’t matter, only I stumbled across it in a drawer in her bedside table where she stored yarn.

What was going on at the time?  She was forcing me to see psychiatrists and I was being medicated on Ritalin, and I didn’t like it, didn’t want that, probably didn’t understand its “necessity” and was railing against it.  I felt violated.  Perhaps I was looking for answers, and her diary was the only place I thought I would find them—as I was certainly not finding them in conversation with her or any of the psychiatrists who were doing this to me. 

It matters not.  A diary is still private.  What does matter is that I opened it, knowing full well what it was, and wanting an answer to the questions raised.

And it didn’t take long to find passages about me, and what we were going through—I was not the only one processing.  I could hear her voice.  It was as if she was a young girl, and she began each entry with “dear diary”. Hearing that voice was the most disturbing part of all—like, why was a little girl puzzling over how to raise me?  It took me about one paragraph of reading the “truth” about me to make me sick to my stomach.  Not because of what I read, but because I had read.  I heard the voice of one for the ears of one, and I felt myself in sin.  I put it back.  I didn’t like what I had read, not just for the dissonance between my perceived self and my described self.  I felt horrible after.  I was inside an intimate conversation witnessing things that were never meant to be seen.  These are things we do that we don’t forgive ourselves for.  Even though I was a child, I still don’t forgive myself for it.  I just felt dirty.  And that proved to be one of two life experiences that shaped my worldview in this regard: that we always find what we’re looking for—look for the ill in people and it is always there, and we can dwell on it…look for the good and that is what comes back.

Why Might Someone Doxx?

Doxxing is a common Sex Work industry threat…I am not a Sex Worker, though as a writer of erotica and a blogger on sexual and highly personal topics, as well as a person who has a vanilla life, I do not wish to be defined by either one or the other.

I understand curiosity…and sometimes liking someone or what they write might lead us to be curious about them.  It’s a natural thing.  But when it goes beyond general friendliness, it becomes a kind of theft…we think we can possess.  A boundary violation.  It’s as if the intimacy they read about makes them feel that they have rights to my privacy, which of course they do not.

A wealthy businessman promised me clothes in exchange for pictures, but he wanted all kinds of information about me, and in truth, it wasn’t that any of the information was taboo, it was that he wanted it before there was any intimacy established.  Not that there ever would have been.  And perhaps, that is where I failed in my attempts at Dommely seduction—I don’t do intimacy without intimacy.

What do I glean from these experiences?  Doxxing is a form of manipulation.  A desire to control.  A kind of “topping from the bottom”…but worse, it is an attempt to steal agency.

Privacy Violation with Intent

Doxxing pales next to the person who feels they have a right to know, and wilfully picks up the diary and opens the pages as I did as a child.  There is always a rationalisation.  A reason where the “rapist” can justify their actions, either so diminishing the person whose privacy is being violated, or having some need to know that is so profound that it overrides any standard of propriety.  Consider the spouse whose partner is suspected of cheating.  Does the need to know justify such a fundamental violation?

Most certainly not.  We might revert to that old saw that two wrongs do not make a right.  But this is different.  In order to do it, to commit this kind of violation, you need to put yourself above the other person, you need to say your agency is more valuable than theirs, you need to elevate yourself and denigrate the other.  This is the definition of arrogance, the definition of narcissism.  I find it odd that the people who have accused me of narcissism are the ones that actually do narcissistic things.

But ultimately, it is the person who violates who is sullied most.  There is a reason that we are not allowed to record conversations without asking for consent, of tapping someone’s phone without getting a court order—there is a moral issue at stake.  

Let’s say you find what you are looking for…haha…and your suspicions are confirmed.  Well, you are sullied.  First you are sullied because of how you obtained the information, but second you are sullied because you can read about how they cavort and enjoy when you are denied enjoyment…and that just eats away at you.  Well, that’s the idea…the former brings on a slow-burn, long-term corrosion of self-respect; and the second just hurts, painful in the here and now.  And as the “rapist”, you deserve it for what you have done is worse.

Being Invited In

There are two people that I have willingly invited to read the blog and who know me.  In some ways, knowing that these trusted people are privy to this is kind of comforting, even if we never discuss any of the content, or at least only very rarely.

A number of my friends know that I blog, and what I blog about, and I suppose they could find me if they wanted to, but they don’t—because that’s what friends are like.  I told one friend about it, where to find it, but then regretted it.  I asked her to not read it, and I am sure that this request was respected…after all, that is what friends are like.  But now I realise that I won’t be inviting anyone else along because knowing that people know me on both sides of the veil is constraining my freedom to write what I want, to be open, and that defeats the purpose.

It actually sucks.  But now I realise something.  It doesn’t suck for me, it sucks for them.  Because they read it, and whatever unhealthy reason that brought to read it is feeding all the nasties in their character, so that in the end, every word becomes a little cut—a kind of death by a thousand cuts.

Of course someone who knows me might randomly come across this blog via a google search and recognise me in its pages, recognise my voice, recognise my places, recognise me in pictures…but it isn’t likely.

The public diary as private space

The anonymity is the essential element to an online diary dealing with the kinds of topics addressed here—themes of sex and sexuality, kink, gender relations, trans politics, etc…all things that are taboo in society.

But allowing anyone to make the connection between me, pen-name me of whatever pen-name it is, or vanilla me, is a dangerous game.  People come and go in our lives.  What might seem like a good idea to share one day, can soon change.  Err on the side of privacy.

Even more important than the writing itself is the interaction.   At first, the conversation is with myself, when I write it, sometimes rewrite it.  I learn from that.  But then when I publish it, it becomes a conversation with those who read it.  It is the conversation itself which is the value-add.

I get a great deal of feedback.  I get comments, I get to interact with other people I have grown to care about (there are some bloggers who are wrestling with life in similar ways, and I love to read what they put out—and that becomes a kind of shared experience).  I also end up with a small number of people writing me directly, answering some of the questions that I pose…and I get tons of connection through the various social platforms that this blog has led me to.  Some fun, but mostly just educational.  In essence, it is a way to build community.  As Miss Kim Rub said, “you create your own community.”

And that’s why I write.  It helps me figure things out.  The process itself, but also how people respond.

Privacy Violation is Theft

What should we think of someone who knowingly attempts or succeeds in piercing the veil?

They would do so in full knowledge of what they were doing.  They would do so as adults.  They would do so as an act of contempt, for only someone who has justified themselves through a lens of hate, even if not fully rationalized, could do such a thing.  And that speaks of them, not of the diarist.

Changing it from a diary to a curse

What happens when someone pierces the veil is that they become a set of prying eyes.  What makes this blog a diary is that it is not connected to me.  If someone makes the conscious connection they have stolen the anonymity, and turned from a diary into something grotesque.  I have written often about the idea that you find what you look for.  And this is just another way.  And those words needn’t be literal.  

If you set out to read someone’s diary, you set out with evil intent, and what you find is the darkness of your own heart.  To set out with evil intent blackens your heart.  It sullies you with the tar pitch of nastiness.

And as you read this, how these words hurt, only hurt because the darkness of your own heart brought you here, and they only become real because you have entered a private space.  Just as a filament in a lightbulb flames out when exposed to oxygen, leaving a toxic dust in its wake, so too is the intruder’s presence.  This is not oxygen that the intruder brings, but a mirror to their own ugliness.

In truth, it can only be a curse.  One cannot un-violate the violated.  One cannot forget the learned.  But what one can do, is understand that it’s our own fault.  What draws the moth to the flame is its own immolation—not conscious, only consequent.  Know that when you pierce the veil, the toxic dust that is left settles on you, and it never comes off.

Mother’s Diaries

When our mother died, my siblings tucked right into her diaries, wanting to find themselves in her words, wanting to find meaning, wanting to know who-knows-what.  But I know that she wrote them for herself, not for us, and remember how I felt to have done that once before.  Whatever I read way back then was meaningless, probably even inconsequential, but I hated thinking that she wrote about me, anything at all.  I hated that she might do that, and oddly, it felt to me that her act of writing about me, thinking out loud about difficult things somehow violated me.  But, of course, it didn’t.  What violated me was knowing that she had done so.  Not the content.  The content was irrelevant.  

One sibling told me, unasked, “you’re not in there at all.  Surprising, given your relationship.”  This sibling had taken the diary to protect itself from the intimacy and commentary on its own life.  Hearing about my lack of presence in the diary was another form of violation…I’m thinking, ‘why not?’  And I don’t want to be thinking anything at all that is provoked by a private diary.  I said, “I’d rather not have any more commentary on what is or is not in that book.”

“Why not?” the sibling asked, knowing full well the answer.

“Because it’s a diary, it’s private, it has nothing to do with me.”

“But she’s dead.  Don’t you want to know.”

“She’s dead, which makes me want to know even less.”

I didn’t want to know what she was thinking about in her intimate moments as she put pen to paper.  If she had wanted me to know, she would have told me.  I wanted even less to know that she wrote about me.  And were my siblings to tell me that there were passages concerning me, I would feel ill…not because they had been privy to intimate views of our mother’s perceptions, but that she felt compelled to write at all about me…

I knew that my siblings were reading them to find themselves and wishing to make themselves disappear from this very personal theory by either “disappearing” pages or entire books.  They were seeking to control the narrative of a dead person.  But the psychic wounds they will feel when they encounter themselves in her words are their own doing.  Energetically, when you set out to violate someone’s boundaries, whether dead or alive, no matter your justification, you are the one who suffers, for you learn a corrosive “truth”, and you may learn of what kind of person you really are.  The kind of person who goes places s/he should not.  The kind of person who does what they want because they have told themselves they can do what they want for any number of reasons. 

What do we call such a person?  A narcissist.  And as with the narcissist, their own hand in the boundary violation and/or the underlying narrative itself is blithely ignored.  Since my own path to narcissism has been lit by the flames of gaslighters, I have come to know the acrid stench.  No matter: the stain on the character for piercing the veil is indelible, and the curse for finding the “truth” is not enlightenment, it is having to live with a reality that is not the lies that we tell ourselves to make life taste better.  And as that eats you up, know that every single word of this blog to the interloper is a curse.

Do any of you know the movie Lost Horizon? It came out in 1973, and has the dubious distinction of being voted one of the 50 worst movies of all time—and by the way, this is not the only movie that I liked that is on this list.  Go figure. The plot?  A plane crash in the Himalayas.  The survivors find a beautiful fertile valley.  The valley has magical properties that keep people young.  One of the characters falls in love with a woman he encounters there and seeks to take her back to the West.  She explains that she will age to her real age, but he doesn’t believe it and succumbs to his own desires—a kind of Garden of Eden redux.  Not surprising, but he takes her out of the Valley and she promptly dies.

Stealing secrecy does the same thing.  Enjoy the read, you deserve to know.

My recommitment

For a while now, I have not been writing as freely out of concern for prying eyes, and for people who are here who should not be here.  I know when it was done and how it was done.  I don’t even care why it was done…

But now I know how much that costs the violator…how it ages…how it corrodes.  Far more than it will ever cost me.  These words that set me free are words that light you up, one at a time—and that’s only because you don’t belong here.  

So, I will be opening up the backlog of stuff I wrote and didn’t publish because I cared that the wrong person might read it.  

An Apology

This has been a dark post in spots.  The Lesson?  Morbid curiosity leads to nothing good.  Just remember that you cannot un-know things.  And sometimes, the loss of innocence that comes with knowledge is a violation in itself.  It is “fine” when it comes with happenstance, but gosh, that we might do that to ourselves?  No thanks.  Be grace, and don’t stoop to that.  Cultivate the art of not wanting to know.