140: What if you were entangled in a web of shame? 42:55

Today's episode is brought to you by Audible. Listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, or expert advice, you can be inspired to new ways of thinking. And there's more to imagine when you listen. As an Audible member, you can choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. Currently, I'm listening to Daring Greatly by Brene Brown, a wonderful audio title that challenges us to imagine a new way to lead

love, work, parent, and educate through the power of vulnerability. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash happening or text happening to 500-500. That's audible.com slash happening or text happening to 500-500.

This Is Actually Happening is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Whether you love true crime or comedy, celebrity interviews or news, you call the shots on what's in your podcast queue. And guess what? Now you can call them on your auto insurance too with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive.

It works just the way it sounds. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Hello Prime members. Have you heard you can listen to your favorite podcasts like this is actually happening ad-free? It's good news. With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts included with your Prime membership.

To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts. That's amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Check out our recently completed six-part series, The 82% Modern Stories of Love and Family, ad-free with your Prime membership.

It's just confusing thinking about even today what I'm supposed to feel about the whole thing. Just because it's so new, you know, we're not really humans aren't really built to fully understand that kind of relationship. Welcome to the Permatemp Corporation, a presentation of the audio podcast, This Is Actually Happening. Episode 140, What If You Were Entangled in a Web of Shame?

This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe,

And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today.

I grew up in a suburban, close to a city, but a very small city in New England. I grew up fairly well off and I was always, as a kid, very extroverted. I had a lot of friends and was always spending time with people and was the sort of person that just liked knowing a lot of people. Over time, as I got older, that did change a little bit. I got more and more introverted as time went on, I noticed.

But as a kid, I was really the sort of person that wanted to be friends with everyone. I always had a very good relationship with my parents, still do. It was a very vanilla, untraumatic, normal childhood. By most standards, I would say. For lack of a better word, as I got older, I got a little more awkward. You know, as a kid, you can kind of just get off on sheer enthusiasm. But as you get older into middle school and then high school,

I was, you know, still that same person that kind of wanted to be friends with everyone, but suddenly not everyone wanted to be friends with me. That was exacerbated a little bit as I got even older. I came out as trans. I was never entirely isolated, but it did serve to isolate me more, and that did push me a little bit more into introversion and push me a little bit more into communities, especially online. I played a lot of video games as a kid, and that was the sort of place that more and more I found myself doing my socializing.

I was assigned male at birth, although pretty quickly had a sense that something was wrong with that. I didn't always have the vocabulary, like I didn't know being transgender was a thing until I was about 18 and that's when I started piecing things together and have ended up in a place where I'm mostly happy with

feminine gender identity. I sometimes feel a little more comfortable with the term non-binary or I just default to female because it's easier. It's the labels are words. I know what I am and what I'm not. I first came out to my friends, it was my freshman year of college, and I was very lucky to have fallen in even beforehand with a group of people that were very, for the most part, very accepting and progressive. Around

That time, also in my freshman year, I started facing that I had fairly severe depression. It was something I had struggled with throughout high school as well, but that escalated over the years until in my junior year of college, I actually dropped out due to my depression. I later would go back and complete it, but at that time, I started receding a lot.

I was still for the most part keeping up with my studies, but things started slipping. I would often not eat or just eat one meal a day just because I didn't have the energy or sometimes because it was a form of self-harm for me to starve myself. In addition to the self-starvation, I did cut for the span of about a year. I also did have one suicide attempt close to the end of my freshman year of college.

No further major attempts, but the suicidal ideation was still there, pretty much omnipresent for a few years afterwards. I had this disconnect where I wasn't able to connect with the people around me because of this depression, but I also really wanted to have those social interactions, and I was still the sort of person that was a little fueled by that.

It was easier for me, again, to not associate with the things directly around me in my real life and more so start retreating into spaces where there was a much more safe, comfortable distance. And that brought me to lots of things like video games and online communities, the sorts of things where there is that distance.

And so the source of communities I found myself in, you know, I played some video games. I wasn't, you know, a huge gamer, but it would be just forums related to, you know, shows I was interested in or just different fandoms, that sort of thing. And I would just connect with other people that had similar interests and find these communities online. So I would have been 22 at the time.

when I was referred by another friend I had made online to a site that facilitated chat rooms in which people would play the game of Mafia, which is

This fairly simple social game where people are given roles as either villagers or mafia and then people try to figure out who the mafia are and the goal is to either lie and not be discovered or discover the people who have been given that mafia role. But there was also a much larger forum and community that had built around it and it had been around by the time I found the website I want to say it was six or seven years old by then.

There was already a long history, a storied history to the social community there that I was entering. It was a very involved community. The sorts of people that were really, really involved there, I found a lot of them were sort of like me in the sense that they had a little bit receded from social communities in their real life. And this had sort of become a surrogate community for them.

Because of that, it was a very lively community. At least at the time, it was a very active, diverse community. To start off, I was interested in the game. I enjoyed the game a lot, but pretty quickly I found the chat room itself was the appeal, just talking to other people and meeting other people. And what brought me to the site was the game itself to play, but what kept me there were

the other people, the community, and I started making friends, some of which I am still in contact with to this day.

Because there was no voice or video in the actual website, it was really just chat. It was text. That sort of facilitated getting to know people very well, very quickly, because there's this level of anonymity and there's this safety. You could open up a little more, but you also didn't necessarily know a person's real name or you didn't know where they lived or you didn't know what they looked like or what their job was.

For many people there, these were very real, very important friendships to them. These were their best friends. They weren't just text. And people would go outside of the website and connect and either meet people or use video programs like Skype to connect with people.

For me as well, they were my friends. They were people I cared about. They were people who, like me, were struggling with depression and other issues. And so you would start to care about these people. You would check in on them. You would want to know that everyone's okay. And there was all sorts of emotional involvement throughout the site. People would get angry at each other. There would be friendships. There would be love. There were sadness and anger and pretty much everything you can think of.

In fact, I know of at least off the top of my head, three or maybe four couples that met on that website and ended up getting married in real life. I would say both my depression and my dysphoria kind of fed into why this place really appealed to me. The depression was kind of just making it difficult in general to connect with people, and the dysphoria element was really giving me this uncomfortable feeling around my body and my voice, and both those things were taken away in this community.

So this community, among other things, would let me be a person that, you know, I didn't have to be male or female or what I looked like. I could just be a very distilled essence of the person I wanted to be, which was another big attraction for me. And I think for a lot of people, I very quickly integrated into the community.

Not just getting to know people, but it really started to feel real for me. It really started to feel like this was my community. These were my friends. This was my social circle. It was my tribe. At this point, it would have been five years ago. It was my junior year of college that I first joined the community.

When I first joined this community, it had been around for about six years, I believe. And there was already a vibrant history. There were people who had come and gone from the site. Josh was a figure who was notorious in a way on the website. He had been banned from the website numerous times, most recently permanently.

Josh was a notorious figure. He was, you know, in the rules of any sort of internet community that you can think of, he had done pretty much everything.

But there was, throughout the site, a sort of respect for him. You know, people would tell stories. He was almost like a legendary figure on the site. He was an integral part of the community. He was the sort of person that if you were someone on this website, you would at least know of him, if not have a connection to him. He had been there present through most of the site's history, and he had kind of done everything you could think of to get yourself

in the ire of the people that were trying to keep the peace on the website. He had posted shock images. He had said racist things, not because he was explicitly racist or trying to be offensive. He was just trying to rile people up.

he had hacked the website. I remember he, I believe the last thing that he was banned for, officially banned forever was the ruling, was that he had hacked a moderator's account. He was a troublemaker more than anything. And the owner of the website by this time when I joined was fairly absent. You know, he would pop in now and then, but it was really a team of moderators. And at some point they just got fed up with him and said, you're gone forever, which of course didn't work, but they tried. When I joined the website,

he was banned from the website. But he was still around, not officially. He would either make up other personas or he would just talk to people online through Skype or through the sorts of communities that surrounded this website but weren't officially part of it. So the moderator team couldn't officially mandate that he couldn't be there because, like I said, there were people who were still his friends and who still liked him. So he was still present, but he was officially supposed to be gone.

Not only was he a very charming person to speak to directly, he was, as someone who had just joined the website and was kind of trying to integrate themself into this community and feel like I was part of it, he was the sort of person that I wanted to get to know. Because if you knew Josh, you were someone. If you had a connection to this person, that really meant that you were part of the website. And so having the opportunity to connect with him would sort of mean you were someone.

One of the things that people that quickly established themselves on the website sometimes did was there was a volunteer moderator team on the website. Because I had sort of quickly become integrated, there were people asking if I would be interested. And for a long time, I said no, I didn't think that that was the sort of thing I wanted to do. What eventually did persuade me, if I'm being totally honest, was that

Again, it sort of felt like a validation of, you know, you're really part of this community. You're really part of this and at the center of it. If you are on this moderator team helping run the website is why I eventually ended up agreeing to put in an application about a day after I submitted this application was the first time that Josh contacted me.

I didn't know who it was at first, but when he did tell me, I knew who he was. I didn't have the full story at that point, but I do remember there being kind of this excitement that this person had chosen to reach out to me. His explanation given was just that I seemed like an interesting person, and that was great. I loved hearing that, that someone thought I was interesting. And so we ended up connecting, and over the course of a few days, started to become friends.

Today's episode is brought to you by Quince. It's been a busy season of events and travel, and my wardrobe has taken a beating. A total overhaul isn't in my budget, but I'm replacing some of those worn-out pieces with affordable, high-quality essentials from Quince. By partnering with Top Factories, Quince cuts out the cost to the middleman and passes the savings on to us.

I love the Italian board shorts. They're made from quick-drying material and offer UPF 50 protection for all-day wear, so I can go from hiking to lounging on the beach without a wardrobe change. And compared to other luxury brands, the prices are well within my reach.

Upgrade your wardrobe with pieces made to last with Quince. Go to quince.com slash happening for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash happening to get free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash happening

This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

Let's face it, we were all that kid. So first call your parents to say I'm sorry, and then download the Instacart app to get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes all school year long. Get a $0 delivery fee for your first three orders while supplies last. Minimum $10 per order. Additional terms apply. One of the first things he did when he contacted me and when we became friends, there used to be this issue where Skype would leak your IP address.

And from your IP address you could roughly find out where someone lives. One of the first things Josh did when he talked to me, which kind of sets the stage for the sort of person this is, is he told me my IP address and then told me where I lived. As it turns out, it was wrong. He told me I lived in one state over, which I didn't, and I told him that that was wrong, but that's the sort of person he was. He was always sort of trying to set people on edge, but in a way that could be construed as harmless.

You know, there was maybe a tiny, tiny part of me that was a little put off, but more so than that, I just, I thought this person was interesting and I wanted to get to know them. But I did discuss with him the fact that I was thinking of becoming a moderator on the website. Later, I would learn this is why he reached out to me because he was looking to make a friend on the, on the moderator team to help himself get back in. At this point, I didn't realize that he had told me that I seemed interesting and that was good enough for me.

I had an interview with the head of the moderator team which seemed to go well but they told me they would get back to me in a couple days. One of the things they asked in the interview was, "Was I friends with any band users?" There were sort of a short list of very notorious band users that this was sort of referring to of which Josh was one of them and I said no knowing that I was of course lying.

When they asked that, I kind of got scared that either someone would figure out I lied or

that this could jeopardize what I was trying to do. And I did something I'm very much not proud of, which is after they asked that question and after the interview ended, I removed Josh from my Skype contacts and blocked him and just completely ghosted the friendship without saying anything. I didn't tell him anything. I didn't say we can't be friends anymore. I just removed him and blocked him. And that was it because I...

I wanted more than being his friend to be accepted by this team and establish these other relationships. But then a big thing happens, which is the owner of the website, who doesn't come back often, he's very hands-off, pretty disconnected from the site, decides that he's going to unban Josh.

And the reason he decides this is because, well, he is friends with Josh, but more so what he has said he's going to do is unban Josh and in turn, Josh will help him patch some of the coding issues that are on the website such that other people can't hack the site. The moderator team, who of course was very sick of him, was not happy about this. And there was this really, really big long thread

that was made on the forums of the website basically just laying into Josh and talking about how terrible a person he is. And there's all sorts of accusations flying around this thread about terrible things he's done, people discussing things he has done or things he's accused of doing. There's everything from racism to making sexual remarks at minors to just generally being a shitty, awful person.

It was this big event that everyone on the site was involved in and I decide I want to contribute. And so I give this story about how he, the first thing he did when we talked is trace my IP address and told me where I lived. And I said, wow, this was so creepy and uncomfortable.

Which, certainly someone could have had that reaction, but he knew that's not the reaction I had. I had told him that I didn't have that reaction. And I was now essentially lying about what I had felt when I had talked to him in order to better fit in with what the narrative was that everyone was pushing, in order to sort of be with the common voice.

You could call it bullying, you could call it call-out thread, whatever it was, I shifted my position in order to be a big part of the bigger group. There was also the fact that a lot of the things people were saying painted him in a very bad light and so there was a part of me that kind of started to justify myself and say "oh yeah this person actually really sucks" but

To say that I was instantly made uncomfortable and creeped out by him, it wasn't true. It was a lie. It was just something I said because I wanted to be a part of the group. We don't hear anything for a little while. People still aren't really sure whether he's getting unbanned. It seemed like the owner of the website may have kind of stepped back after this happened. I get upset that as a moderator and I joined the team and I start meeting the people there and everything's fine.

I think it may have been at most a day after I had become a moderator that someone found the suicide note. He had set up a timer on a, I believe it was a Tumblr blog, such that it would post a note three days after he was going to kill himself. And in the note it was made explicit, you know, "I'm setting this up to be three days after I have my attempt, so if you're reading this, it's too late. I'm gone."

And it was this long note that talked about a lot of things. It talked about how he was abused as a kid. It talked about his struggles with mental health. And then in the note, he didn't explicitly mention me, of course, but one of the lines of the note that I remember very clearly was him citing all these people that have turned their back on him. When I read that part of the note,

What instantly went into my head is, because this had all been so recently that I had done this, that he had seen this, was, oh my god, I just drove someone to kill themselves. You know, having had difficulties with depression and having attempted to kill myself in the past before, logically I knew, of course it was so many things, of course you can't blame yourself, that's

what you always tell people that are in the wake of something like this happening. That you shouldn't blame yourself, it's so many things, it's this disease, blah blah blah. But it was really hard for me, knowing what I had done and feeling so guilty about it, to not think this was my fault. And if I hadn't been a jerk to this person, if I hadn't ghosted them and then basically betrayed them, then this wouldn't have happened, then he might still be alive.

I felt horrible, guilty and sad. And just, I felt like the worst fucking person in the world. Someone on the moderator team found an obituary from an online newspaper, a local paper. And the whole moderator team, of course, was kind of in a weird place because they had sort of been in this crusade against him. And now he had killed himself.

Pretty quickly, everyone on the site saw it. And then there was a thread that was put up as a memorial to him. It was very strange to see not even a week since that thread that everyone was bashing him in. Less than a week later, now there was this memorial thread and there was this outpouring of sadness and people saying nice things about him and people regretting the things they had done.

There was some blame going around, but for the most part, the general sense on the site, at least publicly, was really just sadness that this at all had happened. Most of the people on that site had either dealt with depression or knew a lot of people who do. So it very much became sympathy for that. Josh had lost his battle with depression.

But mine was not the only sentiment of guilt that having so recently had that experience with him where I talked to him and then ghosted him and then started saying shit about him despite having been his friend. At least in my head, my guilt was, you know, huge. It was it was massive. It was I felt so responsible for this.

The website was always a little rough around the edges. There was a lot of negativity that just generally was around the place. And after this happened, there was sort of a pushback against that. People were trying to like be better. But in terms of actually discussing Josh himself, I remember it dying down pretty quickly. I mean, it would come up, of course, it would come up. And I think

And privately, there were still a lot of people talking about it. I know I was, but it kind of just, it kind of just became a thing you only talked about behind closed doors. But as for my own guilt, it really ate away at me. It really started to make me feel more and more hollow as time went on.

I don't remember really myself at that point feeling very, very suicidal. Although, again, it was a bit of a blur. I may have, but I think more so I just felt like a really, really bad person that had to do something right. And so I was trying to pour myself into what little responsibilities I had in this community through the moderator position and

the relationships I had with people who I knew were also struggling. In a way, I guess I was trying to redeem myself in my own eyes by continuing to connect with these people. I didn't want to abandon anyone anymore. As the distance kind of increased from it, more and more of that rationality like, "Okay, there were a lot of things, you know, it was a really long suicide note, you talked about so much, you can't put all of this on you." That did start to rise a little more in my head as the distance from it grew.

But there was still that part of me that was like, "Okay, but directly, you know, if he was, to use a metaphor, like a powder keg, you might have been the spark. And that doesn't mean it was all you, but it also doesn't absolve you." It would have been about three weeks later after I had found out that Josh was dead that I was having a conversation with someone on the site

where I was talking to them about what I was feeling. This guilt, this dumbness around the whole event. And it was two lines that they said to me back was, "Fuck it. He's still alive." I didn't really register what I had just been told, but they, you know, he started explaining, "No, Josh is still alive. He's still alive. It wasn't real."

He had been in a different lobby, a different chat room on the site, and had been talking to someone and then connected with them off the site where they told him that, yeah, it's him. He showed me the profile, which I saw, and I was able to go back through their games. You know, I could see, like, the history of this player who he was accusing of being Josh on the site. And I was able to go back and see, you know, their whole history on the site and

And the first game this account had gone into was on the day that we had found his suicide note. And the first game they entered, they were talking about Josh. It still didn't feel real. Like, there was no way. And so I went to look back at the obituary, and the whole site was gone. The website, the paper that that obituary had been posted on, it wasn't there anymore. That website didn't exist. I was just confused and baffled and just...

I thought I was going crazy, and turns out it was all fake. Josh was on this new account that he had where he was using while he was quote unquote dead. He was claiming to be another user from the website who had left a long, long time ago in order to not have to pretend to be completely new, you know? So he was claiming to be this other user that had long since left the site.

I knew, I had a friend who knew that other user and I just, I asked him to just check up and say "hey, do you know, is this person, have they come back to the website?" And as soon as I told him all about what was going on, about how we thought Josh was dead but maybe he wasn't, he just immediately laughed at me. He's like "no, there's no way Josh is dead. He's playing a joke on you. This is what Josh does." And that's kind of when it sunk in like "oh, oh no, this really is all fake."

He made the website that the obituary was on. He forged it all. You know, he was gifted with computers. He could make a website, so he did. And he copied articles from other websites to put it on there and make it seem more genuine. I didn't know what to do because everyone else on the site still thought he was dead and was still in this like mourning period. And I was like, wait, no, this is all a lie. And who do I tell and what do I do?

I told the head of the moderator team, who told me I must be wrong, but I kind of insisted like no I really think this this is true. I mean it could have been real is the thing like everything in that note, that suicide note he had written, was a real thing he was feeling. You know he was a person who suffered from depression. He was a person who had had his back turned on him by so many people and

I don't know about the abuse he claimed to have had. The things I did could have made someone kill themselves, even if what it really did was make someone pretend to kill themselves. So I remember really not knowing what to feel at that point, because up until this point I had just been completely destroyed by guilt. But then if it wasn't real, should I not feel guilty? Should I

still feel like a bad person? Should I be angry or relieved or sad that this had happened? Like just sad for him that he had felt the need to do this? I... I just didn't know anymore how to possibly react. It almost felt like a second chance, you know? Because I had so often of course been like "I wish I could just talk to him one more time and apologize." You know? And now I could!

But should I? Because what he did was terrible, you know, to fake your death to all those people. There was definitely anger there that he had done this, but I really, at that time, the anger was really overwhelmed by the relief, more so than anything, that he was alive and that if I tried, maybe I could talk to him again and that maybe I could... Because again, I had just become so empty with guilt that suddenly having the opportunity to...

maybe set things right, started to win out above the confusion and shock and anger. So Josh was on the website pretending to be this other person who I, until I found out it was him, hadn't interacted with. But they were around, they were playing games, they were talking to people. Pretending to be someone else, but they were there still.

The difficulty is he's still technically supposed to be banned, but he's on the website and I am now a moderator. So shouldn't I be banning him? And I tell the lead of the team about this and they kind of still have this same conflict where, yeah, he was banned, but he also, we all think he's dead. So it would be weird to issue a ban here.

I tried to reach out to this account. I, my first message to them, I left it very vague. I didn't say, you know, I know you're Josh. I said, I think you're someone who I may have known in the past that I'm trying to reconnect with. Obviously Josh would know what I was saying, but like I could also deny it. And they kind of just rebuked me straight out. Like, Oh no, I don't think, I don't think we knew each other. Like, no, sorry. That's not me. Eventually though, because now he knew that we knew that account,

He deleted it and made another account, which we didn't find until later. But I had sort of lost the trail on him, but at this point knew he was alive and that he was somewhere and that I really just felt this need to reach out and apologize if I could. There was a comment someone made later on, well later into this whole saga, that I think really summed up sort of the state of the community at this point, which was like, coolness on this website is...

you know, the amount of weeks after he faked his death that you knew that he was actually alive. You know, it slowly started to trickle out until eventually there was an event that kind of leaked it to everyone. Suddenly it was someone had said it and then these chat logs got leaked and verified and suddenly everyone on the whole website knew. So at this point when everyone knows it's been about a month only since he had faked his death,

And it almost immediately became a joke that we had all fallen for this. You know, there were definitely, there was definitely a lot of anger and a lot of frustration, but it was also just like, you have to laugh at it at some point. Like, it was just ridiculous that this had happened. Pretty quickly into, you know, this being publicly discussed, Josh himself on one of his accounts started talking in the threads and saying,

He made an account where he was clearly giving contributions as Josh, this person that had just pretended to kill himself. And he started talking and joking around with people, sort of, that this had all happened.

There was just, again, very uneasiness, like, do we ban him? Like, are we supposed to? He's technically supposed to be banned, and now he's also faked his death, which feels like it should be something. But it would also feel very strange at this point to ban him, because everyone's just also going through this relief that he's okay. It was weird. It was really, really weird. You can host the best backyard barbecue.

When you find a professional on Angie to make your backyard the best around. Connect with skilled professionals to get all your home projects done well. Inside to outside. Repairs to renovations. Get started on the Angie app or visit Angie.com today. You can do this when you Angie that.

Most Americans think they spend about $62 per month on subscriptions. But get this, the real number is closer to $300. That is literally thousands of dollars a year, half of which you've probably forgotten about. Thankfully, Rocket Money can find a bunch of subscriptions you've

forgotten all about, and then help you cancel the ones you don't want anymore. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so that you can grow your savings. Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when using all of the app's features.

Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash wondery. That's rocketmoney.com slash wondery. rocketmoney.com slash wondery. So I saw that and again was still kind of like in this place where I wanted to reach out and I did. And now that he was outed and he was himself, he was a little more willing to talk to me.

I was able to apologize to him for what she said, "Oh yeah, that's fine." And we sort of reconnected. And you know, he didn't really, at least when we talked, didn't really begrudge me at all for what I had done. I don't know what degree of significance it ever had to him.

At first, for a little while, he was remorseful, I guess, that he had done this thing. You know, he understood that he had done something bad. But very, very quickly, you know, once I had kind of had that opportunity to apologize with him and the guilt started to fade, I started having more of that, like, anger and that, like, "I can't believe you did this that I hadn't really processed earlier" come up and he started moving into more of, like, "This was a great joke I pulled on all of you guys."

the guilt was replaced with like, "No wait, you're actually just a really bad person." At this point I wasn't acting as a moderator anymore, but I still knew some people who were. And so I started telling the moderators what his accounts were. Because he would tell me because I was friends with him and so I would give that to them. Which he found out I was doing because he kept getting banned.

And that pretty quickly escalated into our relationship completely deteriorating and there was a threat to dox me, which if you don't know what that means, it essentially means they were going to find all my personal information and post it on, like, including like where I worked and my phone number and my address and my full name, my legal name, my birth name, by the way, which like was especially bad for me as a trans person. And they were going to get all this and post it everywhere.

They did gather most of this information, but they didn't, as far as I know, post it publicly. I mean, it went around his circles, but at least he didn't put it all out there.

I remember being terrified when that, when I realized that could happen and trying to like take a whole step back from the entire website when that had happened because it felt like, okay, now I've, now I've poked a bear. Now I just need to disconnect from this because it's just getting too crazy and I'm having too many emotions caught up in this and I don't like this anymore. You know, as time goes on for more and more people, this event starts to become a joke.

which didn't sit well with me. I mean, even for me sometimes in conversations I would try to treat it as such, but it really was... I don't know that I would use the word traumatic, but it really messed with me. I had never known someone that I thought would be capable of what he had done. This is the sort of thing that you talk about like a friend of a friend of a friend doing, and the fact that I had known someone that did this was like

Since this whole thing happened, I've become a lot more wary of the people that I connect with. I wanted to try and give everyone a chance and connect with everyone and know everyone because I loved knowing people. I love people. I love hearing their stories and getting to know what they're all about. But since this has all happened, I've become a lot more wary of the sorts of people that I'll let myself invest emotionally in. I think

I wouldn't say I'm the same sort of person as Josh is, but he was a person who had been struggling with his own mental issues for a very long time and had sort of been receded into this community for a very long time. And seeing what that had kind of made him into in a way, not that this was the only thing, but seeing that that's sort of how it shaped him, I kind of would say it was one of the things that sort of started pushing me back out into the real world.

And not to say that I hate it and it's terrible and that sort of place should never be... no one should ever go there, but it started making me realize that I needed to have more and that this couldn't be my only social lifeline. To this day, I still talk to some of the friends I've made there daily, but for a lot of people this was their community because they didn't have another community. This was their life, their social life at least.

And these people really needed a community. You know, I needed a place where I could connect with people and the site gave that to me. But as I did move forward in my recovery, I think the community we formed was something people needed, but also it wasn't good. It was something, but it wasn't a positive force, at least in my life. I thought it was. And in the end, you know, it was sort of,

Bringing me down and in some of the same ways it had at first brought me up. It had at first been a lifeline for me You know years later. I was struggling with finding a therapist that I felt comfortable Connecting to and I realized you know This would be a lot easier if I could just write my thoughts down rather than try and speak them and I think that really speaks to how these connection the way these connections on the site formed

There was an ease to it when you could write things down and think about it. And that did facilitate relationships that were very close and important, but also just different.

It's just so strange how these relationships can form in such a way that you feel close enough to someone to be in a romantic relationship with them, but also have enough distance that they can pretend to kill themselves and, oh, it's just the internet. It's just online. It's just text. It doesn't really matter. And that conflict is kind of what makes this weird alien-ness to the whole nature of these relationships, I think.

Eventually it all caught up to him. The last I heard of Josh is that he's now in prison. Josh got in some legal trouble over attacking someone that he had actually met through the website. He met a girl through the website and I guess their relationship went south. After hearing about the initial report, didn't follow up with it.

Honestly, made me a little sick to my stomach just knowing that I had had these interactions with someone who did something like that. But I don't know fully what became of it. I believe he was in prison for some time. I don't know that he still is. It all feels a little fake when you're on the website and then once it starts bleeding out into the real world, you kind of start to realize just how crazy it was.

There was also just the question of are the personalities we're portraying on the site real? Are they really who we are? You know, what if someone who's on that site acting very excitable in real life is very shy? Is that a lie? Is that not really who they are? Or just without those filters? Is that the sort of person they are?

That was something I thought about a lot. And I think those filters being removed sometimes showed, in Josh's case at least, some pretty ugly sides of people. And I suppose at some point in my case too.

As I gain more distance from the whole thing, I still have trouble really grappling with my own feelings about my actions at the beginning of this whole saga and how I was kind of a shitty person towards Josh, regardless of what he would go on to do and what sort of person he was. You know, I have had to think more about how I treat people.

You know, I had said that I was someone who always wanted to be friends with everyone, but when I found myself in a place where I felt like I had to choose, I'm really not proud of my actions at that point. You know, there were so many better ways I could have handled that. And I like to think I've learned from the experience, but it's always hard to know. It's just confusing thinking about even today what I'm supposed to feel about the whole thing.

how to really, I don't know that I ever fully processed it or that I ever fully could just because it's so new. You know, we're not really, humans aren't really built to fully understand that kind of relationship. This is Actually Happening is brought to you by me, Witt Misseldein. If you love what we do, you can join the community on our official Instagram page at Actually Happening.

You can also rate and review the show on iTunes, which helps tremendously to boost visibility to a larger community of listeners. Thank you for listening. Until next time, stay tuned. ♪

If you like This Is Actually Happening, you can listen to every episode ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

Welcome to the Offensive Line. You guys, on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some s**t, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agar.

So here's how this show's going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like No offense. No offense, Travis Kelsey, but you've got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter.

Is it Brandon Ayuk, Tee Higgins, or Devontae Adams? Plus, on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery Plus, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday night football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in. Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.