I think I have tended to attract people who are insecure in their gender or sexuality, who see me as a novel sort of toy to work out their issues but then freak out when I turn out to be a person with her own ideas about things—and also freak out at what I threaten to reflect about them. It’s like, they use me to explore some unspoken dimension of themselves then—well. The response has had a different balance in each case, but there’s this baseline weirdness and anxiety that I guess I always saw but never quite understood or connected from person to person, that small collection of others I’ve allowed close to me in that way.

Ergo, this inevitable controlling behavior. They didn’t really see me as an independent person to start with; I was just an accessory to them. But now? After they’ve realized I’m technically my own human being with my own agency? Now, I was a dangerous, rogue accessory who might at any time, intentionally or otherwise indicate what they were really like, and then Everyone Would Know.

I guess it was always obvious there was something “off” about me, leading people who had their hang-ups that they dared not voice to project their own interpretations into that and go, hmm, there’s some fucking plausible deniability right there, in mobile form. And what a rube! What an opportunity.