Heroics and Ethics

I knew Genevieve six weeks when I realized she was being horrifically abused.

I knew she had already applied to the 20 Under 20 program (later renamed Thiel Fellowship) and had exercised her substantial social skills to establish an online social network to try to help her get into the program. And I understood that her real reason for applying was to try to escape her abusive family and I believed that a lot of her supporters understood that and it was why they were trying to help her succeed.

I believe she turned nineteen shortly after contacting me, so this was her only shot at this program. The following year, she would be too old.

She wasn't American and I am not familiar with the laws of her country, but I believed her to be a legal adult, though she was still living with her parents and being treated like a child and like she had no real rights.

I wasn't gifted a membership to Metafilter until after my relationship to her ended, so examples from there that I sometimes give were things I ran across later. I use them to try to illustrate my points, but they didn't actually help me make my decision.

She had already attempted suicide at least twice that I knew of and she was trans and I just felt like her friends didn't actually know how to get her out and she was on track to DIE and I felt I knew how to get her out and I felt like if I didn't try, I would forever feel like I had her blood on my hands.

I was clear I couldn't explain it to other people. Her other friends obviously didn't know what I knew or she would already be out. I got her out six months after deciding to do so without telling her.

1. As far as I know, she was a legal adult. 

2. She had CLEARLY already decided she wanted out and was willing to move to another country to escape them.

3. I didn't decide for her that she should leave home, though I was very aware that she didn't really know what she was asking for and wouldn't actually be happy if she got it.

I got married at nineteen and left home at twenty and our first duty station was a traumatic experience. I spent years blaming Texas before changing my mind about that.

And I was leaving to get away from my dysfunctional family and abusive brother, but it didn't look like that to most people. To most people, it looked like I married my high school sweetheart and he followed in his father's footsteps and became a soldier like my father had been and it looked super prosaic.

I write in hopes of creating support systems that make such dramatic heroics less necessary because that's never a good answer.

She burned me for it and I did my best to stay on the down low and off the radar of her abusive parents and her friends whom I felt certain would blame me rather than her parents, the way I blamed Texas rather than "Gosh, going someplace new is hard after living in the same house most of your life."

I tried to tell her "Take it slow. No need to rush into bras. Be conservative." But she was in a big hurry to do all the things her parents had forbade and acted like I was a bad person for telling her take your time, don't be in such a rush.

While I was a homemaker, I spent multiple years planning a different future for myself.

Hypothetically, I "could" have left my husband and remarried quickly to survive financially. That never happened and it's not possible to prove it was actually a meaningful option if ONLY I had somehow handled things differently.

But I felt strongly that I needed to figure out how to support myself and stand on my own two feet. I felt like my marriage didn't really work largely because I was fleeing something and repeating that pattern would never really remedy it.

I'm the victim of incest twice over. I have an incurable genetic disorder. I was a homemaker for a long time and left and started over under incredibly difficult circumstances.

I've done hard things that took a long time. I've done things that took decades while I pushed as hard as I could the entire time for meaningful solutions.

I encourage you to look for non-heroic, quiet solutions that don't involve fanfare. And if that's not what you want, then I am probably not the right person to provide you guidance.

People who like the drama tend to keep it alive. And heroics and BIG FEELS and the like tend to be a path that doesn't actually get you away from the problems.

I made an extraordinary choice under extraordinary circumstances and it's not really what I want to make available for the LGBTQ community. I want you to have boring lives where your biggest complaints are stereotypical "If I win the lottery, I'm telling my boss TAKE THIS JOB AND SHOVE IT!" 

Those are my dreams: To be healthy and have paid work and whine and cry about ordinary problems and stop having endless drama.

In my experience, people who want to play hero tend to be people who don't really want you to solve your problems. I've walked away from a number of people who helped me for a time and then became a road block.