I’d so far ignored the allegations that Joymuffin was spreading about me, after several people had advised me not to give them extra publicity, but fuck it. She wants to have a public discussion? Fine. Let’s have a public discussion.
Since the most specific and concrete claim of my abuse is the D&D game, I’ll start by discussing that, and then say things more generally.
The D&D episode
Joymuffin describes this as having happened “in the lockdown”. The game took place on the 14th of March. At the time, the authorities were starting to recommend reducing social contacts, but in general people were mostly still meeting in small groups. The official recommendations (newspaper article dated 12th of March; Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare’s Covid info page on March 14th) banned events of more than 500 people and told organizers of smaller events to “use their judgment”; an official from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health had said that she wouldn’t attend a sports game with lots of sweating and close contact, but that a hobby with no sweat and a chance to maintain a distance to other people was probably fine.
Joymuffin and I were... the situation was complicated, but I considered us friends rather than romantic partners, though I had at times felt pressured to give other people a different impression, and sex did happen (more on that later). I had been visiting her regularly to keep her company and help her with daily chores, as she was lonely and in poor physical health. When I was going to the game, I happened to briefly mention to her that I was going. She surprised me by panicking and insisting that I must absolutely not go. When I politely but firmly let her know that I respected her opinion but disagreed with it and would go, she sent me insults for hours, and was specifically upset that I had "called it her opinion when it was about official recommendations by the authorities".
I was rather blindsided by this, as the official recommendations at the time were in fact not unambiguously against small events. I had also gone to see a friend on the previous day and Joymuffin had no objections then, and she herself was supposed to see her sister on the same day. When I later double checked with my two housemates for their opinion, they also did not feel like there was anything wrong with me going to the game.
While I was at the game, Joymuffin sent me messages saying things like (my translation, originals in Finnish):
She also said that my actions had made her feel so horrible that her physical condition had collapsed and she had to cancel her sister’s visit (strongly implying that this was basically my fault too). I did my best to remain calm and conciliatory throughout the discussion (see here for the full chat log, for those who understand Finnish), at first saying that I'd been surprised by her view this time but we could discuss what kind of caution she'd want me to follow in the future.
I also said that while I understood her worry for her health, it felt unreasonable to me that she felt like she had the right to make such demands to me out of the blue just because I was visiting her and helping her out, and that it did not feel fair to me that me helping her with things meant I had to live my life according to her wishes. She felt that this was an upsetting comment to make.
If this had been just an isolated incident, I'd have let it pass, but she'd previously repeatedly gotten upset with my choices, including but not limited to:
1. I was asked to speak at an event free of charge, and was told it was organized on a volunteer basis so the other speakers wouldn't get paid either. She was angry at me because she felt that I was being ripped off, and threatened to call the organizers to yell at them and tell them that they have to pay me. I managed to talk her into not doing it.
2. At an event that we were both attending, someone asked me for help in organizing the next iteration of the same event. I was considering this when Joymuffin started yelling at me and saying that I had too many responsibilities already, so I mustn't take on more. I again tried politely acknowledging her opinion and saying that I disagreed, but she kept yelling at me, until the person I'd been talking with awkwardly said something like "uhh, I guess I'll leave the two of you to talk about it" and left. Joymuffin was later banned from a later iteration of that same event because multiple people including several organizers felt unsafe around her; I was not part of the discussion so don't know the details, but I guess that people witnessing this episode might have contributed to it. (She then blamed me for having been banned, despite me having explicitly refused to tell the organizers details of our personal history that would have cast in her a bad light.)
3. The February meditation retreat that she references. When I told her that I was going, she was upset to find out that she was not among the first people to hear about it, and thought that the reason why I had "kept this a secret" from her was that I knew it to be a bad idea and that the TMI technique I thought was associated with the retreat was dangerous and unsafe. I was again completely blindsided by this idea, and I thought she knew that I considered the system to be a net positive even if there were some things about it that gave rise to caution. She had explicitly given me feedback on two pieces of writing that said the same and hadn't objected to me characterizing it that way at the time (see the acknowledgment at the bottom of this article and the three paragraphs preceding it; also, a chapter that I wrote for a book that we had published together said basically the same thing). I had also had varied success in getting this style of meditation to work of late, and she had seemed encouraging on the times when I had mentioned that it felt like I was getting it to work again.
So it was surprising to find her thinking that it would be a terrible idea for me to go, and even more surprising to find her claiming that of course I also knew it to be a terrible idea. And I just didn’t know what to say to the part where she was insistent that me knowing this was the reason I hadn’t told her earlier, and that I was therefore untrustworthy and deceptive.
Yet she seemed so convinced about this that it did not feel worth it to argue; when I insisted on going on anyway, she e-mailed the organizer of the retreat to tell him that I should be kicked out of the retreat for my severe mental health problems. The organizer got in contact with me, asked me questions about my mental health and history with practice which I answered honestly, and he then felt safe about letting me attend.
When I posted on Twitter that I was going, Joymuffin responded and publicly accused me of lying. Privately she also let me know that I shouldn't have posted that on Twitter where she might see it, because I knew that she'd find that upsetting, and I had other social medias where I could talk about things like that so that she wouldn’t see it.
The whole retreat episode felt very worrying, as it felt like an escalation in her behavior. While she had threatened to contact third parties to stop me from doing something that she didn’t like before, this was the first time that she had started actually acting on it, as well as spreading malicious claims about me in public.
And while things had been difficult with her before, I had thought that maybe if I’m just extra careful about what I do and say, I can keep things alright between us. But if someone becomes completely insistent that you are lying when you are not, and finds it traumatizing when you don’t give in to her version of reality and instead act according to your actual best judgment, it kind of becomes impossible to maintain any kind of friendship.
I thought that I’d give her one last chance after the retreat, and then there was the episode with the game. I thought about what to do, slept on it, and the next morning told her that while I still care about her and consider her a friend, I think it would be better if we didn’t communicate anymore.
A few days later she begged me to come and help for one last time because she had a broken fridge that needed to be replaced. Earlier, a friend had warned me to absolutely not go see her ever again, since my friend was convinced Joymuffin would come up with something to keep me entangled with her. I understood my friend's concern but didn't think Joymuffin was quite that bad, so I went. It turned out there were problems with delivering the replacement fridge, so I had to visit on several different days.
Then on a Friday, six days after the game, the replacement fridge was delivered but Joymuffin also claimed to have COVID symptoms and that I'd have to stay in quarantine with her.
Joymuffin thought I had gotten the COVID from the game and given it to her. It’s worth noting that this is of course possible, but I did not have any symptoms, nor did I manage to give it to my housemates during this time (though in fairness they were also mostly not at home). None of the other people at the game are known to have had COVID either; one person did have brief respiratory symptoms later in the week, but they went away after half a day or so, and he did not think it was COVID.
With regard to the COVID that Joymuffin claimed my oldest friend to have gotten from the game: my friend did get a stomach flu nine days after the game, but a child had also vomited at her place of work a few days before, which my friend had needed to clean up, likely getting the stomach flu from that. [EDITED February 18th: this section originally claimed that my friend got the stomach flu a month after the game, too long for it to be Covid. That is what she told me when we discussed the issue; however today she called me and let me know that she had mixed up the dates and that the stomach flu had actually been on the 23rd of March instead of 23rd of April, as she had originally remembered it.]
As for alternate routes of infection, Joymuffin had also met her landlady in the preceding days to discuss the fridge situation, and both of us had been visiting grocery stores etc.
It's true that I did not report Joymuffin's claimed symptoms to the other players at the time, so that they could have quarantined themselves in case the disease really had come that way. I probably should have. I didn't do it because I felt ashamed over the fact that I had gotten in this trap: after finally managing to get some distance from her, I had disregarded a warning not to meet with her again, and had gotten stuck with her for two weeks just like I'd been warned. I was also pretty sure that if I were to explain the situation and the fact that Joymuffin herself was refusing to get tested or otherwise seek treatment (due to her history of medical trauma), none of the others would have believed her and would think that she was just making things up to keep me there. I didn't believe that she was intentionally faking it, and still wanted to protect her reputation at least that much. When I much later did tell some of them what happened, their reaction was to not believe her, just as I had expected.
Eventually (at the end of June 2020) I finally managed to mostly cut contact again, though I still offered to pay people to come and help her with her chores, and assisted her remotely with social security applications. At one point she let me know she was finally willing to consider therapy, so I paid for a few sessions in the hope that it would help her, even if she wasn’t interested in working on the things that caused me to stop meeting her.
Otherwise I mostly managed to ignore her attempts to contact me, including the text messages she sent me every evening for four months in a row (sometimes saying nice things about me, sometimes less nice things). When none of those worked to get me back, she eventually shifted gears and instead moved to public accusations of me having been abusive.
In those accusations, as in this article, she consistently frames e.g. the D&D game as one where she just tried to make me avoid the game, and then I got angry about it and never forgave her. She systematically leaves out the fact that she belittled me and my judgment for hours, and explicitly attacked me for daring to disagree with her, claiming that it wasn’t her opinion but rather an objective recommendation by the authorities (which it wasn’t). In fact I never even got angry; later in the evening I did tell her that the way she was speaking was not okay, but everything that I said remained far more polite than her overall tone. She also leaves unmentioned the fact that this was not an isolated incident, but the latest in a long pattern of repeated behavior.
The other claims
A few words about our general history. Joymuffin and I had known about each other for a long time, but hadn’t really been in close contact until a few years back, when I noticed that she’d been getting into meditation and invited her to an IRC channel about the topic. We then started talking more, and the possibility of us maybe being romantically interested in each other was raised. Since she lived in the Netherlands and I lived in Finland, we mostly chatted remotely, until she visited Finland in the summer of 2018 and we spent some more time interacting in person.
Eventually I got the feeling that I didn’t feel like the potential for romance was there. After we spent a bit more time in person, I also felt that while she was nice to hang out with every and now then, I would probably prefer not spending a lot of time together. I did my best to convey this as diplomatically as I could, with my exact words being roughly “I get the feeling that we’re not quite on the exact same wavelength”.
This caused her to develop extreme anxiety and a feeling that nobody liked her and that she was all alone. That hit me rather hard, since it mirrored a very similar intense experience that I had previously had, and which I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Since I did nevertheless consider her a good friend - maybe our real-life interaction didn’t work out that well, but we had lots of good discussions online - I started investing a lot of effort into helping her out. Over time, I ended up spending more and more time on this, especially since there always seemed to be one emergency after another that necessitated giving her extra help.
The whole friendship was just unhealthy in all sorts of ways, but I felt stuck in it for various reasons, including the fact that she kept saying things like "your existence is the only reason why I haven't killed myself yet" and because I knew that stress made her physical health conditions worse and I was afraid that me cutting contact would cause a potentially lethal amount of stress. There was one occasion when I tried to draw a line and insist that she seek therapy if she wanted me to continue helping her. She reacted extremely badly, then went entirely offline and stopped responding to my calls for an extended time, making me think that she really had killed herself. (This is the only event in my life that has caused me to have literal flashbacks, in the sense of getting such an intense memory that I think that I’m back in the moment of the painful experience. Fortunately they disappeared pretty soon after.) That caused me to back down.
There was also the concrete issue that her health was too poor for her to work, and as a Finnish citizen living in the Netherlands, she fell through the gaps of the local social security system. According to the terms of her divorce, she was getting money from her ex-husband, but it was going to eventually run out by early 2020. She said that the only way for her to survive was if she could move to Finland, so then I spent a large amount of time looking for an apartment for her, arranging the move etc.; and once she was here in late 2019, I had ended up making all kinds of promises of spending more time with her etc. and gave it a shot in the hopes that she would eventually start feeling better. (Joymuffin consistently talks about how I destroyed her life, but leaves out the fact that apparently I also saved her life. Either that, or none of the countless of times when she told me that “I will have to kill myself if you don’t find me an apartment in time” were actually true.)
With regard to the claims of sexual abuse: I flat out deny ever having been sexually abusive. I find the accusation particularly hurtful as her behavior towards me was consistently sexually coercive. Among other things, if we wouldn’t have sex, she would start talking about how disgusting I made her feel, including on occasions when I was practically stuck together with her for several days and didn’t have convenient options to leave. She would also explicitly ask if I couldn't sometimes have sex even if I didn’t quite feel like it, as a favor to a friend.
With regard to claims of declining mental health, dissociation etc.: I won’t deny that I had dissociative reactions when dealing with Joymuffin. The whole situation was extremely stressful and did trigger such reactions. It’s also true that there was a point when I resumed taking antidepressants: after I tried cutting contact with her, we ended up still interacting for a while after I got out of the quarantine, and then I felt stuck in the situation and like I was never going to get out of it. That caused my anxiety and depression to temporarily get worse. When I finally did manage to draw a line, I pretty soon also stopped needing the medication again.
Overall however, what she calls a decline in my mental health was largely an improvement in it: Over time I got a better ability to assert boundaries, got less hesitant about expressing anger when she was treating me badly, and felt less compulsively drawn into a people-pleasing response whenever she would tell me that all of her anxiety and experience of feeling worthless was because I didn’t care about her. It is worth noting that out of several people who I’ve interacted closely with, she is the only one to have noticed this supposed decline in my mental health.
The claimed “emotional abuse” followed a similar pattern as the one about the D&D discussion. Joymuffin would dislike something I did, after which she might spend hours telling me how this made her feel terrible and how I was a terrible person, and then if I even just said that her words felt unfair to me, she would accuse me of being hurtful. (Towards the end I found that I had to control my voice really carefully, because if I let the slightest irritation leak into it, she would freak out and be terrified over how I was “enraged” at her.)
One repeated pattern that manifested over and over was that she would want us to do something together, and say that it would make her feel better. (In particular, she wanted us to move together and be housemates.) When I refused, she would keep talking about how senseless it was that I was making her feel horrible for no reason, and I just didn’t care about her. She would keep asking me why I didn’t want to do it. I would try to avoid answering, knowing that she wouldn’t take it well, but eventually I would give in and (with varying degrees of tact or frustration) offer some reason for why it didn’t seem to me like we would be particularly compatible. She would then take offense at this and say that I was being abusive and saying hurtful untrue things, and in the future bring up my words as a justification for treating me badly (because I had been so terrible and traumatized her and now she couldn’t help her own behavior).
On the other hand, if as the result of such episodes, I would give in and do something together because she had pressured me into it, she would appeal to it as justification for why we should spend more time together - since I obviously liked doing things together with her and we were well-matched. If I would ever point out that I only did that with her because of all the pressure, then I was being needlessly hurtful and abusive again. Either way, I would inevitably end up as the bad guy, except when I spent my own time with her and told her the things she wanted to hear.
When I've shown third parties chat logs where Joymuffin has called me abusive because of what I've said in that discussion, they have not agreed with her. (Rather, they have characterized her behavior as projecting and gaslighting.) Several of my friends explicitly told me that they were relieved when I finally managed to get out of the situation and cut contact with her.
I do think that she genuinely believes all of her claims about me being the abusive one etc., and I do genuinely hope that she would find help. When she was still clinging to me as her only possible savior, she kept saying that she couldn’t talk to anyone else anymore because I had made her feel so disgusting etc.; now she talks on Twitter about all the friends she has made since I cut contact, which feels like a healthier development.
I agree with her when she says that people are complex and that nobody is all bad. I do genuinely think that Joymuffin has lots of positive sides, and on many issues she was responsive to feedback and did work to improve her behavior. That was part of the reason why I held on for so long - because she was so reasonable with regard to so many things, and I always ended up hoping that since we managed to talk about some smaller problem productively, maybe we could talk about the main problem as well. It was only when things touched one set of core issues in particular that she became insistent that the fault was all mine.
I also didn't want to respond in public for a long time because I didn't want her to get more hurt, and kept hoping that she would get over me if I just didn't engage. I don't want her to get cancelled either. I would have been perfectly content to let her be and hopefully recover if she had just left me alone, and I hope she would do that now.