4. Leaping into the unknown

My late dog Marley fully expressing his love of the surf line with a special branch. Loyal and smart, fast and fearless, Marley loved me with total devotion and brought me joy every day. The goodest boy.

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.” – Rumi

CW- Contains references to sexual abuse

I've been posting for many years online about the global right information war and propaganda trends, because the ways these manufactured information narratives seek to influence society and politics intersect two areas I'm passionate about; information and community.

During 10 years in print media in the late nineties and noughties I watched daily global media landscapes move like shifting patterns in a kaleidoscope.

Over time patterns revealed how certain groups of interests were seeking influence; or moving assets and accumulating power. I watched these influences gain power through creating entire disinformation ecosystems, while successfully attacking and dismantling trusted media. I wrote public good posts and the odd longer piece about it.

Through the lens of a community systems designer and facilitator I also looked at how impacts of that growing disinformation influence could hurt communities, what we would need to do to support people if the worst ideas of current political actors were imposed and assessed the risks facing communities

I spent many hours fostering conversations and thinking deeply about how everything fitted together. How to find ways to plan for grass roots level basic food, energy and housing needs; as communities as we face increasingly volatile geopolitical and climate crises.

I started writing this blog at the end of 2024 to publish long form political analysis pieces after I noticed disturbing anti-democracy political patterns in New Zealand.

The disinformation and overseas influenced propaganda had increased in Aotearoa post-covid and the media was mostly struggling, or completely failing, to examine where some of the worst ideas and influences were coming from.

I started to look into the mining and political connections a bit more deeply.

By February 2025 I was feeling increasingly dubious about links around the people I was looking into and felt I needed to pay stronger attention to my personal security. I sent a DM asking for help/advice to a person I had talked to a little bit online who had a military background. I'd followed and communicated with him since 2020 from old twitter, although we were now mutuals on BlueSky.

Meanwhile I was having fairly frequent unexplained episodes of waking up feeling a bit off or nauseous, waking up injured, waking up and vomiting; and my dog was appearing with unexplained sore patches and had weird vomiting episodes. It was nothing you could really go to the police or anyone with but my internal trauma alarm was really alerting.

So begins this blog episode of the twilight zone series which I'm still sort of in.

The invitation

My 'friend' didn't say he was coming on the DM, just showed up within a few days - but not face to face at my house. All of a sudden I have a neurolink; it's like being able to hear a voice in your head, like a secret agent would wear an earpiece

(A 'handler' talks to you through a chip inside your head but no visible evidence, freaky as fuck, while this has literally kept me alive - I think - people don't understand how seriously this emerging tech needs regulating. We desperately need intelligent, ethical adults in the room.)

Then after a day or two he did like this big 'mea culpa' and confessed a heap of things; like he'd been at my house before after I posted something online he checked me out, then came to look, had been through my stuff and watched me, was obsessed with me, loved and admired my work and art.

He couldn't figure out how to tell me or approach me after breaching my privacy so eventually made himself back off.

But now his hope is revived as he arrives to offer marriage and promises to make it all up to me.

I heard it all out, asked questions.

I said Yes.

And I was actually pretty excited about it.

Meanwhile things are getting moved around the house or placed to draw my attention like a poltergeist to prove he's really there but not in a scary way, more playful, like puns.

This isn't quite all out of the blue so it turns out. Seems he did try and figure something out; however time immemorial suggests matters of the heart are rarely solved with military grade plans and or dodgy disguises...

Then put a 'security detail' on me to go do stuff –and that's where it all went sideways.

I was/am so out of my depth with all of this I'm waving at anglerfish that look like stars to be fair. But I am alive, and getting better and stronger and still here - and fuck those cunts.

I'm not a hundred percent sure I have this correct because I don't know what was supposed to happen or how all this is supposed to work apart from reading about it. And let me be blunt, the inner workings and methodologies of of running a security operations are pretty much never disclosed or reported, so there was no real way for me to know, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't supposed to be my security detail going rogue and behaving like an 'invading force' terrorising me in my home.

Here was tragic naive me thinking I was going to get to maybe learn to do a stunt like Zöe Bell as a treat from my new boyfriend so we could have a Grease wedding... or something a bit more fun anyway. Why not dream a little. I don't know if I had that right but a lot seemed possible. He's certainly resourceful.

Crikey I'm not getting any younger, it's no crazier than something like 'Married at First Sight' and we are actually probably a lot more compatible in many ways.

I needed to figure out a way to red flag something was wrong - something too hard to hide or cover up because they were monitoring everything and also most likely hypnotising me to cover up the worst of what the drugs didn't cover in my sleep. One of them woke me up to question me which I can recall.

I ended up having to crash a car to get away and some of the injuries that occurred during the period prior ended up on the record, so at least I could prove I had been hurt.

A crash course in malicious compliance so to speak.

Over the last 18 months, since then, I have had to lay low to heal my body and raging CPTSD and meanwhile live my life like none of that stuff happened in my house; ostensibly to allow my 'imaginary husband' time to identify the source of the security breach.

The timeline I'm figuring out shows it's more likely he was the original target not me. It looks most likely I became an opportunist target which escalated because my organising was becoming a threat and my blogs and cartoons really pissed some people off.

I can track back a timeline by finding pictures like the one below I was drawing in my art journals. By looking at when I was drawing or publishing other material, and also sometimes if I like my pictures I take a photo with the phone, so the camera roll shows those dates.

I can closely match some with dates by sketches and notes, also topical events.

A hand drawn picture of an eye rolled back a bit and a tunnel with a light at the end like a flashlight. — A section of a drawing I did in a sketchbook mid January 2025 in the weeks before I messaged my friend. When i start getting distressed I draw to help process my feelings as an art therapy process.

The vow

It was always going to hard for 'my friend' to meet me because there was a lot at stake.

The Marine in the supermarket who confronted me in Greymouth many years ago (that I mentioned in a previous story), was apparently my childhood neighbour who disappeared and had came to find me because his friend had seen me on 60 minutes and having already heard stories about me, swore he was going to marry me. My childhood neighbour told his friend the story of finding me in a relationship - and what happened with the t-shirt, the Nazi blackout and the pinky promise.

If I am understanding and hearing this situation correctly, the t-shirt story, my story, has been recounted to illustrate moral clarity to young men who think Nazi symbolism is cool, telling them to black it out.

And my 'mostly invisible husband-to-be' has now been waiting for 34 years - to marry me.

Which is a lot to process and after decades, secrecy and a crazy plan that went sideways, he went to a lot of trouble to get it just right and make sure he won me over.

That got a bit fucked up.

He's pretty mad about that.

Meanwhile the revelations may make this seem a bit like 'the husband at the end of this book' but I'm going great guns with my healing and feel safe and loved. I've been getting 18 months of Al Green on repeat in my ear worm, like a little mantra – and eating lots of cake.

The art of healing

Here's some of my therapy art he's been enjoying during my recovery while I was still mostly non-verbal, recovering from broken bones, getting down to 44kg and losing half my hair.

(Sorry I don't have spoons to do all the descriptive alt on these, and there's a lot of room for interpretation, but I'll add as I can, and if anyone actually gets this far and wants to describe them and send it to me as a kindness these I'll edit the images with captions.)