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In short, shut the f'uck up about Melody already. And Melody, just shut the f'uck up.
We tried silence. It didn't work. The more silent we have been, the more frantic and erratic Melody has become. She has become worse, not better, with silence, and people who have never wanted to harm her have after long months become angry with her.
The people who were closest to her, that skyped with her regularly, weren't just tolerant of her, we were supportive. Many of us freely admit to having our own emotional issues and personal problems. We were silent about everything personal on the board that we learned about each other in skype. In the end, for almost all of us, she became too much. She wasn't getting better care, although several people asked her to. Most people withdrew from personal contact with her.
There are so many people who don't know what we were dealing with behind the scenes. We kept so much off the public forum, out of consideration for her. Most people found out about her suicide incident MONTHS after it happened, because the great number of people who found out about it on the day, or were on the deathwatch, were completely silent about the whole thing publicly, out of consideration for her.
The trolls who knew about it were especially heroically silent. I consider an inside joke out of Elderon and three out of BT, that didn't clue anyone else in on it, heroic, considering the material they had about her personal life at the time, and given how hurt, pissed off and shaken BT was by the whole events of that week.
This was so long ago, it was back when Melody was Nagah, and I knew her best by that name.
It was herself that started bringing things up publicly, starting a thread about the suicide incident of all things.
When people started withdrawing from personal contact with her to protect themselves, instead of trying to repair relationships with them one by one in private, she called us all out collectively in public, making the thread telling everyone about the suicide incident, because she wanted people to know that it wasn't an actual suicide attempt. Given her history that her regular skype friends already knew about, on the day, given everything that happened, it sure looked like suicide to us. We hung on skype all day, frightened, grieving, or angry, till she got back from the hospital, and she told us then the important detail to her, that she wants people to know, that that day she only took a large dose of pills to soothe anxiety, she didn't actually take enough to kill herself.
So she made that incident public herself, and it was entirely redundant, the people who knew about the incident already knew that it wasn't suicide after all. Most people she wanted social contact back with at the time weren't past caring about her welfare, but they were now protecting themselves from her. It was just the last nail in the coffin kind of thing.
It was so sadly ironic for me, because we had kept silence for her, and her blowing the silence only served to inform the whole rest of the OOT that the incident happened. And it wasn't a communication that was going to bring anyone who had stopped talking to her back to her. I was angry that she destroyed the months of work we had collectively done, protecting her privacy.
In that thread she finally and nastily blew the lid on her short, strange cybor affair with BT. Again, public silence from him.
So there were several poster who weren't PMing her, weren't skyping with her, and weren't responding to her in threads. Previously, Nagah had seemed to me to be a pretty regular OOT poster. Melody the poster started bleeding her personal trauma into her posts. The more people fell silent to her, the more distressed or angry her posting became.
She wrote very personal details about her life in the OOT, and got the usual mixture of warm, serious replies, indifference, friendly teasing, and flaming trolls, from the generality of the public, who weren't in on any of the traumas of the previous months. (Perhaps none of you noticed at the time, but BT, Mindel and others were absent from trolling her at this time.)
She didn't take the trolling well. There's been plenty of posters over the years who haven't. Instead of leaving, or growing a thicker skin, she stayed, she became more upset and angry, she went to the admins for redress - which is what they are there for - and she has a right to go to them. But in the meantime she has spread the number of shoulders that she has cried on, and alienated more people, who have grown tired and sick and finally angry with her.
We care. None of us are qualified to give her the care she obviously needs. her problems are too big for any one of us to handle. We want proper, trained, intensive help for her. It's frustrating she hasn't got enough of it. It's frustrating she keeps spilling too big problems onto people not equipped to deal with it.
As much as it's lovely to sometimes be trusted with other poster's personal problems, and I say that sincerely, this is not the place for months of very intense emotional problems. Melody has crossed the boundaries of a lot of people, and I suspect that is why some people are making hostile and ugly posts about her now. Once she made one thread too far, and the first person came out and said ********** you" the rest of us felt permission to say ********** off" too. I believe it's been a catharsis that's been all the greater for so many people holding back so much for so long.
She kept making moves that escalated the feelings of ill will against her. discussion of her behaviour used to kept to tightly knit groups in the know. The more it's gone on, and the more public she makes things in threads, the wider discussion about her grows. After one too many times calling BT at home, after he has ignored her everywhere else, and repeatedly asked her not to phone him, he started passing out her private photographs to some people, in mutually malicious humour.
However much that might be reprehensible, and however much a troll was asking for a broken soul to "schiz out" on him one day, BT has been seriously hurt and disturbed by the whole saga. That might seem laughable to a lot of people, but the main reason that probably seems unbelievable and laughable (if you do) is that you haven't been exposed to all the long drawn out details and the emotional dramas going on. Again, silence on the matter in public, as much for her sake as for his.
