User:Tamzin/Sockblocks, deceit, and ambiguous loss

When I was in high school, a classmate confided in me and a few others that she was being abused by her parents. She had gone to the police and child protective services, but they had been of no help. We, her peers, had no idea what to do in that situation. We lived in a community that encouraged keeping problems behind closed doors, and offered little resources for dealing with ones that people brought into the open. So when she said she wanted to run away to live with friends in another state, we were relieved to have some way to help her. We all chipped in. I gave her some cash and my brother's old cell phone, and called her the cab she'd need for the first leg of her journey.

When the police came to question me, I told the truth about my role, but I also made sure they knew about the abuse my friend was fleeing. So did her other accomplices. The police found her about 48 hours later, after a search spanning multiple states. They thoroughly investigated her family. And they found that not only was there no evidence of abuse, but many other things she'd told all of us, even little inconsequential things, were fabricated wholecloth. That was a shock to all of us at my small, tight-knit high school, and not one we had any expectation of being able to address with her as she wound her way through the mental healthcare system. So we sat and talked it through, various groupings of about 40 kids sharing our feelings over the course of a few days. It wasn't closure but it was something.

A few times a year on Wikipedia, some well-known user is unexpectedly blocked for sockpuppetry. And in these incidents we as a community experience a lot of the same emotions that my classmates and I did in high school—an ambiguous loss that we are unlikely to ever resolve. The community offers limited avenues to address this. On-wiki discussion usually consists of serial comments of "I can't believe it", in many ways resembling the ways we react to deaths of editors. Soon people invoke Deny recognition and seek to shut down discussion. So any real processing of grief takes place off-wiki, on IRC or Discord or Wikipediocracy. That isn't a great state of affairs, I don't think.

What can we do? We can be more open to people expressing their feelings. In cases like these, the DENY ship has already sailed. Someone who has duped their peers for years is going to feel a sense of accomplishment no matter what. While limiting recognition is a worthy consideration, we shouldn't do so at the expense of our editorship's mental health. Being lied to is its own sort of trauma, one that brings feelings of betrayal and confusion. We should not minimize that. We should not rush to stifle discussion, but instead allow people to say what they feel—even if it's less than coherent, even if it's repetitive or shallow.

And those affected should understand that their feelings are valid. It is reasonable to be upset or shocked or dismayed because someone you thought you knew turned out to be lying to you. For many people this will be a level of deceit that they only encounter once or a few times in their lives. Like with any novel or uncommon threat, the brain will take some amount of time to reassess what it knows about the world. Who else can't be trusted? What facts derived from this person must be redesignated as dubious? Depending on the nature of the relationship and the person affected, this may take a long time. When I realized, after a year of working with someone, that she had serially lied about almost every detail of her background, it took another two years until I found the final "Oh shit that was a lie too" lurking somewhere in my mental model of the world.

But these are survivable heartbreaks. We can emerge from the fogs they bring, some faster than others. We do not need to fall back into paranoia or jaundice. But at the same time we can adjust our expectations going forward, reassess whatever internal fact-checking algorithms our own brains use. And we can accept that people are complicated, that someone may have been horrible in some ways but great in others, may have been lying to us about who they were (or weren't) but simultaneously sincere in kind things they said or did. Or maybe we embrace that we're a bunch of hairless apes careening around, causing chaos everywhere we go, and that some things just won't make sense.