For the Person Who Just Realized Their 'Friend' Was Farming Them: A Letter

Content Note

This article discusses online harassment, digital trauma, and the psychological impact of being targeted. If you are currently in crisis, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by calling or texting 988 (US).

I'm not going to start this with a metaphor or a gentle lead-in. You've been through enough. You don't need poetry. You need someone to look at what happened to you and call it what it is.

What They Took From You

It wasn't just content. It wasn't just an account. It was your timeline. The evidence that you existed, that you grew, that you found people who understood you after years of being the only person in the room who didn't fit. The deletion wasn't just a button you pressed. It was a amputation you performed on yourself because staying visible meant staying vulnerable, and you couldn't do vulnerable anymore.

You're not being dramatic. Research on digital harassment survivors documents this pattern: the panic-delete, the identity destabilization, the hollow feeling of a space where your life used to be. Thirty-one of seventy survivor accounts in one analysis centered on neurodivergence as the trait that made them targets. You were selected. You were not random. And you were not wrong for being visible.

The Exhaustion Is the Point

Harassment campaigns don't need to destroy you in one blow. They wear you down. Every notification becomes a threat. Every DM could be the next infiltrator. Every new person who's nice to you could be gathering material. That's not paranoia. That's your pattern-recognition system doing exactly what it learned to do after someone proved that friendliness could be a weapon.

You are tired because you've been running a continuous background process called 'threat assessment' for weeks, months, or years. Nobody handed you a manual. Nobody told you that the exhaustion was a symptom of surviving, not a sign of weakness.

Choosing Disappearance

There's a particular kind of peace in becoming unfindable. The people who say 'don't let them win by disappearing' have never been hunted. Disappearing isn't losing. Disappearing is taking yourself somewhere they can't follow. You don't owe anyone your continued presence on platforms that hosted your abuse. You don't owe anyone your content. You don't owe anyone an explanation.

The exhaustion is not damage. It is evidence of load for being exhausted. Needing to rest is not weakness. It is a system conserving what it needs for needing to disappear. The world that demands your visibility does not own your presence. You get to decide what you keep, what you leave, and who gets to witness your softness.

That's not giving up. That's taking yourself somewhere safe.

— Marin