bluejay · @bluejay_712
27th Feb 2021 from TwitLonger
My experience with Adam Koebel
I haven’t said anything, up to this point, about my experiences with Adam Koebel and our breakup because I didn’t think it was relevant.
Relationships are messy and people hurt one another and this was traumatic for me in a way I don’t casually relive. I thought that with all of the very public outcry, my one voice would just be adding more vitriol to a sea of hatred. This is someone who at one point I cared about deeply, and I didn’t want to add hurt to a situation that had already torn his life apart.
But I also lived in fear of him coming back to social media. Attempting to find another foothold in the TTRPG community. And today I learned that he had.
I don’t think, looking back, that my relationship with Adam was ever a healthy one. Friends who had known me in previous relationships marked how I changed. I went to therapy for the first time and almost every session revolved back to him. I changed, I compromised myself, I made myself small. I’ve never felt more insecure in my life, and toward the end I knew something was wrong and just kept trying to fix it. I was so in love and so goddamn blind.
When that episode of Far Verona aired, it was all-encompassing. Adam wasn’t the only one targeted by the online mob, I was as well. I thought I would lose everything, and I couldn’t believe the viciousness of some of the people that harassed him or turned their backs on him. I kept making excuses for him, as I had done both internally and to my friends and family for the many years of our relationship. Constantly excusing his behavior, changing my own to suit him.
That summer was the hardest of my life. But it also gave me perspective I dearly needed. With the help of my therapist, family, and friends, I finally started to see clearly the red flags in a relationship that I had been ignoring. Traumatic experiences brought into view all of the things I had been willfully blind to, trying to make things work, afraid to be this small, sad person I had become, and alone. I don’t think it’s important to make a list of every argument, slight or manipulation. As in every relationship that ends, there was so much that wasn’t working. Suffice it to say that on a list of "signs of gaslighting," I saw a mirror of my own experience.
I do think it’s important, and relevant, what happened when I finally told Adam I wanted to break up.
The land border between the US and Canada had been closed for months, but Canadians could still legally fly to the US. I had been begging Adam to please come see me, as I was alone in my apartment and had been for months, while all of this was happening and he was living with friends. He eventually, finally agreed but with a series of non-negotiable things he needed first. The one that stuck with me was that he needed to go on a camping trip with the friends he had been living with for three months, to relax and prepare himself for seeing me. It was the last straw on a mountain of straws that had been crushing me for years, and I talked with my mom, my friends, my therapist and found the strength to break up with him.
In our last conversation, when I told him I didn’t want him to come anymore, that I thought it wasn’t healthy for me to remain in this relationship and I wanted to break up, he told me that he was going to come anyway. That he deserved that I break up with him to his face. That he knew things would be different, that I would change my mind, if we were in person. He tried to talk me back and I left the call hyperventilating to the point that I couldn’t speak to him anymore, and he left to go on his camping trip, out of contact for days.
I got off the phone, I called my mom, and I bought a same-day ticket to CA to be with my family. I was terrified that at any point he would show up at my doorstep, that he wouldn’t tell me because it was so clear that his needs were more important than my boundaries. That he was willing to do what I expressly, clearly asked him not to do, to get what he wanted. He went on his camping trip with his friends like he wanted, and texted me after he was done. I told him I couldn’t talk to him, and I still don’t think that I could. I haven’t spoken to him since.
I never wanted to talk about it because I didn’t want to air my trauma. My bad decisions. But I think it’s important to know that this is a person who cannot be trusted with anyone’s boundaries, not even someone he claims to have cared so much about. This is not someone who deserves an audience or influence.