A World of Why.
None of which is "Why me?"
Certain things simply aren’t up for debate.
Fact #1: I’ve been a victim of harassment, abuse, stalking, and defamation by Jim Stewartson and Steven Jarvis’ collective following.
This is not up for debate: it is objective, easily demonstrable fact.
Fact #2: I am far from alone.
Fact #3: I am far from the worst impacted by it.
These two equally objective, demonstrable facts change absolutely nothing about the objective, demonstrable fact that I’ve been a victim of harassment, abuse, stalking, and defamation by Jim Stewartson and Steven Jarvis’ collective following.
This is reality, and it’s not complicated.
It isn’t difficult to understand, and I’ve never espoused facts different from those outlined above.
Like many others, I will speak up when subject to abusive behavior.
It’s entirely within my rights to do that, as it’s in everyone else’s to do the same.
Most people do, and that’s a good thing.
There have been consistent bad faith efforts to reframe this, and the example here is a great example of one of them.
Let’s look at the statement and break it down:
“The only thing that's of concern about it is that I now have to deal with people who are accusing me of the newly enlarged list of nonsensical nonexistent crimes he keeps rectally sourcing, and that any time either of the others are mentioned, I am now implicated, no matter how ridiculous this is.”
This is objectively true.
As I am not either of those people, I am not responsible for anything they do, or anything the Stewanon crowd claims they have done.
It should end there, but in reality, it doesn’t end there.
The people who follow this nonsense, and accept whatever these conspiracy theorists speculate, believe I am now also a travel writer in NY and another user on Twitter. They believe I am responsible for anything either of these other two people do, or are falsely accused of doing.
Instead of simply addressing the specific mentions ascribed to or including my specific account name — which are what I have addressed here for several months, and I don’t really have any interest in changing that — I now have to be prepared to have a whole range of other things thrown in my face by these followings at any given time that I haven’t had to address before this false identification was made.
This should not be difficult for anyone to understand, because it is quite simple.
It’s worth examining the reply in some detail, because it actually tells us a lot about what’s happening here.
It’s from an anonymous source, for one — more anonymous than simply using a single ID tied to an existing account or body of work, but an account made with a name deliberately chosen to demean and discredit a truthful, factual statement regarding an actual lived experience of abuse and the consequences of that abuse that in no way contradicts facts #2 & #3 as outlined above.
People acting in good faith don’t behave in this way.
People who behave this way really don’t want you to be able to identify them even by an online pseudonym, because they know they’re engaging in abusive, bad faith behavior, and they don’t want to accept the consequences of that behavior.
They want the truth of who they are to remain wholly secret, because they don’t want anyone to know that they are an abuser who acts in bad faith.
There are three primary reasons people act in bad faith: they’re unconcerned with the truth and only interested in perpetuating their chosen narrative, they’re so far up their own ass they can’t see reality as it is, or they’ve been misled by someone else engaging in either of the previous two approaches.
I’m not going to guess at which this is, because this narrative has been spread around a fair bit, which is no secret to anyone.
This isn’t an ‘innocent mistake’, taking “either of the others” to include Matt, as the two parties to whom I’m referring are clearly outlined in the citation given at the start, unless the person doing so is somehow impaired.
Hence, wholly conscious bad faith: putting words in someone’s mouth and then armoring up to tilt at that freshly constructed strawman.
There’s a glorious array of other adjectives I’d ascribe to this behavior, but the above speaks for itself, and it’s the sad and simple truth of it.
Note: all ‘you’ pronouns below are the ‘generic’ form of you, indicating anyone at all who reads this, and are not indicative of any one or more individuals.
There is a genuinely bizarre belief, apparently, that only a small number of extreme cases are victims or targets.
That simply isn’t true.
Me speaking up about my experience in no way diminishes yours, whoever you are.
My experience is, factually, as real as yours, whoever you are.
You don’t get to tell me that my speaking to my experience is an effort to take something away from you, because it isn’t. No one speaking of their experiences is somehow stealing from you by doing so.
There is sadly no quota in which only so many people can have the experience of being abused, after which, once the quota is filled, everyone else’s lived experience is somehow free of abuse, in turn freeing them of any need to speak about their own experiences of it.
Me speaking of my experience does not silence you. It does not make you smaller.
You abusing me and trying to silence me doesn’t make you bigger, either — unless we’re talking about making you a bigger asshat.
You have your own voice, and you have the same ability to use it speak of your experiences, just as I do.
Do it.
No, really. Do it.
As an adult, I’m constantly surprised by the need to say these things — any of them — because we’re supposed to understand these simple concepts by now. It’s part of growing up, maturing, and understanding that the world is vastly larger than any given you or me in it.
I watch people play these childish, egotistical games, and shake my head.
I watch people project the bullshit they hate in themselves at others and rail against rather than seeking therapy or something that would heal the wounds in themselves, and it’s depressing to watch.
I watch people constantly spew lies and abusive nonsense in bad faith, and it’s much the same.
It is legitimately frustrating to take time out of my day — time I’d rather spend doing something else entirely — whenever the petty bullshit builds up enough that I feel it necessary to comment on it.
I don’t see much, if any, value in focusing my life in some way on flinging shit at strangers like a caged monkey shrieking at the bars, or behaving like a a snotty reject from an 80s ‘nerds vs. the preps’ mean girl central casting call.
If you do? Have fun with that, I guess. Leave me out of it, please.
It doesn’t feel like a life with much to recommend it from where I sit, but I’m not you. Maybe it’s all you’ve got; I have no idea, and if that’s your idea of how to live and thrive, I’d rather not get to know you enough to know why that is.
And now, some history. Skip it if you don’t give a shit, but if you want to know what I actually give a damn about as a focus of my time and energy, this is where you might want to pay attention.
I’ve worked in the arts in some form or another for a very long time.
I’m lucky in many ways.
My father was a journalist, and he loved to write fiction, too. He wanted to write screenplays for television. He always urged me to write, and he was a harsh enough critic when I was very young that he admires the fiction I’d endlessly start and abandon through college and shortly after. He’s still angry I never finish anything.
My mother didn’t work in the arts, but she studied a variety of them as electives in college, encouraged by her own mother, who was a crafting whirlwind in the days long before the internet and mass-market craft stores. We wish she could have seen the possibilities today, years after her passing, knowing how we sorted through the intricate rubber stamps she carved by hand, or the holiday ornaments she left us from among the literal thousands of them she would tat every year to donate to the local church’s holiday fundraiser. My mother has been deeply interested in jewelry-making and fiber art for the whole of my life, and these things were the glue of our mother-daughter bond, persisting to this day.
They sent me to art school — several of them, in fact — as I jumped from school to school around the country collecting skills. I’d take the classes that were relevant to what I wanted to do, then leave. I don’t have a degree in anything from anywhere, just a bafflingly broad and peculiar portfolio and arsenal of obscure art skills.
It started with a loom. My mother had two of them: one, a beautiful antique table loom that, while it easily fills a whole card table, can’t really go beyond making table runners or scarves. The other, a giant antique four-harness loom the size of a four-posted double bed she spotted on my parents’ honeymoon that my father bargained for until they were able to bring it home with them.
You can imagine, I’m sure, where this is going: she worked the giant four-harness beast, and I worked with the table loom. I wasn’t even in preschool at the time. I made little dollhouse carpets, and we sold them right alongside her work at random fiber events in the area.
Between my mother and my grandmothers, I learned to sew. I learned embroidery. I made clothes for my dolls and other silly, pointless things before gradeschool. I learned to use a drop spindle, I learned to dye. I learned to draw with pencil and charcoal and technical pens and more through gradeschool, to paint with acrylics and watercolor and watercolor dyes. School was a misery of bullying for a cavalcade of reasons, which predictably led to more and more time spent focusing on whatever artistic project I was working on at the time.
We started making jewelry to sell when I was in 7th grade, something we’ve done ever since, and that was a very long time ago. When my mother retired from it a few years ago — as much as one ever retires from it, which is ‘never entirely’ — it was all handed off to me to manage. (Thanks, COVID-19. Augh.)
By freshman year of high school I was nose-deep in theater, both in and outside of school. I’d taken piano and ballet, and was hopeless at both, so it was time for voice lessons, which did thankfully pay off for a while. By the end of high school, despite still getting cast — I focused on comedy, which surprises no one who knows me whatsoever, so it wasn’t exactly hard — the hands-on art and theater each took up too much time to peaceably coexist until I decided to focus on costume design.
That was college. I had endless majors — fashion design, technical theater, costume design — but they all circled around that core skillset.
I was 19 when I was in a car accident that made a permanent ruin of my back, left me with chronic pain, and days I can barely walk almost 30 years later.
I still tried. Two of those listed above were after the accident, against the advice of doctors, because I’m that stubborn, but all the stubborn in the world was not going to change the fact that I was not capable of hauling around anything over 10lbs, which at least 50% of costume design entails. There are still boxes in my attic of half-finished costumes I don’t have the heart to throw away or otherwise get rid of because that stubbornness still, even now, quietly insists, “But maybe some day you can finish them.”
You want to talk about anger? Rage at the unfairness of the world? Get me tipsy and talking about the asshole who sped up through that yellow light and tossed my then very first (and only ever) week-old car across the road into a telephone pole, nearly killing me and a friend in the process. (You’ll hear all new long-winded splutterings of profanity on that one.)
But here’s the thing: that anger doesn’t change anything.
It can’t.
All the profanity in the world might as well be thrown down a well for all the good it does.
If you talk to any artist long enough, you’ll hear about the concept of the ‘lucky accident’. While the one described above was anything but, the other kind happened every so often, too.
I had been tinkering with Photoshop — it was in version 2.5 at the time — while at the last college I attended before the reality that I was not physically up to continuing in costume design really hit home. As luck would have it, in our ‘winter seminar’, which was the very last gasp of my attendance there, the presenters talked about using computers for digital art and design.
That old saying about a door closing as a window opens? Defenestration time!
I hauled ass back home, took night courses in graphic design, worked and saved up for a computer, and kept at it, doing the jewelry still as I had throughout.
Shortly after, a new art school opened in my home town. Why not? I signed on for illustration, got accepted, and… ran into the same damned problem again, because the building renovation itself was not fully complete, and hauling 40lbs of gear up and down 4 floors multiple times per day was simply not viable. (Yeah, those ‘elevators for accessibility’ worked all of two days in the time I was there.)
But there was another happy accident, this time, stemming from another actual accident. I managed to give myself a concussion packing up from one of the art shows we did with the jewelry every year, and missed a segment of my illustration class — specifically, the one that involved making something 3D. My professor, one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met, gave me worlds of side-eye because I was his ‘good example’ — some day I will rant at length about why that was its own world of cringe — but he’d have to fail me if I didn’t come up with something 3D for portfolio review.
I spent two months trying and failing to come up with something. The morning of the review, I was just screwed. Nothing. Just… nothing. I had nothing 3D. Collapsed on the couch amidst the scraps of fabric from a random doll outfit I’d made while nursing my concussion, and…
…threw the damned thing in the bag and went out the door.
We go through the classwork, everything’s great. The doll is languishing at the bottom of the portfolio, and I’m just praying he forgets, knowing he won’t. When he asked where the 3D project was, I reached into the bag, pulled out the doll in the dress I’d designed, patterned, and finished, down to its little accessories, and said, “I hope this counts.”
Life doesn’t come with warning labels. Nobody tells you that, today, somebody is going to speed through a yellow and smash the future you dedicated so much time and energy to right into a pole. Nobody tells you about the good ones, either, though — and I certainly didn’t see this one coming.
He lit up instantly, and grinned at me. I really, truly thought he was going to just crack up laughing at me and I certainly wouldn’t have blamed him. He worked for Absolut and MTV and — later — the Olympics, for fuck’s sake, and here I was holding up a doll at him.
“This is what you should be doing.”
Wait, what? If it had been a movie, that’d be the record scratch sound cue.
It wasn’t even very good, honestly. I’d made far more impressive things, just not in that specific time period, and it was especially unimpressive compared to my 2D work.
So I asked him why.
I wasn’t prepared for the answer. Not even a little.
“This is the only thing you’ve ever handed to me while you were smiling.”
Years later, that still hits me like a hurricane gust every fucking time.
I was in my early 20s and it was the first time someone even made the suggestion that happiness in my work, and in doing that work, was relevant at all.
As much as my family supported me, they pushed, too, they demanded, they had insane expectations and I had spent my life bashing myself to pieces to meet them instead of even letting myself consider whether any of it made me happy or not. For all the frustration about the car accident, if it had never happened, maybe I never would have at all, because life would have led me somewhere else instead.
And so I did.
I spent the next 3 years or so making incredibly fancy little doll clothes, and for the most part, I loved doing it. I still had the skills, working in miniature was something I could do with the smaller — and lighter — materials, and it worked. I won a handful of awards in the one competition I bothered to enter, made things for two charity auctions — one for Mel Odom’s Gene doll and one for Robert Tonner’s fashion model series — and went to two fashion doll collector shows in Paris, with one of my dolls filmed and landing on the nightly news while I, of course, was in the bathroom (thank goodness; I remember absolutely none of my high school French).
It might have continued on like that if the main convention for sales didn’t move halfway across the country, or 911 didn’t happen. Hell, the first time we went to Paris, it was because it was cheaper than going to Chicago.
We went to Italy that year for a family wedding in July. My father lost his job in August — immediately after all of those travel expenses. Then, 911.
We were all glued to the news. I made jewelry nonstop, because I could do it without really thinking about it. We were pretty screwed financially, and I had the materials, I had the time, and my hands had nothing else productive to do while despairing at the 24 hour news cycle.
I’d get bored and push the designs further in one direction or the other. It kept on this way for months. I had a random idea involving shards of stained glass, so I tested the bit I had, then went off to a local stained glass shop to ask after buying some scrap. After a few visits, I brought in a piece to show them what on earth I was doing with all of the scrap, and the owner asked if I did the local prestige craft show. No, we’d been trying to get in since I was in gradeschool, but never made it — at which point he ducked into the office and came back with signed paperwork, saying he’d see us there; he was the head of the jury for that show, entirely unbeknownst to me until then.
My mother cried, and then we both started laughing, because if all of this long-winded rambling proves absolutely anything, it’s that dumb luck is absolutely real.
Things went on like this for the next few years, and the ‘little family business’ expanded enough that we signed up to be able to accept credit cards for the first time, and began looking into even more local and regional shows to do. I spent a month as a featured artist at a bead shop, and a handful of my pieces landed in a book published by a bead collector and historian.
While all of this is going on, I stumbled onto DAZ|Studio, in its very early days. That old seminar about using computers in design had covered Poser, similar software, allowing the posing and rendering of 3D models. Before a year was over, I was selling model skins on DAZ3D. I was still making jewelry, but to say I’d been productive before that would be something of an understatement; now throw ADD hyperfocus, a workaholic streak, and quick hands into the mix. We were not hurting for stock, so I was able to slow down on that and focus on 3D.
Another few years of that, and I had the chance to work with absolutely amazing artists from all over the world. Even better, we were making tools that helped other people — who might not have the same level of skill — express their own ideas in their own creative works.
I can’t overstate how important that is to me. If you’ve read this far, know you have read about a lot of hard work, but also of incredible privilege and support. Talent is only part of it, and plenty of people have all the talent in the world and no ability to develop it as I have, or a chance to use it. I had a family willing and able to send me to learn, and that’s undeniable privilege.
Needless to say, any time I see the ‘cheating’ arguments for Poser, and now more so with AI, I remember this.
I remember how my privilege allowed to develop my skills. I remember seeing the images other people made with the imaginary people I made, for better or worse, and how they came up with things I never would have dreamed of myself.
Most importantly, I remember that ‘having the skills’ — or talent, or however else you want to define it — doesn’t mean you have the best ideas, the most profound expression, or don’t have something entirely valid and important to say with what you ultimately create.
Tech changes — and their notoriously dodgy mac support — ended up ending that one after a handful of years, sending me back to the jewelry mines for the most part, where I’ve remained ever since until the pandemic put a halt to local shows operating safely, with a two-year stint of dyeing yarn to sell alongside the jewelry at shows that is a strange saga unto itself. (Finally, one tangent y’all get spared, because goddamn already.)
There you have it. Some proof of what I’m talking about exists out there in the ether, but I’m not going to link it. The people who believe it don’t need a link, and the people who require one would only come up with a reason it ‘doesn’t count’ or is some other flavor of fiction anyway — likely with a side of stalking for good measure, like the world’s crappiest garnish.
What I care about? My focus? Where I thrive and where I ‘live’?
It’s this. All of the things in this wordy, boring-ass section of a substack post full of abject chaos, dumb luck, and privilege.
If you haven’t figured out that this is what matters to me — not social media clout, not accruing a pile of sycophants, not fame, not praise, not pity, and so on — then you probably need to rethink a few things.
There is no quantity of likes, no number of followers, no amount of retweets, no random viral snarky comment that matters worth a damn compared to finishing a piece I’m proud of for whatever reason.
That’s not your reality? Cool! You do you, but stop trying to convince yourself that it isn’t mine.
And here’s where we pick up with specifics once again.
If you come for that area of my life, it’s personal.
Do it dishonestly or in bad faith, and you will see me spit fire.
This happened not long ago when someone threw misinformation at me about some of the work I’m doing now. Note I’m saying misinformation, not disinformation, as it is my earnest belief that the person who said what they said believed it to be true and relevant at the time. (It wasn’t either of those things, unfortunately for all involved.)
That was bad enough, but right on its heels, we have Steven Jarvis, (mis)understander of things, with a comically absurd take.
I addressed this at the time here.
Various Stewanon adherents began engaging in abusive bullshit and/or stalking my art Twitter account, where I was trying to focus my time and attention on things that have absolutely nothing to do with them.
Jim Stewartson speaks regularly of ‘tortious interference’, something I have no interest in. Why? If someone is doing their real, legitimate whatever-the-fuck-they-do, they aren’t abusing me or people I care about on the internet. It’s pretty simple, really. That didn’t stop these people from engaging in it in regard to me, and here’s real evidence of their behavior — note when the art account is targeted in the screenshots for abuse — when these attacks began.
Listen up, class: this is what a single-purpose hate account actually looks like.
This is someone playing petty paranoia head games and targeting my business.
I’m not especially concerned about the petty paranoia head games, because as mentioned previously, I have been out of high school for a very long time, and they were a waste of time even then. If somebody wants to get their evening wine and rail at a stranger on the internet they obviously neither know nor understand, really, pick someone else, because I have better things to do with my time than catalogue and screenshot your perpetual bullshit.
Last night was the comment discussed above, and this genius.
Two nights in a row, someone likes a bunch of tweets, then hides themselves away, just like the commenter, after doing something surely intended to stir shit.
Truly, there must be better uses of this person’s time, no matter how petty and immature they clearly are.