If you think the suffering and torment of academia are limited to America, I have to tell you—you’re mistaken. In other countries, it’s worse. What genuinely puzzles me is this: why do so many people insist on staying in places where they’re not appreciated, where they’re paid poorly, where they’re expected to work day and night, and where, inevitably, their rights are violated several times a year?

And especially the more powerful people—why don’t they just pack up and leave altogether? I understand that changing jobs becomes harder, particularly when you’re over fifty. But there are options. You can leave. You can hold your head high, work brutally hard for a few years, and still lie down at night with peace of mind. Without anxiety. Without the dread of having to return the next day to the same toxic environment and keep working— even if you’re the boss.

Why do people like torturing themselves? Truly—if after all the effort you put in to gain power, this is how you’re treated, and you then have to watch yourself being worn down like this… why did you bother in the first place? And why did you stay?

I genuinely miss snow.

I want snow.

The body truly does recover. You just have to give it time and take care of yourself. Gradually, everything grows calmer, and your relationship with the world softens. You even gain a clearer, sharper picture of the people from your past—and you no longer feel the need to run from them.

I still can’t quite believe that the puffiness actually goes away—and that you even start losing weight. I wish I could go back in time and stop being afraid of one person. He wasn’t frightening. I was afraid of myself.

P.S. No, he was abusive. You should be afraid of predators, and stand up to them. They are unlovable.

Being shamed, the social pressure that he gave to her, and the humiliation he caused to her, rewarded her with distrust, and emotional collapse; it immediately eroded her confidence and sense of safety.

Seeing other people around her — potential witnesses or silent judges — heightened the feeling of being alone in the struggle, magnifying distress.

She trusted him in some way — expected fairness, respect, or at least private feedback. The public nature of the attack betrayed that trust, and crying is a visceral response to that broken expectation.

She can’t immediately defend herself. That loss of agency amplifies the emotional reaction. Tears are a natural response to feeling trapped and powerless.

Her departure is the culmination of escalating emotional pressure, humiliation, and loss of safety.

Sudden spikes of shame and fear can trigger immediate action. She’s no longer able to endure the daily emotional toll.

Wielding authority to humiliate her — destroyed any sense of psychological safety she had at work or around him. Staying would feel dangerous or suffocating.

Deep-feeling people often make decisive exits once a boundary is irreversibly crossed. Unlike more cautious types, when the threshold is hit, the mind goes straight to solution mode: remove myself from harm.

She values her emotional depth and authenticity. Remaining in an environment that diminishes her self-worth would erode her identity, so leaving is both protective and restorative.

She does this to protect her inner world.

Why it’s primarily his fault

1. Abuse of authority
   • He publicly shamed her, leveraged his power over her life, and pressured her emotionally. That’s not her responsibility.
2. Failure to regulate intensity
   • Being charismatic and intense is fine — but when you let your frustration, ego, or stress spill into aggression or humiliation, the harm is yours.
3. Creating unsafe emotional space
   • He didn’t provide trust, safety, or respect in the moment she was vulnerable. Instead, he made the environment hostile and threatening.

Why she’s not at fault

• She’s skittish and emotionally deep — her sensitivity is natural, not wrong.
• She reacted humanly to public humiliation and emotional pressure. Crying, withdrawing, and ultimately leaving are protective, rational responses, not failures.
• Her leaving was self-preservation. In fact, staying would have been riskier for her mental health.

“Why am I scared of you when you haven’t actually done a thing wrong?”

Why she is overwhelmed:
Because he is a lot.
Not in an arrogant way, but in that concentrated, unfiltered, masculine presence that some men carry without meaning to.

He’s steady, confident, and emotionally direct. When he looks at her, he’s fully looking, and that kind of attention hits straight through her defences.

Plus:
• She feels his intensity before he even speaks.
• She senses he’s pulled toward her — and that alone is destabilising.
• He’s unpredictable in a way that isn’t dangerous, but is powerful.
• Her own reaction to him is new and uncomfortable.

She isn’t scared of him.
She’s scared of what he pulls out of her — emotions she’s not used to managing at close range.

Why “skittish + intense” is a famous psychological pairing:

Because it creates a closed emotional circuit.

• The intense one approaches,
• The skittish one reacts,
• The intense one feels alive,
• The skittish one feels overwhelmed,
• The intense one pushes more,
• The skittish one withdraws more,
• The intensity rises,
• The avoidance rises,
• The tension becomes impossible to miss.

It’s electric, unstable, addictive, and unforgettable.

This pairing often leads to:
• obsession,
• longing,
• miscommunication,
• emotional explosions,
• deep attraction,
• and very slow burn tension.
Classic dynamic.

She relaxes when she’s chosen; she freezes when she’s visible.

That’s why she shows dual behavior.

That’s not a flaw.
That’s a nervous system doing its job—maybe a bit too well.

She doesn’t freeze because she loves him.
She freezes because he matters—and the meaning of that isn’t settled.

Once meaning is clear, the freeze disappears.
Love or not, ambiguity is the real culprit.

Unromantic, but accurate.

Who fell first?

Him. Easily. Instantly. Catastrophically.

She only realised hers much, much later — but her body clocked him immediately, long before her mind admitted anything.
So the order goes like this:

1. He falls first (within minutes).
2. Her body falls second (within hours/days).
3. Her conscious mind falls last (years later).
   Classic “intense meets skittish” dynamic. One sees. The other denies.

He didn’t guide it right because he loved her too much and too fast,
and she loved him too quietly and too fearfully.
They were locked in the same storm,
but using completely different maps.
He pushed.
She ran.

Both thinking the other understood.
They didn’t.

I’ve realized this by just watching myself over the years; when a person’s trust is taken away, when a wound is inflicted, it can never fully heal. Your trust will never return to what it once was, and the wound will never completely mend. The human brain is a strange thing.

That’s why people distance themselves from those individuals forever, growing cold toward them. It’s as if they no longer exist. Remembering them reopens the wound and brings back the memory of their actions—the very actions that destroyed that trust.

And that’s why, at some point, you truly forget those people. Not pretending, not faking it—truly, they vanish from your mind forever.

At some point, they stop mattering to you, and you don’t even recall them. Only every few months, or maybe once a year, do they pop into your mind, and you say, Oh, these used to take up a part of my mind for a while.

This is from PETA’s website. I have been aiming to put this on for a long time now.

New PETA Study Finds UW-Madison Is Nation’s Worst Animal Welfare Violator Out of All Top-Funded Universities.

I have this habit — I pick up on all the energy in my surroundings. Even if I have no idea what’s going on, it still affects me deeply, and sometimes in a really frightening way.

Now check this from the PETA website.

“A macaque with a tail injury was supposed to receive an antibiotic for five days, but the final two days’ doses were given to her uninjured cage mate instead.

Six rats died as a result of errors in mixing xylazine and ketamine for anesthesia administration.”

These are the people I used to see, work and collaborate, in a way, however not directly. But still, it ruins your day.

Now check this.

Wisconsin National Primate Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison

“Experimenter Ned Kalin has exposed infant monkeys to terrifying and threatening circumstances, including frightening them with rubber snakes to elicit anxiety and depression in these emotionally vulnerable animals. Other experimenters at the school have inflicted traumatic spinal-cord injuries on crab-eating macaques. The monkeys were then monitored for “clinical indicators of illness including limb weakness, vomiting, diarrhea, jaundice, bleeding, and anorexia” and killed either 90 or 120 days after being injured.”

Ned H. Kalin, MD is a Hedberg Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

Imagine raising your child with all your power, and sending them to these mentally unhinged environment to do studies with Ned.

https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/new-peta-study-finds-uw-madison-is-nations-worst-animal-welfare-violator-out-of-all-top-funded-universities

https://www.peta.org/features/inside-primate-laboratories/wisconsin-national-primate-research-center

She loves him by accident.
He loves her on purpose.

They can complete each other —
but only when both are stable.

The tragedy is they met too early, in the wrong context, with the wrong power dynamic.

“He triggered her deepest fear.

If I let you in, you will hurt me again.”

How can he guarantee he won’t hurt her again?

Amongst the things I have read in the past couple of weeks, this is one of the best pieces.

She trusted him, because he was Him.

But he wielded his authority like a weapon.

“It wasn’t the words. It was that he had the power and chose to use it on her.”