Two things happened for me over the holidays five years ago: I went to rehab, and I acquired a cyberstalker. These were not entirely independent events. The stalker was someone in India who’d started following me when I was playing poker, who came to believe we had a close personal relationship and that my tweets were coded messages to him. When I stopped tweeting for two months, he became convinced something had happened to me, so he tracked down my email and phone number and started spamming me with messages demanding to know where I was.
By the time I realized this was happening, he’d already escalated to the point that I was clearly never going to respond. I started blocking him on different platforms, but he’d just create another account or phone number, or find some other way in. He messaged me dozens of times a day, alternating between threats and pleas. When he reached out to my company six months later to apply for a job, I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help — but the friend told me he was afraid to intervene because he didn’t want to become a target himself. I decided that there was nothing I could do from the other side of the world, and resigned myself to waiting him out.
Only he never tired. Years went by and I never responded, and still he messaged me multiple times a day. The messages became more disturbing, more pornographic, more violent. He told me he would come find me in Berkeley and hurt me. Finally, last November, in the span of a few days, he sent me an image of his brand new passport and a visa application, which he said he planned to use to travel here, and successfully extorted money from my brother by spoofing my phone number and pretending to have kidnapped me.
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Enough! I thought, and snapped into action. Except that I didn’t. Instead, I curled up in a ball and cried, and told friends who suggested contacting the police that there was no point, that no one would be able to help as long as I was here and he was in India.
But my husband was insistent that there had to be a better answer, and asked me to let him intervene on my behalf. In short order, he was in contact with the FBI, the US consulate in India, and, with the help of his friend Govind, who has family there, the local police where the stalker lived. Within months, the situation had resolved, and he will never set foot on American soil.
One of the interesting things about all of this is that there was nothing particularly inventive about the strategies my husband deployed. They were more or less exactly the strategies I would have come up with if I’d been put in charge of a similar situation in someone else’s life. Why did it take another person getting involved for me to realize I wasn’t Actually Trying?
I think what happened is this: When the stalker entered my life, I was at a low point in personal capacity — broke, alone, addled, etc. My approach towards him at that point (ignore, hoping he’d stop) was the only one that seemed available given my spiritual and psychological resources at the time. But my orientation to the problem became fixed in time at that point of low agency, and it never occurred to me to revisit it as my capacity for action increased.
I think we are all like this. People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.
Let’s say that life is divided up into three theaters: work, relationships with others (all kinds) and relationship to self (physical health, introspection, emotional development, all of it). I think it’s the rule, rather than the exception, that people are stuck at an earlier stage of development in at least one area. There is one theater of life where they’re not Actually Trying — where they’re approaching serious problems with the resourcefulness of a teenager, though they are now capable adults.
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