Yesterday, at approximately 12:30 AM (in the morning!), my roommate Nathanael Reuben Magby woke me up by violently banging and rattling my locked bedroom door. It was locked, of course, because they had entered my room without my permission multiple times before.
I assumed that they had some sort of emergency so I opened it, whereupon they started talking about something non-urgent: the lease agreement. So I decided to close my door and go back to sleep, but they physically stopped me from doing so, pushing and shoving the door backwards and knocking me off-balance. It was terrifying, to say the least. This sort of thing hadn’t happened to me since childhood! But I used what little consciousness I had to grab my phone, and started recording just in case their violence escalated.
After the ordeal was over, I reached out to my friends to let them know what happened. I sent them the recording I had, and I told them “If anything happens to me in the next few weeks, call the cops on Nathanael Magby from Denver, Colorado.” This made me safer, knowing that if they attempted to escalate things, there was a clear record of the context so they wouldn’t be able to lie and claim self-defense.
With my fear of physical danger addressed, I was still in a state of frustration and anxiety, so I spoke to another group of friends - a signal groupchat of racially and ideologically diverse persons.
This wasn’t urgent at all, it could’ve been an email or a text. But they refuse to communicate in any other format besides in-person and face-to-face. And I don’t want to talk face-to-face because they constantly cut me off, interrupt me, and railroad me.
My friends validated my frustration, and reassured me that I wasn’t the one being unreasonable.
I hate dealing with those kinds of people. They are incapable of reason, their primary mode of communication is nonconsentual emotional vectors of guilt and threat. They call it “connection” and “being real”.
“Take it to email” is a good counter and tell. If they can’t or it upsets them, that’s proof that they can’t be chill, cool, reasonable, and word oriented.
Safety Measures
In hindsight, it was a poor decision to become roommates with someone who refused to leave a rape cult. Their tactics of making people feel scared, isolated, threatened, and insignificant affected me for a long time, but now I’m fortunate enough to have people who respect me as a human being. As a result, I’m here right now, publicly talking about the last steps of separating from the cult instead of letting it devour me from the inside.
My twitter mutuals were there to validate the sheer ridiculousness of the situation, with some chipping in with their own stories of toxic roommates who would bang and slam on their bedroom door in the middle of the night.
My real-estate aunt was there to walk me through the legal steps I could take to protect myself, like
Your roommate is breaking the lease and basically putting all the responsibility on you to find a replacement. Keep a record of all the effort you spend to find a replacement roommate, and take them to small-claims when they’re out so you can get reimbursed for all this trouble.
Tell the corporate landlord and inform them of the situation and how they’re refusing to communicate over email.
But there was still something missing.
Flashback, June 2022
The second time I ever met Nathanael Magby, I stopped by their basement apartment in Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood to kill some time before I went off to meetup hosted by Matt Yglesias. As I was typing away at my surface pro in the kitchen, Nathanael told me that they were incredibly horny and asked if they could start masturbating in front of me.
To be clear, I consented in the same way that a sex worker consents to being paid for sex - if I didn’t need a place to stay for the night and instead had enough energy to drive back up to Windsor, I would’ve told them, “no.” And to be clear, they didn’t technically do anything illegal - they didn’t know that they would lash out in subconscious, passive-aggressive ways if I denied them the sexual pleasure of masturbating in front of me.
It was hard for them to make out their own tiny flashes of anger at hints of rejection, to question their own shame at being attracted to a woman with a penis, or the frustration at having to settle for one of them until a cis one comes along. But I could sense their underlying resentment, and I chose to go along with them because I was just too exhausted and lonely to do anything else. More importantly: I didn’t want to spend the $150 on a hotel room from getting booted.
So they went ahead and started masturbating in the kitchen.
Back To Sexual Healing
Yesterday, I was still missing something. Logically speaking, I was better, safer, and validated. But I still needed something to resolve my feelings of slight violation by Nathanael Magby - I needed a clearly-consentual, sexual experience, with enthusiasm on both sides that would serve as a psychological response to my history with Nathanael.
So, I politely asked a friend on Twitter for feet pics - someone who had already sexted us before and already knew from previous conversations.
You see, one of my bigger anxieties is that I will become the people who traumatize me. By trying to engage with someone in an environment where consent can freely be denied (over the Internet, with someone thousands of miles away), I established sort of a mental monument to strong consent, a response to Nathanael Magby’s mild disrespect for human boundaries.
Although, I can’t really use my right hand for a few days because that door scuffle thing kind of sprained my wrist.