Who I Had To Be To Get Here

2024 was a turbulent year for me. To talk about my 2024, though, I have to first talk about someone else: Deirdre Olsen.

The year was 2019, and I had moved to Vancouver the year before to take a job with Tantalus Labs. I was working for Tesla of cannabis, and I really thought I had died and gone to heaven. I was living twin lives as a regulatory affairs executive and a social media celebrity.

SunLab was amazing to work at; whenever I needed a break, I could walk through the greenhouse and walk through a forest of cannabis. I could literally smell the industry I was helping to build from the ground up.

As I started to assimilate into the newly forming scene, I started to hear the whispers about Marc Emery. I was definitely an outsider. My work in the industry was mostly on the legal side, which had tensions with the ‘legacy’ people. By the time I started to hear things, it was an open secret that Marc Emery was a creep.

The self-styled ‘Prince of Pot’, Emery rose to fame by selling cannabis seeds, which he was later arrested and extradited for. He and his wife ran Cannabis Culture HQ in Vancouver, a combination of a vapour lounge and cannabis accessory store.

Memetically speaking, he was the Elon Musk of weed. Working at CCHQ was the promised land for a lot of young weed enthusiasts, including young women. Weed had its #MeToo moment when Deirdre wrote about her experiences with Emery.

My oldest friend in the industry puts it best: She didn’t want to believe the whispers about Emery, but after hanging around CCHQ enough times, she knew.

The weed scene wasn’t unlike the AI scene now in San Francisco: Ascendant. Vortexes of money, sex, and power swirled around influential personalities. The stakes were far lower than those in the Bay today, but the shape of those vortexes are similar.

Lisa Campbell touches on it in her writing on Deirdre’s story. Despite #MeToo, weed was heavily sexualized. Marc’s writing speaks for itself:

Don’t let her wails deter you. Every woman wails and howls and cries or some kind of psychic resistance but this will be conquered… once you continue thrusting. Her body is defeated.

Almost immediately after Deirdre posted her story, the war against her word began. I wasn’t out at the time, so I still heard what men say when they think women aren’t listening.

Deirdre was a liar. She was coming for Marc’s empire. She was an unstable girl no one should listen to.

Deirdre is the bravest person I’ve ever known. Emery had been given free reign because women witness to and victims of his misdeeds were afraid to speak out. She put a stop to it, just by telling her story.

The minute a woman talks about sexual harassment or assault, the PR war begins. I didn’t realize that when I posted my blog last December. I wasn’t ready for it.

Maybe I should have been? I didn’t think that it was going to be controversial to say that a grope happened at a festival populated by internet randos.

A good chunk of my 2024 was sickeningly familiar: Seeing and hearing every awful thing that was said about Deirdre be said about me. It was worse: There was no equivalent to the digital mycelial network of the Vibecamp community in the weed scene in 2019.

You couldn’t design a better system for putting victims on trial than tweets and group chats. I caught little bits and pieces via friends and subtweets; it was bizarre.

The only thing I’ve ever heard about my incident from Vibecamp was that I would be followed up with. That never happening was probably the biggest fuck you the event and community could give, so I was left to piece things together from that mycelial network.

I don’t want to equate what happened to me with Deirdre’s story: I can’t imagine what it was like to have mainstream media attention. Earning the wrath of a niche community is miniscule in comparison. I was still scared, and felt powerless as some strawman of me was built up, tweet by tweet.

Steelmanning that strawman of myself : I was a cruel, dishonest feminist who lied about my sexual assault to score points against the Vibecamp / TPOT community. I preyed on autistic men and rationalist celebrities, and had to be punished and humiliated by the vaguely neo-buddhist movement in the Bay.

As I said; bizarre. But familiar. I saw some pretty ugly things in the early part of this year, not the least of which was multiple men in the TPOT community rejoicing in my impending social death.

They reminded me of men in Vancouver’s plant medicine scene I have had to protect friends from. Men who are skilled in using spiritual language to spread misogyny and prey on vulnerable women.

Those kinds of men were the most ardent of Marc Emery’s defenders. I experienced scene whiplash.

Deirdre told her story in a very different time. #MeToo was still in people’s minds, and she had the support of powerful women in the cannabis industry who were fed up with the misogynist bullshit that Emery became a symbol of.

I was in a niche community that, in their own words, prefers the company of men. It was rationalist-adjacent, and rationalists have a noted history of problematic behaviour dating all the way back to events surrounding Leverage Research.

What happened to me was minor by comparison.

It’s still all so nonsensical; a woman being groped, and/or creeped on by a man at a festival is banal. They are the kinds of things responsible events design safety policies around.

I don’t expect much from ‘emergent events’: They are often more concerned with sustainability than safety. I shouldn’t have expected so much from Vibecamp or its org team, but I did.

To say I was disappointed is a large understatement. A lot has remained unsaid, because if you were to describe the entire saga beat by beat, I think it would be quite obvious how badly it was handled.

The onus is not on victims to be reasonable, or responsible, or calm.

Things didn’t get better when it became clear I was going to be ignored, and that strawman of me was going to get etched in scene history as fact. Things got really bad; I alternated between not being able to sleep and sleeping most of the day. I became very seriously suicidal.

Eventually I realized I needed help. I found a really good trauma therapist, and I finally was able to start healing. She was somewhat familiar with the Very Online scene and rationalism. She wasn’t very surprised at what had happened.

Even with therapy, I still wasn’t able to hold it together. Eventually I went to my doctor: I remember that day very clearly.

I was terrified to tell my doctor that I needed help. I still felt shame and embarrassment over what had happened to me, and dreaded retelling the story to yet another person. I wasn’t convinced my doctor would believe me.

She did. We made a plan that changed my wellness routine.

In that moment, I was probably operating at 5%, if that. In a few months, I was at 90% for what felt like the first time ever.

I’ve suffered from depression for all of my adult life. It has waxed and waned in intensity, but some part of it has always been there. An unlikely chain of events was started by the man who groped me in 2022, the end of which was finally being freed of depression.

It’s weird. Weird to be able to spend an evening doing absolutely nothing without also feeling like I have a gaping wound that just won’t stop hurting.

2024 also had some of the most amazing, connective moments I’ve ever experienced. A woman holding my hands at a party was near the top.

I was able to let go of a lot of things. I developed my Twitter presence before coming out. Once I started to really step into this new person I had become, some elements of that presence started to itch.

They felt comfortable, familiar, but wrong. In contrast, my community now is the touchy feely Burning Man-ish set, but with strong feminine energy. I don’t feel like I have to explain my presence anymore, things just are.

If there was a high point, it was being in a cuddle puddle at an artsy somatic party in September. I was next to a new friend, a fellow girlboss who was embarking on a new chapter of her journey. I didn’t feel the need to be guarded; I finally felt safe. I knew my well-being was important to the people around me.

For a few seconds, I thought of the Vibecamp 1 afterparty. Things eventually got touchy-feely there, but I just wasn’t in a place where I could fully embrace it. I feel very sad about that fact, because I think that party had the potential to be something that deepened my trust in the community.

Some things just weren’t meant to be. I miss a lot of people from that community, but I wouldn’t be at the point I am now without all the turbulence.

I haven’t always been at my best over the past few years: Sometimes very far from it. There were some people who really, really believed in me that I let down. When I told one of them that I regretted it, they told me this:

I’m of the opinion that everyone’s best is yet to come. Can’t regret who we had to be to get there.

I think she’s right. I had to be that angry and hurt person to get here.

Unalived is a word people use to refer to suicide to get around algorithmic filters on social media. I’ve been suicidal at various points in my life, and what I feel now is the opposite. It feels like I’ve been realived.

Being realived in current year is not sunshine and rainbows. Fascism is ascendant, I’ve recently been reminded violence is socially acceptable against people like me. This chapter probably isn’t going to be some idyllic metamorphosis into a carefree professional burner like I had once hoped.

Inna Mosina is a new friend, and was one of the first people to be charged under Russia’s anti-LGBTQ laws (for the high crime of posting a rainbow flag on social media). She is wise, and has an incredible way with words.

Two things she’s told me have stuck:

Real bravery is fighting when you know you’re going to lose.

To stop fighting is to agree, and to agree is to surrender.

Things have always been a fight for me, and maybe it was a bit foolish to assume otherwise. I don’t agree that trans women should be pushed to the margins, or segregated from society, so I’m going to keep fighting.

I don’t think I would have been able to keep fighting without being realived. I hope this fight is over someday, but until then: I will not surrender.