“Cat Person” and Me

I dated a girl seven years younger than me. We were both in our twenties at the time, and I assumed she was a few years older and she thought I was a few years younger and when it actually came up I struggled with it but went forward. She's got an interesting background, and has been horrifically abused, and once told me I was the first person she ever trusted after having sex. Not that the confession was after sex, though it was, but that I still seemed trustworthy after having sex with her.

I read Cat Person... Right around the breakup, though I think it was before then and I saw myself in it. Scared the heck out of me. I don't think I was ever as creepy as the Robert of the story was. I spent a lot of time reexamining my actions and hers and trying to figure out how much I was looking in a mirror.

I'm terrified that she'll write a "cat person", fictionalized or not. She was scared for good reasons of a ton of behaviors that I did not exhibit but her "friends" tried to accuse me of, the way a cheater always accuses first.

On the other hand, I know that I'm accusing her of a whole host of behaviors that aren't true or maybe only have a grain of truth to them. They say hindsight is 20/20, but I think nothing could be further from the truth. They say you look on the bast with rose colored glasses, and that's not quite it either. You see patterns, and you try to make patterns, and sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong. Getting it wrong can be dangerous. Getting it right can be dangerous, too, particularly when the pattern is one you've been manipulated to see.

I don't think I have any special insight or conclusions to draw here. I'm trying, like the author of both stories - the fictional account and the real one - to contextualize and understand and in many ways to "get past" whatever that was. All I can say is that there's dozens of "Cat Person" stories, and an awful lot of them actually do have a clear villain, one side or the other, but probably more have a set of shared mistakes and bitterness - That for ever Robert texting "Whore", there's a Margot in hysterics, and a set of bitter people who regret everything, but didn't do anything worth regretting.

This was a good read but I was struck with something else… has anyone noticed on long form content the scrollbar being “stuck” at around 85% and never moving after a while? Is this a hack to keep people reading? Am I imagining it?

Maybe Roupenian actually, literally faces threats from men who didn't like her story. It... wouldn't be the first time people harassed a writer for a creative work they took to be offensive.

Yeah this wasn't a particularly bad example, I just noticed it that's all (it's not the first time either). The article was engaging, but it was jarring to look over and see the scrollbar not move.

I just don't like the idea that someone somewhere had decided that to increase "engagement" they need to lie to me about how far into the article I am. I get that they're probably fighting the recent trend of declining attention spans but I don't know if I like the solution being subtle manipulation.