the teacher who groomed me in high school is posting ai slop on youtube now
i have google alerts set up for my high school and its associated creeps. this guy’s name was a jump scare in my email this morning.
when i thought i knew him, he was pursuing an arts-related phd and was the smartest, most interesting person i’d ever met. he traveled internationally to present at conferences, which sounded important, and lectured as if building up to an o captain! my captain! ovation from students.
for over a decade, our relationship lived in my head as a largely impotent schoolgirl crush – i was enamored and he indulged, but only a little bit, and only for a moment.
a few years after graduation, a friend visited me at college and yelled in my ear over the bass at an outdoor club: “you know what he did was fucked up though, right?”
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between pestering me for suggestive photos and inviting me to “say something sexy, say something scandalous, say something provocative,” he found time to nurture my love of writing and budding interest in feminism.
he introduced me to artists like carolee schneemann and marina ambromovic, to bell hooks and audre lorde. he gave me access to his jstor account and printed a dozen articles for me to read about the body as art or medium or whatever. he would send me excerpts from his dissertation and i would vague-post poetry about him online, which he would respond to via text.
we spent hours “synthesizing” my “research” into a cohesive “narrative” “portfolio” for my application to his undergrad alma mater; his feedback was signed “your biggest fan” in big, curly letters. when i was accepted into the program, we cried and embraced dramatically in front of my classmates. and when i was in the fitting room trying on junior prom dresses, he told me he wanted to see.
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it’s impossible for these vignettes to coexist in my mind – the image of him pouring life into me and the one of him teasing it out – and so, over time, both gave way to a new memory, where i was the one goading and coaxing and prodding and he humored me to avoid hurting my fragile, teenage feelings, which is still bad, but in a way that insists he was just a little drunk on his own koolaid and not the alternative.
the best parts of me, i knew, came from him, and my stomach burned with betrayal when i considered anything else.
then, in my late-twenties, our school was in the news for a similar story involving another teacher and i started having panic attacks when driving in its direction on my visits home.
it was a visceral repulsion, as if the big atrium of the main building had a miles-wide blast radius i couldn’t breach.
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the relationship was secretive, but not subtle. we ate lunch together in his office daily, sometimes in coordinating outfits if he texted me that morning with instructions for what to wear.
our “work” was often in dark rooms during skipped class periods, or in the hours between school and some monthly fundraising obligation i was eager to volunteer for because i could, like, you know, just stay here instead of going home and coming back later, if that’s okay with you.
it was always okay with him.
i’m still not clear on what was my idea and what was his – whether i was the one who asked to go for coffee, whether he was the one who offered to pick me up.
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another year and the disorientation became overwhelming.
when you are hiding something from yourself – protecting yourself from it – you feel fractured: one part of you braced against the door and another part of you slamming into it from the other side. you want to believe it’s for your own good, but you know that it isn’t, you know that opening this door is your one task of this moment.
so i eventually pulled the two peeling pleather journals off the shelf, the ones where i’d written this story out in real time, the ones i had refused to read because i already knew what happened and i didn’t need to go looking because what was there to find.
i bargained with myself that i could flip to a single random page, and if i didn’t see anything weird, i had to admit defeat and for the love of god move on with my life.
except i did see something weird.
obviously.
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the next week was effectively spent in a k-hole of my own past trying to understand how i didn’t remember literally any of this. it’s like i was retroactively violating myself reading back through such meticulous records and transcribed texts – comments about the size of my body, a story of him spamming messages about my perfume during class and watching for my reaction, the way he punished me with silence when i wouldn’t take the bait to escalate our relationship further.
it wasn’t just him, or this, but two brutal years of my life that had been neutered in my memory. i stared at the wall for hours trying to square what i was reading with what i was sure i thought i knew.
this shattering of your perspective feels physical. your vision goes blurry and it’s as if you’re floating in some liminal space, because your through-line has snapped and suddenly your journey from there to here doesn’t make sense anymore and where is here anyway? you don’t know because you don’t know anything.
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anyway, looks like he started a new youtube channel. curiosity got the best of me and i found myself watching an ai-generated version of him in an ai-generated boardroom, his ai-generated voice reading some ai-generated script about being hungry for hard work or something.
i scrolled more and had to stop when i heard, “what’s up, guys!” in, to his credit, the most youtube voice i’ve ever heard.
his websites, too, are full of blog posts and media analyses written by chatgpt, and not even a good model.
which is all to say:
i guess the rest of the illusion broke. whoever i thought he was would hate him.