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+In November, I wrote to Ben about how I was still stuck on writing the grief-memoir. My _plan_ had been that it should have been possibly to tell the story of the Category War while glomarizing about the content of private conversations, then offer Scott and Eliezer pre-publication right of reply (because it's only fair to give your former-hero-current-[frenemies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenemy) warning when you're about to publicly characterize them as having been intellectually dishonest), then share it to _Less Wrong_ and the /r/TheMotte culture war thread, and then I would have the emotional closure to move on with my life (learn math, go to gym, chop wood, carry water) and not be a mentally-dominated cultist.
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+The reason it _should_ be safe to write is because Explaining Things Is Good. It should be possible to say, "This is not a social attack; I'm not saying 'rationalists Bad, Yudkowsky Bad'; I'm just trying to carefully _tell the true story_ about why, as a matter of cause-and-effect, I've been upset this year, including addressing counterarguments for why some would argue that I shouldn't be upset, why other people could be said to be behaving 'reasonably' given their incentives, why I nevertheless wish they'd be braver and adhere to principle rather than 'reasonably' following incentives, _&c_."
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+So why couldn't I write? Was it that I didn't know how to make "This is not a social attack" credible? Maybe because it's wasn't true?? I was afraid that telling a story about our leader being intellectually dishonest was "the nuclear option" in a way that I couldn't credibly cancel with "But I'm just telling a true story about a thing that was important to me that actually happened" disclaimers. If you're slowly-but-surely gaining territory in a conventional war, _suddenly_ escalating to nukes seems pointlessly destructive. This metaphor is horribly non-normative ([arguing is not a punishment!](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends/) carefully telling a true story _about_ an argument is not a nuke!), but I didn't know how to make it stably go away.
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+A more motivationally-stable compromise would be to try to split off whatever _generalizable insights_ that would have been part of the story into their own posts that don't make it personal. ["Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) had been a huge success as far as I was concerned, and I could do more of that kind of thing, analyzing the social stuff I was worried about, without making it personal, even if, secretly, it actually was personal.
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+Ben replied that it didn't seem clear to me that I was a victim of systemic abuse, and that I was trying to figure out whether I was being fair to my abuser. He thought if I could internalize that, I would be able to forgive myself a lot of messiness, which would reduce the perceived complexity of the problem.
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+I said I would bite that bullet: yes! Yes, I was trying to figure out whether I'm being fair to my abusers, and it's an important question to get right! "Other people's lack of standards harmed me, therefore I don't need to hold myself to standards in my response because I have [extenuating circumstances](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYrcTJFJoYKX2DxNL/extenuating-circumstances)" would be a _lame excuse_.
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