It began with a shirt. rswfire held it up to the camera in the interior of his RV, and the first thing he said was that he had to show it off. A guest had made it for him — someone he met back in April, or maybe May, at a different campground, before he was moved to this one about a month ago. They had driven up here to hand-deliver it. He told them once that he didn't really wear tie dyes, but that he liked dark colors, and they had gone back and dyed it over and over until it came out the way it did. There were two. He showed the second as well, the one with more reds in it, brighter than the first. He said he was actually going to wear these. He said it made him feel a little like a hippie. He noted that this was his first new shirt in about a year and a half — he bought clothes right before he moved into the RV and hasn't since.
Then the tour, which he offered almost as an aside, admitting the place was a little messy. His keys had been lying on the queen air mattress and it popped that day — a small hole, and he wasn't sure how to fix it, so he pulled out the twin and set that up instead. He observed that this wasn't entirely a bad outcome, since it would make working from the laptop easier now that the desktop was out of commission. He panned to the desk he built himself and said plainly that he never refined it. He searched for the word — dye it, no — stain it. He'd like to sand it, stain it, make it look nice, if he kept it, if he was able to keep the RV, and he named that as unknown. Above the desk sat the tower with no GPU, waiting on another one. He pointed out the Alexa device, important to him, now working again with the internet restored, because he plays music in here constantly. He goes through cheap headphones every couple of months; the newest pair had a problem he traced to the little adapter converting aux to USB-C. The USB-C ones cost more. He said he doesn't have a lot of money, so he buys the five-dollar ones.
It was around five o'clock. He said he was in a strange mood, and reached for the word — sorrowful, he thought, maybe. He said he isn't very good at describing emotions, but that he was feeling this one in his chest, and hadn't in quite a long time. He was sitting with it, and said he was very capable of doing that: his emotions are never turned off, never have been his whole life, no compartmentalization, fully integrated. He tested the word again and landed on remorse.
The reason surfaced next. That day he had posted in a local Facebook group about what happened to him at Honeyman, to bring attention to it locally, because he had come to feel that this might be the only way anything happens. There has to be accountability, he said, because he was abused — and he stated that abuse is the correct word for what happened to him over two months, not indirect, deliberately targeted by two people who he said should not be in their positions, because they had shown their character. He said he knew it wasn't only him: as soon as they threw him out, nearly every volunteer he ran into over the next few weeks had a story about them. Not isolated. Which means, he said, the institution knows and is protecting them anyway.
He returned to the volunteer coordinator, and to the detail he could not get past — that she came from a university where she was a DEI coordinator, a role he described as protecting people like him, and that she took what she learned there into her new role and turned it the other way. He said he couldn't think of anything more unethical, because it means she knows better. And he said he knows that she knows, because of one moment on their call: when he told her Ryan had told him to eat glass, she was shocked. He heard it in her voice. She contained it quickly and went right back to the script, but for that moment she was a human being with him. That, he said, was the whole problem at Honeyman across those two months — that none of them, not Alison, not Lisa, not the director, ever interacted with him like a human being, because they were calculating instead. He said he felt remorseful, and that he shouldn't, because there is no way for Alison and Lisa not to know what happened was abuse. The pattern is too clear. He documented it and handed it over without pressure and without asking for anything, and they ignored it. That, he said, is where he runs out of words. He said he can't focus on this all the time because he has a life he's building — and that he also can't ignore it, because other people are being harmed. Then, directly: that's on you, Lisa. You need to act like a leader.
From there the field widened back out. He said there's a lot he needs to do, that he's in a transitional stage. He described his archive as fairly complete, in a good enough state that he can let it sit for a while — and immediately qualified that this is how he thinks about it now, not necessarily how he'll feel tomorrow, because he's still metabolizing what happened. He named the abuse and named its extension into other fields, into the silencing and the lack of accountability, and said that isn't something you get over, it's something you process, something you metabolize. Then: it's a beautiful day out here, and the situation is pretty good. Two more months here, then somewhere else. He said maybe he'll talk about it then — he isn't ready yet, and a couple of months from now it will be a completely different situation. He identified the constraint by name: the same problem he had at Honeyman, the line past which he can't talk about his life freely. He said that's hard for him, because he doesn't compartmentalize, because he wants to share his life authentically, and this is who he has always been. And at Honeyman, he said, he understood the rules and he didn't break them. Music came up. He closed by thanking them for the shirts.