Revenge story
18 July 2025
Article published by: Leah Rowe
Date of publication: 18 July 2025
I did a lot of really weird shit in 2016. I was an angry, lonely troll and didn’t know how to handle people, and they didn’t know how to handle me. From my own perspective, what happened to me then was a betrayal, and I wanted revenge.
I learned later that anger is largely futile. I ended up feuding with this lady for years, until we later made peace with each other; the lesson I learned is that people are basically complicated and the reason they do things is always going to be completely alien to you, and that’s OK. You have to learn to be self-sufficient in your own sense of self. You have to focus on your own strengths and learn not to rely on others; they have their things to deal with and they have no reason to think about you at all.
The problem with that, when you’re a lonely 24 year old (as I was in 2016), who has never had a sense of self, when you’ve suppressed your identity for so long, a lot of that pain (e.g. gender dysphoria) comes out in other ways. When you feel like everyone is out to get you, then you will make everyone out to get you. You make your own reality. A self-fulfilling prophecy.
Coming out as trans and transitioning didn’t magically fix all of my problems, but it enabled me to work on them. I had buried my own personality and moulded myself to fit other people’s biases (as I saw them) for so many years, and the way I basically dealt with that was to be stoic at all times - except I wasn’t, and so when I first started actually confronting myself, all those bottled up feelings that I’d suppressed for years came rushing out.
Anger is a gift, but only when you use it properly. I tried for years to suppress it. I look back at that period with nostalgia now, but I was genuinely scary to be around back then. I lost all of my friends. None of the people I’m friends with today are the friends I had back then.
Ms. Marie faced the full wrath of my anger, but she didn’t really do anything wrong; I didn’t need to listen, and I was always free to do my thing. She simply had the misfortunate of being my friend at the time.
The lesson I learned years later is this:
Nobody owes you a damn thing. You don’t owe them anything either.
And that is the biggest lesson of all. This one wisdom avoids a lot of conflict when you start to appreciate it.
If you ever find yourself in a situation like the above, I want you to step back and challenge yourself, and ask yourself if what you think is really worth thinking about. Perhaps the other person has their own things to deal with, and you are, like, the last of their concerns? 2016 me did not have this wisdom.
My eyes are open now.
Those events in my past were completely pointless. I could have avoided so much hassle. I ended up apologising to the FSF - and Marie - 6 months later.
The events in this comic were what led to me stepping down from Libreboot in early 2017; I had completely burned out. As a result, I left a committee of other people in charge of the project; this also failed, because those people were incompetent, which 5 years later led to me taking control of Libreboot again, once I’d stopped feeling sorry for myself, and such was even covered in the previous Coup d’état article.
Therefore, this comic, titled Revenge story, is the prequel to the Coup d’état comic. My experience with Marie was a microcosm of my entire experience between 2016-2020. It took me until mid-way during 2021 to finally feel calm again.
Markdown file for this page: https://libreboob.org/20250718.md
Subscribe to RSS for this site
This HTML page was generated by the Libreboot Static Site Generator.