I need to talk about stalking today. wikipedia says this about stalking:

"Stalking is the obsessive following, observing, or contacting of another person, or the obsessive attempt to engage in any of these activities. This includes following the person to certain places, to see where they live or what the person does on a daily basis, it also includes seeking and obtaining the person's personal information in order to contact him or her; e.g. looking for his or her details on computers, electoral rolls, personal files and other material containing the person's private information without his or her consent."

They continue to say this: "Stalking exists in many forms. [...]. Stalkers may even have a sincere but misguided belief that their victims love them, or have a desire to help the victims. Stalking consists of a series of actions which in themselves can be legal, such as calling on the phone, sending gifts, or sending emails.

Stalkers will often denigrate and objectify their victims. This can help stalkers to abuse their victims without experiencing empathy, and may reflect or fuel a belief that they are entitled to behave as they please toward the victims. Viewing victims as "lesser," "weak" or otherwise seriously flawed can support delusions that the victims need to be rescued, or punished, by the stalkers. Stalkers may slander or defame the character of their victims which may isolate the victims and give the stalkers more control or a feeling of power.

Stalkers may use manipulative behavior such as bringing legal action against their victims. They may also attempt to diagnose victims with false mental illnesses. Stalkers may even threaten to commit suicide in order to coerce victims to intervene - all methods of forcing victims to have contact with the stalkers."

Further down, wikipedia leaves no doubt as to the effects of such restraining behaviour on the victims of stalking. I can't even chuckle at that exhaustive list any more, as I have been suffering from ALL of these effects - for most of my life to this very day.

Since I have isolated the most likely source of my being stalked as my own family, I am now implementing a list of actions, hoping to reduce the degree of outcomes of this abusive behaviour. However, it is almost impossible to escape that, as I still have a phone, address, e-mail etc.

One of those measures will have to be to refrain from posting any more publicly visible entries here. I made the mistake of posting last night's entry as public, and retribution in form of an unsolicited phone call with suppressed caller ID follows in its footsteps. For those of you, who'd like to be able to read this blog in the future, I suggest you send me ipermail requesting to be promoted from contacts to something above that. I will have to see, whether that works better. If not, I might have to stop posting entirely.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but the situation is really as serious as it sounds.

update: There is a small possibility, I'm wrong THIS time about it - but it has happened before, so I don't feel all too remorseful.