Here we are! Wednesday in Hong Kong! Sitting outside the coffee shop people-watching, as per usual.

I love people-watching in Hong Kong. The outfits! Le gasp! Hong Kongers have such great style. It’s very comfy, very casual, but somehow also very professional and classy. I could sit here and watch people all day, and I have.

Other sights I enjoy seeing while people-watching (aside from the outfits): influencers in the wild, specifically Mainland Chinese influencers in the wild. They are on some next level shit. I cannot even explain it to you. I’ll be going about my normal day and suddenly I see an influencer dressed up in a $10,000 designer ballgown posing on the stairway in front of some random fruit stand. Like, why? I love it. It never stops being funny!!!!

They get real serious. I saw a full-on team the other day with a camera crew that consists of one guy holding multiple phones, a hair & makeup person, and a manager-type dictating out where the next location was. Honestly wasn’t sure if the influencer in question was an actual celebrity/movie star type or just some rich chick with an Instagram account. It’s hard to tell!

My other current obsession with people-watching? Old Chinese uncles. They don’t give a fuck! It’s amazing! The best place to spot them is in the park when they’re getting their workouts in. Some of these old dudes are RIPPED! They’re out here casually doing a million pull-ups like they’re about to get drafted into the army and sent off to war any day. It’s crazy.

And, of course, they’re doing it all with a hand-rolled cigarette in their mouths, mean-mugging anyone who walks by.

They have two modes: working out in the park, and slumped over staring at their phones. There is no in-between.

Welcome to Hong Kong!

So it is official now: I am not going to Ireland… yet. But it’s fine. When I woke up this morning, I heard a little voice in my head saying, “You know what’s better than going to Ireland? Not being in debt!”

And I thought to myself… that is very Irish, and also very correct. Not being in debt is fantastic. It’s the best way to live your life, truly. So we have to make some short-term sacrifices now. In the long-term, hopefully it will all pay off!

I actually do feel better today. There is definitely something to the Guinness-Irish Stew-Mashed Potatoes-Garlic Bread-Chocolate Brownie with Vanilla Ice Cream combo. That shit was real medicine, ya’ll. I can feel it.

I also did a really intense hour-long meditation last night in the middle of the night. I was trying to sleep but they were fixing something on the street so there was this unbearable drilling going on well into the night. I just put on my headphones and went into chakra cleansing mode.

I asked a question but I did not get an answer. Instead my Irish grandmother showed up as my spirit guide and gave me a great big hug. She just kept repeating to me over and over, “You are loved, you are loved, you are loved.”

She also said my dad wants to talk to me, but it’s really hard for him. I agree with that. It’s still really hard for me to talk to him. She said she doesn’t think we are ready yet, so she’s the one that decided to take over for him. I’m cool with that.

Best we can do right now is the occasional song on the radio and gently pushing the dessert menu my way. It is what it is.

I did say one thing to my dead dad’s spirit last week. It was really cathartic. It was after the LiveNation/TicketMaster verdict came out. This was my dad’s dream case. He was working on it when he died. As soon as I saw the news, I stood up and said very loudly to no one in particular, “I don’t give a flying fuck about TicketMaster, Dad!”

And I don’t. I really, really don’t. I don’t care about my dad’s career at all. I don’t care about his students (many of whom were smarmy, obnoxious suck-ups who I genuinely felt lacked real intelligence). I don’t care about his legacy. I don’t care about any of the cases he worked on. I don’t give a flying fuck!!!!!!!

Now the entire world knows the truth about Betsey Horton, Writer Extraordinaire! I do not give a fuck about antitrust law in any way, shape, or form. Not my circus, not my monkeys. The US is totally fucked and there’s no coming back from it. A lifetime of work, all for nothing. Was it really worth it to hurt your children and destroy their lives over it? I don’t think so!

So yeah, I don’t give a fuck. It felt so great to just say that. Yeah. I do not give a fuck. Just like my dad never gave a fuck about me or what was good for my health or well-being. If he really cared, he wouldn’t have forced me to move to South Dakota. He would have just let me go to live my life the way I wanted to live it. But he didn’t. Instead he held me hostage for my entire adult life, and now I’m finally free.

Unfortunately, I still have no idea what to do with my freedom, except apparently get drunk and fall down the stairs and hit my head so hard I turn into Little Miss Optimist!

It’s okay. I’ve been researching this topic. It takes a lot of time to feel safe again after escaping an abusive situation. As we all know, my trauma is of a very complex nature. It’s taken some time to sort things out.

I had identified 4 areas that were the biggest problems: Relationship Trauma, Family Trauma, Work Trauma, and Location Trauma.

As of right now, I feel that I have done the necessary work to heal the Relationship Trauma and the Location Trauma.

I clearly no longer fear men, sex, or dating, so that’s good. I worked that out! That was really hard for me. I didn’t date through my entire 20’s because I was raped and assaulted and had the entire school/town gang up on me and call me a liar when I wrote about it. Now I see that behavior has nothing to do with me as a person.

Conservatives in general simply love predators and abusers. They love protecting them even more. Look who they worship as their King! That behavior has nothing to do with me. That’s just how they are. They’re a basket of deplorables. Always have been, always will be.

Mystery solved! The End!

It can be hard some days. I still have nightmares and flashbacks about living in the Town. It took me about six months after I left the country for it to really sink in that I finally escaped that place for good and I never, ever have to go back there ever again.

Some days I still wake up in a panic thinking I’ll have to go back there someday. But I don’t have to go back. I never, ever have to go back there ever again. I am marked safe from the state of South Dakota, today, tomorrow, forever, and always.

And she lived happily ever after. The End.

So now that I’ve escaped The Town, aka the source of the Location Trauma, I can date, make new friends, meet new people, and network without dealing with any of that bullshit following me around. I get to live a brand new life, free of the Rape Apologists running an active smear campaign in an attempt to ruin my life. And I get to date much, much hotter guys. BIG, BIG, BIG win for me!

Now the two things that are left are Work Trauma and Family Trauma. The Family Trauma is like an open wound that is just spilling out all over everything. It’s just gushing blood, nonstop. Just an endless well of pain. It feels like I’m trying to put a tourniquet on the wound to stop the bleeding but it’s not working. There is no stopping the bleeding. It’s just going to keep coming out till I die on the floor.

There is NO ACCOUNTABILITY from my family whatsoever. NONE! That is the aggravating part. There is just this total refusal to acknowledge anything that happened or talk about it or try to communicate in a healthy way at all.

Everything just gets dumped on me, and I get blamed for everything, and then I get vilified even more when I stand up for myself and say, “Hey, this is actually unhealthy and wrong. I’m not going to be your scapegoat anymore. Please respect my boundaries.” And then what do we get? More stonewalling and silent treatment as “punishment.” It’s all so textbook. It really is!

So there’s clearly nothing to be done about it, because even though I am the one who is tasked with the job of “fixing everything” because it’s always “my fault,” no one will actually sit down with me or take the time to work out any of it. Yet somehow there is always something new to blame on me or some recently invented problem that is magically my fault even though I had nothing to do with it. Love that.

So yeah, we can’t resolve that. I don’t know how to heal from that or resolve it. Just always be sure to remember why it’s always been my life dream to put an ocean between myself and my family. My goal for the future is to just stay as far away from all of them as possible. They can’t hurt me if they’re not in my life anymore.

Really gotta work out this whole job situation so I can be free of them forever. Too bad my applications keep disappearing into a virtual blackhole while these comic book supervillain tech bros shoot up Special K and blabber on about “replacing everyone with robots.”

Where is James Bond when you need him? Seriously. I’m so tired of listening to these utterly deranged men with no empathy or compassion openly talk about destroying the planet. It’s exhausting.

Like, yeah, I remember when I was 17 and hated everyone and wrote a manifesto about nuking the world. Then I grew up. I went to India and studied yoga and learned how to appreciate art and went out into the world and saw the beauty of it all. I stopped being angry and hating everyone and everything. It really made a difference in my life for the better! Y’all should really try it sometime!

Mitakuye Oyasin, assholes.

This leads us into Work Trauma. Obviously, most of this comes from living in South Dakota and being forced to work with and around some of the worst people on Planet Earth. Every job I had when I lived there consisted of non-stop gossiping, bullying, hostility, stealing, cheating, lying, corruption of all kinds, and a general effort to hurt as many people around they could for their own selfish gain.

It was the worst at Starbucks. Everything they did to me there was 100% illegal under the law and against the code of conduct in the Employee Handbook. Nobody cared because they don’t have values or morals or empathy or anything like that. It’s just uncontrolled mob violence at all times.

I don’t flourish in that type of environment because, again, I’m not a sociopath who is willing to crush anyone and everything around me just to make $.50 more. I’m just not interested in that. I don’t like hurting other people. The idea of intentionally running someone out of a job so they no longer have healthcare or a paycheck is literally the definition of “psychotically evil” to me. Yet to most of the people I encountered in South Dakota, it was considered “fun and games.” They would brag about intentionally creating situations where people lost their housing and healthcare.

Horrible, horrible, disgusting, depraved people. Just awful in every sense of the word.

I saw and heard so many horrifying things when I was working in South Dakota. It was unbelievable. Truly. Sometimes I look back on it and think, “I can’t even believe that shit was real. What the fuck is wrong with those people?”

They’re psychotically evil, they have no soul, they lack empathy, and they are sadists who actively take pleasure in being as mean and cruel as possible to other people. That’s what’s wrong with them. It is what it is.

Unfortunately, it’s a very prevalent attitude in the world right now. The worst people on Earth have now all been emboldened by the Dump Truck to be as shitty and evil as they want with zero consequences. Meanwhile, we’re all just sitting here derping around, letting it happen, like… whatever.

Anyway, this is why I could not tolerate the South Africans once I discovered the truth about how they ran the company I originally came to work for here in Hong Kong. I took one look at that crazy apartheid shit and Noped right out. I’m not dealing with that again.

Same thing as South Dakota, but worse, mostly because South Africans don’t hide their shittiness under a fake nice veneer like South Dakotans do. They’re just out in the open about the fact that they are bad people with extremely problematic world views. And you know what? I’m grateful for it, because I saw all of those red flags waving and got the fuck out before getting hurt again. Now I have all the documentation I could ever need to prove that this was actually the company’s problem, not an issue with me as a human being. Go me!

So now I just want to find a situation where I don’t have to deal with any abuse anymore. It’s a dream, I know, but there must be something out there I can do that doesn’t require me to be at the mercy of someone who can accurately be described as a “comic book villain.” I just cannot have that energy in my life anymore. I’ve been vastly overexposed to it. I have no more tolerance for it at all.

Zero tolerance policy towards sociopaths. Period.

In the meantime, we never did figure out what actually happened on Saturday night. One of the baristas just stopped by my table to chat with me about it. She said, “I don’t think it’s safe for you to go out by yourself anymore. I’m really concerned about you after some of the stories you’ve told me about the people you’ve met. The fact that this has happened to you now three times in a month, and it started happening after you met these guys… are you sure there isn’t someone following you or keeping tabs on you? They do that to journalists here, you know.”

Maybe. Who knows? It could be someone messing with me. It could also just be me drinking too much wine. Either way, she is right. It’s not safe to go out alone after dark anymore. Find a friend and go with them, if I go out at all.

It’s comforting to know that someone cares today. It really is. I needed that today. Some days I just feel so alone on this journey.

Anyway, let’s say someone did drug me and attack me on the stairway and hit me in the head to “teach me a lesson.” It obviously didn’t work! I’ve been following a lot of Irish Heritage pages on Facebook and I’m here to tell you my DNA is unmatched in strength and resilience after 900 years of surviving attempted genocide in various forms. It’s gonna take more than a little push down the stairs to get rid of me!

Besides, I’m not a journalist. I’m a writer on an epic journey of self-discovery across the world, dragging a 3-piece luggage set full of heavy trauma behind me. I’m here to start my life over. I want a fabulous apartment and a job I can tolerate and an actual, real long-term relationship with someone who isn’t an abusive, rapey, narcissistic sociopath. It doesn’t seem like it’s a lot to ask for, and yet…

Anyway, I’m off now. My head still hurts. Gonna lay down in bed again with my ice pack and meditate. It’s okay for you to rest, Betsey. It really is. You’ve been through so much already in life, and now you’ve just taken another beating, so yeah… it’s fine if you want to lay down and rest.

Rest, rest, rest…

Have a nice day, y’all.