Dear Mr. M,

I have read and responded to every comment you have written to me following every post I’ve posted over the past year. I understand you are frustrated and no longer want to receive my blog posts and since you aren’t receiving my email responses I decided to write to you here.

I’m writing this to ask you to please unsubscribe yourself (scroll to the bottom for instructions). I have attempted to let you know countless times that YOU are the only one who can unsubscribe yourself from my blog. This is WordPress’ policy – not mine. I would gladly do it if I could.

Your comments are aggressive, angry and threatening:

“Get me out of this damn blog you sent or I’ll report you to WordPress”  

“I’m going to be posting things on the Internet about you and the invasion of privacy by sending your crap to me even though I have repeatedly told you to remove me.”

While these comments may seem innocuous especially considering I am a retired Marine Corps officer and should be able to easily ignore their aggressive tone, I can’t. I recently realized that you are my cyber bully and like cancer your voice has spread into my own inner world. For the past year whenever I sit down to write a blog I hear your snarky, angry words and I stop writing. My inner cyber bully has morphed into Kevin Spacey in House of Cards.

The words that I share are my own inner thoughts and ideas and being able to write them freely is what keeps me healthy and alive. It’s an extremely vulnerable act to share your heart and soul in a public forum. I didn’t invite you to my blog, you subscribed yourself, so please do us both a favor and follow the directions I pasted below to unsubscribe yourself.

I realize that whether you actually read the content of this blog post and follow the simple steps is not in my court. This is merely a last-ditch effort to alleviate the suffering on both sides.

What is in my court, however, is to figure out how I attracted this sticky booger that I can’t seem to flick off. What is wanting to be loved in this situation? What part of me is wanting to be heard? What inside me is angry, rude and frustrated? If I can open to these questions and listen with compassion perhaps the booger will melt away easily and effortlessly.

I want to evict you from my inner world and tell you the threat of your words showing up within a minute (every time) of my posting will no longer keep me from blogging; but now I see that I evicting you will never work. What’s needed is for me to open to the scary, mean, icky parts inside me.

I mean you no harm Mr. M, and I feel your frustration so please unsubscribe yourself. Here are the instructions Wordpress sent me:

To be removed from Gypsy Love Cafe Blog,  follow these instructions —
1/ The next time you receive an email notification from my blog, open it and scroll to the bottom of the post where you will find this message: “Unsubscribe or change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions.”
2/ If your Internet browser is not open, open it.
3/ Click on the hyperlinked words “Manage Subscriptions”. This will open a page in your browser that contains your email settings for my blog.
4/ Find my blog name “Gypsy Love Cafe” on this page and point your mouse cursor at it
5/ The word “unfollow” will appear immediately below the blog name, Click on “unfollow”.
That’s it. You should not receive any more email notices from my blog.

 

Here is an email from WordPress with more information:

Hi Katariina,

Unfortunately, we don’t remove subscribers from blogs, as it is an opt in process for a user to follow a blog. Subscribers are ultimately responsible for removing themselves. Continue to let this user know that there is a ‘manage subscriptions link’ in the email, and mark comments from the user as spam. If the user becomes inappropriate and you believe he is violating our terms of service, (threats, rude language, etc.) please submit a link to the abusive comment via our Abuse reporting page.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

Cheers, Erin

 

Respectfully,

Katariina