The Charley Project’s Facebook page has not been active in a like a year and a half. I didn’t really use it for anything important anyway, I just posted links to my blog posts and links to articles about missing persons. The reason I haven’t gone on it for so long is I do not like looking at the private messages I get. Most of them were fine, but maybe one out of ten was a person screaming at me and 99% of the time I did not deserve it.
I do not blame family members of missing persons for however they react to their predicament, because I understand they have found themselves in a horrific situation and their world has turned upside down. Not only that, but this is a horrific situation very few people can understand. Everyone knows what it’s like to have someone they love die, and there are loads of support groups for people who have lost a child to death, but very few people know what it’s like to literally lose a loved one and have no idea what happened, and there are very few support groups for them. Furthermore, a lot of these people have a hard time getting others to take the case of their missing loved one seriously, and they’re also at risk of being exploited by jerks who tell them lies and try to get money out of them. (“Pay me $2,000 and I’ll tell you where your daughter is.” Etc.) So I understand that sometimes they’re going to lose their minds.
I just have a hard time dealing with it when they lash out at me. And they were lashing out a lot on Facebook. Sometimes they also lash out on email, but not as often as on Facebook.
One time I got a message from someone who was extremely angry, and just raging at me, and my first thought, glancing at what they had to say, was “This person cannot possibly be angry about what they say they are angry about. Something else must be going on.”
They were raging at me because I had “misgendered” their son, when in fact it was a typo. And it would have been obvious that it was a typo, because throughout the casefile in every instance but one, I called their son “he” and I said in the distinguishing characteristics that this was a “male” person. But in one single instance I accidentally wrote “she.” A reasonable person would have been just like “Could you please fix this typo” instead of exploding, so obviously something had happened to make the writer UNreasonable.
I read their whole long message and found my answer in the last paragraph: they said they’d found out that day that their son had been found dead. Their response to this awful news was to write me a message screaming at me demanding I profusely apologize to them.
And I understood why and didn’t hold it against them. I understood that allowances must be made for a person in that situation; they were crazed with grief basically. But I couldn’t help being hurt anyway cause they said some horrible things to me. I really dread receiving messages like this and they happened more often on Facebook than on any other platform. After awhile I just couldn’t bring myself to go there anymore. I still use my personal Facebook account to look up info about missing people but haven’t looked at the Charley Project’s Facebook page in a long time. I even talked about in therapy, trying to get myself to go back there and look at the messages, but I just couldn’t.
I suppose I ought to just shut the Facebook page down. Like I said, I didn’t use it for anything particularly important.
The Charley Project Blog 