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China Elevator Stories
Abracadabra: Wishing a Stalker Away
Stalkers consistently misinterpret their victims’ words as not legitimate or credible.
04/11/2025
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
A stalker is a person who lacks the boundaries that others have—they lack an understanding of the right to privacy and often suffer from erotomania, a mental illness that leads them to believe their victim is in love with them, just as they believe themselves to be in love with the victim. When I use the word “love” here, I do not mean true love. Stalkers are often narcissists who are incapable of genuine love, but they may label their obsession with you, your life, your status, or your career as “love.” Often, a stalker does not truly pay attention to who you are as a person; instead, they fixate on you because of their illness—one that prevents them from recognizing others as independent human beings leading their own lives, free from them.
They equate harassment with love, and when you say no to their extreme advances—which are not loving at all but rather psychological terrorism mislabeled as “love”—they continue forcing unwanted attention on you. This “attention” often doesn’t even concern you as a person, but rather your interests or hobbies, which they misinterpret as something public and then adopt as their own in an attempt to imitate your identity. They refuse to accept your right to decline spending time with them, claiming that you must do so because you are in a “group” together.
Dealing with such a person can turn your brain into mashed potatoes, because they constantly twist reality—insisting that what is up is down and what is down is up.
Even after you have clearly communicated a million times that you are not interested in them, do not find them attractive, and want them out of your life, they will not stop. (Let’s try this, after years of stalking, since no amount of reasoning with a severely deranged stalker ever works: “Abracadabra—out of my life you go now, you vile, disgusting stalker who has made my life a living hell and left me a shell of myself.”)
In the worst cases, a stalker will not only follow you outside but also attempt to force their way into your professional life. The most dangerous stalkers are those who try to work with you so they can harass you at your workplace. Imagine being a teacher instructing students, while a stalker insists on joining your workplace, harassing you during lessons, demanding your attention, and embarrassing you in front of others—all because he lacks the intelligence to understand that as an adult, you have your own work and responsibilities. He might even mock your German skills, belittling your Austrian accent.
Well, let me be clear: we are proud of our Austrian accents and of our linguistic diversity. A German who is accustomed only to his own dialect may unfairly criticize yours as “improper German,” or call your grammar flawed simply because it differs from his. Ironically, when he writes an email riddled with errors, he still blames you for not using “proper language.”
If only one pronunciation of German were permitted, all Germans would first have to abandon their own dialects, then learn to pronounce every word identically. Austrians would have to exchange Austrian flags for German ones while they’re at it. Should we change our passports too, replace Austrian with German on our birth certificates, and erase our culture in the process? Because the Third Reich once held power over many countries, does that mean we should still live as though it wasn’t dissolved?
The stalker—an incel who worships the far right and feels empowered by the growing influence of extremist groups—repeats to himself: “I’m right, I’m right, I’m right,” while labeling me as wrong.
When someone refuses to use their brain, that’s the kind of delusional thinking and emotional blackmail you end up facing—all because you want to go to work unbothered by an incel suffering from delusions of superiority and grandiosity. These types are often encouraged by right-wing ideologies that tell them they are powerful, when in fact they are deeply insecure individuals projecting their inferiority onto others.
And then, of course, they criticize your German skills—even though, by any objective standard, they are excellent. Why else would I have been hired by universities in China to teach German if my language skills were not sufficient? Why else would I have received formal recognition for my contributions to Jilin Province from the provincial government? (Not that I usually boast about such things—those certificates mean little to me personally—but perhaps that very recognition makes such men resentful, as it underscores their own lack of achievement.)
That one email—the one so full of mistakes that I unsubscribed from the newsletter—should not be given undue importance. Let’s not let trivial matters dictate our lives. No Austrian should ever be shamed for their German; we learn it as our mother tongue, just as Germans do, and we have every right to be proud of it.
Not that I am into achievement, competition over work or projects, or over a career, or bragging about how great someone is in their career—boasting constantly that people who have founded companies are superior human beings, so special that no normal employee could ever compete with them.
Why see people as a set of unnatural hierarchies, where those who have founded their own companies are seen as inherently better than those who don’t feel a need to do so?
Take his daddy, for example, whom he still talks about all the time, claiming his daddy is doing this and that, not allowing me the emotional space to not be affiliated with him, to not be drawn into an imagined relationship with him, or to feel obligated to pay praise and love to him—which, by the way, I still don’t understand: the reasons why a person prays to their daddy as though they were extremely little and their daddy were extremely huge, trying to force another human being into feeling close and bonded to him, giving immense power and recognition to that which may matter to him but is certainly insignificant and unimportant in my life.
Have you ever been shamed for your “German”?