Silver Parnell
Sannyasini Kaliprana
Accidental Hermit
Readers will notice that I have changed the blog name from "Diary of an Accidental Hermit," under which I have been writing for the last ten years, to "Silver Cottage Hermitage," which is what I named my hermitage residence, years ago.
I had not planned to do this but it was thrust on me, like so many things are these days. A poor, disabled, senior woman cannot even keep those things that she herself creates when people with more resources just mow them down.
A woman I knew, peripherally, 30 years ago resurfaced on Facebook recently. The monastery/convent she helped create was closed, and she and a couple other members left institutional life and moved into an apartment building in the Southwest. They were getting set up to teach online classes and whatever else she had in mind to support herself. I did my best to help her, offering to advertise her online classes about a saint we both admire. I was happy to be in touch with her again, as we had a lot in common, plus a small bit of history.
On about May 29th, I sent her a private message with the link to my blog "Diary of an Accidental Hermit" with some explanatory conversation about it, telling her I had been writing it for the last 10 years, etc.
Shortly afterward, in June, I began to see advertisements for her. She was now being called "The Accidental Hermit" which is not how she'd ever been known before this time and did not describe her situation at all. These advertisements obliterated my blog when my readers tried to find it in a Google search. Even if my readers typed in my exact blog name, no one would be able to find it. All you could see, for pages and pages, were advertisements for this woman's podcast.
Of course, I questioned her about it on Facebook and sent her the link to my blog again, but she ignored me for two weeks, so I sent her an email. In her response, she claimed it had nothing to do with her and that the interviewer had invented it out of whole cloth, but when I listened to the podcast, it was obvious she had fed it to the interviewer. Of course, I have no idea whether it was deliberate or accidental, which really did not matter because my blog had been obliterated. For all intents and purposes, ten years of work and close to 400 blog posts had vanished.
"The Accidental Hermit" is a catchy moniker and had been used by 2 other people in the last 30 years, but in our situation, my blog could not even be found, with nearly 400 posts, in addition to which, she and I are doing something EXTREMELY similar and there was a risk that our work would be confused with one another's. She had recently set herself up as an urban hermit in an apartment in the Southwest, which is what I have been doing for the last 20 years.
This woman was then and now remains unapologetic about the chaos that she caused me. She is too busy gaslighting me and criticizing me for how I wrote my email. She also got the interviewer involved and wrote her an email that gave the impression that I was just some stranger that had swanned in from out of nowhere and was sending her "disturbing" emails. Like the internet version of a deluded homeless woman.
A bit of a minor celebrity, it is possible that this woman is used to people deferring to her, but to be honest, I have encountered similar officious and hostile reactions from people who have been caught violating my copyright with some biographies I have written in connection with genealogy work I did, so perhaps this is just the reaction that grasping people will give, as a matter of course, when they are caught doing something unethical.
Rather than fighting about it, I changed the name of the blog to conform to the name of my hermitage, and am in the process of switching out the individual blog addresses on some of the posts. It has cost me a lot of hours of work, but I exert myself willingly if it will save me from this sordid mess. I intend to put it behind me as quickly as possible and move on.
It IS disappointing that my friendship has been repaid in this way. "No good deed goes unpunished!" I can't say I'm surprised, however, because this incident is yet another example of why men are in charge of the world. Most women simply do not know how to support other women, working instead to undermine one another. I've written about this tendency many times.
As is my custom, I will find whatever beneficial and holy thing that can come out of this change to the blog and pray that my little band of readers can eventually find me. I will put some work into tagging my blog posts with the original name of the blog, and hope that this will do the trick. We will be "up and running" soon.
In the meantime, may you all be blessed!
Silver Rose
Sannyasini Kaliprana
P.S. All of the blog posts I write are independently researched and written by me and all of them are protected by legal copyright, so please just enjoy them here and leave them here where you found them and do not copy any of it to any other place for any purpose.
(c) Copyright 2022, Silver S. Parnell
All rights reserved.
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