The heist

Part one
Possible contributing factors

Before I begin this story, I want to say that, in my opinion, unless you’re dying of starvation, or something equally as serious, you shouldn’t steal anything ever, and there really isn’t a valid reason for doing so.

Yet, I am not judging you if you have, as I obviously don’t know the circumstances around that event, and I would bet as teenagers, or under the influence of alcohol, etc, most of us probably have stolen something, and that the circumstances were probably some what similar to those in this story.

I also understand how you might end up in that situation, after all, I did. None of us are perfect, nor completely innocent creatures. We all make mistakes. We all do stupid stuff.

Stealing certainly isn’t “for me.” It is in no way who I am, or a reflection of my morals or character.

Despite wanting to explain the factors that might have contributed to this incident, I am in no way making excuses for what I did, or attempting to shift the blame to anything, or anybody, else. Ultimately, I did what I did because I made the choice to, while being fully aware it was wrong.

On the day I stole, I did not go out with the intention to steal, at no point did I make a plan to steal, I simply saw something I considered to be worth very little value financially, that I thought I should have been able to buy, and because I couldn’t, and I wanted it, I decided in the moment to take it.

This is all to say, that though I feel it is important to address the state of my life and my mental health at this time, none of it was the cause of what I did. It all just created this perfect storm during which I cared very little for either myself or life, and truly I believed I shouldn’t, which resulted in me doing something out of character.

These feelings were further fuelled by the fact that everybody else thought so little of me and my life, and had or were treating me accordingly, and to a large extent I was allowing them to treat me this way.

As all these contributing factors are either stories I have told, will tell, or am currently in the middle of telling, I will just briefly list them here (and, if I remember, add links to the full stories below, as and when I write them).

It was the summer holidays in between my first and second year of university, meaning I had spent the previous year dealing with both xenophobic and classist discrimination.

Why not be a thief if that’s what everybody believes you are?

Well, for one thing, it not only makes what were incorrect and unfair opinions of you correct and fair, if you’re caught it proves to the people who held those incorrect and unfair opinions that they were correct, therefore further harming everybody else who is unfairly effected by those untrue opinions.

More importantly, though, you should never allow hateful, bigoted, people to change who you are, especially for the worse.

Listen, I understand this second one is hard, particularly when we are upset, angry, stressed, etc. The best of us can, and will, fall down occasionally. What really matters is that we haven’t harmed anybody in the process, and that we pick ourselves back up, dust ourselves off, and resume trying to be the best version of ourselves we can be. This includes apologising if it is both necessary and appropriate, and fixing anything we have done wrong if it is possible. Be honest, and admit your mistakes. Own them. If you don’t, or can’t, you will never learn from them, or improve as a result of making them.

During this same year, I had ironically been the victim of the very thing people suspected I was, a thief. This thief had keys to my room in halls, and was allowed to entre it when ever they decided it was necessary, which somehow made me to blame for being victimised because I had stupidly assumed I could safely keep my possession in a private room I paid to occupy.

Why, then, should anybody care if I stole from a large organisation’s attraction, that I considered to be a scam?

Also, why should I face any punishment when the person who stole from me hadn’t.

Maybe you agree with this idea, but the truth is, I actually don’t. Business have to pay staff, bills, and other costs. If we all thought this way, if we all did what I did, some companies would make such a loss they would go under, while others would close down because they would no longer be profitable.

I also don’t agree that I shouldn’t have been punished, despite the reality that the punishment I received would likely have had a much greater impact on both my life then, and now, than the item was worth, as well as being much greater than the loss the organisation suffered, as a direct result of my actions, deserved. I doubt anybody ever realised the item was missing.

Theft wasn’t the only crime I had been the victim of, then blamed for, that year. There was the big one. The one I am moving towards telling you about. The one that lead to my first long BPD episode that was misdiagnosed as a nervous break down, and eventually to my first suicide attempt.

There was the fact that I had to move back home, and back in with my mum, for the summer.

Here, I would like to say I foolishly took a job in a pub that summer, which I walked to and from down isolated roads, even in the early hours of the morning, all of which contributed to the deterioration of my mental state, regardless of the fact nothing to awful happened to me. Honestly, though, I had no choice. I needed the money, after all you don’t get student loan over the summer holidays, and I was earning so little at the pub, due to a combination of my age and sexism, that I couldn’t afford taxi fares home, and my options were limited to getting a taxi or walking.

Then, there were the friends I was with that day, who they were as people, and my relationship with them.

On top of all this, I was suffering severely with a serious undiagnosed mental illness. One that causes me impulse control issues. Looking back on this incident, with the knowledge that I have this illness and the type of episodes it causes me to have, I feel strongly that on this particular day, I was in the grip of a mixed manic type and suicidal type episode.

Part two
The incident

I knew I had made a mistake on the train journey there. I hadn’t wanted to go, and I had told MK as much. More importantly, I hadn’t felt mentally well enough to go.

The best way to describe how I was feeling that entire summer is mentally unwell.

Those words sound strange, obvious, and like a colossal understatement, now I have a diagnosis which proves they were always true.

You see, mentally unwell, are words I have thought and said my entire life, while experience borderline episodes, whether short or long.

Mainly, I said them to GP’s, desperately and hysterically, while crying and “shouting”.

Their response was always that I was fine/ normal/ there was nothing wrong with me, everybody suffers from anxiety/stress/depression/etc, at times. It was delivered in a tone and/or manner that suggest I was being dramatic/wasting their time/ after attention/ trying to get out doing something I didn’t want to do.

So, whenever the feeling of being mentally unwell became overwhelming in the moment, for any reason, I would chide myself, echoing both these doctors’ words as well as their attitudes. I would tell myself I was faking feeling mentally unwell, either to get out of doing something I didn’t want to do or for attention. It never occurred to me, very likely because I am genuinely mentally ill, therefore vulnerable, particularly when it comes to abuse, use, or negligence of responsibility and duties, of people in a position of power, such as these GP’s, that this couldn’t be true, as not only did I not once attempt to use feeling mentally unwell to get out of doing anything or to gain attention, on the contrary I actually tried my best to hide the fact that I was struggling and to behave “normally”.

Whose idea it had been to go to Blackpool, I don’t know, but I am fairly certain it wasn’t MK’s, therefore I am fairly certain he had been invited and want to go, but didn’t want to risk ending up alone for the day, and this was his motivation for nagging me so aggressively and relentlessly to go with them during the days leading up to the trip.

My reason for coming to this conclusion is that the only people MK knew in the group that day was me, KK, and one other person.

The only people I knew out of the group going were MK and KK.

KK was never my friend, she was MK’s, but I liked her, and for a while I thought of her as my friend. To me, it seemed as though she considered me to be her friend too, but on reflection I understand this probably wasn’t the case.

All the other people we went with were also only loosely connected to each other. What I mean by this is that, not a single person in the group, of around twenty of us, knew the majority of the other people in our group. One person had suggested to another they should go, they both invited their own people, who invited people, who invited other people, and so on. This is strange in itself.

This is why, on arriving at the fair ground, we all split off into groups of two or three.

It was only at this point, KK explained to me that she had wanted to go, but had been scheduled to work, and though she had requested a shift swap, she didn’t think she was going to get it.

On hearing this, the sensation that had begun to build inside me on the train journey there, which was that I was trapped in a situation I didn’t want to be in, a sensation I experience a lot, began to grow into a manic energy that screamed to be released. Often, when I feel this way, I want my consciousness to leave my brain with a frantic urgency, then I begin to feel trapped inside my own brain, as though my consciousness is hysterically clawing at my flesh and bones to escape.

With this, came the rage I experience when I realise I have been used, abused, or taken advantage of, in some way.

How many times had I declined MK’s invitations?

How many times had I made it clear I didn’t want to go?

Too many, not only to count, but to not feel like I had been manipulated into going for MK’s own selfish reasons, rather than he just want me to.

Every time I had said no, I didn’t want to go, he had reasons why I should, I hadn’t been to Blackpool since I was a very young child/ I had only ever been with my parents, never my friends/ it would do me good to have some fun.

Only, I don’t find fair grounds fun, I hate them, I hate the rides, I hate the crowds of people, I hate the loud repetitive noises, I hate the music, I hate everything about them, and I had expressed as much to MK.

At first, the only two people in my group were MK and KK. This meant that not only did MK continue to nag me to take part in things I didn’t want to take part in, such as go on rides, KK joined in with the nagging.

I practically begged to wait with their things instead, but they rallied strangers, either in the queues, or running the rides, to “encourage” me to get on them. This group pressure got much worse when we were joined by another sub group form our larger group, then a second.

Now there were, if I remember correctly, eight of us in our group.

With each ride I was pressured onto, my anxiety – and with it the feeling of a building panic attack, my stress- and with it my racing thoughts, and my depression- and with it the desire to die, and blaming myself for being pathetic because I could assert myself, grew, agitating me further, until I felt as though I was suffocating inside my own body, and I desperately needed to get away from both my friends and myself.

To make the situation more unbearable, by the point we naturally came to the game stalls, I need food. It wasn’t just that I was starving, which I was. One of myself harm behaviours is eating- I am a binge eater. I imagine any other self harmer understands the compulsion and need to engage in self harm behaviours, and that is what I was feeling in the moment, the mounting, intensely painful, urge to engage in mine.

Which, as I write this, makes me wonder if what I did was an attempt at self harm, or just a desperate attempt to get out of a situation I didn’t want to be in, didn’t feel safe in, but felt trapped in. Maybe, I wanted to get caught.

Maybe, I just didn’t care if got caught. After all, when you don’t value yourself or your life, and neither does anybody else, and/or you want to die, it is hard to care about the consequences your actions have on both you and your life.

But more realistically, maybe I did it because I wanted that fucking stupid toy, and I was sick of feeling like everything and everyone was was, taking advantage of me then telling me it way my fault they had taken advantage of me, telling me a was a bad person while expecting me to be a better person than they were.

Either way, when I saw the giant my little pony toys, which were about half my height in length, that was one of the prizes, I wanted one.

Assessing the stalls, I searched for a game I thought I might be able to win, which also had the my little ponies as a prize, vocalising my intentions.

“You cant win,” MK informed me. “Those games are rigged so nobody wins.”

“He’s right,” one of the girls in our group agreed. “Everybody know they’re a scam.”

“Surely, they would be allowed to do that,” I argued.

“They do,” One of the body shrugged.

“That’s not fair,” I started to complain, stopping when I realised the majority of the stalls were unmanned, and I could see they had toys on their shelves below their counter tops.

If I remember correctly, there were three rows of stalls. None of the centre stalls were manned, and only one in every two or three of the stalls on the outside rows were. Even better, all the manned stalls were busy, so none of the staff at them were paying attention to us.

“Let’s take one,” I whispered. I wasn’t thinking about how my actions might affect the staff or business, because I was under the impression these games were rigged, therefore I was simply evening things out a bit.

“No,” MK told me forcefully. “You take one if you want one, but when you get caught, you’re not with us.”

“Fine. You’re all cowards,” I laughed, thinking about all the rides they had bullied me onto that day. Yet, they were all scared of taking a toy from a conman. As bizarre as it is, in this moment I wasn’t even angry at them. I was angry at them the entire day before, and after, and for many of the following days and weeks, but not in this moment. I wasn’t even upset that they wouldn’t “help me”. I expected to get caught. I Knew nothing about stealing. They weren’t responsible for my actions, I was.

However, here’s the thing, and I completely understand if you don’t believe me, because this is a story about me stealing, but if the roles had been reversed, I would have at least tried to talk them down. I deeply regret what I did that day, I would never do it again, and up until that point it is something I never imagined I would ever do.

The really crazy thing, though, is that I hadn’t really believed I could win a prize, even when I though the games were fair, and I would have happily lost.

Honestly, looking back, I think I was more pissed off because they had took that small bit of fun I could have enjoyed that day away from me.

And, if they had tried to help me, I reckon they would have gotten me caught.

Settling on my target stall, I walked confidently towards it, despite having no idea how I was going to execute my heist. As I did, I watched the staff, to make sure they weren’t watching me, in what I felt was a perfect imitation of my previous indecision over what game to play. When I reached my target, I kept walking. Placing my hand on its counter top, I slid it along the surface, before dropping it underneath and grabbing the tail of the first pony I felt on the shelf below. Then, when I got to the end of the stall, I pulled my hand with they toy in it over the side of the booth, where the gate to get in and out was, without missing a step, and continued the entire length of the row of stalls, before turning around and rejoining the group.

Later, they would admit that even knowing I was stealing, they never saw the actual act occur.

“It seemed like one second your hand was empty, then magically the next you were holding the pony,” the girl who had agreed with MK giggled.

When the entire group met up at the exit later, one of the men in the group had a giant, human sized fish toy. A fish toy I recognised from those game stalls.

“How the fuck did you steal that?” I asked in awe.

“I didn’t. I won it,” he had answered confused.

Part three
After thoughts

Maybe there are no shades of grey, just black and white, when it comes to stealing.

Maybe, it doesn’t matter why we stole, or who we stole from.

As stated in my introduction to today’s post, my opinion is that stealing is wrong. Yet, I wont judge anybody just because they have stolen, as context does matter to me.

Though, I would be very interested to hear your opinion.
What do you think, does
-who you stole from
-what you stole
-why you stole it
-or any other fact around the act of stealing,
matter?

You’re more than welcome to discus your thoughts in the comments.

There are, however, some factors I cant forgive when it comes to stealing.

One of these is throwing, vulnerable, ill and/or disabled people, under the bus to save yourself. By this I mean, pretending you have physical and/or mental disability and/or illness to avoid blame and/or punishment. When people do this, they fuel, if not outright create, stigma and discrimination, that those of us who genuinely do sufferer with these illness and disabilities then also have to suffer through.

It is because of what I did in today’s post, that I knew immediately, on seeing the CCTV footage, the technique that lady who stole my bag used.

Due to this technique being so well executed, as well as my half a decade, plus, experience working in retail, it is my opinion, because I obviously can’t say for certain, that neither of those ladies needed that wheelchair for illness or disability, and instead were using it fully as a tool and prop.

As a tool, the chair obstructs by standers, and security cameras, views of the crime as it happens. Then, it serves as a place to both hide and store anything they successfully manage to steal.

As a prop, its purpose is much darker.

People are less likely to confront a physically disabled person, even when they see them doing something wrong. Most people will just pretend they didn’t see it. On the rare occasion a person does confront them, they are more likely to do it discretely and in a less emotionally heated manner.

This isn’t the case for mentally ill or mentally disabled people, even when our illness or disability is obvious. In fact, more people feel both entitled to intervene, and to use aggression or force, if they suspect we are mentally ill or mentally disabled.

Here is where the use of a wheelchair gives an extra advantage that baffles me, especially because we know criminals will fake disability to aid their crimes.

If say, it was a mentally ill or mentally disabled person being confronted for stealing, and they, or a person with them, explained they were mentally ill or disabled, that would likely only encourage the person confronting them to call the police, and escalate any force or aggression they were already using.

Whereas, if the person in the wheelchair, or pushing it, claimed to be mentally ill or mentally disabled, that would likely not only deescalated the confrontation, but earn them sympathy and pity, and likely allow them to go about their day without the police even being mentioned.

This is not me saying mentally ill and mentally disabled people should be allowed to steal and/or face no consequences if they do. This is me saying this double standard baffles me.

I do wonder, as I write this, if caught, would those two ladies who stole from me, a genuinely mentally disabled person, therefore a person who is more vulnerable to crime, have claimed disability was the reason they victimised me?

And if at the time, I had known I was disabled and stated as much to discredit that excuse, which of us would have been believed, me the victim, or them the thief?

And how much of that belief or disbelief would have be due to there being a wheelchair involved?

Why are we more likely to believe and have sympathy for somebody just because they appear to be physically disabled?

And why are mentally disabled people constantly met with so much aggression, physical force, and disgust and/or distrust?

Does this conversation make you uncomfortable?

If so, good, it should.

But, it should make you feel uncomfortable for the right reasons-
It should make you question inbuilt social norms that are ignorant and ableist, that we have all been raised with, and made to believe are correct, until we are suddenly understand they are not, and why they are not, because we are on the receiving end of the ignorance and ableism.
This includes me, I was born into the same world as you, I was raised with the social norms that are discriminatory, the only difference is, I was born with the genetic predisposition to certain mental illness, and then had experiences as a child that triggered those illnesses, and because of that everything I say or do is now looked at by society through a lens of distrust and disgust.

If on the other hand anybody reading this feels offended by my observations, experiences, and opinions on disability discrimination, stigma, and inequality, around disability, not only when it comes to being disabled but the different disabilities, as a disabled person- know this, I don’t care, these people can go off and continue to be ignorant, ableist, and bigoted, and me and other disabled people will continue to talk about all these things to decent human beings who just don’t understand yet, or who just have never really had these things brought to their attention yet, etc and because of both our advocacy work, and the decent people who we encounter, the world will move on and catch up, and when it does these people will pretend they have no problem with us, and never did, just like they do for every other set of people who has ever been victimised unfairly in a similar way, so they can earn clout from complete strangers, for values they don’t really hold- but if this description fits you, you better not say anything bigoted about my disability where I can see it or hear it, because if you do I will keep those receipts, and I am happy to pull them out in the future and remind everybody who you really are.

It would serve these people well, people who now hang on to liberated minorities coattails, while talking absolute crap that they don’t realise exposes them as a bigot, to remember that at the points in time these minorities were being persecuted the popular belief was that they were awful people, that is what allowed them to be persecuted. Mental illness, and my type of mental illness, are no different. It might be popular to hate them now, but one day, hopefully soon, people will understand why persecuting us is wrong, and those people will be on the wrong side of history.

As a person with borderline personality disorder, I could blame the traits of the illness that affect me, such a lack of impulse control, for my crime in todays story, but it wouldn’t be true. In my experience BPD doesn’t make you do anything you wouldn’t do if you didn’t have it, it just takes you to your own personal extremes an awful lot, be that self harm or shouting when you’re upset, and for most of us who suffer from it, our personal extremes are the same as most people who don’t suffer from its personal extremes.

So, why should I as a disabled person who wouldn’t blame my disability for doing wrong, who understands the importance of not blaming my disability for doing wrong, allow other people who don’t have my illness, or an illness similar to it, blame our illnesses for the bad things either they themselves or other people do?

I shouldn’t. And I won’t.

That is why it is important that I tell todays story, and the context of everything that surrounded the event, then put it into perspective in regards to how it is viewed in the real world, compared to how other people doing the same thing is viewed in the real world.

And lets all be honest, if I didn’t have BPD, and I was telling this story at a party, for example, I’m sure instead of turning me into a villain, you would giggle like the girl with us that day did, and then tell me your own story, about a time you also stole something completely fucking stupid.