Well, that’s it. I have no reason to keep the silence any more. So now, I can explain what’s been going on.

You all know that I signed up for Stand Up For Mental Health a while back, and in early May, the class started.

It’s basically a program where people with mental health issues learn to do standup comedy as a way of dealing with their issues in a way that turns the bad things into good comedy.

I am a lifelong comedy nerd with mental health issues, and this seemed like the place for me.

All went well until the last class I attended, which was on June 2. In that class, the star of our story and the man behind Stand Up For Mental Health, David Granirer, didn’t quite keep people to schedule as he should, and so despite there being 11 people in class that day, we spent the first two (of three) hours on around three or four of them.

As a result, the last hour had to cover the remaining seven of us, and that made things just a wee bit rushed. The previous class, I had barely gotten to say anything at all, and then to be rushed (which always makes me terribly anxious) through no fault of my own, made me fairly upset.

And Felicity was disappointed as well.

So Felicity, in a long post to Facebook, expressed her disappointment with how things went. Her language was very mild, she named absolutely no names, and she assigned no blame.

I replied to that post in language that was a tad more…. direct.

In response, one of the other people in the course, whom I will call C, launched a very personal attack against Felicity, insulting her comedy and acting like she had just shot the Pope. At every turn, Felicity tried to de-escalate the issue, but C kept on attacking even after Felicity had clearly said ‘uncle’. She accused Felicity of taking her (C’s) turn, which was patently false, and

This was bad. It really hurt Felicity and made her very depressed. We talked about it that evening. She was crushed.

We had been told in our orientation that if we had a conflict with another student, we were to take it to David and he would deal with it. So that is what Felicity did.

It’s a sound and sensible policy, providing certain conditions are met.

But the next thing Felicity know is that people are mad at us for talking about the class in public, thus violating a rule that I am not sure we were ever told. The offense against Felicity was forgotten, and we were the ones in trouble.

Now I was really angry. So I emailed David about the whole situation and was quite blunt with him.

This goes back a few times, then I find out that he has decided it would be “best for everybody” if he transferred us to the next iteration of the program, which would start next January.

In effect, we were being kicked out of the course because he thought some people were “uncomfortable” with us there and and it would be “best” if we just never showed up again.

All for the crime of not knowing that we were not supposed to talk about the course on Facebook (something other students have surely done in the past without getting kicked out).

Needless to say, this made me extremely angry and I emailed David to that effect. I told him that he was betraying Felicity and I, two people with serious mental health, because it was easier to throw out the two big fat nerds than to actually deal with the problem.

I told him he was no liberal. In fact, he was handling the situation no better than any Fox News fan.

I stand by those words.

He was away for a while, so the next move didn’t take place till last Sunday. I got an email from David saying he wanted to talk to me on the phone. I emailed back saying (not for the first time) that the phone made me very anxious and I would prefer to keep it in email.

He emailed back and insisted that it had to be done over the phone. Three guesses as to why, and the first two are “because he was exploiting a known psychological weakness of mine for personal advantage. ”

I emailed back to say “Fine!” and named a timeframe.

He wanted to talk about what would go down today. Today was our last shot at pleading our case. We had agreed to apologize to the class for this whole ordeal, and Felicity and I fully planned to do this.

On the phone, I assured him that I was not planning to launch into an angry diatribe and that I was going to show up purely to apologize and nothing more.

This was true. That is all I had planned to do. Of course, someone of my skills can apologize in a way that nevertheless makes the truth of the situation crystal clear, but it is true I wanted only to apologize.

And that is how the conversation might have ended, had David not then asked about the things I had said in my email. I told him I still believed all those things to be true. He became agitated, and told me that I would not be welcome at today’s class. I told him I would be there anyhow, in the parking lot, waiting for Felicity in her car. . He said no, not even that.

What was he afraid of? That I would attack the class with my mind powers?

Then he hung up on me (so manly) and frantically called Felicity, saying that if she brought me there at all, he wouldn’t let her apologize to the class.

Even if all I did was sit in the car and wait.

Felicity says he sounded rattled and stressed out. Good.

So what went down today was that Felicity and I had lunch at the Denny’s nearest to the course, she went and apologized to the class while I waited in Denny’s, and then she came back, told me how it went, then we went home.

And what do you know…. most of the class didn’t have any problem with her at all.

So basically, Felicity and I got bullied by David. C presumably emailed him about how horrible we were and she’s a crazy person with Borderline Personality Disorder so presumably, she’s pretty scary, and as a result, he took it out on us when all we had done was unwittingly and with absolutely no malice break the rule about public posting on Facebook.

Clearly, this was all about him, not the group. He kicked us out because he couldn’t admit that he had mishandled the situation entirely so he decided to just make us go away.

But I don’t go away until I am done.

And I am far from done.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.