The targeted individual spends years documenting everything. Videos of the cars. Recordings of the noises. Screenshots of comments. Logs of every harassment, every sleepless night. They share it all online because they believe that if they can just show enough proof, someone will finally listen. A researcher. A journalist. Someone who can help. So they keep sharing. Ten years. More. They reveal things that will never be forgotten—fears, suspicions, the slow unraveling. They offer up pieces of themselves, believing each revelation brings them closer to rescue. The outsider artist learns a similar lesson. Their poverty becomes part of the appeal. Their instability, proof of depth. Their illness, evidence of authenticity. Galleries write about it. Critics mention it. The work is called "raw," "honest," "from a real place." So the artist learns: this is what gets attention. Keep making work from the pain. Keep performing the wounds. They too believe the story will lead somewhere. But for both, the audience has different interests. The online communities consume the evidence, then move on. The researchers never call. The journalists lose interest. The white knight never comes. What once seemed like reaching out now reads, to the outside world, as confirmation of instability. The art market consumes the spectacle of hardship, then moves on when the novelty fades. When the artist tries to make different work, the interest fades. When they ask for better pay, they're reminded to be grateful for the exposure. Years pass. They have a body of work about being poor, but they are still poor. Both are encouraged to become specimens. The targeted individual as proof of persecution. The artist as proof of authentic suffering. Both perform their wounds for an audience that consumes without committing. Both are told that revealing everything will lead somewhere—to help, to success, to rescue. Both discover too late that the arrangement was never designed to support a livable life. It was designed to extract something—a story, a spectacle—while the person holding the story is left with less than they started with. The gallery moves on to the next outsider. The forum moves on to the next person who claims to be targeted. And the person who gave everything to be seen is left alone with what they revealed.