Bending Reality

I came to a shocking realization tonight: I am alarmingly easy to manipulate. I’m proud of myself for seeing it tonight, but it’s brought up a lot.

I was in the negotiation phase of dating with this guy we’ll call {MC}, who is one of my guys with the dead girlfriend. Two, actually — cancer and suicide. I should have known something was up when he said he was investigated for the latter of those deaths. Anywho, we were talking about official shit. He didn’t want to, and I didn’t want to keep doing it unless it was official. I was feeling things, and I felt really connected to him, and that’s never a good thing. That’s the psychopath test: if I feel connected to you, you are absolutely a psychopath with blue eyes.

I officially cut him off for the second time because he wouldn’t meet my demands. He wanted fuck buddies — I wanted a relationship. We were already at the “texting all day about meaningless shit” phase. He was at the jealousy phase if I even logged on to the dating app, despite him just wanting friends. I said, “Ask me out.” He said no. I said goodbye because I’m tired of giving men all of me — heart, soul, and body — and then being abandoned for someone else they’re fucking.

Quick. Clean. Surgical. I told him not to contact me. He made it twelve hours before he messaged me on the dating app. I, still being open to a relationship with him, replied and said something flirty about how he couldn’t stay away from me. Then shit got weird…

He told me he didn’t message me. I sent him a screenshot of the message. Then he said he had sent it right after we talked the previous night. It was time-stamped 1:04 PM. He told me that was when I read it. I told him no, that was when he sent it, because I didn’t open the app until 6 PM. Why was he lying about that? I had proof.

I was confused. Then he got mad at me for contacting him. He had messaged me first — I was replying. You see where this is going. He said some other shit too and turned it all around on me like I had done something to him. He said he would have dated me if I hadn’t gone out with this other guy, so it was my fault. That kind of shit.

It was very reminiscent of a conversation I had with {D} when he was unknowingly sending read receipts. He lied and said he was on his bike. I explained to him that he couldn’t operate a motorcycle and check his messages at the same time, and that he was reading the messages in real time — so he couldn’t have been on the bike. He told me it was my jealousy making me think that. No, it was the read receipts. He never backed down from his story. And the fucking hat still isn’t real.

I didn’t recognize how easy it is for me to just agree with and allow men to bend my reality. What I knew, I didn’t know. What I saw, I didn’t see. These larger gaffes of gaslighting are obvious, but it’s the tiny things that add up until you question your own reality.

Now in the case of {D}, I recognized it — to a point. I didn’t see all the small things, but I felt reality slipping. That sounds crazy, but if someone is telling you one thing is something else and you believe them, you start questioning what you see at other times. It’s not losing touch with reality; it’s living in someone else’s reality and trying to accept it as your own. And that is a fucked-up feeling.

I told {D} he was destabilizing me. I didn’t do the girl thing of “oh he should have known.” I literally used the words: “Please stop, you are destabilizing me.” Repeatedly. For months. I wasn’t particularly stable to start with, but I’m very aware of my mental health. I try to explain it and let people know what I need before it becomes a problem. I always know logically exactly what my mind is doing — because I educated myself on it, how and why and what the links are and the chemical functions of the whole mess — but I can fall into the depths of depression and anxiety regardless of knowing why. I try to avoid the meltdown by mitigating and, of course, by asking people not to mind-fuck me. Not that they listen.

So it finally dawned on me that {MC} has been gaslighting, mind-fucking, fucking with my head the whole time I’ve known him. Just like {D} did. Just like Brian 2 did. They were bending my reality. And literally, if you think of an actual break with reality, my reality was being bent by the influence of these men.

{D} did eventually break me, and I’m still coming back from it.

Tonight I am both proud and ashamed of myself. I’m ashamed because I allowed myself to fall into that with {MC}. If he had said yes to dating me, I would have gone into the same type of relationship I had with {D} — with him having control of my reality. And again, I know that sounds crazy, but I have no other way of explaining it right now. The influence on my thoughts is what I’m referring to as reality. I don’t think he’s a magician or a god or literally controlling my brain, just influencing my perception and making me question what I see. But this time I saw it, and I said “No.” I am proud of that.

I told him in no uncertain terms what he was doing was abusive, that it was gaslighting, and that I never wanted to have anything to do with him again. I stood up to protect my reality — for the first time, preemptively — in my life. I did good. I hope I can stay strong if he messages again, but for tonight, I did good.