So, my name is Dan, and I recently started being honest about my mental illness - not in the good way. I've been lying about so much shit, not because Im protecting myself, but because I think its fun. I hurt people for fun. I've hurt animals before. I hurt myself for attention. I sexually gratify strangers on the internet for fun, and I don't have any morals or conscience. I'm pretty sure I've never felt guilt, and my "intrusive thoughts" are generally things I like and want to act on (i.e. inappropriate sexual acts with coworkers using foul means/illegal based roleplays). I stayed up all night, and I wrote a very, very long blurb about my mental illness. 

TW: INCLUDES SELF HARM, SA, SUICIDE, AND MORAL AMBIGUITY


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Right now, it is 4:38 AM, and I have been up all night crying. That was a lie - I haven’t cried in days. For the past two days, I have hyper fixated (bordering on manic) on writing a story. I finished out at 15,000 words, with more yet to come. You see, I cannot do anything in moderation.

I was sexually assaulted from ages 8 to 10. Except, I don’t know if it really happened. I have the memories of their words, and I have these believable situations in my head, but I don’t know if they happened. If I approached the person, would he agree that it happened? Or did I make it up? If I was able to piece together and describe all my memories, they surely wouldn’t match up with reality.

I have made things up before, like hallucinations. I never had them. But I was so afraid that someone wouldn’t listen, that someone wouldn’t believe me, so I made my case sound as severe as it possibly could. I have never experienced a hallucination in my life.

To top it off, I am a hypochondriac, but with mental illnesses. When I hear of a mental illness, I convince myself that I have it. I am convinced that I have autism, currently, but I am sure that isn’t true. I convinced myself, and my doctors in the past, that I had bipolar, DID, OCD, ADHD, and nearly schizophrenia. Not because there was REALLY anything wrong with me, but because I saw the words on the internet and thought that it would be more interesting for me as a person if I did have those things.

I am also an exceptionally good liar. I have lied about places, about memories, about events. I lied to my parents that I was the one driving when my best friend and I got in an accident. First, it was to save my friend’s ass - then, it became a truth in my head. I lied about my hallucinations, or having a cousin that died of cancer. I lied about my eating disorder in middle school. I lied to friends about my parents arguing all the time, and I lie that I am traumatized.

I don’t think I really am traumatized. I hear the phrase “gaslighting” tossed around, but I don’t think I’ve ever truly experienced it. Except, sometimes I do. When I mention things my mom did that hurt me, and she says “I think you’re remembering wrong, I wouldn’t do that” with a laugh, it hurts. It makes my head hurt, it makes me want to cry, all because she can’t just say sorry. It makes me think, did it really happen like that? Or am I making things up again?

Then, I think about the times my feelings have been invalidated. When I say I am sad, everyone says, “so what, everyone’s sad.” So I can’t say “I'm sad” anymore. I have to say, “I want to kill myself.” That gets attention, nothing else does. But “i’m going to kill myself” doesn’t even work. So I started to act on it again. I have overdosed twice in the last year and a half, and not for good reasons. I started self-harming again. I say started, it was only twice. And I make a little test for myself. If I don’t tell anyone, if I don’t share that I’m doing it, people don’t react. Do I still feel like I’m faking? Or do I feel like they need to know about it for it to exist?

I used to be very sad. I used to be so, so horribly depressed that I would cry myself to sleep, that I’d stare at the ceiling while sitcom laughs played in the background. I couldn’t even blink, my body was just so numb. When I was sad, time passed quickly. My parents would fret, my friends would talk about me like I was a stone statue that couldn’t respond, and I’d cause an uproar for not doing any school work. Teachers would shame me and tell me to give up (well, just one said that), and students around me would ask why I never did my work. I liked that. But then I started to see a therapist. A person designed to hear me complain. But I wanted to hate it so badly. I lied to my friends, telling them that I hated therapy and didn’t need it, or that I was going to refuse medication. In reality, I was so excited to start meds - I just wanted it to be someone else’s idea first.

I guess the reason I wanted all these things to keep going forever wasn’t so I could struggle with it, but so that I would exist in people’s minds. I liked that I was a trouble to them. It made me happy, even for a moment, that I had tricked them into believing I was depressed and useless.

Except, I really felt that way. I felt, simultaneously, that I had tricked them into feeling something on my behalf, as well as me wishing they would go away and stop asking.

I felt smothered for so long from everyone else, but I craved their attention. I would die inside if someone didn’t ask about one of the clever little quirks I had designed into my personality - like looping the tail in the letter “y,” or my funny facial expressions. I wanted someone to notice me, I wanted someone to care about me like I cared about them. I could list anything about any of my friends, but they could surely not list a thing about me. I do not exist in their minds.

I am very judgemental. I make fun of people in my minds, behind their backs, then flip my opinion when I’m with another person. Like Oliver. He was a friend of mine. When I was with one friend, I would express that I pitied him, that he did not deserve what happened to him - because he was similar to that friend. Then, with my other friend, I would make fun of him because he was trans - because that friend hated trans people.

For years now, I have allowed myself to fall into situations where I am to blame for my own misery. I was in a relationship for a few months with a woman named Payton, over the internet. We never met, but I felt a genuine connection to her. We would send sexual messages, and eventually, she convinced me to send a nude picture of my chest. I was 15. She sent me a picture first then demanded I reciprocate. But, when I say it like that, it makes me sound like the victim. I was asking for it; I clung to her like she was the only sanctuary I had ever known. If she began to cry, I would give her my shoulder. When I didn’t want to pretend to be sexually attracted to her, I would back away and lie that something negative had happened in my day to make me not want to talk to ANYONE. I could never give her any responsibility for my bad feelings. Then, when I would not want to have sexual contact, she’d grow upset. Not directly, not like she heard the words and grew sad. But when I’d reject her advances, she’d say “oh it’s fine I guess,” then slip into a darker state of mind. For hours, I’d type away at my keys, promising a future with her to keep her from killing herself.

Looking back, she wasn’t sobbing on the other end of the keys, holding a razor to her wrists. I know that now, just like I wasn’t begging her to stop with tears in my eyes. I sat blankly staring at the screen, ignoring my surroundings. I’d call it a false panic. Inside, it felt real, but I didn’t express any emotion.

My emotions feel fake. I don’t feel like I genuinely feel any of them, and as a result of that, I don’t express the right feelings. Sure, I smile when I am supposed to, and I feel like I am allowed to be happy from time to time, but I don’t actually feel it. I don’t genuinely feel joy bubbling in my chest. If I could react the way I wanted, I would stay blank in the face, monotonous in the voice, and empty in my gestures.

My eating disorder is a subject of great interest for everyone around me, I’m sure. Kidding. No one cares. My mom didn’t believe I had an eating disorder when I first told her, after I had tirelessly taken online quizzes and done research on the matter through triggering content. I had been purging about three months by then, which I had never done before leading up to it - to her knowledge, I had been doing it since middle school, though, and had a brief intermission before my mental health “spiraled.” Anyway, I was terrible at starving myself, and I was a very fat girl, so she clearly didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe me. I was always fat growing up. Then, I took a psych evaluation with my local mental health providers. Months after taking the exam, I got the results: no eating disorder. I asked what made them think that, and they said that I didn’t show traits, that it was a manifestation of my other habits. Then, I talked to my therapist. Her words are still ones I can quote: “I may not be able to treat eating disorders, but I can diagnose them - that isn’t what’s happening here.”

So, that was three people who had denied my call for help. It spiraled. That, actually, is the one mental illness I take credit for - not because i formed it myself (which I did), but because it had a physical effect on me. My heart rate and blood pressure had dipped so low that I was in danger. I felt like a slug. But, I was only down to 265 lbs. So who cared? My therapist at the time did. (kinda). He sent me to McCallum Place, a residential ED facility, where I stayed for two months both in residential and intensive outpatient settings.

Why, you may ask, do I say “kinda?” Because he hated me, and I hated him. But none of us ever said a word about it. His name was Andy, not that that’s important to anything but one point in the story. From my mom’s point of view, he was a narcissist, one that was always challenging me and convinced me of my DID only to sneer at me behind my back that I was lying. In reality, I was trying to convince him that I had it so he would think something was wrong with me. I had him for about one session, but my unwillingness to talk the next session about these fake “alters” was a dead giveaway.

I didn’t hate him for that. I hated him for that snarky, unforgiving smirk he gave my mom when he said “she doesn’t have DID. She’s been doing too much research, it’s all in her head.” I hated his cocky attitude, his cruel voice, and the fact he talked to my mom about that in a session where i wasn’t present (my mom was another of his clients). I didn’t want him to tell her the truth, I didn’t want her to believe him over me. And I CERTAINLY didn’t want anyone else calling me out on my bullshit.

He wasn’t the first one that had called me out. My medicine prescriber did the same. I wrote down all my “symptoms” of ADHD (which I am still debating whether it is fake) and shared them with him - he said to my face that I had “looked up a list of symptoms and written them down.”

Remember earlier when I mentioned a psych eval? Well, on that evaluation, it said that I “dramatized my symptoms for attention,” and that my only issues were depression and anxiety. Oh, that made me mad. I don’t want to be called dramatic. In fact, I don’t want to be called anything. I hate people talking about me, but I love when they talk shit TO me, so I have something to bitch about.

See, that’s the funny thing: I hate attention. Not negative attention, but positive attention. I don’t want to be complimented, assured, confided in, or anything of the sort. Fuck off, don’t talk to me, I don’t want to hear it. It’ll always be the same things I’ve heard since elementary school when people were forced to give each other compliments “you’re kind,” or “you’re smart,” or “you’re tall.” No diversity. No care. I wasn’t a thought in their minds, no one could even think of anything besides those three descriptors. And it carried through to all my grades.

I love negative attention. It fuels my self loathing, I think. I used to take pictures of my body, take videos of me doing sexual acts, and send them to people, post them on the internet. I would ask people to degrade me, tell them that I was interested in them, and lead them on so they would say horrible things. The amount of times I told someone I was interested in rape, or gangbangs, or beastiality, or urine, or impregnation? Insane. I’ve been called so many things that make me feel like garbage, like an object. I feel dirty and used. And that makes me feel alive. In fact, even though I promised a friend I wouldn’t do it anymore, I’m going to start again tonight. I hope she finds out, I hope she’s disappointed in me, and I hope she hates me for it. I’ll blame it on my “addiction to self harm and poor coping strategies” or something of the sort.

I have never had sex more than with one person, and it was only a few times. I would barely even call it sex. He pressured me, and I was, again, 15. That was a weird few months for me, breaking up with Payton then diving into a relationship with Adrian. I don’t know if it was really pressure, or if it was just me trying to make people pity me. But I never said yes. I was so, so uncomfortable with it. After that, we spent time getting naked and going on Omegle to talk to strangers. They seemed to like it. I once made a goal to see how many men I could get to send me videos of them jerking off to me, and it surely broke a record of some sort. I think I got up to 8, and three of them came on camera. Pathetic.

I don’t think I’m better than anyone. In fact, I quite hate myself. I cannot think of one good thing about myself. Actually, I don’t know that anyone else could, either. To top it off, I have a dogshit personality. I blame people, trick them, lie to them, all to get some kind of reaction. 

There was this poor girl named Carmie. I look back and cringe, but also wish I had saved a bit of space for me to go on the attack again. I was friends with her online, until another friend of mine hated her. Then I saw her as prey. I attacked her, making her hate herself. Then apologized and made up. Then I did it again a few months later, and she forgave me again. Then, I made secret accounts to be friends with her, and I would tell lies about other people. I manipulated the fuck out of her, just for the fun of it. And every time, she would believe me, and I’d crush her again. Then, I’d lie. I lied to her that I had been diagnosed bipolar that day, so I was super cranky. She immediately apologized to me. I made her feel like the bad guy. I didn’t have a single regret, I actually loved it.

I don’t currently care to recover. I don’t really know why I’m here. I’m not addicted to anything, I just feel like I’m floating around in my own head. I could stop self harming anytime, without issue. I don’t feel bad for “relapsing,” if you can even call it that. I don’t feel bad for sexually gratifying strangers on the internet, either. I don’t feel bad for crushing people’s feelings, or making situations awkward. I don’t feel bad for lying. I don’t feel bad for anything. I don’t feel anything, period.

Somedays, I worry something is wrong with me. Somedays I think I’m going crazy, somedays I want to be just like a character I saw in a show. I’ll use words they said, dress like they do, and copy their motions and expressions. Then, once I have that character absorbed into my personality, I’ll move on.

I never had genuine feelings for anyone else, I just saw a person that seemed like I could trick into liking me and convinced them that I was a good match, that I cared.

I thought once, “I’m so glad I turned out to really need glasses, so people didn’t find out I was faking needing them.”

I really am fucked up, huh?