(inspired by friends' dating app woes)
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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She didn't just think she was a witch, which I was mostly OK with because religions are weird and stuff, so I thought as long as it doesn't reach the realm of life-affecting problems, it's a non-issue.
She also believed she had friends who were werewolves, she could do magic, the date of your birth determined your personality, because a planet was in retrograde good things were about to happen, vampires started the Red Cross so they could always have access to blood, and, oh yeah, along with her two mortal parents she also had an incubus second father and that she was half-demon and that's why she liked sex when she wasn't supposed to.
That... That girl needed some serious help, but claimed that she was well-adjusted and fit to help other people instead. Because, of course, she was also an empath...
Edit: I want to make something clear that it suddenly struck me I haven't; with all this craziness that she believed, that young woman had her life a hell of a lot more together than I did or do. She graduated university while I flunked out, she found a job while I'm being rejected every time that I apply, she found a low-rent apartment to live in while I'm still living with my folks. Don't get me wrong, girl had some trauma and had some problems. But she was contributing to society while I'm fucking around on the internet because I can't seem to make anything of myself.
That's so much to unpack
It really was. While there were bits and pieces of this that came up during the relationship, the bulk of this came out as we were breaking up. She had been abused as a kid, though I'm not sure the extent of that abuse. At the very least, she was abused by being effectively abandoned. She said she fended for herself, mostly eating canned food she got for herself through grade school, things like that.
I was upset for a while, she's not someone I want anything to do with, but mostly I just feel bad for her. She was traumatized as a kid, she receded into a delusion to try and escape that, and her delusion came to define her to the point where she got incredibly defensive if you tried to challenge its reality. She had said that she tried therapy before but that it didn't work because she knew better than the therapists how to deal with her problems, and I'm certain what that actually means is that they tried to talk her out of her delusion and she wasn't having any of it.
I really hope she got the help she needs, but I sadly doubt it.
How old was she? Because, while I don't doubt the mental health aspect of it all, it also sounds a lot like a young person who doesn't really know themselves and is desperate to feel special.
I don't remember exactly how old she was, but we were in our last years of university (I failed out, she graduated) so she was definitely in her early twenties, 22-24, somewhere in there.
And, yeah, no, my amateur and as such meaningless guess of a diagnosis was also that part of the delusion was a need to feel special. She talked about how most other people didn't know the truth, they couldn't know the truth, because she had magic power that let her know things about the world that normal humans couldn't. You get that sort of language in conspiracy theorists and other types of people who want to feel special, they want to be in on some secret that everyone else can't be. So I'd say that's definitely part of it. But I also think, especially with her believing in a third parent when she was initially abandoned by her father and effectively abandoned by her mother until her father got custody of her again, I think most of it stems from her trauma as a child. Even that need to feel special, with no real parental figure for many of her formative years (I don't remember how old she said she was when her father regained custody of her), probably stemmed from that lack of anyone encouraging her.
But, ultimately, I don't know. She didn't tell me half of this stuff until we were breaking up. And I'm not a psychologist, and she very much needed one.
I had a brief connection with a woman last year who was similarly deluded but in a different way, but also outstandingly kind, talented, intelligent, etc etc, and she was very open about how much abuse she'd undergone in her life, and it just makes me fucking cry. I've never cried about anything so much in my life. It feels like there's no justice.