hsphaven

I wake up at 3pm, still nauseous from the alcohol I drank yesterday. My head feels like it’s been rammed into a brick wall and I have a cough. Don’t tell me I’m sick again? I’ve only just got over the flu.

It’s 5pm. Looks like it’s too late to go to the post office and send the badge someone ordered from my Etsy store last week. Whenever I get an order, I am no longer excited. “Shit, I can barely stand to be alive, let alone get this order sorted” is what I think. Thankfully I already have the badge made up, so I just need to post it.

It is 6pm and I reluctantly leave my bedroom. I’ve been putting it off as I can’t stand to be around anyone, and I definitely do not want to be asked how I am because the answer is always the same: horrible. I just go through different degrees of horribleness. Today it is particularly horrible.

It has been 8 days since my psychologist dumped me. I haven’t showered all week and clumps of knots are forming in my hair.

I look at pictures of nature on my laptop…. deserts, fields. Instead of making me feel peaceful, they terrify me. They remind me of the emptiness that consumes me. They remind me how big the world is and how big the distance between my heart and my psychologist’s is, if she even has a heart. On TikTok professor Ahmed Hankir shares five signs of a psychopath:

1. Manipulation
2. Grandiosity: the psychopath believes they are the best at what they do
3. Lack of remorse or guilt: the psychopath will not show a trace of guilt towards the people they harm
4. Superficial charm
5. Callousness and lack of empathy

My psychologist meets all five criteria. I believe that even if I were to die, my psychologist wouldn’t give a shit. I think the most frustrating criteria is no. 4: Superficial charm. This is because no one will believe you when you say this person abused you. They all look up to this person.

“It is only after they take everything they want from you, squeeze you dry and discard you that you snap out of the spell that you were under and realise what happened to you,” Ahmed says.

But even after hurting me so much, I still struggle to break the spell that she has cast on me. I remember the funny, caring person I thought she was. That is when the pain and longing to be dead sets in. The flashbacks are like the way Voldemort invades the minds of his victims, creating visions designed to torture them into madness. As Snape describes, “Only after extracting the last exquisite ounce of agony, only when he had them literally begging for death would he finally kill them.” I am no longer screaming out loud, but I am still screaming. They are silent screams, screams that never manage to leave your mouth as though you have been gagged. Similarly the tears rarely make it to the surface, instead building up inside and drowning you from the inside out. It all feels like a nightmare I keep expecting to wake up from.

I feel like I’m on life support. My body is alive but I am gone. My spirit has gone. This is the way I have been living for 25 years. That radiant, energetic child with a quirky sense of humour was gradually and systematically beaten out of me and now I am an empty vessel. I never thought I could get emptier than I was already when I met my psychologist, but does the sky have a limit?

Getting involved with a psychopath is like falling down a rabbit hole. I feel like Alice in Wonderland. That is what I will title this chapter of my life. When I told my psychologist that I’d found her on Facebook, she blocked me, changed her profile picture to a white rabbit and her name to “Yu Cantfindme”. My mother says my psychologist has a face that looks like a cat. I will have to rewatch Alice in Wonderland as I have a feeling it will take on a whole new meaning this time.