187: What if you were trapped all over again?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. In horror movies, there's this beautiful moment for the protagonist where the monster's real. Everyone can see it. It's clearly hurting people. But a lot of times in real life, there isn't a neatly wrapped up ending.

From Wondery, I'm Wit Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 187. What if you were trapped all over again?

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I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. I was born in 1997. Parents were kind of these party animals, for lack of a better term. Always people over the house, always big parties, a lot of drinking I saw as a kid, right? It was very normal for me to see someone very intoxicated. I know that they do smoke weed. There was cocaine, especially in the earlier part of my life.

People look at my parents like as a good time, a really fun people to have around a party. But my parents are what I would now call a little emotionally underdeveloped. They were both born in the 60s. Mental health was not discussed, even though my dad's grandfather killed himself right after my dad was born. You know, there was no deeper discussion about, well, depression runs in our family.

My dad's father also had his issues with alcohol, drinking too much. My house was like a constant cycle of arguing problems and then drinking. And then the problems would just get worse or deeper or more meaningful to the person who was bringing up the problem because it never got dealt with in the first place.

There's all this stuff that we now look at as mental health issues with addiction, over-drinking, doing drugs, just looking for a good time that back in the day was just considered partying. It was more considered normal. So a lot of tension just rose in my house because you have someone with depression arguing with someone in my mother who is anxious and unwell.

a bit of a narcissist. So it's just all of these mental health issues clashing all at once. I don't necessarily even think it's really their fault. They just have a limited perspective because they were born well before all of this stuff was talked about.

I was a really talkative, loud, energetic child. I always got in trouble for talking too much in class, always got that on my report card as like smart kid, but talks too much. And I think part of that has to come from the emotional unavailability of my parents.

When problems aren't being resolved in the home and then they're just getting worse and perpetuated again and again and again, you know, you don't feel totally great going to your parents about whatever you're feeling because it's not going to be handled the way you want it to be. We talked, but there was never any deeper, meaningful conversations, which is what I crave. And now as an adult, I realize that's something that I gravitate towards as a person.

I always would get shit from my parents' friends for arguing with them, yelling at them, telling them off. But my thing with my parents' friends was always, you have no idea what my parents are like when you're not here. You see the version of them that they project onto everyone else, but I know what they're like on a Tuesday at 7pm when I just want to get my field trip permission slip signed and

And it causes a three-hour argument where my mom cries and my dad storms off to go be by himself. And I'm stuck trying to pick up the pieces. My mom is a very successful narcissist.

She manages large groups of people. She's always made hundreds of thousands of dollars during my lifetime and worked 60 plus hour weeks, which I commend her for. But at the same time, she never gets challenged because she's very generous. She always has people over out free alcohol, free food, whatever. Yes. But again, on Wednesday at 6 p.m.,

I can't even ask you a question without you freaking out. My sisters were five years younger than me and didn't really know what was going on. So I really was kind of by myself dealing with this stuff. And I had a lot of self-doubt when it came to my life in general because I felt a little crazy.

The two people I was supposed to be able to go to about anything I can't go to because they have their own issues. Then I'm like, oh, my God, no one knows what's going on. Only I do. And these adults have carte blanche to say whatever they want because no one's going to believe a child over two adults living in a house that makes them look successful. They have money. They have jobs. So what's the problem here?

I always had to apologize when me and my parents got into a big fight. They wouldn't come to me to seek out my forgiveness or to make me feel better. I would have to do the opposite. So it was a lot of reverse parenting. I was called a problem child, but no one ever was like, why is there a problem?

I know I grew up privileged. I knew I had more money than other kids. I knew that I had more Christmas gifts. I knew I went on more vacations than some other kids did. But at the same time, I looked at these kids like they are much happier than me.

Now I get it, right? I'm a white man living in a whitewashed America and I acknowledge my own privilege. And I think that's a very important process. But the privilege masked the problems at home. The privilege masks your parents hitting you, your parents neglecting you, your parents emotionally abusing you because you're well fed. And I think that was a big reason that it was hard for me to get help.

Because I felt like it wouldn't matter. In middle school, I was a fairly popular kid. I had a girlfriend before a lot of other people did in eighth grade. But by the time high school rolled around, I had a really tough time connecting with people. I was very alone in high school.

I don't know why, but there was definitely always this disconnect between me and other students. It was almost like all the other students had someone tell them how to dress, how to behave, how to do whatever. And I felt kind of a lot of the times I was just faking it, looking around, trying to imitate other people.

I just started feeling so adrift, alone, by myself in all of these emotions. Is it my fault? Am I the reason that this happens to me? Dr. Drew said something on a podcast. We talked about returning to the mother for like a recharging effect. Going back into society, it's scary. And then you come back to the mother and she like comforts you in some way.

As a child, I felt like I never got to recharge. I would go to school and deal with the problems that I was having socially. Then I would go home and feel sort of the same exact way.

Instead of my parents taking care of me when I would go to them and say, I'm not feeling like I have many friends. I feel kind of disconnected. I would get a reaction from my mom like, oh, what, you have mommy issues? Which, yes. And my dad would say something like, well, if people don't like you, it must be your fault. One of the things that really led to a lot of self-doubt around the issue of me being the problem was when my dad would hit me.

I have a particular memory of my dad chasing me around my old house.

I ran up the stairs. He followed me. I ran into the bathroom down the hall, slammed the door, pushed it open. Much bigger man. I was a child. So I ran to the corner where the medicine cabinet was and he grabbed me and he was mad that I was running. I might've hit him, something like that. I made him really mad in that bathroom and he took my head and he slammed it into the medicine cabinet a couple times and

There was a couple of times where we'd get into fights and he choked me out to the point of very near unconsciousness. It was the culmination of a lot of screaming and yelling in the house. A lot of that tension built up. He wasn't drunk. And that's the interesting thing for my dad, who is someone I consider an alcoholic, much, much nicer to me when he's drunk. He's a jolly old Santa when he's drunk.

One time he chased me around the house with a knife and I was probably 16 years old. I don't think he would have stabbed me if he got to me. But if I wasn't going to listen to the previous abuse, which was lesser, something else had to get added on top of that. He would always turn it on me because I would say, I'm going to call CPS of Child Protective Services. I'm going to get you arrested. I'm going to do it. And he would be like, call.

call and then we'll show them all the nice things you have and your Xbox and your toys and how you live in a nice home and you're well fed and they're not going to do anything.

In horror movies, there's this beautiful moment for the protagonist where the monster's real. Everyone can see it. It's clearly hurting people. But a lot of times in real life, there isn't a neatly wrapped up ending and you have to rely on people believing you. And when you're a child, fewer people want to believe you.

In high school, I played football. So I started working out for the first time in my life. I was getting bigger and stronger and faster and growing into my adult male body and more capable of defending myself. And so the incidents were very few in high school. But after a while, my dad didn't have to hit me. The intimidation factor, the idea that he would hit me worked just as well.

If he gets mad about something and has his angry face, I still feel that fear. It's kind of like how a baby elephant they tie to a little tree. And when it's a big giant elephant, they tie it to the same tree and it could move, but it thinks it can't. So I'm constantly in this state of just general fear for this person who I really love.

It's very conflicting. I think that's the biggest thing to me is like all of the emotions are so conflicting because it's like, it's my fault. No, it's his fault. No, it wasn't that bad. No, it was really bad.

But any child wants to feel the love of their parent, even if the parent left, even if the parent is an abusive, crazy, alcoholic monster, way worse than my parents. The child will never stop wanting to feel the love of a parent because deep down inside of us, we all know that's the most natural, beautiful love there is.

Relationships are definitely tricky for me. I had one when I was like 14 and then didn't have another relationship in high school. I dated a girl for two years, the first two years of college. When I was 18, first girl that really showed an interest in me in that way. But I felt this big open gap. I was like, there should be something here that is missing. You don't really love me because you're not yelling at me. You can't.

Because you're not loving me the crazy way that I love you or that I've been loved before. She was definitely safer and more of a rock. And I was going through this crazy big change in my life where I had much more friends. I partied a lot. I was doing a lot of drugs. And we just grew apart. I started off my junior year at a big school in the South living with two drug dealers. Wow.

they were friends of mine. They weren't just some sketchy people I met on the street. They're friends of mine for two years. They just happened to sell drugs. You know, we're just playing video games, shooting the shit, whatever. And this guy and a girl walk in to buy from my friend and they leave. And like five minutes later, my friend looks at me. He's like, that girl asked for your number. And I was like, okay. I was like, give it to her. I was like, she's cute. She's cute.

She gets my number, adds me on Snapchat, immediately messages me and says, you're hot. You are hot. And I was like, word.

Messages are exchanged. We start hanging out. And all of a sudden, I'm with this person who is exciting and does drugs with me and is very attractive. I was like, oh, this is where I'm supposed to be right now.

This is my life kind of coming into its own. And this is like everything a 12 year old could imagine his life being at 20 years old. Having the best time of my life.

She definitely came with red flags. My friends told me a couple of things about her that they had known, or I told them some things that she had told me and they were like, that's kind of a red flag. But I was having so much fun that I just fully ignored it. I just, I blazed ahead. I was like, this is everything I want. Shut up. I'm having fun.

It wasn't a great mindset to have, but I was also a 20-year-old boy. So this is, I'm the man. This is awesome.

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And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. We started spending all of our time together, and then a hurricane swept through the South, shut down the state I was living in for an entire week. So we had basically a free-for-all.

We spent a week in her place doing all kinds of drugs, having all kinds of sex. I couldn't believe the amount of fun I was having. It's everything I wanted leaving the other relationship. What I was like, oh, I'm missing this. I'm missing this passion, this kind of fiery, crazy, jealous, like obsessive love. Like this is everything that I always wanted. I was like, oh, this is what a relationship should be.

She obviously was getting more comfortable with me and revealing more and more about her past and more about herself and how she felt about things in the world. And some very, very shiny, bright red flags started coming out that even in my blissful state, I could not ignore. Talks of arrests in high school, in and out of rehab, whatever.

When you're getting to know someone with a lot of these bad things in their past, they really will let this sense of security and trust build up. So you'll sit there and be convincing yourself that it was ridiculous. She got arrested in high school in a situation that you're definitely being lied to about and also have no idea because you weren't there. They're your girlfriend. So why would you not believe them? You're supposed to be on their side.

I picked up my girlfriend from a bar in the downtown area of our college. And she was very drunk and drove her home to my place where we were going to sleep.

She's really angry about something. Something had happened out that she was like, you know, they don't know me like that. They don't, they don't, whatever she was saying. She was just like very animatedly upset about whatever incident occurred. She was just kind of nonsensically yelling about something that didn't matter about people that she didn't really care about. So I was like, I just started laughing. It was a nervous kind of laughter, but she slapped me on the stomach open-handed and

Kind of knocked the wind out of me. Not, not totally, but I felt it. It was definitely a hard strike, but at the same time she was really drunk and animated and angry and I was laughing at her. So I just, I was like, ah, that's bad, but it's, it's kind of whatever. I just got over it.

My girlfriend had a friend visiting and there was a big party at my, one of my best friend's places because it was his 21st birthday. So everyone got together. We all got dressed up. We, we got really drunk. It was a fun party. Later that night, me and my girlfriend and her friend that's visiting, uh,

get in an Uber, and we go back to my girlfriend's place. That is where we plan on spending the night. An argument broke out between me and my girlfriend. I thought she was making a big situation out of kind of a seemingly meaningless situation. We're all having fun. We stayed up late. We could have just went to sleep. But the argument gets so bad that the friend leaves my girlfriend's bedroom because she doesn't want to listen to us argue.

Around this time, I'm starting to get tired of my girlfriend yelling at me. So I'm sitting at her desk in her bedroom and I just start laughing. I remember it being this like deep belly laugh. Similarly to the night before, a full hearted, just can't believe this is going on right now. What are you yelling about? I'm just laughing. At that time, my girlfriend grabbed the back of the chair that I was sitting in and she pulled it.

And I fell backwards on the back of my head and the back of my head hit her metal bed frame. At this time, remember, I'm very drunk. So it kind of snapped me out of that. I was laying on the ground and my head started swelling up. I could feel it in the back of my head. I was like rolling around a little bit. My vision's kind of like weird. Looking at lights is hard.

Her friend that was visiting rushes into the room because she thinks that I hit my girlfriend. And about the same time as her friend's rushing in, I get up and I'm like, you're crazy. I can't believe you just did that. I'm getting the fuck out of here. And my girlfriend just looks me in the face, angriest person I've ever seen, and just starts throwing right hands, just starts punching me right in the face.

I don't even know what to do. I've never been in this situation before. I know I can't hit her back. I'm a lot bigger than her. My girlfriend's friend is pulling my girlfriend away from me and she just won't let her. She won't stay still. She won't stop fighting. Her bedroom door opened in. So anytime I would try to leave, she would throw herself at me into my back and not let the door open.

She kept hitting me throughout the course of the night. There were multiple missed Ubers, I think something like eight to 10, where I would try to call an Uber to leave. And she wouldn't let me because she would say, if you leave, I'm going to kill myself and I'm going to tell everyone you beat and raped me.

And so in my drunk, concussed brain, that was enough to get me to stay. That was enough to try to work things out. Not really work things out, but just stay there and keep getting punched in the face over and over again.

I don't think she meant to slam my head into the metal bed frame when she pulled me out of the chair. I think she just was mad at me. She knew how bad it was that she, that happened. And so instead of trying to make it better, she just was like, fuck it. I'm going to double and triple and quadruple down on beating your ass right now. I was being attacked by a person and had no ability to defend myself.

Going through my head was the idea of being arrested for domestic violence, for defending myself against a woman who was attacking me. I know that no matter what happened, I was going to go to jail. There was weed in the apartment as well, so that wasn't going to look great on anyone.

It's getting worse and worse. She's not relenting. She keeps striking me. At one point, I did get out of there. I managed to get out of there. And I called an Uber and I called the non-emergency number with the police to try to get a ride out of there. I said, my girlfriend beat me up. I don't want to press charges. I just want to go home. I'm really drunk.

Well, my phone had about 3% battery when I left the place and it died. So I'm standing on this main road. I'm the only person out. It's 4 or 5 in the morning at this point. I'm really terrified. I don't have my phone. I don't have any of my stuff. My laptop was in her place. But what I do see is a Waffle House. I know Waffle Houses are open 24 hours. So I walked to the Waffle House.

And they ended up making me a free meal. If the person working the late night shift at Waffle House knows you're having a bad day, you're having a bad day. At that point, I wasn't going to walk home all the way across town. I didn't know what to do with myself. So I walked back. This is probably the thing I regret the most, is I let myself get back into that place. I had to knock very loudly.

My girlfriend answered the door, still irate, still yelling at me. Hit me a couple more times that night. I mean, she never let up. I tried to leave. I tried to get my stuff and she just wouldn't let me. She made me sleep in that bed. The hardest part is feeling like I was back as a child, not being able to defend myself, not being able to fight back.

Honestly, I really felt that sort of like another person. How does someone tell you they love you and then strike you because you don't do what they want?

For people that physically abuse others, they're putting their pain quite literally into you. I'm not going to take care of you physically or emotionally in this moment, but you have to take care of me emotionally and physically and my childhood and all of the shit that I went through because I'm hitting you. So I'm getting it out, but you take this pain and you go deal with it on your own accord.

I honestly think that if I had not been hit or abused as a child, I wouldn't have handled this situation so well. A part of me is very thankful that I knew what it was like to be hit and to not react in a way that made the other person more mad or to not do something that will make you seem like you're the bad guy. But it's that double-edged sword of would I have gotten out of the situation immediately if I'd never been hit before?

I don't know. Would I have hit her back? Would I have tried to defend myself not thinking? No one wants to feel powerless. So being in a situation where you're feeling powerless and also powerless again, and now I'm an adult man. And so I'm back in the situation where I know I can defend myself. I know I can stand up. I know that if we actually fought, I would win that fight.

But this idea of not being feeling believed, not feeling validated or believable, because why in that moment when the worst thing that's ever happened to me has just happened to me, am I going to go, now everyone's going to believe me. Now everyone wants to hear my side of the story because I never had that mindset before to begin with. It's really stirred up all of these conflicting feelings. And that's probably why I stayed.

I wish I took some chances to save myself. The decision to go back was not an easy one, but going back seemed like a lot better than walking home with no wallet, a dead phone in the middle of the night in a pretty sketchy part of the city, to be honest. And I went to bed in the same bed as this person.

I woke up first, and this is really one of the stranger scenes of my entire life. I'm so out of it. I had such a bad concussion. My shirt's ripped off of me. Bruised. Cuts. She was pretty worse for the wear as well, and I woke up cuddling.

It was almost an out of body experience. Like I woke up looking at these two people spooning and I was like, this can't be me. I'm not I'm not the type of crazy person that that gets into fights with his girlfriend like this bad and then just like sleeps in bed and walks it off the next day.

My car, I'd left at my house, so she had to drive me home. She made me drive, and on the way home, she made me go buy her Tylenol and a wrist splint for her bruised wrist, which definitely was bruised and hurt because she is not a boxer, and she threw many rights.

She takes me home. We walk in, my roommate's sitting there, the roommate that I met her through. Almost in a cavalier way, she explained what had happened the night before to my roommate's just shocked attitude. And it was like scary casual. She agrees to leave. And I say, let's sleep it off. Let's sleep it off. I'm lying to her at this point because I just want her to get away from me.

She goes back to her place. I'm in mine. All of my friends come over to watch football and to eat dinner. She's like, come over right now. You have to come over right now. When she gets up from her nap, I'm like, no, I can't do that. I'm with my friends. We have to break up. Like that was too terrible. I'm not going to press charges, but just like, we can't be together. She's like, why are you listening to your friends and family? You're a pussy for that. Why can't we be together? Yeah.

She storms over to my house. She starts yelling, screaming, making a scene.

We're trying to get her to leave. She will not leave quietly. So she calls with my front door open, calls the police, says my address. And I mean, my friends are all worried out of their minds. They try to calm her down. She's still freaking out. And eventually I get her to agree to leave because I said, I'll come over and we'll spend the night together at your place.

I was very out of it at this point. Like the concussion was really sinking in and I was just like, Oh, this is not good. Like, I don't feel right. I need to go to the hospital.

I'm super concussed. I go to the hospital on the Monday or Tuesday after this happens, and I got diagnosed with a severe concussion. The doctor made note that there were maybe 20 welts on my head, many that you couldn't see because of my hair. So she felt them, and she made it clear in the report. And she also diagnosed me with PTSD. Okay.

This really sparked a lot of the stuff from my childhood coming back up and me having to deal with these through a PTSD-riddled brain. All these memories and thoughts about stuff I really hadn't thought of in a while started resurfacing.

My girlfriend, she became my ex-girlfriend, right? I said, we can't be together. This is too terrible. Even though she's flooding me with messages about how we should be together, why we should be together, how can you leave me, all of this kind of stuff. This is when I start blocking her number. And so she starts messaging me on an email. Block that. Starts messaging me on another email.

There's anywhere from eight to 10 different emails that she used to iMessage me on. So this is at the point where I'm like, oh my God, this has happened before, right? Some of the email names were, this is the last warning, I swear, at gmail.com. And that was when it started getting really, really harassing and scary. So fall break was right around the corner. It was about a week and a half away.

I talked to the student advocate on campus and they told me if I got all of my professors to sign off on me leaving, I could probably go home for a couple of weeks and then come back after fall break. So I had to go report this incident to every single one of my five professors and

I had one female professor asked me how I could let this happen. She was like, oh, she had guys come beat you up. And I was like, no. She was like, oh, how'd you let this happen then? You're a man. Which just goes back to that not being believed my whole life thing where I'm sitting in a classroom explaining to someone how I'm the victim of domestic violence. And they're not even capable of understanding that I could be.

When you're questioning your manhood, your friends are making jokes about something that is very sensitive. But I don't blame a lot of the jokes. And some of them are funny for sure. And it's how everyone processes things.

their own shit. But the idea of a woman getting brutally attacked, essentially held hostage for a night, and then her friends making jokes there about it at any point is, is this such a unique situation to be a male victim of domestic violence because people are not going to want to believe you and they're going to think it's funny.

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But the craziest part to me in the aftermath was not that she harassed me. That seemed fairly normal. But she got friends to harass me. She got this dude to call me, getting blocked and then sending me text messages on emails harassing me. She had multiple of her friends reach out through Instagram and say stuff like, I know you both hurt each other, but that's not what happened.

I felt very safe when I was at home, when I was away from my college, because I was hundreds of miles away. She couldn't get me there. My parents were there, which is ironic, the safety feeling in my house. It's one of the only times in my life I've ever felt that.

The harassment kind of trickled. I kept getting unknown numbers or no number where like the numbers blocked on the other end. I kept getting those calls for a good month or so after the incident. It just kept coming in different numbers calling me. She would go out and get drunk and get some guy's number and then call me on it and be like, I'm going to have people beat your ass, all this stuff. Her dad was harassing me.

He got himself super and hyper involved in this situation. But at the same time would be like, I know my daughter's crazy. I know she's liked it. But my ex-girlfriend would lie about me messaging her and would just delete all of the messages she sent me and then only put the response and then be like, look, he's harassing me. So her dad trying to protect his daughter kept harassing me.

I know that she goes around telling people that I hit her. This goes on for a couple months, and then it all really culminates in another one of my friend's 21st birthdays. We go out to bars, something I completely stopped doing because I was so terrified that I would get beat up. And lo and behold, I go to the bathroom.

And one of the bouncers in the place put me in a headlock, punched me in the face multiple times, gave me a double fat lip, two black eyes, and then threw me down a flight of stairs. For months, for months, I woke up every hour on the hour in a cold sweats. I had the most intense dreams of my life during that time. I'm checking my phone. I'm like, please don't be calling me. Please don't be messaging me.

It was that fear. It was that constant looking over my shoulder. I knew she knew where I live, so I didn't feel very safe being at home. The harassment continued up until we left for winter break that year. A good two, three months where I'm living in my college town that I grew to love and was in a constant state of fear.

I didn't want to report it. I wanted it to go away. I begged her to stop harassing me. And when she didn't do that, I felt there was no other option.

I confidentially reported it to the university with help of my counselor who worked with the school. She helped me confidentially report it. I had to collect all the text messages. I had to collect all the pictures. I had to be ready to go to court. I had to prove to the school that she did something.

I just kept collecting things. I kept screenshotting when she would call me seven times in the middle of the night. And then when she did not stop harassing me, I ended up taking her on in a pseudo legal case through the Title IX office at my school, which is the Equal Opportunities and Protections Act. So I submitted all the evidence to them. I went to my hearing. She got a hearing. She got an opportunity to submit all of her evidence.

That helped mitigate some of the calls. And also the evidence was overwhelming against her. Every time she called me, I just screenshotted it and sent it to the Title IX office. So I was just building more of a case against this person and they found her guilty.

The student conduct did not expel her when they found her guilty. They did not feel it necessary to remove her from the university. She was only removed when she did similarly harassing behavior to a star athlete. Then she was not allowed to come back. The biggest advocates for me at this time was my friends.

good, close friends. If I was just having one of those nights where I couldn't sleep, they would let me come stay there and I felt much safer. My parents really stepped up in this moment. They're very flawed people, but they were there to support. They believed me. And that was a big thing. My counselor was incredible at the time. I can't thank her enough.

The ending was just as abrupt as it started. The calls came fewer and fewer until they just stopped. Honestly, when it stopped, I mean, there was a good month or two where I was almost missing it. As fucked up as that sounds, I'm so used to this chaotic energy, this chaotic environment. I thrive in it. I do well in chaos.

Once I formally brought that to trial, she was forced by the university to stop contacting me. I think that her realizing that I wasn't fucking around, that I wasn't

going to lay down and let her walk over me. As crazy as it may sound, I think she fell out of her emotional feelings towards me. I'm not going to call it love. It wasn't love. It was obsession. And you know, it was crazy. And, and she was like, fuck you. Like, I'm not, I'm gonna, I'm gonna harass someone else.

You want there to be some satisfying conclusion or thing, or she gets arrested. And she did end up getting arrested for harassing someone else. But I was over it by that point. And it just happened. It's like the tide sinking away. You just look up and one day it's gone.

There was a moment when I was home, when I got that two-week reprieve from school right before fall break, that I broke down in my kitchen and I started crying and bawling my eyes out. And I was like, just another person that I'm supposed to feel this comfort and love from that wants to hurt me.

And it was very interesting because as there for me, as my parents were about everything else, about helping me out financially, about like taking care of this, they still could not be there for me emotionally in that moment. They still had a hard time accepting what they had done. And it's something to this day, I just, there's no ability to talk about that in any sort of good or cathartic or, you know, moving on way. That's it just is this big,

dark cloud hanging over the whole thing. Dealing with PTSD is something I never thought I would deal with, right? I'm not going to fight in a war, but man, do I have extra, extra, extra empathy and sympathy for anyone dealing with it for any reason.

I also think that I learned through this that so many people are just undiagnosed PTSD from trauma that we don't consider to be traumatizing enough to be given that label. But waking up in the middle of the night, terrible, awful nightmares and needing to go back to sleep, but being afraid to and being in this constant stage of like awake and alertness is really taxing on the brain.

I turned 21 right after this incident happened, and I started drinking really heavily. Not that that's the most abnormal thing for a 21-year-old to do, but I mean, I was drinking really, really heavily. There's that immediate relief from drinking that does make your nerves better. It makes you sleep better.

It's something you constantly have to feed into to feel that release. But it reminded me of my parents. Here I was now 21 years old drinking to numb the pain. As horrible as it may sound, as weird as it is, it really made me feel for people like my parents. People that have no obvious thing to point to. Like this moment happened in my life. It's still the worst thing that's ever happened to me.

Things have moved on and moved forward, but people with this permanent trauma or this permanent PTSD from a traumatic childhood that they'd never even get to process because it's just so constant. It made me grateful for my privilege. At least I had the ability to fly home and get the fuck away from her and to be safe.

Just being hundreds of miles away and that safety and comfort that coming out the other side, I am incredibly grateful for. At this point, like I know people believe me. I know that I'm the more reliable source of information when it comes to anyone else that's going to ask about the story. And so over time, I really just stopped feeling that fear and it just started becoming funny.

Laughing about it helped me get through it. The ending was marked by all of these beautiful new beginnings in my life. I started one of my favorite jobs I've ever had at this awesome restaurant, met one of my best friends working there. I started going to music festivals. I started going to raves. I met a whole community of people that way, and that really helped me move on. And finding these really positive things just helped me get out of this.

A woman I worked with one time just randomly wasn't prying. I don't think she knew this story, but she looked at me and she goes, when did you become an adult? And I was like, that's a really good question. I don't know. In my head, I was like this moment, these moments. I don't know if I ever would have stopped going down the paths that I was going down if I didn't have a wake up call to this magnitude. It made me a better person.

There are many men out there who have been through some sort of similar situation, have been

have been abused, and there was no one around to believe them. There was no parents to drop $10,000 on a lawyer. There was no friends to have a home to go to. There was no flying away from the situation. They just had to face it by themselves. And those are the people I'm doing this for because you're

You're not alone. And there needs to be more discussion on male victims of sexual abuse, of physical abuse. Then we can finally get the help that we need. I was always a scared person. I was always scared people wouldn't believe me. I was always scared of doing something wrong, making people mad. This really taught me to not be scared. And at rock bottom, I found my launchpad.

Something I didn't even know was there because I was so scared. I was so terrified of, of something bad happening to me, of my life being ruined, of, of me being physically hurt, of me being socially struck down, of any of these number of bad things happening. And I was like, you have to grab that fear by the horns and go with it. I'm not saying that

you know, every negative thing has to be turned into some positive, great thing and be ignored. But I am saying that if I didn't do that, I don't know what would have happened to me. I don't, I would have let this crush me out of what the weight of everything that I've dealt with in my life, all of the trauma, all of the abuse at all of the conflicting feelings, I would have let it crush me. And it was a decision I had to make to find positivity, to try to go be better and, you

I don't know if that ever would have happened. If this event didn't happen, I don't know if I ever would have become the person I am today. And I like me a lot.

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I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me, Witt Misseldein, and Jason Blaylock, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Andrew Waits and Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper.

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I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

No, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.

Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.