190: What if your fairytale was finally within reach?
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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. I was really lost and I was so incredibly desperate for someone to love me and take care of me and to care about me and to fill the void that kind of been opened in me.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 190. What if your fairy tale was finally within reach?

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It was a pretty normal childhood. I had mom, dad, sister, who was nine years older than me, so she was kind of out of the home pretty early. My mom was always kind of the fierce, independent woman, and my dad kind of the follower. My mom was very emotional, and my dad was very subdued and even-keeled.

One of the biggest events that happened to me when I was younger was I was sexually abused by my best friend's older brother. My best friend was my same age, and then the older brother was about 15 and I was 5. Because I was so young, I didn't have any memory of it. I more had kind of a physical memory of

I would go into my friend's basement and that's where the TV was. We'd watch TV and his brother would lay on top of me and he would rub himself on me.

What happened that made me go talk to my parents was he sat me up on the back of the couch while my best friend was kind of sitting closer to the television. And he pulled my pants down and I got scared and I started to cry and that startled him. And I went to my parents and told them about it. The abuse stopped after that.

The neighbor's child was accused of sexual abuse. They obviously denied that that would happen, and they kind of cut off contact with all of us, even though we were right next door to each other. And then they actually ended up packing up and moving, and I never saw them or talked to them ever again. As I was growing up, puberty and figuring things out sexually, I just didn't think about anything with another person sexually.

What's come of it is that I've always been very sexually subdued. And by that, I mean, I'm not very open. I've never looked at sexual experiences as something I really care about. When I get touched in a certain way, I just feel sick.

In those years when I was starting to look at boys, 13 through 18, 19, I never fantasized about sexual anything with any of the boys. And I remember when I went out with my sister at one point, she was showing me all these topless, muscular men. And I was just like, okay, whatever.

So there was this disconnect and that's continued to this day. I have that ability to be more than a friend, but I couldn't, much like the sexual portion, I couldn't cross that line.

threshold of being vulnerable, both emotionally and sexually. So I could be a girlfriend non-sexually to an extent, but there's that little bit of wall where I couldn't open up. There was a stopping point.

But unfortunately, that reinforced my worthlessness as a person and especially as a female. And I became submissive. I graduated high school when I was 18. I actually ended up joining the military.

It gave me a lot of confidence and strength. But when you're in the military, you get used to somebody telling you what to do. And after I did a short term of active duty, I got out of the military, honorably discharged. And I unknowingly was looking for someone to tell me what to do. I ended up meeting someone and he saw that and he took full advantage of it.

That was five and a half years. It was a lot of emotional abuse and a lot of sexual abuse. The emotional abuse was just a lot of berating in front of his friends, especially when his friends came over for game night, for example.

I was required to serve everybody. I was required to get anything anybody wanted, which included leaving and going to Taco Bell or whatever I was required to do. I remember a time I was woken up, it was two or three o'clock in the morning, and I was told that I was required to go get him soda. I had to work the next morning. So it was that time.

And it broke me down and I became a servant. After probably two years, I started to be not sexually attracted to him because I kind of learned that he was a shitty person. He told me that it was my fault I wasn't attracted to him.

There was a night, probably about three and a half years in out of the five, that he was on top of me and he was penetrating and it hurt a lot. I started to cry and he stopped, looked down at me and he said, are you okay?

It wasn't heartfelt. It was kind of like a thing that he just had to do so that he wasn't that bad of a human being. And then with a quivering voice and tears rolling down my face, I said, I'm fine because that's what I was supposed to do. That was my job. My job was to serve him, make him feel good. And he kept going until he finished and he left the room.

I was kind of like, okay, that's my job. That's what I do. No matter what, I have to please him, period. Even if I hate it. It affected me for years. Unfortunately, it didn't make me fight back or gain any sort of confidence. In fact, I lost a lot.

After the abusive relationship, which was until I was 25, I went searching for boyfriends who I could serve. I told new boyfriends that I wanted to serve them. I just laid it on the table because that's what I was worth. And I thought that my willingness to serve was something that empowered me.

I was very much in the desperate attempt of finding a fairytale relationship. So I did a lot of searching via apps. And one of the people I found, I thought was great. He made a lot of money. That was awesome. I tried to serve him. Unfortunately, that also meant that I attached myself to him. I didn't want to be away. I think I moved in with him after a month later.

And I tried so hard to become a part of his life and be important to him. And at one point he told me that I was unstable. So I went to the bookstore and I bought $250 worth of therapy books. I stacked him up in his house against the wall and he walked in and I was so excited. I was like, look, Kali's books. He looked at me like I was crazy.

That's where the post abusive life put me was in this perpetual need to be with that other person.

When he broke up with me, he told me that we would talk about it tomorrow. Well, he never contacted me. So I went to his house late at night after I moved out and I knocked on the door and he didn't answer. And so I stood there and I knocked on the door and I screamed his name and I yelled and I cried. My whole world was crashing down.

I was really lost and I was so incredibly desperate for someone to love me and take care of me and to care about me and to fill the void that kind of been opened in me. I was 27 years old.

I was living back with my parents and I had a full-time job at the time. So I was holding that down, but things were up in the air as far as who I was and where I wanted to go to kind of console myself. I was playing an online game, an MMO, massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

Been a gamer since I was little, so it was therapy to just kind of not feel lonely and feel okay. I had been playing this online game for a few years at that point. One of the people that I played with, we'll call Jay, knew of my relationship with the abusive boyfriend. So he knew what I went through, and he knew of the vulnerability, most importantly, and

While I was living with my parents, we ended up playing more and more together, wrote messages to each other in the game, and he explained that he had a son. And the dynamic started to shift from game-related conversation to a more personal opening up, kind of realizing that we're two real human beings and not just these in-game characters.

Two or three months in, we ended up exchanging phone numbers. We did a lot of texting in the first four months. It was every morning that I would wake up and throughout the day, I felt very supported by him. I felt very equal. It felt like a best friend, but a best friend that I had feelings for.

It felt like somebody I'd been with for years. We could talk about anything. I felt that he respected me and respected my opinion. I felt that I could just say anything. And even if he disagreed, it would be a conversation. There was no threat. There was no physical service. I couldn't serve physically. I couldn't serve sexually. And thankfully, I just had to be me.

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This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe,

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. About two months in, he said he wanted to send me something. And I gave him my parents' address.

He actually ended up sending me a white button-up and a thick silver ring, male's ring, with diamonds all the way around. He told me it was worth, I think he said $7,000.

When I received the ring and the shirt, I was elated. I got to have this shirt that smelled like him. It felt like he was with me and that was just the most romantic and fantastical gesture.

But he had never actually sent me a gift for me. Something that like, oh, this is your favorite candy or this is your favorite something, something. He sent me him, sent me his shirt and his ring that he wore.

And the ring I loved because it was bigger. So it made me feel like he was a bigger person. I just had this imagined tall, bigger person. It was like my fairy tale.

I got to just create this person inside of these inanimate objects. I could wear the shirt, which I love to do. I slept with it every night. And I can put on his ring and he was there. He was right there. I could be in my imagination. I was held by him and comforted by him and got to feel warm from his body that I imagined. It was just like being with him without him being there.

After a couple months of texting, that's the point that we decided to have an actual voice conversation. I made the call and as it's ringing, I'm super nervous. And then when he answered, his voice was soothing.

I got a feeling within the first 10 or 15 seconds of just being in a comfortable space. And it felt like we just always heard each other's voice. It didn't feel like the first phone call. It was so natural. It reinforced my belief that he was a good person and a trustworthy person and a safe person.

From that point, we talked all the time. And when I say all the time, I mean, I'd wake up and I'd call him and then I would go to work. And then once I got home, I would call him and we would sit on the phone for four, five, six hours at a time.

There were multiple times I would be at work and on the phone with him at work the whole day. I was ready to marry this person because it was like, wow, this person actually listened to what I'm saying and are willing to engage in a real conversation with me, an equal, real conversation as a human being.

So it was a breath of fresh air from my previous experiences. After another two months of talking on the phone, I had the novel idea of getting a tattoo. Thankfully, it wasn't my first tattoo, so I had some experience.

I had commissioned an artist to draw out this little Japanese anime cat girl, which was supposed to be me, but in cat form. So I'm a huge cat fan in the picture. She was wearing the white button up that he had sent me and she was in a submissive position. So she was like on her knees and,

And she had a collar on and the collar was the chaos symbol. So it was like a circle around her neck and had arrows pointing out in every direction all the way around. And the reason for that was because Jay's name, his online tag was chaos. And then right above it, I had the words property of chaos.

I felt so equal and yet part of me still wanted to show him that I was submissive. I had the tattoo done that day and it was right below my belly button and it is not a small tattoo. Probably six inches by five inches.

And I was devastated because it was done poorly. And interestingly, I told Jay that it was done poorly. And he actually took the initiative to call the tattoo shop and yell at the tattoo artist. At the time, I thought that was incredibly romantic because he is protecting me.

I had it fixed by a different tattoo artist, and that artist actually had hit on me, and I had told Jay about it, and that is the second tattoo artist that he contacted and yelled at.

Those events showed me that he was this valiant knight that was in front of me and had his shield and was protecting me from all the arrows. He was doing what he needed to do to make things right just for me. Around the time of the tattoo, on one of our phone calls, he did say, I love you to me.

And I wasted no time saying it back because 100% I loved him. And I had been mentioning that I wanted to see him. So he did end up sending me a photo. It wasn't exactly what I thought, which is to be expected. But because I loved him so much, and I did, I made it work in my brain.

So I just kind of worked my way into liking the way he looked. And then it took no time for me to love the way he looked. I was to a point between the five and six month mark that I was willing to fit him into the perfect relationship fairy tale mode, no matter what it took.

By month six, because the I Love You's came out and it was more serious, he had made mention of wanting to be with me, actually physically be with me. I was kind of like, okay, well, I have a job here and I can't really up and leave my job. And he said, I'll come live there. Within about a week, he had brought it up again and was very serious about it.

I was elated that he wanted to come live with me. I asked him about his son and he said to me he'd bring him with. And I didn't question it. I heard him say that and I said, OK, great. And I could not stop thinking about it. I was more excited than I'd been in a long time before.

He was going to drive from Maryland to Wisconsin. And having his kid with him, we guessed it was potentially going to take maybe a week, two at the absolute most, because he didn't want to drive real long stretches with his two-year-old.

As the journey begins, we keep in contact. I'm on the phone with him a lot as he's driving. I hear his kid in the background. Things honestly kind of progressed as normal. We still talked every day. The only difference was that he told me when they were stopping and that they were going to take a break.

Within the first week of his trip, I went out and got an apartment. He had sent me a copy of his driver's license, and I had spoken with the landlords of where I was going to be renting, and incredibly, they allowed both of us to be on the lease, even though he wasn't there. And I rented a two-bedroom apartment, which I could not afford.

I was nervous, but I believed that he was going to be there to help me. So there was no real severe concern. So I moved all of my stuff into the apartment, which was a TV and a mattress. And that's it.

was at the apartment, maybe up to a week, and I was keeping consistent conversation with him. He was about two hours outside of Wisconsin. I was so excited because I had waited probably about two and a half weeks for them to get there. And again, it took him so long because they had to keep stopping for his kid. So I got in my car because I was going to surprise him. And I started to drive south toward the Wisconsin-Illinois border.

I was on the freeway and I was almost to the welcome to Illinois sign and he called me and he said, I have to turn around. My ex wants our kid back. I didn't know what to say. This person, my soulmate, the person that I love what I feel is more than anything I've ever loved in my entire life.

This person that I've been enamored with for six months and have waited three painful weeks to finally see and to finally hold and to finally be in the arms of. And he tells me that he has to turn around. I was devastated.

I drove back and I went straight to my parents' house. I walked to the door and I had a full on panic attack. I couldn't breathe. I thought I was dying. I remember I sat on their couch and I struggled through hyperventilating to tell my mom and they knew the gist of the story. So she knew kind of what was going on.

Luckily, she had some Valium she was prescribed and she gave me some of that because I couldn't function. I was so gone. Once the Valium took effect and I did calm down, my parents pulled out a cot and I laid down and the first thing I did was call Jay. Not angrily. I remember laying in that bed and I just talked to him.

And everything was just back to normal. It was just him back on the road, driving back home. And he made that trip back to Maryland, supposedly in a few days. And even with that, I kind of chalked it up to, oh, well, the ex wants the kid back, so he just had to rush. It's always something.

So he gets back home. He drops the kid off. He grabs a couple more things. And within a couple of days from arriving home, he heads back out on the road. When we spoke, he seemed to be pretty excited to get to me. So I was hurt from what happened, but I was back up, ready to go, super excited for him to come and be with me. Kind of judged that maybe it would take a week at the absolute most.

I would be on the phone with him and all of a sudden, as I heard kind of the whir of the truck, I would just suddenly hear a real quick like squeak what sounded like a kid. And I would blatantly ask, I'd say, that sounded like a kid. Oh no, that was just a guy passing me. Or that was just the sound of the truck. Or it was just blatantly, oh, I didn't hear anything.

He started to stop at motels more often than planned. So I started to ask him what hotels he was at.

Just so I could kind of judge where he was. Because a lot of the time, he would tell me he wasn't exactly sure where he was. Or he would, if I would ask, he would kind of skirt around the question and say something like, I'm going to be there soon. I'm just going to keep driving. I don't want to focus exactly on where I am.

Because our relationship, in my mind, had been so perfect, I didn't want to create any waves. So that was another reason that I didn't really question a lot. So we got to one motel, and I started to kind of think that it was weird that he wasn't getting very far. So he would be in the room, and I'd say, oh, okay, what motel are you at? And he would say, I don't know. And I would say, okay, will you go outside and check? Okay.

And he'd say, well, I'm too tired. I would suggest to maybe look at the documentation in the room to find out what hotel he was at. He would state that there was no documentation in the room. I suggested he grab a newspaper to show him where he was. And he would say there was no newspaper. I also suggested he call me from the motel room. And he would say that there was no phone in the room.

And then I'd say, okay, I wanted to believe it. So I did. This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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He then got off the phone with me, contacted 911, and they took him to the emergency room. He had gotten care there, and he had contacted me from the emergency room. And again, I asked him what emergency room. He didn't know. He ended up getting back to the motel room, and he was told by the staff to stay inside and rest because of his concussion.

A few days that passed, he had gotten back on the road, and the next hotel he went to, he ended up injuring himself, his ankle or his leg, where he couldn't move. He was supposedly stranded in this hotel room, and he told me that he was unable to go anywhere. I said he could yell for people, and he said that he was unable to yell.

I told him that on my phone, I had the Find My iPhone connected to his phone. And it said he was still in Maryland.

And he said, well, there's no internet service in this hotel room, so it must think that I'm still in Maryland. And then a few days had passed and I saw him log into the video game that we played together. And I confronted him about that. And he said that, oh, they managed to fix the internet here. So I've been able to hop on and game from the floor.

He had crackers and water with him. So when he was stranded on the motel floor, he was surviving specifically on crackers and water for about three weeks, maybe a month. I cannot tell you how I believed it that long. I don't know. All I can say is that he was very good at talking.

He continued to be incredibly kind to me and tell me he loved me. And he would keep me believing it by explaining things like how he was having trouble seeing because of his concussion or how much his leg hurt. Or one time he explained that he had to crawl, kind of drag himself on his elbows to get to the bathroom. Yeah.

I had a battle going on inside me because I didn't have enough confidence in myself to trust my intuition.

So there were little spots where I thought, there's no way that he can't crawl to the door and open it and yell for somebody. Or there's no way there's not a phone in the hotel room. Those things started cropping up, but they were immediately shot down with as many excuses as I could come up with.

And if I let myself believe that he was lying, then so much came to the surface. The fact that I believed him, the fact that he's the type of person that would lie, that I loved somebody who would lie like this, that somebody like him exists now.

There was too much at stake. My mental stability was at stake. It was too painful to think that he would lie to me after all of it. After as close as we had gotten, that was going to be too painful. It was safer to accept this reality.

I started to question more and more because the lies became more and more ludicrous. And I kind of started to gain confidence in myself and my belief and started to question him as a person. So I was in my apartment that I rented for us.

I was laying on the bare mattress with no furniture around me. And I had no money to my name. I could not buy food. I couldn't pay my bills. And he wouldn't send me any money. I was on the phone with him. And I said to him, Jay, I'm surviving off bread and water. And that's it. And he said to me, well, you can survive off bread and water.

What kind of love of your life tells you that you can just survive off bread and water? He did tell me in that sixth month he had made it to my city. I was reluctantly elated and he said, OK, I'm in I'm in a motel. I said, OK, which one? And he said, I don't know, but I'll look out the window for you.

And I said, all right. And I spent four hours driving around my city to every single motel looking for him. And I didn't find him. That was kind of it for me. He knew I was kind of giving up. And he had told me that he was in my parking lot. He was finally there. Month six. And I had a little bit of flutter, like, okay, great. And I looked out and there was nobody there. And he said, oh, I must be in the wrong parking lot.

I didn't yell and I wasn't angry, but I told him that we needed to be done. And I said, you contact me when you are at my door. In fact, you come here and you knock. And his response was, I'm almost there.

And I stuck to my guns and I said, no, when you are actually here, you knock on my door and I will happily let you in. But until then, I don't want to hear from you. And that was it. It was frustrating not knowing who he was and not knowing how much of our relationship was a lie and how much was true.

It made me really sad that human to human, somebody could do that. I think that's what killed me the most. Somebody can be on the phone with you telling you how much you mean to them and how much you love them and that you want to do everything for them. And you're going to make this perfect life. And it's all a lie.

I think that his lies to some degree were fascinating because he did put so much effort. He spent so much time. He spent the majority of the day on the phone with me. And that went on for months. This is massive, the amount of effort he puts into this. All the questions that I asked...

you know, for him to take pictures of newspapers or take pictures of where he was or, you know, call me for and all of these things. And for every single one of them, he had to come up with a response. And he had to remember every single response that he gave me. And on top of that, he was doing this to other virtual friends. So he's created this

And that's why I believe that this can't just be a guy that just catfishes for fun.

A month or two in, that's when a lot of confusion and anger and sadness and all the emotions came in because I had spent so much time masking everything that it took a while for those floodgates to open up to the myriad of emotions that were inside me.

For years, I struggled with sleep. I struggled with getting comfortable and getting relaxed. And even to this day, I have a really difficult time with fully relaxing. I've never been that vulnerable. I've never been that open. And that experience led me to create a very strict threshold for everything.

There's a stopping point because I do not want to connect to something that strongly ever. I mean, I do, but my body says, fuck no. I struggle greatly with affection and intimacy on any level in a physical sense. I feel nauseated and I, to this day, I'm still working through that.

It's been 10 years since we were together. I have started therapy for the past three years. I've opened up that Pandora's box again. I kind of froze time and I'm unfreezing it.

Now I look at him and I go, you know, I feel bad for Jay because I think he really did care. I think he lives in a sad existence somewhere, whether that's depression or fear of truly connecting, fear of loss, right?

you know, diagnosable or not. I think there's some sort of mental anguish within him. And I think he is yearning for connection. And there are some people in this world who are terrified of being abandoned. And I think this was safe. This is safe zone for him. This is how he connects with people.

So he wanted connection so bad, but he feared the abandonment. So he needed to lie to keep people in his life, but keep them at that distance. So the more he lied, the more he could keep me where he wanted me so that I would continue coming back. And that kept him safe and comfortable and kept people close to him.

And it must be miserable, must be incredibly painfully lonely. I've really changed my view of myself during that time period.

When I was in my relationship in my early 20s, I was forcibly made to believe that I can't trust myself. I cannot trust myself. I can't trust decisions I make. Everything I believe is wrong. And then I got into this relationship and it was safe. I was in control because he was elsewhere. And I think that kept me safe forever.

I can open myself and be vulnerable and love unconditionally because I'm safe. And that left me wide open. And with that safety, he was able to kind of weasel his way in. And I believed, I believed 100% that this was real.

I had finally started to trust myself. I really backed something that I truly 100% believed in. And then it fell apart. That brought me back to, can I really trust myself? Can I trust anything that I believe?

Maybe that guy was with, maybe he was right. Maybe I can't trust myself. Maybe I am just so ignorant and I can't make the right decisions. And to this day, I still struggle with that. I struggle with making a decision and, and believing in it and accepting that if maybe I am wrong, well, that's human nature. It's okay that I'm okay, that I'm not a failure, right?

One of the things that's always going to be a reminder is the tattoo. It's not like it's on my back or between my shoulder blades. Every time I look in the mirror, I see it. And very luckily, it says property of chaos, which I can kind of pass off as just a concept. But it does hurt to have that reminder. One of the things I've thought about recently

covering it up with actually is crossing off chaos and having it say property of no one and having the image kind of scratched out so that I can, I can remember it, but I can also have that reminder to myself that I, I am the property of no one.

Through the struggles of these three important parts of my life, I kind of continuously felt more and more worthless. I look back now on that person and I feel really bad for her because she was worth something. That person was worth a lot to me.

I used to look back on those days and they were all my fault, you know, things that I did wrong or I should have noticed. But just the past, I'd say, three years of therapy up until this point, I've really started to learn to love that person that I was. And I'm learning how to slowly gain back my worth again.

and realize that it's not all on me. It's not all on my shoulders to fix it or to make sure people stay in line. I can only do what I can do for myself. And I finally realized in the past, God, three months that I matter. I matter. And what I want matters. And I deserve to be worth something.

Today's guest prefers to remain anonymous, but if you'd like to reach out to her directly, you can email at hersavepoint at gmail.com or connect on Discord at hersavepoint hashtag 5365.

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I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was produced by me and Matt Vola, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellie Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the This Is Actually Happening community on the discussion group on Facebook or at Actually Happening on Instagram.

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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+.