258: What if you fell in love with a vampire?
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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 broke. And I don't think I knew what was real and what wasn't. I don't think I knew who I was. I didn't have a self anymore. If I had ever had a self, I didn't have one now. I didn't have anything. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

Episode 258 What if you fell in love with a vampire?

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. My mother was born in Great Falls, Montana.

but she was adopted by my grandparents. My grandparents were rather affluent. They both came from affluent families. They also had their own ranch in Montana. My father came from the opposite end of the spectrum. He grew up in rural South Carolina. His parents, my mama and papa, were actually factory workers, and they ran a juke joint out in the middle of nowhere called the Sugar Shack.

It was drinking and every southern redneck trope you can come up with is where my father came from. He tried to escape that by going into the Air Force and he ended up in Great Falls, Montana at Thule Air Force Base where he met my mother. So really it was like two opposites ending up together and it was tumultuous from the beginning.

It's very hard to come up with an actual history for my parents' marriage because my parents both have conflicting stories. My mother, my father was abusive. He was physically abusive with me and my sister. He was physically abusive with her. And he was an alcoholic and drug addict. And she had to leave. If you ask my father, my mother was controlling, emotionally abusive, abusive to us and abusive to him.

My father was stationed in Florida when my mom left him and she took us back to Montana. And then they began a custody battle. It was a very vicious custody battle. They both went for the throat. Behind all of this was my father's mother, Mama. She was footing the bill for my dad's lawyer. She hated my mother and she really wanted two more children.

And she was willing to do whatever it took to make that happen. Because of a couple of mistakes my mother made, she lost custody of us. And we ended up with our father taking us back to South Carolina. I was about four years old and my sister was three. And we moved in with my grandmother, my mama. Almost immediately, my dad left us with our grandmother and he headed to the nearest bar.

My dad began a very quick descent into alcoholism and drug addiction. Meth, cocaine, alcohol, lots and lots of alcohol. So we were left with Mama. Mama wanted children. She wanted more children than just the ones she had. And she wanted to raise more babies. And so she decided to raise us. But I did not always play ball with Mama the way she wanted me to play ball with her.

She wanted cute kids who fell into the Southern paradigm. And I never did, not even as a little child. I talked back too much. I had too many of my own thoughts and it caused her to become more and more abusive.

Oftentimes, she felt that a smart mouth meant that your intestines and your insides were clogged up and they needed to be cleaned out. And so if I smarted off too much, I was taken to the bathroom and given a glass of juice mixed with castor oil. For anybody who doesn't know what castor oil is, it's what Mussolini used to use to kill people in Italy during World War II.

The most horrible thing in the whole world is Donald Duck orange juice. It's an old brand of orange juice that came in a can and she would keep it for mixing with castor oil. She would sit us down in the bathroom and she would mix the castor oil in a glass and start to give it to us.

Some of my most vivid memories of that are me and my sister vomiting it back up and then my mom mixing more and giving it back to us. And I would just beg. I would be like, I promise I will be good if you don't make me drink this. And it didn't do any good. She was like, drink it. And so you drank it and you choked it down. And if you vomited it back up, she mixed up another glass and made you drink it some more. And then you finished it.

And then once it was all finished and the whole like horror of the whole thing seemed to be over, that's when she would send me to my room. And then you just sat there and you waited. I would get this gurgling feeling in my stomach and then I'd need to go to the bathroom. And then it would be so horrible that nine times out of 10, even going down the hallway to get to the bathroom, I wouldn't make it to the bathroom.

I would just defecate all over myself. And then she would come into the bathroom and yell at me for defecating on myself. And then she would make me clean my underwear in the toilet after I was done. And then I would have to go to the bathroom again. And then it would go on. You'd have to go for a couple of hours until there wasn't anything left in you. And you just felt empty. You just felt like an empty husk.

She was also very religious. I grew up in church with my grandmother and she very much was into the whole spare the rod, spoil the child. In my mama's case, it was spare the curtain boards, spare the belts, spare the spoons, spare the hammer if that's what's in your hand. And she would hit and she hit me a lot and she beat me a lot.

One of her favorite things to say was, if you don't cry, then you didn't learn anything. So oftentimes I would try to take the beatings from my grandmother and not cry. And she would then find more painful spots to hit until I did. The idea was that if she hit me enough, then I would be the type of child she wanted, like my sister. She did what Mama told her to. I didn't listen.

Even to this day, when I think of my grandmother, I think of this gigantic being, but she really wasn't. My mama was about five foot two, five foot one. She was a very slight woman. She also suffered from alopecia. So my grandmother didn't have any hair on her body and she did not have any eyebrows and she did not have any eyelashes. She did not have any fingernails.

This woman did not look imposing at all. But to me, she was this towering, horrifying figure. But on the other end of that, she was the only one who was offering love. My father wasn't there. My father was getting drunk. My father was getting high. And a lot of times, if it was inconvenient, then it equaled violence. So if I inconvenienced him, then he was hitting me.

And so there was this strange dichotomy of hating her and loving her at the same time and needing her. And then something would happen and this dam in me would break and I would just rage because I was so angry at everything. And that kind of carried over into school.

I had major behavioral issues, lots of tantrums, lots of throwing things. In first grade, I had a massive tantrum with my first grade teacher and ripped his gradebook from his hands and flung it at him. I didn't know how to translate what I was feeling.

And every time I acted out, there was no understanding that, "Oh, this is him dealing with his trauma. Let's help him with his trauma." It was, "Let's beat him until he stops. If we beat him enough, if we degrade him enough, he'll stop." And I just didn't. I ended up having a major meltdown, and the school insisted that I be placed into a mental health facility. And I was put in for two weeks. It was pretty horrifying.

It seemed to me that I was just abandoned there to this place that I didn't understand for reasons I didn't understand. And I was still having these rages, only they would put me into a quiet room all by myself and that would just make it worse. And all I had to torture was myself then.

I was just so alone in that place. And it was so scary. I just felt like I was free floating. And that was something that happened so often when I was a kid was that I didn't feel like I had an anchor. And when I came out, I came out with a diagnosis of mild depression and ADHD, which I do not actually have.

We got to be about 11 or 12 and my mama decided that my father needed to actually look after us. So instead of living with my grandmother, we ended up moving to a trailer park where our father lived. Luckily, my father ended up meeting another woman. She was the only truly kind person in my life. She became our mom. She took care of us when we were sick.

But one night in a drunken rage, my father came home and he kicked her out of the house after she had lived with us for about three years. Despite having been kicked out and everything, she came and got me and my sister on weekends. She gave us an allowance. She took us on trips. She brought us Christmas and Easter and birthday presents. So I kind of did have a bit of a mother experience through my stepmom.

I have scattered memories of my mother in my early childhood. We had sporadic phone calls with her. And then from about the ages of about seven to 14, our mother stopped calling and we didn't know what happened to her.

You've got my grandmother and my father talking horribly about my mother. And one of their favorite kind of insults to throw at me was, you're just like your mother. Your mother was fat, and so you're fat. And when you don't have a mother, you kind of create this idealized version of that person in your head. If my mother was there, I wouldn't get beat all the time. Everything would be so much better if my mother was here.

But I just had this hole in me that wanted to be filled. And it was a massive hole. And the only thing I had to fill it with was what I imagined she was. Sometimes that was all that kept me warm at night was this thought that, you know, my mom might be out there. But then there's also the worry that maybe she's not. Maybe she did die. Maybe I will never meet her again.

It was coming towards the end of eighth grade, inquire class, and there's a knock at the door and somebody passes a message to the teacher, passes the message to me. Can you please call your mother at this number? I spoke to my mother for the first time in eight years that night. My mom is talking to me again. I found a lifeline. My will started turning even at like 13, 14. I was like, I'm gonna get the hell out. That's what I'm about to do. I'm about to get the hell out.

So I started talking to my mom. I started talking to my mom incessantly. And eventually it was decided that that summer we would go to visit her. It didn't take long to find out that she wasn't June Cleaver. The loss of me and my sister had left very deep scars on my mother, and she did not deal with those emotions well.

Very quickly, things get volatile. My mom was very emotionally unbalanced at this time, and I was challenging. I had a lot of trauma that I didn't know how to deal with, and it created a very combustible environment. My mother became just as abusive as everybody else had in my life. She started hitting me, calling me names.

My sophomore year, we went to a fast food restaurant and I didn't tell her what I wanted to order. So she punched me in the face. I lost it and jumped out of the car. And that night I was put into a foster home. I spent a couple of days in the foster home. I was assigned a social worker. And then they said, you should go back home to your mother. So I went back home to my mother.

That went on for another year. My stepfather ended up leaving her. She got diagnosed as bipolar. We ended up having to move to a far smaller house where I didn't have a room and I slept in the laundry room between the wall and the dryer. I knew that South Carolina was bad, but I couldn't do this either. I couldn't do this. And I ran away during my grandfather's funeral because I knew she couldn't come after me. She had to be at my grandfather's funeral.

So, on the day that my grandfather was cremated and buried, I ran back home to South Carolina. It was the summer of 1998. I rode a bus at 16 from Great Falls, Montana, all the way to Florence, South Carolina. During this time, there were some improvements. While I was spending those two years with my mother, my father had reached rock bottom and had finally gotten clean.

and he had married my stepmother. The abuse of my younger years kind of went away, but the scars from the time I spent with my mother were still really fresh. And I still had this horrible view of myself. Like, I still did not think that I was worthy of love. I did not think that anybody would ever love me. I was overweight. I had lots of pimples. And then I knew that I was gay, but it wasn't something that I could say out loud.

We were very religious. My mama took us to a church that was identified as Free Will Baptist. People hear Baptist and they think it's bad. Free Will Baptist is worse. At the end of the service, they have what they call an altar call. To go to the altar, pray for forgiveness, accept Jesus Christ, and become saved. I would go to that altar call.

The preacher would start to preach, "You have to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, otherwise you're going to go to hell." And hell isn't just a burning, fiery place, it's a separation from God. It's complete aloneness. And I think more than being afraid of fire or brimstone, I was afraid of being that alone.

And so I would go to the altar call and I would kneel down. All the people in the church would surround me and they would put their hands on me and I would cry and I would pray. But my prayer was always the same because at the back of my mind, I always knew I wasn't good enough. And all I could do was sit there on the altar with my eyes squeezed shut and beg God to change me. Make me not be gay. Make me be a better person. Make me be the person that people will love.

Every other Sunday, I would answer that altar call. And I just didn't change. And I started to believe that God just didn't listen to me. God just didn't want me. And maybe I don't need God to change me. Maybe I don't need God. And it's when I decided that I don't need God that I was able to see it as more of like a special secret that was just mine.

I knew that being gay was bad and that I couldn't tell anybody about it, but it felt like it was the one thing in my life that was just mine. So much of me had been taken from me forcefully that having this one secret thing, it was like a core inside of me that just belonged to me and I didn't want to share it with anybody else because I didn't want anybody to take it away from me. And so I kept it for me and me alone.

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I was just very isolated. I didn't have friends in school. I ate my lunch by myself. And my one saving grace was the things that I read. From a really young age, I learned how to disassociate from what was happening to me in my life by escaping into the alternate realities of books, movies, and TV. And my taste always swung to the darker side of things.

vampires, monsters, but vampires are really connected too. And in particular, I connected to the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. Vampires are magical creatures who are above the rest of the world.

They were free. They were free to kill people. They were free to fuck people. They were free to do whatever. There was male and female relationships. There was female-female relationships. There was male and male relationships. There was poly relationships. There were all these things and all these different ways to love that I had never even thought of, that I never thought were possible. And they didn't feel guilty about it. And they only found acceptance.

And that's really what I connected with in the books was that there was this sense of freedom and acceptance in the monstrous. I felt that I was monstrous. I had been told my whole life that I was horrible, that I was ugly, that I was horrible. I was unlovable. Then in these books, they're monstrous, but they're loved and they're magical and they don't care what God has to say about them.

They took the darkness and they made it magical. So the internet, I literally remember when people were still doing news stories about it's called the information superhighway. And after I left Montana and I came back home to South Carolina for my birthday, my first birthday there, my dad came home with a computer. It was also understood to also be like a family computer, but nobody was really interested in it except for me.

And one of the very first things I did was look up Anne Rice stuff. So I started looking up Anne Rice information, anything about Anne Rice I could get. And that's how I stumbled upon Le Jardin Savage, The Savage Garden. It was a website, but it was also mainly connected to a message board. You talked on AOL Instant Messenger and you talked on message boards.

This message board, its draw or hook was that you could speak to the vampires from the Vampire Chronicles. You could talk to Lestat or Louis, you could leave them a message and they would respond.

I did not understand what a role playing game was at that time. I'd never experienced it before, but also they did not advertise themselves as a role playing game. They said that they were the vampires from the Vampire Chronicles and they did not reveal who they were in real life. They didn't tell you that this was a game. They said, we're the characters and we're going to talk to you.

So I added them to my AOL Instant Messenger and I mostly communicated with other "humans" on the board. This is the first time I ever made friends. Up until this point, I never really had friends. Over just a week or two on this message board, I was making friends. The vampires were very exclusive. But I started interacting with the vampires on the message board and one day I was on Instant Messenger and one of those vampires appeared on my online list.

His name was Dennis. Dennis is a character from Interview with a Vampire. He is a minor character. He only shows up for a few pages and doesn't show up again ever again. So he wasn't super important, but he was a vampire so I wanted to talk to him. So I took a deep breath and I messaged him. I was like "Hi!" and he answered back and he said "Hi!"

And one of the first things he said to me was, "I'm watching Desperado with Antonio Banderas and I just think he's so delicious, don't you?" Up until that point, I had never once admitted to anybody that I was in any sort of way attracted to a man. I remember sitting there for a second and I wrote back and said, "Yeah, I think he's delicious too." My heart was pounding in my chest, but honestly at that moment in time I felt so free

Just having it out in the digital world made me feel ten times lighter. I felt like a brand new person. It was almost like being born. And I wasn't rejected. That was such a novel feeling for me to not be rejected. That was the start. I start talking to Dennis. It is... it's a starstruck thing at first. Here I am talking to one of the vampires off this message board.

He could talk to me about anything and I could talk to him about anything. And we could seem to understand each other. After a few days, I got online and he was like, I don't think I should talk to you because I think I'm starting to have feelings. I was like, feelings? What kind of feelings? He was like, I think I'm falling in love with you. And I started crying.

Because that was the first time in my whole life that somebody had told me that they were feeling love for me, that I actually felt like they were telling the truth. And I was quiet for a while. And he was like, do you think we shouldn't talk anymore? I was like, I don't want to stop talking to you. And he was like, I don't want to stop talking to you either.

It was an unspoken rule that we didn't talk about things outside of the computer. I did not talk to him about my father, my grandmother, my sister. I didn't talk about any of that. We talked about everything inside the computer. As our relationship kind of began to grow, we began to build an alternate reality.

The more we talked, the less the real world seemed to matter to me. And this world that I was building with Dennis started to become more important. It began to become my real world. And I'm going to school at this time too, but I'm no longer really interacting with people at school anymore. I go to school, I get my work done, I come home, I get on the computer. The more I get to know Dennis, the darker my personality gets.

Through Dennis, I start to understand the goth subculture. Being in rural South Carolina, I had no clue about that, but color began to bleach from my wardrobe. And we kept building this world. We're living in this flat in New Orleans, and we were building a life together. We had a flat in Paris. He was flying me to New York City.

And it was my first sexual experience. My first sexual experience was a mental one. I had never even been kissed before. But with Dennis, I was learning how to be kissed. And in this alternate world, I was loved. And that world was all that mattered to me. The lines between reality and the alternate reality started to blur.

He told me that he had someone who made sure that I made it home. He said he had somebody who was watching me to make sure that I was always safe. He would tell me that at night he was actually coming to my window and watching me sleep to make sure that I was safe. He would come and watch me through the window at night. He would fly to my room window and watch me. He would see my face and wish that he could kiss me.

That was good enough for me. I had had so little love that just the imaginary love was enough. And it became so important that it was no longer a game. It was real. And Dennis was real. And this vampire love that I was having was real. I began to believe that Dennis was a vampire. My hold on what was real and what wasn't was slipping. And I let go.

I was totally in it. I believed that Dennis was coming to my window and watching me sleep. I believed that I was in an intense relationship with an immortal vampire who was going to love me for all of eternity. And I couldn't think of anything more amazing than someone loving me for all of eternity.

You know what? If the real world thinks that's messed up, they can keep thinking it. Because you know what? For the first time in my life, somebody values me. Somebody is in love with me. Somebody wants to take care of me. Dennis wanted me. Dennis thought I was special. Dennis wanted to be with me for all of eternity. Yeah, I was lost. I'm going to go to this world. I felt loved and nothing was more important than feeling loved and feeling wanted.

Dennis very much pushed the narrative that he was a vampire. He would be like, I haven't fed in a few days. I need to feed. And he'd be like, I'm going to go out tonight and I may be gone for a day or two because I really want to find the right person. I found this person and I'm stalking them and I'm going to drink their blood because they're evil. They're an evil rapist who rapes women and I've been stalking them for days and tonight I'm going to finally eat them.

I'd be like, good, they deserve it.

He was never outright evil. Like, if he was telling me that he was locking virgins up in his basement to torture, that probably would have been an issue. He would explain to me, there's this child molester who lives down the street. I've been stalking him for days, and now I'm finally going to kill him. And I'm finally going to not be hungry anymore. So I'm probably going to have to go offline for a day or two while I finish this up. But when I'm done, I'll be back for a while.

It was always, "I'm gonna go feed on bad guys. I only feed on the evil because they deserve to die." And I believed. There came a point where I believed that Dennis was a vampire and that he lived in New Orleans and that he drank people's blood. It was during this time that my father decided that I needed therapy. So he sent me to a therapist.

I told Dennis about the therapist and Dennis was like, don't say anything about me to the therapist. Don't say anything about me. This is our secret. This is our world. They won't understand. Don't say anything. So first I didn't say anything, but eventually I began to trust the therapist after a couple of sessions. And I was like, I have a boyfriend. She was like, like a man. And I was like, well, he's a vampire.

She didn't respond. She was like, okay, well, tell me about it. And so I did. I told her about it. I had several sessions with her over a couple of weeks. And I was still having my communications with Dennis. Eventually, she told me that she didn't think it was a good idea that I was talking to somebody on the internet like this. And I told her that it was fine. And she was like, has he ever asked you to leave? And I was like, no. I got the sense that she was starting to think I was in danger.

It was around this time that my father decided that we were going to go on vacation. And I really didn't want to go because I wouldn't have access to a computer and I wouldn't have access to Dennis. But my father was like, no, you're going on this vacation. I was like, fine. So I told Dennis, I was like, I'm going to be gone for a couple of days. And we went on vacation. And when we came back, the computer was gone. And I was like, where's the computer? He was like, something was wrong with it. It was flickering. I went and got it fixed. It'll be back in a couple of days. And I was like, okay.

And so I took a deep breath. I went to the library and emailed Dennis and told him that I was going to be gone for a bit. And we pronounced our love for each other. A day or two later, my dad took me to my next therapy session.

When I got to the therapy session, instead of my dad just leaving me there, he came into the therapy session with us. And my therapist brought in her boss. And the therapist looked at me and she was like, so I need to tell you that I told your father about Dennis. And I felt as if I had just been eviscerated. I felt as if my entire world had come crashing down. She told and everybody knew.

And it was this horrible mixture of embarrassment, fear and hatred and panic. And I lost it. I freaked out. I screamed. I tossed a chair. I ran out the door. I didn't know what to do. And so they had security actually bring me back in and sit me back down.

My dad looked at me and he was like, "We believe that you're being taken advantage of. This is an adult person who is speaking to you. This is wrong and you're being preyed upon and we need to stop it." I was having a full-on mental breakdown.

I was escorted to a police car and sent to the mental hospital in Charleston. And that is where I spent the next three weeks, was in a mental hospital, while they began to investigate who Dennis was and where he came from.

I had somebody who loved me and here they are taking it away again. They took it away from me just like they've taken everything away from me. My father takes everything. My grandmother takes everything. And this was mine and they took it again. And now I'm in a mental institution where I am now falling into a dark, deep depression because I feel as though I've lost my true love.

But there was this part of me that kept looking out the window because I was positive that Dennis was going to show up. I was like, he's going to realize I'm missing and he's going to come get me. He's going to come get me. So the first couple of days I was in there, I was convinced that he was going to come and get me. I didn't say anything to anybody, but I was like, Dennis is going to show up. He's going to come in here. He's going to break the doors down and we're going to leave. And I'm not going to have to worry about any of this ever again. But he didn't. He didn't show up.

He didn't come to my window. He didn't come bursting through the doors to drag me away and fly away with me into the night. He didn't do anything. And it was just me, all by myself again, in this mental hospital. And I was having to look at myself, and I was having to realize that this fantasy, this dream that was so beautiful, was all a lie.

My brain was fighting with itself. My brain was like, "No, it's real. These people are all stupid, but it's real." And the other part of me was like, "None of it was real. You have no idea who Dennis actually is. Dennis is going to come get me. I know he's going to come get me. No, he's not. He's not. He's not going to come get you because whoever he is, he can't come get you." I broke. And I don't think I knew what was real and what wasn't.

I don't think I knew who I was. I didn't have a self anymore. If I had ever had a self, I didn't have one now. I didn't have anything. And in accepting reality, I had to start rebuilding me because I didn't exist. For a while, I did not feel that I had a self. I had stopped seeing myself in the real world as a real person. And I only saw myself as the person I was when I was with Dennis.

I had spent, you know, three, four months building this new person. He had a vampire lover. He had friends. Once that was ripped away and I was there alone in the hospital, I didn't have any sense of who I was anymore. I was blank.

It was confusing and it was horrifying. And I felt like I was free falling constantly, just like it was when I was a kid. I didn't feel like I had an anchor anymore. I had had an anchor. Dennis was my anchor. Dennis anchored me. I didn't have an anchor again. I was just free falling and I had to find the strength to look at myself in the mirror and start seeing me instead of the fantasy that I created.

I had to anchor myself and I had to find my personality after I had totally given up on it. And nobody was going to be able to do that. Dennis wasn't going to be able to do that. My father wasn't going to be able to do that. My mother, my grandmother, nobody was going to be able to do that except for me. The last week that I was in the hospital, I remember looking in the mirror and really looking at myself in that bathroom mirror and really seeing me for the first time in a really long time.

I didn't see the fantasy anymore. I saw me and I wasn't completely horrified. So that was the start of me finally being able to anchor myself. It was not a completed moment. It was not a moment where everything was answered and everything changed.

But it was the first baby step on a journey that would take me years to complete. But that was the first baby step, was looking in that mirror and realizing that I needed to be me. Nobody was going to save me except for me.

So in this mental hospital stay, while I'm dealing with this shift in my reality, we end up having to do like a family group gathering to talk about the situation. And a therapist looks at my father and my grandmother and my sister and is like, this is about your son being gay. Your son is gay and there's nothing you can do about it. And I've never been more mortified or horrified in my life.

I don't even know what I am at this point because I'm so mixed up, but here's this therapist telling my whole family that I'm a homosexual. And it was just all too much.

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Even though I came to this self-realization, there's still this part of me that's pulled towards Dennis, that misses Dennis. So I sneak away to the library after school, get onto AOL Instant Messenger, and I get a hold of Dennis. I'm going to talk to Dennis. He's online. And I'm like, I'm back. I'm here. We can talk again.

And he was like, "What are you doing?" And I was like, "What do you mean, what am I doing?" He was like, "Why are you talking to me?" And I was like, "Because, like, we're in love. I miss you." And he was like, "You're dead to me. I've already had your funeral. Please don't contact me again." And then he blocked me. It hurt. It hurt really bad, but I needed to hear it. It was the nail in the coffin. It was like, "Okay, that's over. I don't have this anchor. This anchor doesn't exist for me anymore."

The last piece of my heart broke, but I walked out of the library and I didn't have a mental breakdown. That was the end of Dennis for now. So I continued on in high school. I had issues. My parents really didn't talk about the gay thing. My stepmother was convinced that it was just a phase. My dad felt that the whole situation was a predatory situation and that I had been targeted and I had been preyed upon.

I ended up graduating high school, barely. And I ended up starting school at a technical college and I ended up getting an apartment and I spent a lot of time at the library. I would talk on the computer on the library and I ended up reconnecting with some of the friends from that board. After the whole thing with Dennis happened, it turned out that they actually had a police investigation into it.

There was a huge scare that the police were going to shut down the whole site. So the actual owner of the site had shut down the site herself for a time. And then once they realized nothing was going to happen, then they brought it back. But I was banned. I was banned on site. But I started talking to friends I had made on there again on Instant Messenger. And I started to discover who the people were behind the vampires. One particular friend was talking to me and she was like, you know, Dennis is a girl, right? I was like, what?

And she was like, yeah, Dennis is a woman. Her name's Shannon. And I found myself shocked beyond shocked. I was horrified and I didn't believe him. And I was like, how do you know? And she was like, I've talked to her before. And she was like, I'm going to be seeing her in New Orleans this week. I'm going to New Orleans. We're going to meet up with some of the other people who play vampires. She called me while she was in New Orleans. And she was like, I told Shannon that I was talking to you. She wants to talk to you.

So she passes the phone over to Shannon and she was like, "Hi Michael, this is Dennis, but you can call me Shannon." Dennis was gone and now Dennis was Shannon. And Shannon was a woman. And a woman had been my awakening to homosexuality and it was all very confusing. We end up having a conversation. We start talking.

There are some bizarre aspects to Shannon's personality. One of them was that she was so wrapped up in the Dennis persona that the very first time I spoke to her, she spoke with a fake French accent. It came across as fake. She pretty much sounded like a female Pepe Le Pew.

And so I had to really push past her Dennis persona because just as much as I had wrapped myself up, it came across that she had wrapped herself up in the fantasy of Dennis. And I wasn't interested in Dennis anymore. Dennis was a fiction. And so our first couple of conversations was getting past the fiction. And I got to know actual Shannon.

So the whole you're dead to me and I've already had your funeral, I spoke to Shannon. I was like, that hurt. That really hurt. And Shannon explained to me that when my computer got taken away, my dad reported everything to the police and the police had our computer. It wasn't getting fixed. The police were actually digging through our computer.

It was around this time, some kids who may or may not have been on the Le Jardin Savage board had murdered this girl's parents and were heading to New Orleans. And there was some belief that they were heading to New Orleans because they were part of that message board and they believed the vampires were there.

And so the cops were really going after everybody on the board. And Shannon had to completely disavow her entire online life because she was afraid that the cops were going to come after her. Apparently they didn't. And that's how she ended up back online. We start talking over the telephone regularly. And I start to think, well, I was in love with Dennis. So maybe I was in love with Shannon.

The more we talked, the more it felt just like those times I talked to Dennis. On one of our many conversations, she finally came out and she was like, I feel like I'm falling in love with you all over again. And I was like, I feel the same way. Even though I've came to all these realizations about myself that I needed to be myself, I was starting to think maybe I can be with a woman. And we begin to have a long distance boyfriend-girlfriend relationship.

It was all I love yous and I want to be with you. I can't wait till you're here. It was decided that we needed to be together and we're going to fall in love and it's going to be amazing. She was like, you're going to come here and we're going to build a life together and we're going to be everything that we always wanted. And I will have the kind of relationship that my parents always wanted me to have.

So we made the decision that I was going to move from South Carolina to Ohio to go be with her. I packed my bags. I got onto a bus and I rode that bus all the way to Ohio to the little town that Shannon lived in. And I met Shannon for the first time. I, at this time, was not quite 19.

Shannon was a 34-year-old woman who was the mother of two. She was not Dennis at all. Shannon immediately walks up to me and tries to give me a kiss. I am right off the bat uncomfortable. And I'm like, "Hi, it's great to meet you." And we hugged. And I immediately knew that I had made a mistake, that I had clung to emotions that I had for a fantasy.

So we get to her house and we go upstairs and we lay down on the bed and she starts to touch me. And I have never felt more uncomfortable. Clothes never came off. I immediately pull back from her and I was like, I can't. And she was like, that's OK, we'll take it slow. And she was like, we'll just lay here. And so we just laid there.

And during this whole time we're laying there, I'm coming to the realization that I know this isn't going to work, but I don't know how to extricate myself. I don't know how to tell her that I can't. I choose not to sleep in the bed with her. I choose to sleep on the couch. She tries several times to initiate more physical contact, but I can't. It's not that I'm revolted. It's not that it's like, oh, God, woman or anything like that. It was more just I knew it wouldn't be real and it wouldn't be healthy.

And she became more and more irate at the fact that I was not trying to participate in a more physical relationship with her. As Dennis, Shannon knew that I was gay.

Shannon encouraged my gayness as Dennis. Dennis was my gay awakening. So she was very well aware that I was gay. But I think just in the same way that I clung to the fantasy that Dennis was a real vampire, I became the fantasy for Shannon that I wasn't really gay, that I was in love with her. And I think in the same way that my fantasy was broken, her fantasy was broken.

I was there at Shannon's house for two weeks. After that two weeks, it was decided between the both of us that I should leave. And that was the true end. I saw Shannon out of the window of the bus as it was driving away back to South Carolina. And I remember realizing that that was the end of my first true love.

It was all a gamut of emotions, but I knew now that I was gay. I knew that that's who I was, period. One of the first things I did the first week I was home was officially come out to all my relatives, even my grandmother. I was 19 and I sat down with my ma and I explained to her that I was gay. And I explained it to my father and to my stepmother and to my sister. And that's who I've been ever since.

From about that point in time until today, I have unapologetically been myself. Just like anybody else, I've gone through my trials and tribulations, but I've worked really hard. I've gone through a lot of therapy. I am about to celebrate my first year anniversary of being married to my husband. We're literally about to close on our first house.

Owning a house, having a husband, the younger me that existed then never believed that they were lovable enough to have those things. And so I never allowed myself to believe that I could have them.

He loves me unconditionally. He's the first person I've ever been with who unconditionally loves me. But part of unconditional love is being honest. And pretty early on in our relationship, he looked at me and he was like, you have some things you need to address. And if we're going to have a successful relationship, you're going to have to address them. I'm not going to force you to, but I'm going to suggest that you at least think about talking to a therapist.

And so I took that first step and met my therapist. And that's when I started taking the steps I needed to to address the trauma and to really come to accept the fact that these things happened to me, but they were not my fault. The biggest step, the biggest hurdle is to be able to let yourself off the hook. This was other people's shit. This was not my shit.

And in accepting that I didn't create those situations other people did, I've been able to forgive myself and in some ways forgive them. I don't have any relationship with my paternal family or anybody in South Carolina, but my mother and I have repaired our relationship. We have a very, very good relationship. She lives close to me.

I've been able to heal that relationship at least. And so there's healing and there's more healing to come. But now I find myself 20 years later looking at my life and going, my life is pretty great. And I am pretty lovable. And I don't think that I could have gotten there without that first look in the mirror and that realizing that I had to build myself.

If I was going to be the person I wanted to be, I couldn't depend on anybody else. And I had to be me first. And I feel like today I am the person that I want to be. I can look at my abuse at the hands of so many people and be like, that was horrible. That was super horrible. But I can also look at it and be like, it should have never happened, but it molded me into a new person.

There is nothing wrong with embracing the darkness. It's not the darkness that you need to worry about, it's being swallowed by the darkness. Embracing your darkness is a good thing. Like accepting the bad as well as the good, the scary as well as the pleasurable. Accepting those things as all part of life and all part of this thing that makes you who you are, that's a good thing.

The bad thing is when you let the darkness swallow you. When you don't have the balance to look at it and be like, "Here's this darkness and it makes me me, but you know what? There's also this light and this light makes me me." And if you don't accept both of them, then you're going to get swallowed by it. The biggest thing I had to face was that fantasy isn't reality. That I can't live in my fantasies. They're prettier.

They're more amazing, they're more magical, but at the end of the day, they aren't reality. And I had spent so long living in my fantasies that I had to come to terms with the fact that I needed to make the real world my priority. I had to live outside my head, outside my imagination, outside my computer, outside my TV, outside of my book.

I had to start making the world around me as amazing as the world inside my head was. I can do my own thing to make the world a little bit more beautiful like those fantasies. And not just for myself, but for other people. Even if that's just being somebody's anchor, being there for a friend. Those things all make the real world just as beautiful as the fantastic one.

To me, the most beautiful things are the things that are broken and put back together. The things that other people would look at and say are monstrous are the things that I tend to look at and be like, "That's not monstrous, that's healing." Monstrous is beautiful in its own way. I love the monstrous because I was turning the horrible into the pretty, and I think my monstrous is pretty beautiful.

Today's episode featured Michael. If you'd like to reach out to him, you can email at vvsanctionvv at hotmail.com. That's V as in Victor, V-S-A-N-C-T-I-O-N-V-V at hotmail.com. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad-free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Witt Misseldein.

Today's episode was co-produced by me with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook or follow us on Instagram at ActuallyHappening.

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Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast, Against the Odds. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who live to tell the tale. In our next season, it's July 6th, 1988, and workers are settling into the night shift aboard Piper Alpha, the world's largest offshore oil rig.

Home to 226 men, the rig is stationed in the stormy North Sea off the coast of Scotland. At around 10 p.m., workers accidentally trigger a gas leak that leads to an explosion and a fire. As they wait to be rescued, the workers soon realize that Piper Alpha has transformed into a death trap. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app.