From the Eyes of an Ex-Stalker
Disclaimer: This is a true story about myself that has controversial themes including stalking (duh), teen depression, mental illness, abuse, and suicide.
For clarification, I was a teenager when this happened. I had an unhealthy view of the world. As if the circumstances would make me any less ashamed. It started when I entered high school. I was of the mindset that it was weird that I didn’t have a boyfriend yet. I was thinking about how awesome it would be to have someone that loved me that way. I wanted it more than normal because I didn’t feel loved by anyone including my parents.
I was imagining the perfect guy. I wanted a guy that I wasn’t afraid of. Those were somewhat rare. Muscly guys were out. They had the power to physically hurt me. I didn’t want someone outgoing because I figured they had choices and the only way they’d choose me is if they wanted to take advantage of me. I was convinced that if most guys had the chance, they would hurt me. I decided I wanted a skinny guy that was shy and introverted. I wanted a guy that looked safe.
As I was thinking about this, I noticed a guy that fit the bill and he was looking in my direction. When I noticed him, he looked away. That moment I mentally latched on to him. I decided that he was the one. (Ugh. I cringe when I think about this today.) I had a dilemma. I didn’t know how to talk to him. I couldn’t think of a normal way to get his attention. So, I didn’t try right away. Over time, I made friends with his friend. It wasn’t that hard. (He started the conversation.) We had things in common. I liked his friend.
From this point on, let’s call my crush, “R” and his friend, “D”. So, D and I were talking about anime. I was surprised to meet someone into that stuff. We didn’t exactly enjoy the same genre of animes, but we had common interests. One day I noticed D and R had brought Yu-Gi-Oh cards to school and they were playing with them. The next day I brought mine. I wasn’t interested in keeping them. I didn’t have fun with them like they did. My mom wanted me to keep them because she’s a card collector. She believes it’s worth buying and keeping something that doesn’t have value now because it might have value later. I didn’t and still don’t agree with that. I don’t regret giving the cards away.
So, I brought my cards to school. I felt silly having something so weird and foreign in my bag. I showed the cards to D. He was jealous. I had some cards that were valuable to him. I gave them to him. He was happy and excited. He showed them to R. I don’t remember his reaction, but some time later when I was on my way to lunch R wanted to talk to me. I was so nervous and excited. I had no idea what it was about. He talked so fast it was hard to keep up, but the gist of it was, he wanted me to take a certain card back from D so I could give it to him. I wanted to please him and while he was right in front of me, that desire overwhelmed me. I reluctantly agreed.
Later, when I was by myself, I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. I knew I’d feel guilty about taking back something I gave to my friend, but what stopped me was more than that. I didn’t want to be embarrassed about asking that of my friend. I worried that if I did this, R might find out I loved him. I wasn’t ready for that. I was terrified of rejection. I think subconsciously I was afraid of being accepted too.
The next day when I thought it through, I pulled R aside in the same place and time he did the day before. I told him that I had second thoughts. R was disappointed and I was sad about disappointing him, but I didn’t regret my decision. It was moral and it was safe.
I think I experienced some cognitive disparity and this event caused someone different to come to the surface. I’m not saying I had multiple personality disorder, but what I experienced was similar. I’m not a psychologist and even if I was, I recognize that I would be horrible at diagnosing myself.
I struggled with two different parts of me. They didn’t have names and at the time I didn’t even realize they were there. I considered them both me. Two opposite parts of me. One was realistic me, which lost the overall battle against its opposite. The unrealistic me, the one that needed to believe someone loved her even if it wasn’t true.
This is difficult to write, I don’t want to remember any of this.
At that point, the realistic me knew that I probably ruined my chances with him. The other one said it could still work out. For a long time, I didn’t talk to R again, but I was compelled to find out more about him. I watched him whenever I could. I would look at him across the class, he’d look up and I’d pretend to be looking elsewhere. I don’t know if I deluded myself, but sometimes I thought he was looking at me and he was doing the same thing I was.
Soon, I started stalking him subconsciously. I know it sounds ridiculous, but stay with me. I didn’t follow him anywhere at first. I just talked to my friends. I don’t remember who brought him up if it was them or me. It was probably me. They would tell me things about him even if they didn’t realize they were doing it. I don’t remember if I learned any personal details about him, but I did eventually learn what his class schedule was. At one point I considered following him home (then it wasn’t subconscious), but decided that would be too obvious. Instead, I followed him to the buses and found out which bus he took. When I got home I looked up the bus route and found a rough area of where he lived. (I wonder why I was able to find a school bus route on the internet. That shouldn’t be a thing.) I never searched the area for two reasons:
- I didn’t want to be caught.
- I didn’t have a way to get there.
My stalking never went further than that. Probably because I didn’t have the means. I tried stalking him on Facebook, but his page was private and the idea of friending him gave me anxiety. (It’s extremely easy to find out info about people on Facebook if you’re friends with them. I’ve found out where a friend lived without her permission once.)
Time went on. One day there was a new girl in school, let’s call her N. I felt sorry for her. She looked like she didn’t have any friends, so I tried to be hers. I stupidly told her about R. I was trying to bond with her. Unbeknownst to me, she made an AIM account and impersonated R. (To anyone who doesn’t know what AIM is: it was an instant messaging service.)
N said everything I wanted to hear. That he had feelings for me too and was too shy to say anything. Part of me believed it. You know what part. It was ecstatic. The other part of me questioned if it was actually him. The realistic me was vocal in that conversation, it wanted this person behind the screen to prove it was R. N set up a time and place for us to meet. We were to meet before school in the cafeteria.
I went there for a little bit. It was awkward being by myself in a crowd of people being with their friends. I was incredibly nervous. I kept looking at the clock and not seeing him. I eventually left before the bell rang. I couldn’t stand my distress when I was there and waiting for him. I think I didn’t want to know if it was him or not. The unrealistic one was at full power and was convinced I just stood him up. I would look at him with pity when I stared at him. He definitely noticed I was looking at him that day.
A tiny part of me was mortified by what unrealistic me was doing and she was only able to come out when he wasn’t around. N might not have been the only one to play with me like that. Someone sent me a Valentine’s day gift and signed his name. I looked at him weird that day too. I never found out who sent that one.
Shortly after that, someone else new came to class. I don’t remember her name, but let’s call her C. She was the most horrible person I ever met. She made it her life’s mission to make my life miserable. She would hurl the most creative insults at me every chance she got. Normally, when someone was mean to me, I would physically hurt them and it would be the end of it. She had herself a bodyguard. Not literally. I doubt she would have been able to afford one. She stuck close to a guy in class and he would protect her. I couldn’t get past him. I wondered if she exchanged sex for protection. She seemed like the type.
The one insult that hit me close was when she accused me of sleeping with my father. I wonder if that would have bothered someone who didn’t have daddy issues. I suspect that she knew that would bother me. I suspect she heard from the grapevine a twisted version of what happened when I was eleven or twelve.
If you care to read more about that it’s in here.
I forget how, but I brought this problem with C to an authority figure at school. I think I was interviewed by a dean. He treated the situation like I came to file a police report. He had me write a statement and he asked me to name a witness or two. I wasn’t confident that I knew anyone who would back me up. I dumbly gave the name of one of C’s friends. He supposedly looked into it, but nothing ever came from it. If I didn’t have a distrust for authority figures before, after that it definitely solidified it.
During this time I wasn’t as focused on R as usual. I stopped actively stalking him. I was more worried about how to be okay.
One day I was so upset all I wanted to do was hug a friend, so after class I did. She got mad at me for interfering with her getting attention from her boyfriend. She didn’t realize how upset I was and she apologized after, but it still gave me a complex. I was hanging on to the belief that I had friends who cared and even though she was just one person out of a few that I had, she shattered that belief.
Even after the bullying stopped, it took some time for me to feel like I mattered again. When I was home, I started hiding in my closet because I couldn’t take the abuse from all sides. It kept my dad from finding me, but it forced me to be alone with my thoughts. They were worse than anything anyone has ever said to me. I started to contemplate death.
I thought about getting in the pool and keeping myself underwater until I drowned. One day I found a mirror in front of me in the closet. I thought about breaking the glass and stabbing myself with it. I thought about a lot of methods of death and I was trying to find one that wouldn’t hurt. The only thing that stopped me was fear of more pain.
I think it was around then that I started having random panic attacks at school. At the time I didn’t know what was happening to me and none of the adults in my life could figure it out either. My mom took me to the doctor because everyone thought it was a physical thing like asthma. It wasn’t until years later when I heard a panic attack being described that I realized what they actually were. The panic attacks disappeared as mysteriously as they appeared. They only lasted a few weeks.
The school year ended and it was somewhat of a relief. I cherished the peace I had when my parents weren’t home. The following high school years were better and I started to distance myself emotionally from R. I still thought about him often, but I was accepting the reality that it was never going to happen.
When I was a junior I made a new friend. At the time I was getting into expressing myself through music and I wanted to learn how to write songs. I heard that she was good at writing poems and I asked her to help me. I scared the crap out of her when I asked because apparently, I had a threatening demeanor. It wasn’t what I was going for.
We were extremely different, but we had one thing in common. We were damaged. I was the closest to her than any other friend I ever had. She was the first friend I had who understood how I felt about my dad. She was my shield in a sea of people that I didn’t want to be in. I followed her everywhere I could. I was late to class a bunch of times because I didn’t want to leave her. She was the only person that made me feel together in high school.
I told her all my secrets and she not only kept them but tried to help me with my problems. She tried to get me to talk to R. She was unsuccessful for a while. The anxiety ran deep. She started to sit with him at lunch and after a while, I couldn’t stand being by myself. I joined them for lunch every day. Most of the time I didn’t talk to him, but it gave me an excuse to look at him.
I was truly learning about him for the first time. He wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t see that. Even though I was beginning to learn about his personality I was in denial for a little while. I just kept seeing him as that perfect unattainable guy I made up in my head. (I don’t mean that he was necessarily a bad guy. I just overrode every part of him that I didn’t like in my head.) Eventually, I talked to him a little bit, but I don’t remember the majority of what was said.
What happened next is mostly a blur to me. I was walking behind R, he turned around and we had a verbal exchange. He was annoyed with me. He said, “Why do you have to be so crazy?!”
It woke me up. His tone reminded me of my dad. I told myself, regardless of what his feelings were, he didn’t deserve me. I didn’t have a choice on who my dad was, but I did have a choice on who I loved. In that moment I finally did have a choice. I chose to not let him hurt me again. I said nothing and walked away. I never talked to him again.
At the time I was angry about what he said, but as I’ve grown up I realized the problems I had were not normal and probably did make me seem that way. I’ve run into him a few times over the years, but I’ve decided to act like he didn’t exist. I have no desire to talk to him again, but I do wonder what he’s thinking when he sees me.
