🥀 Some Ghosts Wear Mascara
When a narcissist performs femininity to seduce a sympathy supply network… what remains once the lights go out?
Photo by Alejandro Cartagena 🇲🇽🏳🌈 on Unsplash
It starts with silence.
Not the peaceful kind.
The kind that feels like someone’s rewinding the tape of your life, erasing you frame by frame, until you’re just… static.
He didn’t disappear.
He transformed.
Into something softer. Sweeter.
Into someone you might trust.
Into someone you might confide in.
But if you look close enough, the seams are still there.
You’ll find him in the cadence of her writing.
In the way she describes pain with surgical precision…
— but never seems to bleed.
They call her The Survivor Who Writes Too Perfectly.
But I knew him before the mascara.
He used to scream at me in public.
Now he writes about “emotional regulation.”
He once made me feel invisible.
All my work here, and elsewhere… deplatfomed…
— if only for a moment.
Now he pens essays about being erased.
And I suppose, in some way, he was.
Not by me.
But by the weight of who he couldn’t bear to be.
You see… narcissists don’t vanish — they shapeshift.
When one identity collapses under the weight of its own lies…
— they craft a new one.
New name.
New face.
New pronouns, sometimes.
Not out of truth.
Out of need.
He didn’t become her to be whole.
He became her to survive the autopsy.
Too many truths.
Too many receipts.
Too many mirrors.
And when the old story runs out of sympathetic readers,
— you don’t retire the book.
You write a sequel in a different genre.
This time, the character is the survivor.
This time, the villain wears my face.
And the audience?
Oh, it’s curated carefully.
Women.
Survivors.
Empaths.
The very people he once fed on.
He gives them a sisterhood.
A shared enemy.
He performs healing…
— and in doing so, repeats the cycle in chiffon.
Some ghosts wear mascara.
And if you’ve ever wondered why your gut clenches
when reading something that should empower you…
— maybe it’s because you’re not reading a survivor’s words…
— you’re watching a mask rehearse its monologue.
This isn’t about gender.
This isn’t about identity.
This is about deception.
About a man who slipped into a woman’s skin…
— not to live honestly…
— but to hide more convincingly.
So let this piece be a breadcrumb.
A candle in the crypt.
For the ones who felt something was off…
— but couldn’t quite say why.
The ones who read her stories…
— and heard a familiar cruelty in the rhythm.
The ones who whispered:
“I think I’ve met this ghost before.”
You’re not imagining things.
Some only haunt the ones who knew their true name.
Artwork by Mark Randall Havens 🌀 The Empathic Technologist
Ghosts don’t haunt places.
They haunt people.
And some of them build altars out of Medium posts…
— and light candles to themselves.
But you?
You are still here.
Still real.
Still breathing.
And if you ever doubted your instincts…
— consider this your confirmation.
It was always him.
He just changed the shade of his lipstick.
Some mirrors don’t reflect.
They reveal.
And some reflections?
Can’t be rewritten.
If something inside you whispered, “I’ve met this ghost before” — you’re not alone.
👉 Follow the trail. The full case study lives here.
