Finding Ghosts [2020]

Before I start this post I just wanted to say that I am going to be rather busy this month. I won’t be able to post or interact as much as I would like. I will share why pretty soon. It’s partly because I don’t want to jinx anything.

I have found right before moving to a new country that you can uncover ghosts from your past in the country you are leaving. When you run into a moment like that, and if you’re in England, you say it’s a “Blast from the past”. One sign that a country has not worked out for me is that I’m trying to leave behind a lot of awful things that I have witnessed or experienced. There’s nothing like moving to another country to help you wipe the slate clean and start anew. My favourite thing is changing my phone number because the chances of self-delusional narcissists finding you are practically zero! Yes, I have mental health issues from being hurt the way I have. Mental health issues can be at a different level as an expat or when you repatriate because the country you’re in is definitely significant to your experience! I never let anyone tell me otherwise! If someone asks me if moving to a new country is a good way to leave ghosts behind, I would answer with a resounding yes!

My blast from the past happened when I was going through some message settings on my cell phone. I ran into the blocked messages by accident. Normally, if I am deliberately trying to clean out things like that, I can mentally prepare myself for it. This time, it was by accident, and I was completely unprepared for what I saw there! 

All I am ready to share right now is that I have been raked over the coals by a number of people during the time I have lived in the US. The same thing happened in the UK. I have blocked a lot of numbers, it’s true. Even though the people I blocked were narcissists, there were some situations I could have handled better. It’s hard when bad people affect your actions and you lash out because you can’t take their crap anymore! You look like the bad guy all of a sudden when in reality, they have been hurting you all along. Newton’s Third Law of Motion can be applied in the sense that every action a person does to you (good or bad) produces an equal and opposite reaction in you. Things you do intuitively follow this rule too. Sometimes, you don’t know why your intuition makes you lash out, particularly if someone is super good at hiding who they are. In the end, you find out your intuition was correct.

Anyway, even though I removed the contacts from my cell phone after blocking them, I could still identify the messages by the first few words that show up when you see a message! There were some narcissists I blocked SIX months ago who are still trying to contact me! I’m not interested in contacting them! Why do you think I blocked them? There is a point where you think, “This is harassment!” I understand if blocked contacts try to contact you again within a month of you blocking them, but six months is excessive! I also suspect someone I blocked two years ago found my number, even though I changed it. Wouldn’t put it past them.

When I saw that crap on my phone, I didn’t read the messages all the way through. I deleted them, but I had seen enough of them to identify the sources. For the first time in several months, I had a full-on panic attack! I spent some time with my mother and it was soothing. I eventually felt better.

I hate running into stuff like that unprepared! One thing I hate about technology is that you have to psych yourself up for looking at electronic means of communication that have a bad history. Something is wrong if doing that is necessary. I fully support making technology less addictive for precisely this reason. I also support giving people privacy and expect my privacy to be respected too. This is one of the reasons that I write with a pen name. It’s not a personal attack, and no, I’m not doing it to hide that I’m a woman. I just want some privacy, so I set a boundary. To my readers who know my real name, thank you for respecting my pen name!

I will be back with the posts soon. I don’t know when though, but keep watching this space!