Dark Empath

It all began November 30th, on a windy Monday night out in New York City. We agreed to meet at his job and I waited for him to finish his shift so we could go out for drinks. Meeting him was like a breath of fresh air; I was simply infatuated just by staring at him. I could see the pain and hurt he felt many times before and all I wanted to do was make it go away. But by spending so much time mesmerized by his eyes, I failed to see the negative energy that surrounded him.

I should’ve seen right through the fake *** person he made himself out to be. I blame myself for wasting my time on such a narcissist. He took my love for granted; the memories of my first love are shattered. Can you believe the first time I ever felt pure love was by a man obsessed with his pride and ego? The veil didn’t stay up for long, the signs became too loud to ignore, the red flags were there all along. It started with the gaslighting, then the hoovering, and the love bombing followed right after. It was a pattern; an endless cycle that always led to torment and misery. He was much more than a narcissist, far beyond an egocentric, despicable individual. He was a ‘dark empath’ and I wouldn't wish this kind of mental illness on any empathetic individual to begin with.

There were times I felt at peace when I was around him but there were times I failed to see the anxiety that he created in me. The inconsistency shown by him when he wouldn’t respond to texts for weeks or when he would ghost me would break me. Even when surrounded by loved ones, I felt so isolated and confused. I didn’t understand why I just couldn’t cut this guy off as I’ve done with others before. To this day, I still don’t understand the entirety of what happened. It all may seem disorganized but that’s what the situation was and ended up to be.

After our first meeting on December 5th, he ghosted me for a couple of days. After countless efforts to reach out to him, he finally texted back but only to disclose that his “roommate” from Atlanta was actually his ex from Florida. Him ghosting me right after we met was difficult in itself, but this was a different type of blow. He told me they were separated for three years, had no feelings for his ex, and was only residing with him due to the circumstances of the pandemic. At that moment, I chose to give him the benefit of the doubt and disregarded my own gut feeling, dismissing it as it being difficult for him to disclose he was living with his ex. As I was trying my best to come from a place of understanding, I turned against my intuition and ended up burning myself.

Now here’s the lowest blow of them all, we agreed to meet on the 13th and he decided to ghost me on the day of. Being pushed to my tipping point, I was livid throughout the week of the 14th – 18th, growing impatient with myself and becoming someone I wasn’t. I became paranoid to the point where I had to reach out to his friend in order to see if he was genuinely okay. My reasoning for this was out of concern, because the last message he sent to me read, “I’m so excited, I’ll let you know when I leave.” That’s when he finally reached back out and said that he was fine and that he was thinking about a lot of things.

This hermit mode of his continued on for another week. That was the same week of Christmas, the week we made plans to spend the holidays together. I was feeling so many emotions, many which I have never experienced before, which left me wondering if everything was alright. Something felt off and I wasn’t sure on how to cope and understand. The energy was very intense; so much pain, anger, and grief present and knowing that it wasn’t just my own was baffling. I felt like I was a vessel taking on not only my own emotions, but the emotions of the narc and all of his previous victims.

This is when it started to get too bizarre for me to emotionally comprehend. My belief system and my spirituality started to overlap into this twisted psychological game I was in. On my first night out with him, I forgot to mention we held hands. Now, I don’t know if many of you believe in what I call this ‘sixth sense’, but after holding his hand that night, I had a rather odd dream. In the dream, we were in what seemed to be a random room. The setting was already set; he was naked, and I was unsure of his intent. When I looked down towards his crotch, this is when I saw the Devil branded on him. I immediately told him I had to leave the room and went to the room across from his. The doors happened to be glass and I could see everything that was going on from across. What I saw after was much more terrifying. I witnessed him drowning in what was once his bed, now water. As he was drowning, asking for help, a dark figure loomed over the bed of water, extending out its hand. However, I could sense that this figure only wanted to help him, just to drop him back into the pool of water. Something within my dream came to me and said, “come with me, you can’t watch this any longer”.

That dream still gives me chills, but I mention it because what comes next is just as interesting as it is horrifying. One could say that this was my “higher power” coming to me through the form of a dream to warn me of the severity of this situation, but I still refused to trust my intuition. During the last two weeks of December, I went through an intense purging of emotions. I cried almost every night until I came to the realization that in order to eradicate all of these intense emotions, I had to devote myself to healing and meditation.

Before I continue, I am not here to question your stance whether or not you believe in God(s). Regardless of what you believe, I am here to share that coincidences are real and the smallest circumstances can have drastic consequences. As I tried to understand what was going on, I decided to do my research. My research ranged from spiritual topics such as tarot, astrology, and twin flame journeys. I do want to disclose that I was already spiritual prior to any of this but I was not as invested as I am at the moment. Everything just felt like a coincidence, as if everything had accidentally aligned. However, I do admit that my investment into him was primarily based on fallacies. When we discussed our mutual interest in astrology, it led to the discovery that we shared the same sun, moon, rising, and Venus signs. Aside from that, I also shared numerology and how despite having different birthdays, we shared the same life path number. All these coincidences led me to believe we were twin flames, I must have been convinced it was fate. As much as I wanted to believe we were, I had to come to the conclusion that bringing this to his attention gave him a strong narrative to reel me back into this cycle of what I learned was ‘narcissistic supply’.

Moving beyond Christmas, we made amends on New Year’s and decided to move forward. However, January 3rd, 2021 was the last day I saw him. On the following day, I had this surge of suspicion overcome me. It’s like I knew he was hiding more than he was letting on when I interrogated him the day before. This is when I discovered, through some snooping, that he threw me into a third-party situation. When I confronted him about it, he ghosted me once again. I decided to end this once and for all and texted him back the second week in. On January 24th, he messaged me and love bombed me once again, but it was to no avail. Nothing made sense anymore, he would continue to respond to my texts confessing his love for me, but never addressed the problem in the first place. I was done, I had enough, PERIOD.

The next day was when it all clicked. That morning, I came across an article on narcissistic behaviors and why narcissists need new supply. I confronted him one last time, this time devaluing him in the most disrespectful way. That was not the best course of action as I did end up experiencing my end of ‘narcissistic injury’, but to end this story of overlapping themes of psychology and spirituality, I’d like to end on this last coincidence. It is not a coincidence that the journal I first wrote in about my experience with this narcissist, before finding out about this contest, was started in a small black notebook. And knowing that I will come into $20,000 dollars because of this story will only make this experience, as soul draining as it was, all the better.