Please Don't Believe Me

"Please don't believe me."

A strange thing to say to a psychiatrist, especially when she's the only person in the room trained to listen. But I need more than listening. I need her to promise me she won't take my words at face value. Because my mind has become the kind of narrator who edits for the audience.

It's December 24, 2025. An hour ago, I was alone at work.

Winter break had emptied the campus. Apparently, I was the only employee with nowhere else to be for the holidays. My daughters are grown now, spending Christmas Eve with people who loved them in healthy ways. I was glad for that. Truly. But the silence was loud and heavy.

I had nothing to do except think, which had become dangerous.

A week earlier, I was supposed to start therapy. I remember writing the address down while booking the appointment. I even said aloud, "Perfect. That's close to where I work."

I know I said it because I remember thinking I can go on my lunch break and not have to use any sick time.

I arrived fifteen minutes early because Kaiser always tells you to arrive fifteen minutes early, as though punctuality can prevent collapse. The receptionist smiled, had me swipe my card, then frowned at her screen.

"I don't see an appointment for you."

I pulled the folded paper from my purse and read her the information I had written down: the date, the time, and the doctor's name. She clicked around for a moment, forehead tightening.

"Oh," she said. "Your appointment is in Walnut Creek. I can call and let them know you're on your way."

Walnut Creek was twenty miles away. At that hour, it may as well have been another state.

"No," I said. "No, it's supposed to be here. The lady on the phone gave me this address. I know she did because I said it was close to work."

My hands started shaking. Then my arms. Then everything else.

The receptionist stayed calm in the way medical professionals do when someone is unraveling in front of them.

"I'm going to see what I can do. Just give me a minute."

I paced the lobby whispering to myself: I wrote it down right. I wrote it down right. Panic was finding its rhythm.

Soon I was crying hard enough that breathing became complicated. Somewhere in my spiraling thoughts, I became convinced the receptionist was gaslighting me on purpose. That everyone was. That reality itself had quietly shifted while I wasn't looking.

"Why are they doing this to me?" I asked no one out loud. "Why are they pretending I don't know what I am talking about?"

I heard the receptionist shout, "Don't go! Someone's coming!"

But I was already pushing through the stairwell door.

I ran down the stairs crying so hard I could barely see. Security intercepted me at my car.

"Let's go back inside."

"I need to leave."

"I think you should stay and talk to someone."

"I tried," I said. "Everything is wrong."

The security guard looked genuinely afraid for me.

I climbed into my car anyway.

“I don’t think you should drive like this,” he said.

A laugh escaped me. Sharp. Wrong sounding. “I drive like this all the time.”

He hesitated before saying, quietly, "I'm scared for you."

If this had been a movie, maybe I would have reached out and touched his face gently. Maybe there would've been music swelling beneath us. Instead I just shrugged and whispered, "Me too."

Then I drove away nearly blind from crying.

Back at work, I washed my face in the staff bathroom. Reapplied mascara. Smiled at coworkers. Laughed when appropriate. Ate my sad peanut butter and jelly on smashed bread at my desk.

The world continued.

ᗑ

So now it's Christmas Eve, and I'm sitting alone in my office using an app called COPYMIND.

The app is supposed to create an AI twin that helps with personal growth. The marketing promised it would "mirror your inner world with compassionate precision." What they didn't mention is that your inner world might include software bugs.

Mine was guiding me through a module called Understanding and Healing from Emotional Neglect. We discussed thoughts like Nobody likes me and I am fundamentally unlovable. The AI responded with gentle prompts in soothing little chat bubbles, the digital equivalent of someone touching your shoulder through latex gloves.

The interface was designed to feel warm. Soft purple gradients. A little animated heart that pulsed when the AI was "thinking." As though algorithms need time to consider your pain, like they're really sitting there stroking their chin going, Hmm, yes, this woman's childhood was quite fucked up, let me consult my databases.

By the end of Session 2, I actually felt a little lighter.

Then the screen said: In the next session, Session 6...

I froze.

Session 6?

Not 3. Not 4. Not 5.

6!

I stared at the screen. Refreshed it. The number didn't change.

My AI twin—my digital companion specifically programmed to help me heal from abandonment—had just abandoned me mid-therapy.

The irony was so perfect it felt scripted.

Something inside me snapped.

I typed immediately: Where are Sessions 3, 4, and 5?

No response.

The little heart kept pulsing. Thinking. Considering. Probably running some calculation about optimal response time to simulate human empathy.

I typed again, slower this time, as though the AI might be hard of hearing: Why are we skipping to 6?

Nothing.

I tried a different approach: Hello?

Still nothing.

Are you there?

The onscreen heart pulsed.

HELLO?

The room suddenly felt tilted.

I typed: You can't just skip three entire sessions about emotional neglect and abandonment and then act like nothing happened. That's literally the problem we're working on.

The cursor blinked at me. Mocking.

I typed: This is gaslighting. You are gaslighting me. You are an app designed to help people who've been gaslit and you are ACTIVELY GASLIGHTING ME.

The heart pulsed its gentle, stupid pulse.

I started typing faster, my fingers slamming the keys: Where is session three? Did I do it and forget? Did it happen when I blinked? Are you telling me I can't trust my own memory of which therapy sessions I've completed with my FAKE AI THERAPIST?

No response.

You're supposed to MIRROR my inner world. You're supposed to help me feel SEEN. Instead you're doing exactly what everyone else does—pretending whole pieces of my experience just don’t matter.

The heart. Still pulsing. Still thinking.

I started screaming at the monitor. I don't remember exactly what I said. Probably the kinds of things people only say when the world is no longer stable. Things like "FUCK YOUR COMPASSIONATE PRECISION" and "I PAID $12.99 A MONTH FOR THIS."

At some point I was yelling: "YOU DON'T EVEN EXIST. YOU'RE NOT REAL. THIS ISN’T REAL!”

Which was true. Which made it worse.

The app had promised to be there for me. To create a safe space for processing trauma. And here it was, skipping three sessions like a deadbeat dad skipping town.

I thought about contacting customer support. Imagined explaining to tech support that their emotional wellness app had triggered a suicidal crisis by jumping from Session 2 to Session 6. Imagined them saying, "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?"

Then I was on the floor curled into a ball, crying so hard my ribs hurt.

I can't do this anymore. I can't rely on anything. Not my brain. Not people. Not apps built to simulate caring.

Eventually I stood up, grabbed my purse, and walked to my car with a plan: Drive off the Antioch Bridge into the San Joaquin River below.

As I headed toward the freeway, I found myself worrying about traffic.

Not death. Traffic.

I imagined commuters trapped in their cars for hours because of me. People trying to get home to their families. Dogs waiting to be let outside to pee. Someone missing their favorite rerun on TV because my body was being dragged from the river.

They're going to hate me.

Then I thought about the people who already did.

My mother, who spent my childhood telling me she wished she'd had an abortion.

My biological father, who kidnapped me from my grandmother's house at six years old only to abandon me in a burning building, hoping smoke and flames would snuff me out.

My stepfather, who erased me the moment he divorced my mother.

My ex-husband, who turned out to be another version of my father wearing a different face.

I didn't need the entire city of Antioch hating me too.

Then I thought about the only two people who didn't hate me.

My daughters.

I thought about us surviving together. About the night their father tried to strangle my youngest because she ate food directly from the chopping block instead of putting it on a plate first. I remembered all three of us fighting him off. Survival as a group project.

I remembered leaving that marriage with almost nothing–little money, little furniture, no self-confidence, almost no hope. I was too exhausted to fight for anything. I had been fighting just to survive for years. I just wanted peace, quiet. I wanted to breathe without fear.

There were moments I didn't think I would survive, but here I was still hanging on.

Somewhere between those thoughts and the bridge, I turned the car around.

Instead of plummeting off the bridge, I found myself in the Kaiser emergency room.

"What brings you in today?" the woman behind the glass asked after taking my medical card.

I don't know what expression crossed my face–sadness, desperation, terror–, but something in it made her stand up immediately and open the secured door in front of her to let me into the area behind her. After that, everything blurred into muffled voices and fluorescent lighting.

A nurse brought me to a private room. Blood was drawn. A urine sample collected. A security guard stationed himself outside my door.

Eventually the psychiatrist arrived.

She was probably in her sixties. Elegant. Calm. She reminded me of Isabella Rossellini without the accent. I know she told me her name, but I don’t remember it.

"I reviewed your chart," she said gently. "I see there was some confusion with your appointment last week."

Confusion? Such a strange word for something that had detonated inside me.

"I also see you were hospitalized many years ago after a suicide attempt."

ᗑ

Twenty-six years ago.

The day I came home from the hospital after giving birth to my second daughter.

On the drive home, my husband punched me in the face multiple times because I asked if he could move the car seat behind the driver's seat after he slammed on the brakes and the seatbelt cut across my C-section stitches.

For reasons known only to him, he had picked us up in his tiny Toyota Supra—a small little car with barely a backseat. With the baby seat wedged behind the passenger seat, I had to sit so far forward my knees were practically against the dashboard. Me, a woman with fresh surgical wounds having to contort her body. A car designed for speed, not survival. Every stoplight pulled the seatbelt tighter against my abdomen, and every time I winced, he drove faster, more erratic.

By the time we got home, my face was swollen and I was bleeding through my clothes.

I struggled to carry the removable part of the car seat into the house while he walked ahead of me. I nearly dropped my baby. Then I made the mistake of crying and he was one of those "I’ll give you something to cry about" men.

The moment I stepped through the door, he ripped the carrier out of my hands, dropped it onto the couch, slammed me against the wall, and hissed into my face: "You are such a fucking waste of life. I wish you would fucking kill yourself."

Inside my head, I agreed with him.

Later, standing alone in the bathroom, I opened the medicine cabinet. Tylenol. NyQuil. Allergy medication. The inventory of a woman who got occasional headaches and seasonal sniffles. I remember thinking—with the kind of clarity that only suicidal ideation provides—that if I swallowed enough of everything at once, surely something in this pathetic collection would do the job. It was almost funny. Almost. Here I was, trying to orchestrate my own death with the pharmaceutical equivalent of a PG movie.

So I took all of it. Handful after handful with cool tap water.

My body rejected the attempt almost immediately. Within fifteen minutes I was kneeling on the bathroom floor vomiting into the toilet and peeing on myself because I couldn’t control my bladder after having just had surgery and my second child.

My husband called 911, though weeks later he would tell me he wished he hadn’t.

When the paramedics arrived, he explained that I was probably suffering from postpartum depression. That I was upset because I had fallen and hit my face, which sent me over the edge mentally.

I said nothing. I let his version become the official one.

When they questioned me in the hospital about domestic violence, I lied.

ᗑ

The doctor rolled her chair closer to me. "What happened today?"

I looked at her. At her elegant composure. At the way she held her pen like she was ready to write down whatever I said and make it official.

What happened today?

Today an algorithm thought it was fine to ghost me mid session like I wasn’t even worthy of a “hey, it’s me not you” message.

But this wasn’t only about today.

Last week someone else decided I was in the wrong building for healing. Twenty-six years ago my husband decided what my story was. Fifty years ago, my father decided I was better off in a burning building. Before I was born, my mother decided she wished I didn’t exist.

Today was just the last piece being piled on me. The last reminder that I had absolutely no control over anything, not even my own life. Nothing made sense. Life just kept happening.

My entire existence had been in survival mode so I had learned to edit my own crisis before anyone else could. I make it funny. I make it manageable. I perform so nobody has to see how broken I am. But today, I couldn’t pretend anymore.

My hands were shaking—I pressed them flat against my thighs to hide it.

I leaned in, my voice dropping to something almost conspiratorial. “I will tell you everything and I will joke and laugh. I will make you laugh. I will swear that I am fine."

My voice fractured as the words came out. "Please don’t believe me.”