Let me start by saying that if by the end of this, most of you think I should die, please don’t worry, I feel the same way. This is an alt account, and the name is largely a reference to how much I have felt like a ghost of my former self after what happened. But I need to get this off my chest somehow. This will be long, but there’s a lot to it, sorry. So, first, relevant background info:

-I have borderline personality disorder and had to stop going to therapy over a year ago because I couldn’t find a full-time job that would let me take even one half day every two weeks to see a shrink. I don’t know how much you guys know about this disorder but you get extremely attached to people and your emotions are very intense.

-I was in a bad relationship in the past where I was gaslit for years, and I use the term because multiple therapists have used it too. To say this gave me trust issues is putting it mildly. It’s hard for me now to find a middle ground between total distrust and absolute blind faith in someone.

-Many years ago, I fell romantically for a girl who was being badly abused, and my failing to improve her situation or help in any way led to the most serious one of my failed suicide attempts. She wound up beaten half to death in the hospital. I heard him break her arm while we spoke on the phone once, because he caught her speaking to me.

So, the situation. This past summer my partner of almost 4 years and I broke up. Partly because my trust issues had caused real problems, as had my borderline disorder. I knew it was coming (I’d overheard her tell a friend over the phone she was planning on ‘leaving him’ at the end of the summer), but it still really hurt. I deal very, very badly with being alone. And now I was really isolated, since I’d moved to a new state for said now ex-partner where I knew no one else. Because of that, I started trying to meet someone new very quickly. I mostly did this by joining a variety of kink communities. I really want a partner who is also into kink, and it helps with my trust issues in an odd way, so that’s the kind of spaces I joined. I ended up talking to a good amount of people. A couple of them were more local, and I ended up hooking up with a few folks. One of them really stood out.

She told me her name (I’ll use Jenny because it’s close enough), and we really hit it off. We even turned out to have all these shared interests outside of BDSM. Sometimes it honestly seemed like every time I'd express something I liked she'd be about it too, we had so many things in common. She quickly started telling me about her terrible home life, how she lived with her "cruel and hateful" mother. She never flat-out used the term abusive but the behavior she described always was, and she would describe being mistreated quite frequently. She would tell me no one else in her life cared or understood, or trusted her. She told me again and again how much I meant to her, how I was the only one who truly cared in the way she needed. She also told me some very dark fantasies she had and that she didn’t share them with most people, so I felt really trusted which mattered a lot, and I indulged her over text in said dark fantasies. I figured it made me extra-special to her. She was the only person I had ever been with who told me she liked that I got super attached and was, in her own words, “obsessive”. I had wanted to hear that for my entire life. Once she said that it was over for me, I’d have done ANYTHING for her. And she told me that within two weeks of meeting me. She was unfortunately younger enough than me that most people would find it weird. She told me she would be turning 19 about three months after we started talking (I had just turned 31). Everyone else I was talking to was much closer to my age, and I usually wouldn’t get involved with someone with that big of an age gap. But she made it very clear she only intended to be with older men, and she told me again and again how special I was to her. So I made an exception. Plus my biological parents had something like a 9 year age gap so like… it wasn’t inconceivable to me.

She would also tell me a lot about how I was kinder and better to her than any of her 'other doms'. And with her awful home situation, I really felt that if I was there for her and got her away, I could finally forgive myself for ‘Alice’ (the other girl I loved who was being abused). I haven't forgiven for what happened to Alice for 12 years. I really went to quite some lengths too, I wrote her a 15 page love note, snuck around in the middle of the night so her abusive mom wouldn’t find out and hurt her, did anything and everything she asked of me so I wouldn’t fail her like I did Alice. Jenny and I spoke at some length of making a plan to get her away from her abusive home, and she’d tell me each time we discussed it how happy the idea made her of living with someone who actually loved her and treated her well. I did sappy things like sending her song lyrics that reminded me of her, and sending her pictures of beautiful natural areas (the natural world and hiking was one of our shared interests). I would encourage her not to starve herself since she had an eating disorder she told me she struggled with. I was even saving up money to get her out of there. My goal was to have enough to replace any possessions that were too big or unwieldy to quietly sneak out her window, because I thought that was the level of sneaking we would have to do for her not to be harmed. I had a plan to go so far as to set up a bank account with $1000+ in it beyond that in her name so she wouldn’t ever feel trapped, as I understood her mom monitored her finances (and took money out whenever she felt like it). She never explicitly told me her mom got physical, but given everything else and given some of the language she used and things she’d imply … I thought it was safe to assume. She’d really paint a picture that it was happening but stop just short of saying it. Plus, the first time I ever met her she had these bruises which I’d initially figured were from BDSM stuff, but later I really began to question that, given where they were v.s. what she was into. It really didn’t add up.

There were always some weird things about Jenny, but I didn't question them. Partly because I'd seen them before with Alice. She would vanish, for days at a time. Not online, no response to messages, nothing. She would tell me her mom was isolating her, or taking her phone and laptop away so she couldn't communicate with anyone. She’d give me the impression it was because her mom didn’t like her feeling independent. I’d seen Alice’s abuser do similar. But Jenny would vanish for longer. With Alice it would be like 3 days. With Jenny it was 9 at the longest. That total isolation from the outside world when the abuser feels it’s getting in the way of them having control felt very similar. So despite the disappearances, the weirdness, her being younger than I would usually go for, all of it... I really let her in. I trusted her like I should have trusted my now-ex fiance. She was my entire world, for a while.

But October was really rough. Her abusive mother caught her sneaking back inside from seeing me late at night. Jenny told me her mom figured she had a boyfriend and said her options were to break up or be homeless. She didn’t want to. But told me she would be isolated again. For all of October I heard two sentences from her, and she took me out of her profile bio sometime in that time. Which I rationalized as her worrying about her abusive mom finding it on her phone. I knew her birthday was coming up, since she’d told me it was in early November. So I got her this whole really thoughtful birthday present. I got a tigers eye heart, she loves cats and I thought the play on words was cute. I got a gold sheen obsidian bracelet, because it looks pitch black but turns gold in the light. Because we had met in a VERY hardcore and kinky BDSM community and had a big age gap, but cared for each other in a really sincere way. And I got her this Harley Quinn plushie because we had this whole thing about Harley Quinn and the Joker (because of a combination of the kink stuff and both being obviously mentally ill). I know the truth is those two have a TERRIBLE relationship, but a lot of neurodivergent folks in the kink community make it this whole thing. Plus I've been an alt guy since I was 13 and Harley is an alt icon.

I couldn't fit all her present in one box because the boxes I had were small. I used the fake name she'd told me to use if I ever made physical communications with her, and left the tiger eye heart in a box on her doorstep along with a scarf she'd left in my car a little while ago so she knew it was from me. I went to deliver the second box the day after, with the plushie and bracelet and a note that might be the sweetest thing I've ever written. She was outside taking the trash out, and when i got there and saw her after not hearing a word for almost two weeks I tried to go to her. I called her name but she didn't react and walked back inside. And her mom saw me. And had threatened to call the police if she ever saw Jenny’s "boyfriend" again which I'd been told by Jenny (and checked out as abuser behavior). I ran back to my car and drove off, feeling really bad and like I must have gotten her hurt.

Two days later, I was woken up at 7:30 by banging on my door, after staying up til 3 with a friend who was having a rough time. The cops were outside and said I needed to come just answer a few simple questions. I was so I tired I didn't even know what it could be about. When we get there, the officer tells me a girl I've been seeing is claiming what we did wasn't consensual. So I melt down and start spiraling mentally, because I care a LOT about that. EVEN MORE SO with crazy hard-core kink shit it needs to be agreed on by both people ahead of time, and everything I'd been doing with anyone I saw in the last several months was kink-related. And after he mentions a couple encounters it becomes clear he's talking about Jenny. So, then I notice the cop has the other present I left (with the tiger eye heart) on the table, and I say the mom must have reported me for trying to drop off that present and explain that she's abusive. And he asks if that means I'm claiming all those encounters were consensual again. So I say yes, of course, and that I even have proof in my DMs. And then he shakes his head, smiles, and asks if I want to know how old she really is. And how sure I am that she's a she. And tells me the mom was a sweet, supportive, and very protective lady. Not the tiniest sign of being cruel and abusive, even tells me he looked into it since he “saw the messages”.

It turned out "Jenny” didn't exist. I was lied to, "she" was 3 years younger then she'd told me, not named Jenny at all (I had directly asked her if that was her real name and she'd said yes), and is a trans male. His name didn't even start with a J.
Literally every word I was told was a lie, told to me so that I'd sleep with someone I would NEVER have considered ever doing that with if I’d known the truth. Every single part of Jenny, down to their fucking gender identity, was a lie. When the cops finished explaining, I broke down completely and told them I deserved to die. I told them I was going to kill myself. They told me I shouldn't say that and that it could be worse as they cuffed me. And I slit my wrist with my fingernails trying to reach a vein and make good on it, in the cop car. I didn't manage to, but only because it's hard to make that kind of progress with jagged fingernails through handcuffs. So I spent my first 24 hours in jail in a padded cell without even a blanket because they noticed a new bleeding self harm scar when I got out of the car and they were like oh he was serious. I tried to finish the job under my shirt so the camera wouldn’t see, but my nails were just too dull and the vein was too deep. I got out after about a week on bail because my family still cares about me, knows I'd never do that on purpose, and got me a real lawyer.

I still don't even understand why he did it. I don't get why you’d make up someone that involved, that untrue, for that long, just to get someone to sleep with you who wouldn't otherwise because it would be wrong. I genuinely believed Jenny was a real person too. We'd talked about plans for the future, about living together, about going to a cabin in the snowy mountains nearby in the winter. To say I was blindsided is an understatement. And now I feel HORRIBLE for what I've done. I'd have never, ever ever, done anything with who Jenny actually was if I had any idea. I feel like if I wasn't mentally ill, unobservant, and seeing things through rose-colored glasses I shouldn't have fallen for it. I feel horrible, awful, devouring guilt over it. I barely know how to live with myself anymore. I’m regularly suicidal now.

How am I supposed to do anything but end it, at this point? Given what he tricked me into doing, given that romantic relationships matter more to me than anything in the world, given that the most accepted I’ve ever felt by someone was a lie to get me to do something awful. I don’t see a way forward. Anyway, sorry for everything. If you hate me after reading this, I assure you, I hate me more.