Hi all!
Some background information:
I was an international student, living away from home for the first time. When I first arrived in Australia, I attended a regular university. I tended to notice the lonely people on the edges of crowds and tried to include them (I used to be that person sometimes, when I was a shy kid). Unfortunately,those people tended to have mental disorders and started stalking me. My first stalker was a pathological liar; my friends and I all found him very annoying, but we didn't realise each other's feelings toward him and thought everyone else was being really patient with him (we were all just gritting our teeth and being nice). He once forced his way into my college room at 11:15 p.m. (after I had told him sternly to stay away from me because I had chicken pox, but he insisted he wanted to hug me and catch the pox so he could have his exams postponed too). Fortunately my then-boyfriend rang at that very moment and later my friend down the hall helped evict him.
Anyway, after 4 years of various stalkers (who generally were at various church events I attended, and my friends knew to watch out for them and protect me), I graduated from my first degree with no lasting ill-effects.
Then I embarked on a second degree (one I actually wanted to study, not one my mother forced me into), at a college with many home-schooled students from remote country areas and dysfunctional families, and all hell broke loose.
The main things which affected me were:
1) A toxic "relationship" with a possessive, emotionally and verbally abusive younger male who exhibited all the symptoms of covert narcissism. One week he sent me 200-over text messages claiming he wanted to kill himself over an essay. He said things like "You're the only person in the world who cares about me" and "You're my only friend", which made me feel trapped. He also became angry when a couple of other guys exhibited interest in me (though they were merely having a friendly chat), and he would glare at them. When I asked him about it, he claimed he was protecting me from them. Unfortunately I was like a frog being slowly boiled to death; things started out pretty innocently and by the time intense emotional manipulation was occurring, I couldn't see a way out.
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to be continued
