The Fear of Myself

Being afraid of yourself is something you rarely hear anyone admit—not to others, and certainly not to themselves. Fearing your own existence sounds almost made-up. When you actually stop to think about it, the obvious counterquestions always follow: “What are you actually afraid of?” Is it a lack of self-confidence? Is it your appearance? Are you afraid of embarrassing yourself in public? Whatever the reason, you sound utterly ridiculous trying to explain to someone why you’re terrified of your own mind. Some don’t take you seriously at all; others at least pretend to listen and understand, even though nobody ever truly does.

And perhaps that’s the worst part of it. Not the fear itself, but the realization that you can never properly explain it to another human being. How do you describe something that exists entirely within you, something that has no visible shape, no distinguishable voice, and no physical presence, yet somehow feels more threatening than anything standing directly in front of you?

You can’t point at it. You can’t run away from it. And you certainly can’t ask someone to take it away.

For most people, their minds are their own. Their thoughts might be unpleasant from time to time, but they understand that a thought is just a thought. It comes, it goes, and life continues as usual. At least, that’s what I used to believe.

I no longer have that luxury.

What I am about to tell you now is how that fear of myself finally became understandable—both to the people in my life, and hopefully to you, reading this right now.

I should warn you that some parts of this story may sound ridiculous. Others might seem impossible. If you’re looking for some elaborate supernatural explanation, a convenient twist that makes every little detail fall into place, I’m afraid I can’t give you one. I’ve spent sixteen years searching for that explanation myself, and I still haven’t found anything that satisfies me.

I can only tell you what happened, what I remember, and what I have spent the better part of my adult life trying desperately to forget.

Whether you believe me is entirely up to you.

It started during my freshman year of high school.

It was one of those bottom-tier schools, packed with students who cared about anything and everything except their education, the worst public high schools built in the worst possible area. A place that valued neither its students nor its teachers. A complete waste of space, if you will. I ended up there as a consequence of throwing away my ninth-grade year completely, though in all honesty, I can’t put all the blame on myself—it was one of the lowest points of my life. After constant ditching and severe depression at the end of middle school, I landed a spot there. It’s something I deeply regret now, considering I actually had the choice of whether to pursue high school at all. In all likelihood, I probably would have ended up as a telemarketer with a drinking problem or a janitor struggling to pay rent if I hadn’t stayed in school—but if that outcome had been guaranteed, I regret every single day that I didn’t take that path instead.

My mother, of course, would have disagreed. She was convinced that education was the only thing separating me from a miserable future. She wasn’t entirely wrong, but at sixteen, I couldn’t have cared less about what my life would look like at thirty. Thirty seemed impossibly far away. I was more concerned with making it through a single week without feeling like I was wasting my life.

Back then, I had a habit of blaming everything around me for the way I felt. The school, the neighborhood, the teachers, my classmates, even the weather. It was easier than admitting that I had no idea what I was doing with myself. I suppose that makes me sound like an insufferable teenager, and perhaps I was one. But I also remember being genuinely miserable, in a way that made ordinary problems seem almost insulting. People told me things would get better. They always say that, don’t they?

Sometimes things get worse first.

The start of the year at that hellhole—which is what I called it—was relatively quiet for me. Nobody spoke to me, nobody cared that I existed, and the homework was easier than I had anticipated. Everything felt manageable. I did what was required in class while everyone else was selling and using drugs in the school bathrooms—a circus I found vaguely entertaining in a twisted way. It went on like that for a few months until a couple of new students enrolled. Naturally, they were potential drug dealers and wannabe gangbangers—the kind of guys you just know live in expensive houses with wealthy parents. They almost made me laugh every time I saw them strutting down the hallways together, but to avoid fights and confrontation, I kept my laughter to myself.

I wasn’t particularly interested in making friends. I’d grown accustomed to being alone, and after a while, solitude starts feeling less like a punishment and more like a privilege. Nobody bothered me, and I didn’t bother anybody. I had my seat in the back of the classroom, my usual table at lunch, and my own little routine. I could go an entire school day without having a meaningful conversation with another person.

Looking back, I think I preferred it that way because people were predictable when you didn’t have to interact with them. They came to school, talked nonsense, laughed at things I didn’t find funny, and went home. Whatever problems they had were theirs to deal with.

I had no idea how quickly that comfortable little arrangement would fall apart.

For context: I was six feet tall—and weighed about 191 pounds at sixteen years old. I was in good physical shape as well, so a fistfight with a few losers would have ended badly for both sides. But that was the least of my concerns. My primary concern was the thought of having to spend four full years in that place—something I desperately wanted to avoid. Looking back, you could question why I even chose to start there if I had no intention of finishing. My answer is that I had no control over my life back then; my mother pressured me to go, wanting to save me from becoming that alcoholic telemarketer or broke janitor I feared becoming myself. But honestly, none of you would want to spend four years in a ghetto school either, would you?

I had always considered myself reasonably levelheaded. I wasn’t the type to lose control over a disagreement, and I certainly wasn’t someone who went looking for trouble. I could be angry, arrogant, and unpleasant, but I knew where to draw the line.

At least, I thought I did.

Many boring and lifeless weeks passed in that pit. The same schedule, the same pathetic faces in the hallways, the same repulsive slop on my lunch tray—until one day.

A final student arrived. A guy, to be precise. I’ll keep his identity anonymous and refrain from sharing names.

“Same old, same old,” I thought when I first saw him: a scrawny kid wearing the exact same attire as the other wannabes in the school. But that was just my initial impression seeing him sit in the classroom that morning.

He didn’t look particularly threatening. He was thin, almost awkwardly so, with a face I probably would have forgotten by the end of the day if someone had asked me to describe him. His clothes were unremarkable, his posture ordinary. There was nothing visibly wrong with him, nothing that would have made a reasonable person feel uncomfortable.

I remember that because, afterward, I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to identify what it was about him that had bothered me.

His eyes, perhaps? His expression? The way he carried himself?
I couldn’t settle on anything. Every time I tried to picture his face, I could remember the general shape of it, but the details seemed to slip away from me. I could remember what he wore, where he sat, and even the way he moved his hands while talking. Yet his face itself remained strangely difficult to reconstruct in my mind.

At the time, I thought nothing of it.

The day proceeded like any other, but something felt wrong. Different. A subtle, cold prickle of anxiety settled in my chest. I didn’t understand why, but I shook it off as quickly as it came. The school day ended, and I walked home after the last period. At home, I couldn’t stop thinking about that brief minute of anxiety. I was confused; I wanted an answer. But I couldn’t get one—not from anyone else, at least.

It was a peculiar feeling, difficult to put into words. Imagine standing in your bedroom late at night, knowing perfectly well that you’re alone, but feeling with absolute certainty that someone is standing just outside the door. You haven’t heard anything. You haven’t seen anything. There’s no logical reason to believe it.

Still, you know something is wrong.

That was the closest comparison I could come up with.

Except I wasn’t standing in a dark room. I was sitting in a classroom full of people, under fluorescent lights, listening to a teacher drone on about something I can’t even remember anymore.

Nothing had happened. Nobody had threatened me. The guy hadn’t even spoken to me.

And yet, for that brief moment, my body had reacted as if I had narrowly escaped something terrible.

I remember sitting on my bed that evening, staring at the wall and trying to recreate the sensation. I wanted to understand it, to trigger it again somehow, just so I could examine it more closely. But the harder I tried, the more ordinary everything seemed.

Eventually, I went to sleep.

The next morning, I walked into the classroom, still thinking about the previous day’s weird sensation. I took my seat at the very back. The miserable faces around me didn’t help at 8:30 in the morning, but by that point, I was used to it.

A few minutes later, the new guy walked in—just as scrawny, wearing the exact same clothes as the day before.

And then it happened again.

Not even a few minutes passed before that same light anxiety washed over me. I tried to shake it off once more, but this time it didn’t leave. It intensified.

I felt my stomach knot violently, burning with sharp pain. I excused myself to the bathroom—a room reeking of burnt plastic and cannabis, which only made it worse. I felt the overwhelming urge to vomit, but nothing came up.

I stared into the mirror.

My reflection looked completely normal. But inside, I was being utterly tortured. Tortured by my own body. I began retracing everything I had eaten the day before and for breakfast that morning—could it have been food poisoning? Unlikely. I ate the exact same breakfast every single day: two slices of toast and a bowl of my favorite cereal.

I splashed water onto my face and stood there for a while, gripping the edge of the sink.

The bathroom was almost empty. Somewhere behind me, a faucet dripped at irregular intervals. I remember counting the drops because I needed something to focus on besides the pain in my stomach. Every few seconds, another drop hit the porcelain.

Then, for no reason I could identify, I became convinced that someone was standing behind me.

I looked up.

Only my reflection.

I turned around so quickly that my shoulder struck the metal partition beside the sink. There was nobody there. The bathroom door was still closed, and the stalls were empty.

I stood motionless for several seconds, listening.

Nothing.

I felt stupid. Embarrassed, even, despite being alone. I had spent years mocking people who believed in ghosts and other nonsense, and now I was frightened by the possibility of an invisible person standing behind me in a school bathroom.

I washed my hands and returned to class.

I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. What was I supposed to say? That a skinny kid had somehow given me a stomach ache by existing in the same room as me?

I could already imagine the laughter.

I returned to the classroom after managing to calm down slightly. I sat back down at my desk in the rear and attempted to focus on my schoolwork. Tasks I usually found easy were suddenly impossible. Dammit. The anxiety was still vibrating through my entire body. I felt a surge of rage and confusion, but I couldn’t control it, leaving me feeling entirely helpless. I had never felt anything like this before.’

Why was it hitting me so suddenly? And from what? That was what I needed to know.

I glanced toward him once or twice during the lesson.
He was doing absolutely nothing unusual. He sat at his desk, occasionally looking at the board and scribbling something in his notebook. At one point, he leaned over to whisper something to the student beside him, and they both laughed.

Ordinary behavior.

Completely ordinary.

But every time I looked in his direction, I felt a tightening in my chest, as though some invisible hand were slowly closing around my lungs.

I eventually stopped looking at him altogether.

That helped. Not immediately, but enough that I could get through the remainder of the lesson. I remember feeling a strange sense of relief when the bell rang, as if I had just survived something I couldn’t explain.

On the walk home, I made a decision.

I wasn’t going to look at him again.

It was a ridiculous decision, of course. You can’t simply avoid looking at someone who attends the same school as you. But I figured I could manage it. Keep my eyes on my work, avoid making eye contact, and carry on with my life.

For the first time since the whole thing began, I felt as though I had some control over the situation.

That evening, I sat in my bedroom with my laptop, desperately searching for anything that could explain sudden, unprovoked anxiety attacks. I clicked link after link, reading through dozens of medical conditions. I cross-referenced symptoms, but nothing I researched matched what I was experiencing.

A healthy teenager with zero history of physical or mental illness doesn’t just develop debilitating panic attacks out of thin air…

But there is always an explanation for everything. Or most things, at least.

The truth is, anxiety doesn’t always stem from a conscious thought. Your brain is constantly scanning for danger, and sometimes the body’s fight-or-flight response triggers even when there is no overt threat in sight. You might feel your heart racing, your chest tightening, your hands trembling, or a sudden, suffocating urge that something is deeply wrong and that you need to flee the room immediately.

I read about panic attacks, stress responses, and the way the brain can misinterpret harmless situations as threats. I found accounts from people who described waking up in the middle of the night with the overwhelming conviction that they were about to die. Others talked about feeling detached from their own bodies, as if they were watching themselves from a distance.

Those accounts frightened me more than I expected.

Not because they sounded particularly dangerous, but because I recognized parts of what they described. The helplessness. The feeling that your own body had decided something was wrong and refused to listen when you tried to convince it otherwise.

I remember thinking that, if this was what anxiety felt like, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

Then I came across a discussion thread on some obscure health forum. I can’t remember the website, and I’ve tried finding it again since. All I remember is that the original poster described experiencing an intense feeling of dread around a particular person. They insisted that nothing had happened between them, but being in the same room as that individual made them physically ill.

The replies were mostly dismissive. Some suggested anxiety, others paranoia. One person made a joke about having a sixth sense.

But one comment stood out.

It read something along the lines of: “Sometimes your body knows something your conscious mind hasn’t figured out yet”.

I stared at that sentence for a long time.

It wasn’t particularly profound. It wasn’t scientific evidence of anything. It was the sort of thing you’d find on a thousand different websites, usually accompanied by a picture of a sunset.

Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

That realization hit me like a physical blow. Those sudden attacks in school—they had only occurred when the new guy was in the room. Could my own body be violently reacting, trying to warn me about him?

It sounded irrational, stupid even, considering I had never spoken a word to him or even looked him in the eyes.

I tried to dismiss it—”you’re losing your mind,” I told myself.

Then my thoughts drifted toward the supernatural… things beyond human comprehension or scientific explanation. Ghosts, spirits, demonic possession, telepathy, paranormal phenomena.

Was I possessed by something vile? Or did he carry some dark, malicious entity attached to him?

I had always been skeptical about whether such things were real. But I was drowning in desperation for an answer.

Where was this coming from?

I spent the next hour reading about stories of people who claimed to sense danger before it happened. Most were easily explained as coincidence, misinterpretation, or exaggeration. Others were clearly fabricated.

I knew that.

I kept telling myself that I knew that.

But there is a difference between reading about something frightening on a screen and experiencing something you cannot explain with your own body. When it’s happening to you, logic starts to feel less like a comforting certainty and more like a suggestion you can no longer afford to trust.

That night, I had a dream.
I don’t remember the beginning of it. I only remember standing in the classroom, sitting at my desk in the back, looking toward the front of the room.

The new student was standing beside the teacher’s desk.

Everyone else was facing forward, motionless. Their heads were tilted at precisely the same angle, their eyes fixed on the blackboard. Nobody spoke or moved.

He was the only person looking at me.
I couldn’t make out his expression. His face seemed blurred, as if I were looking at him through a pane of fogged glass.

Then he smiled.

I woke up before anything else happened.

It was just a dream. I know that. I’ve had plenty of strange dreams throughout my life, and most of them meant absolutely nothing.

But I remember lying in bed afterward, staring into the darkness, feeling that familiar tightness in my chest.

I didn’t go back to sleep for a long time.

Three days passed, and the new guy didn’t show up once.

During those three days, the sudden, oppressive anxiety never returned.

The first day, I assumed he was sick. The second day, I barely thought about him at all. By the third, I had begun convincing myself that the entire incident had been some strange coincidence, a brief episode of anxiety that had attached itself to an unfortunate person.

I felt almost embarrassed by the way I had reacted.

I even started laughing at myself. Imagine being so pathetic that you develop an irrational fear of some random student because he happens to sit in the same classroom as you.

Ridiculous.

I told myself I was fine, and for a while, I believed it.

But the sheer absurdity of it was driving me insane. Why did I only experience that when I looked at him?

I was about to find out.

Another morning passed without seeing him at school.

“Typical,” I thought. He was probably out playing gangster, trying to sell drugs to middle schoolers in some park.

During lunch break, I always sat alone at a table positioned far against the back wall. It was my routine, and I refused to eat if someone else occupied it. I set my tray down, sat down, and began eating.

Slowly.

Just a few minutes into lunch, I saw a student enter the cafeteria. A guy who occasionally hung around the new student.

He entered with deliberate intent, locking eyes with me as he crossed the room toward my table.

I set my fork down, never breaking eye contact as he approached. He pulled out the chair opposite me and sat down. He remained dead silent for a few seconds before leaning in and speaking a single sentence:

“It’s a trap. Don’t go.”

I stared at him.

For a moment, I genuinely thought I had misheard. The cafeteria was loud, filled with the usual clatter of trays, scraping chairs, and dozens of conversations happening simultaneously. Yet I had heard him perfectly.

His voice had been quiet, almost conversational.

“What are you talking about?” I managed to respond.

“Don’t go to his party. He’s going to murder you. The whole thing is a trap.”

My mind went completely blank.

I looked at him, waiting for the punchline. I expected him to laugh, perhaps slap the table and tell me I’d fallen for some stupid joke. I even glanced around the cafeteria, looking for someone watching us from a distance.

Nobody seemed interested.

The student sitting opposite me wasn’t smiling.

He looked frightened.

Not amused, not smug, not even particularly nervous. Frightened. His eyes kept flicking toward the cafeteria entrance, as though he expected someone to walk through it at any moment.

A violent chill ran down my spine, feeling as though a thick rope had been looped around my throat and pulled tight until I could barely breathe.

Why?

Why would he want to take my life?

A stranger I had never spoken to, someone I had never had conflict with—and now he was planning to kill me.

I wanted to ask a hundred questions at once. What party? When was it supposed to happen? How did he know? Why was he telling me?

But my mouth had gone dry.

I finally managed to ask him how he knew.

He didn’t answer immediately.

Instead, he looked down at the table, rubbing his thumb against the edge of his sleeve. Then he leaned forward again.

“Just don’t go,” he said.

That was it.

He stood up, pushed the chair back into place, and walked away.

I watched him cross the cafeteria and disappear through the doors.

I never saw him approach another table. I never saw him speak to anyone else. He simply left.

For several minutes, I remained seated, staring at the spot where he had been sitting.

I barely touched the rest of my lunch.

There was something particularly disturbing about the way he had delivered that warning. He hadn’t tried to persuade me. He hadn’t explained himself or asked me to believe him.

He had spoken as though he were telling me the time.

As though the outcome had already been decided.

I considered following him, but I couldn’t bring myself to stand up. My legs felt strangely weak, and the cafeteria suddenly seemed too bright, too loud, too crowded. Everyone around me continued eating and talking, completely unaware that anything unusual had happened.

I remember wondering whether anybody had seen him sit down with me.

For some reason, that question bothered me more than it should have.

I eventually returned my tray and went to my next class. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I didn’t even tell myself that I believed him.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the new student.

That evening, I searched my messages and social media accounts for anything related to a party. I found nothing. I hadn’t received an invitation, and nobody had mentioned one to me.

I had no idea why the student had assumed I would be going.

More importantly, I had no idea why he believed I was in danger.

I went to bed that night with the distinct impression that I had missed something important. Something that everybody else seemed to know about except me.

The next morning, I woke up with severe anxiety and a crippling stomach ache.

It was back.

I had zero intention of going to school; I was genuinely fearing for my life. But I refused to tell anyone—because as every criminal and non-criminal knows, snitches get stitches.

My mother asked why I wasn’t getting ready for school, and I told her a half-truth: my stomach hurt really bad.

She shrugged and left for work.

Alone in the empty house, the anxiety and pain did not subside. My mind spiraled into graphic, sickening visions of all the brutal ways someone could be murdered—and how that might happen to me if I ever set foot back in that wicked hellhole.

I pictured being cornered in a hallway. I imagined someone waiting for me outside the school gates. I thought about the possibility of getting into a car with someone who claimed to be giving me a ride, only to realize too late that I had made a terrible mistake.

Every scenario became more elaborate than the last.

I couldn’t stop myself.

The day dragged on, hours stretching far longer than normal. I checked the clock repeatedly, waiting for the afternoon to arrive. Every time I looked away and looked back, I felt as though barely any time had passed.

I kept the curtains closed.

I don’t remember deciding to do that. I simply remember noticing, at some point during the morning, that the room had become unusually dark. I looked toward the window and realized that I had shut the curtains without thinking about it.

I opened them again.

There was nobody outside.

Of course there wasn’t.

I felt ridiculous for even checking.

But then, something terrifying shifted.

Gradually, the anxiety began to melt away, turning into something else—something cold and unexplainable.

The terror that had gripped me since the moment I opened my eyes was leaving my body.

How?

Why?

Was my body warning me about him? Was it something supernatural?

I was desperate for an answer.

The pain in my stomach subsided first. Then the tightness in my chest began to loosen. My breathing returned to normal, and the room seemed to regain its usual proportions.

I sat on the edge of my bed and waited for the fear to return.

It didn’t.

For the first time in days, I could think clearly.

And then I remembered the warning.

“He’s going to murder you”.

I repeated the words silently, trying to understand why they had frightened me so much. They were just words. A claim made by a student I barely knew, without a shred of evidence.

I should have felt relieved.

Instead, I began thinking about the new guy’s face.

The same face I had struggled to remember.

And as I pictured him sitting at his desk, looking in my direction, I felt something change inside me.

It wasn’t fear.

It was hatred.

When night fell, I was still cooped up in my bedroom. The anxiety was entirely gone now. But whenever I pictured his face, my heart flooded with a dark, suffocating hatred—so intense that I was literally shaking with rage.

You sick fuck. You want to kill me. But I am not weak enough to let you. When I see you, I’ll make sure I stand up and put an end to you first.

The thoughts were violent, twisted, disturbing.

They didn’t belong to me.

They went against everything I was.

I knew taking a life was wrong—I had always known that. God would never forgive me. My mother would never forgive me.

I was hyperventilating, soaked in cold sweat, staring at the ceiling before falling asleep.

It felt like two entities were waging a war inside my head, fighting for control of my mind. Yet somehow, I drifted off.

I wish I could explain what those thoughts felt like.

They weren’t simply impulses. They didn’t feel like ordinary anger, the kind that comes from being insulted or humiliated. They seemed to arrive fully formed, accompanied by an absolute certainty that I had every reason to feel them.

I would think about the new student, and suddenly there would be this overwhelming conviction that he was evil. Not unpleasant, not untrustworthy, not someone I disliked.

Evil.

I couldn’t explain why. I had no evidence. I had barely exchanged a glance with him.

But the certainty was there.

And the more I tried to argue against it, the more agitated I became.

I remember sitting up in bed and whispering to myself that I wasn’t going to hurt anyone. I said it repeatedly, almost like a prayer.

“I’m not going to hurt anyone.”

For a few seconds, the words calmed me.

Then another thought appeared.

You won’t have a choice.

I went completely still.

I had no idea where that thought had come from. It was so different from everything I had been telling myself that it felt as though somebody else had spoken it.

I turned toward the bedroom door.

Nothing.

I looked around the room, at the desk, the wardrobe, the pile of clothes beside my bed. Everything was exactly where it should have been.

I was alone.

I knew I was alone.

Still, I sat awake for a long time, afraid to close my eyes again.

Eventually, exhaustion won.

When I woke the next morning, I walked straight into the kitchen, opened a drawer, and pulled out a kitchen knife.

It was pure animal instinct—shocking even to me, as I had never carried a weapon in my life. The knife was small, but it had a long, dangerously sharp blade. I carefully wrapped the blade in aluminum foil so only the black handle remained visible, tucking it securely into my waistband.

I can still remember the sound of the drawer sliding open.

It’s such an ordinary sound. A little scrape, followed by the soft clatter of utensils shifting against one another.

For years, that sound meant nothing to me.

Now, whenever I hear a kitchen drawer open unexpectedly, I feel a cold sensation settle somewhere deep in my stomach.

I remember standing in the kitchen afterward, looking at the empty space where the knife had been.

I didn’t feel frightened.

I didn’t feel angry, either.

I felt strangely calm, as though I had completed some mundane task that had been waiting for me all morning.

That calmness was what frightened me most when I thought about it later.

I had spent the previous evening terrified of the thoughts in my head. I had promised myself I wouldn’t hurt anyone. And now, without hesitation, I had taken a weapon and prepared to go to school.

I could have put it back.

I could have walked away from the kitchen, gone upstairs, and told my mother what was happening.

I could have done a thousand different things.

But I didn’t.

I took the knife and left the house.

I took my usual long walk to school. Surprisingly, my mind was eerie and clear—no intrusive thoughts, just reflections on upcoming class assignments. Thirteen minutes to reach the school gates; two minutes later, I was sitting in the classroom.

He wasn’t there when I entered, a fact I was strangely grateful for, even though the anxiety was completely gone.

I sat at my desk and took out my books.

The classroom looked exactly as it always had. The same scratched desks, the same faded posters, the same dull fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. Someone near the front was complaining about homework. A student behind me was tapping a pen against his desk.

Nothing was wrong.

For several minutes, I almost convinced myself that the previous day had been a dream.

I remember looking down at my hands.

They were steady.

My breathing was normal.

I could think clearly.

Perhaps I had finally gotten over whatever had been happening to me. Perhaps the anxiety had been a temporary illness, something brought on by stress and an overactive imagination.

I wanted to believe that more than anything.

Then the classroom door opened.

Twenty minutes into class, he walked in.

My eyes opened completely as I watched him, but not out of shock.

That dark, malevolent hatred from the night before surged through my veins.

I felt like a hungry wolf that hadn’t eaten for days fixing its eyes on a stranded fawn. I didn’t break eye contact for a single second.

I saw him glance at me out of the corner of his eye, his posture stiffening as visible discomfort settled over him.’

My hands began to tremble violently, and cold sweat broke out across my forehead.

In that split second, I felt like I was physically fighting against something inside my own skin.

I wish I could say that I was frightened by what I was feeling. That I immediately recognized the danger and tried to leave the room.

But I didn’t.

Some part of me seemed to be waiting for him.

The moment he entered, everything I had been thinking about disappeared. My assignments, the teacher’s voice, the people around me—all of it became irrelevant.

There was only him.

I remember noticing small details that I had never paid attention to before. The way his shoulders moved beneath his shirt. The sound of his shoes against the classroom floor. The way he avoided looking directly at me as he walked toward his seat.

I interpreted every movement as evidence of something sinister.

When he looked away, I thought he was hiding something.

When he glanced in my direction, I thought he was checking whether I was watching him.

There was no possible way for him to behave normally in my eyes. Whatever he did, my mind found a reason to turn it into a threat.

And the worst part was that I couldn’t seem to recognize what I was doing.

I wasn’t considering different explanations. I wasn’t asking myself whether I might be mistaken.

I simply knew.

Or, at least, I believed with absolute certainty that I knew.

I stood up.

I walked slowly toward him, stopping about three feet behind his back.

The entire class turned to look at us.

The teacher demanded that I sit down immediately.

I didn’t hear a word of it.

I remember the classroom becoming strangely quiet. Not completely silent—there were still small noises, a chair scraping against the floor, someone whispering—but everything seemed distant, as though I were listening to the world through a thick wall.

The new student began turning around.

For a fraction of a second, our eyes met.

I cannot adequately describe what I felt then.

I didn’t see a monster. I didn’t see anything supernatural. His face was still the same ordinary face I had seen every morning.

But I experienced a sensation so overwhelming that every other thought seemed to vanish beneath it.

I was certain he was going to hurt me.

I was certain I had to stop him.

And I was certain that if I hesitated, something terrible would happen.

I pulled the foil-wrapped knife from the waistband of my jeans.

The blade slid out of the foil easy.

I began stabbing him—rapid, furious, relentless thrusts into his neck and upper back and face. The girls in the class began screaming in horror; the guys looked paralyzed with terror. Nothing could stop me. Nobody tried to stop me.

Blood erupted from his neck, gushing out in heavy streams across the floor. It soaked through his clothes and splattered across mine. His body went completely limp from the very first strike.

The floor beneath him turned into a puddle of his own blood.

I had stabbed him roughly thrity-five times before I finally decided to stop.

When I had stopped his whole face and neck was covered in his own blood.

Mutilated, looking like something you encounter on gore sites.

His face had numerous deep cuts with blood still pouring out.

I dropped the blade and walked out of the classroom.

I remember the sound of my shoes against the hallway floor.

I remember someone screaming behind me.

I remember passing a classroom with its door open and seeing a teacher standing inside, staring at me with an expression I still cannot describe.

And I remember thinking that I needed to get home before my mother returned from work.

That was what went through my mind.

Not what I had done. Not the person lying on the floor behind me. Not the screaming students or the teacher who had witnessed everything.

I thought about going home.

I walked through the school gates and continued down the same road I had taken that morning. The sun was shining. Cars passed by. A woman was walking her dog on the opposite side of the street.

The world continued as though nothing had happened.

I don’t remember how long I walked.

I don’t remember the exact moment I began to understand what I had done.

The next thing I clearly remember is sitting in a room with a police officer asking me questions.

I couldn’t answer most of them.

They asked why I had done it.

I told them I didn’t know.

They asked whether I had known the student.

I told them I hadn’t.

They asked whether he had threatened me.

I told them I didn’t think so.

Then they asked me a question that I have never been able to forget.

“Did you want to kill him?”

I opened my mouth to answer.

Nothing came out.

Because the truth was that I didn’t know what I wanted.
I knew I had done it. I knew I had taken the knife from my kitchen and carried it to school. I knew I had walked toward him and attacked him.

Those memories were mine.

But the certainty that had accompanied them—the overwhelming conviction that I was in danger, the hatred, the feeling that I was fighting something inside myself—those memories felt different.

I could remember experiencing them, but I couldn’t understand them.

And I still can’t.

Today, I am thirty-one years old.

It has been sixteen years since I committed that murder.

I avoided life in prison because mental illness was considered at sentencing; they believed it was some psychotic episode. Which, in all honesty, you could definitely call it that.

I deeply regret what I did—it was something horrible that I can never undo.

I wish I could tell you that the years since then have helped me understand what happened. That I eventually found a diagnosis, a medical explanation, or even some small piece of evidence that made the entire thing make sense.

But I haven’t.

I’ve spoken to professionals. I’ve spent years trying to reconstruct the events leading up to the murder, examining my memories and questioning every detail. I’ve read countless accounts of people who experienced psychosis, paranoia, dissociation, and other disturbances of perception.

Some of their experiences sound familiar.

Others don’t.

And none of them can tell me why it happened when it did, or why it happened around that particular person.

I have tried to convince myself that the answer is simple. I was a troubled teenager. I was under stress. Something happened to my mind, and I became dangerously unwell.

That’s the explanation I return to whenever I need to feel grounded.
It’s the explanation that makes the most sense.

But there are details I cannot reconcile.
The first is the anxiety itself. It began when I saw him, disappeared when he was absent, and returned whenever he entered the room. I know that sounds like confirmation bias, and perhaps it was. Perhaps I had become so fixated on him that my body reacted whenever I saw him.

I have considered that possibility more times than I can count.

The second is the warning.

“It’s a trap. Don’t go.”

I never learned what the student meant by that. I never found out why he believed the new guy intended to murder me, or whether he had any reason to believe it at all.

I don’t know whether the warning was genuine, a cruel joke, or a lie intended to provoke me.

I don’t even know whether the party he mentioned was real.
For years, I tried to track down the student who had spoken to me that day. I wanted to ask him what he knew, what he had seen, and why he had approached me specifically.

I never got the answers I wanted.

Eventually, I stopped looking.

There is another detail I rarely discuss, even with people who have spent years trying to help me understand what happened.

I remember the new student’s expression when I stood behind him.
Not clearly. Not in the way I remember the classroom or the sound of the teacher shouting.

I remember the moment he looked at me.

For a fraction of a second, I thought he looked frightened.

That would make sense, wouldn’t it? Someone standing behind you with a knife is a terrifying sight.

But sometimes, when I remember that moment, I think he looked frightened before he even saw the knife.

I cannot prove that.

Memory is unreliable, especially when it has been examined and reexamined for years. I understand that. I know how easily a person can alter their own recollections without realizing it.

So I don’t trust that memory.

I don’t trust any memory that seems to suggest there was something more to what happened.

I have to be careful about that.

Because the alternative is much worse.

I live under a protected identity now. I rarely leave my apartment. I have become accustomed to the silence, the solitude, and the strange comfort of knowing that I can spend an entire day without having to look another person in the eyes.

I am terrified of myself—terrified of what I might do if I ever cross paths with someone who doesn’t feel right.

Most days, I can live relatively normally. I get groceries, pay my bills, and keep to myself. I don’t carry weapons. I don’t look for trouble. I don’t allow myself to become involved in arguments with strangers.

I have learned to walk away from situations that make me uncomfortable.

And if I ever experience that old sensation again, I have promised myself that I will seek help rather than act on it.

I know what happened when I failed to do that.

I also know that fear is not evidence. Feeling threatened does not mean someone intends to hurt you. A strange sensation, a sudden thought, or an overwhelming conviction is not proof that anything supernatural is happening.

I understand all of that.

The problem is that understanding something intellectually doesn’t necessarily make it easier to live with.

I still remember what it felt like to stand in that classroom, watching him walk through the door. I remember how quickly my thoughts changed, how the world narrowed until I could see nothing but the person I had convinced myself was a threat.

And I remember how normal everything felt afterward.

That is what haunts me most.

Not the blood. Not the screams. Not even the memory of the guy lying on the classroom floor.

It’s the fact that I was capable of doing something so terrible while feeling, for those few moments, that I was doing exactly what I had to do.

I have spent sixteen years trying to understand how a person can become so certain of something that they stop questioning it entirely.

I have spent sixteen years wondering whether I could ever become that person again.

Sometimes, I wake in the middle of the night and sit in the darkness, listening to the ordinary sounds of my apartment. The refrigerator humming in the kitchen. A car passing outside. Someone moving around in the apartment above mine.

I tell myself that these are normal sounds.

I remind myself that I am safe.

I remind myself that I am no longer that sixteen-year-old boy, that I have spent years learning to recognize my thoughts for what they are rather than treating them as facts.

And usually, that is enough.

But occasionally, I remember the classroom.

I remember the way my body reacted before I had any explanation for it.

I remember the warning.

And I wonder whether the worst thing that happened to me was losing control of my own mind, or whether it was discovering just how little I understood about it in the first place.

I don’t believe I was possessed. I don’t believe I have some special ability to sense evil in other people. I don’t believe that a person should ever trust an unexplained feeling enough to hurt someone else.

I have to believe those things.

Because if I don’t, I have no idea how I am supposed to live with myself.

Still, there are nights when I catch my reflection in the darkened window of my apartment and find myself looking away.

Not because I think there is something standing behind me.’

Not because I believe I can see something in my reflection that other people cannot.

But because, for a brief moment, I remember the boy I used to be, and I cannot help wondering whether he would have believed me if I had told him what he was going to become.

I wonder whether he would have laughed.

I wonder whether he would have been afraid.

And I wonder whether he would have understood that the person he needed to fear was never someone he could point to, someone he could avoid, or someone he could run away from.

It was himself.

God help me, I just hope it never happens again.

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