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Mark Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F__k (2016, HarperOne) - libgen.li

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My fiancée was with us in the restaurant, by the way. Erin thought it

important that she be included in the discussion; Erin wanted her to know that

she was “willing to share” me and that my girlfriend (now wife) “shouldn’t

feel threatened” by her.

I met Erin at a self-help seminar in 2008. She seemed like a nice enough

person. A little bit on the woo-woo, New Agey side of things, but she was a

lawyer and had gone to an Ivy League school, and was clearly smart. And

she laughed at my jokes and thought I was cute—so, of course, knowing me, I

slept with her.

A month later, she invited me to uproot across the country and move in

with her. This struck me as somewhat of a red flag, and so I tried to break

things off with her. She responded by saying that she would kill herself if I

refused to be with her. Okay, so make that two red flags. I promptly blocked

her from my email and all my devices.

This would slow her down but not stop her.

Years before I met her, Erin had gotten into a car accident and nearly

died. Actually, she had medically “died” for a few moments—all brain

activity had stopped—but she had somehow miraculously been revived.

When she “came back,” she claimed everything had changed. She became a

very spiritual person. She became interested in, and started believing in,

energy healing and angels and universal consciousness and tarot cards. She

also believed that she had become a healer and an empath and that she could

see the future. And for whatever reason, upon meeting me, she decided that

she and I were destined to save the world together. To “cure death,” as she

put it.

After I’d blocked her, she began to create new email addresses,

sometimes sending me as many as a dozen angry emails in a single day. She

created fake Facebook and Twitter accounts that she used to harass me as

well as people close to me. She created a website identical to mine and

wrote dozens of articles claiming that I was her ex-boyfriend and that I had

lied to her and cheated her, that I had promised to marry her and that she and

I belonged together. When I contacted her to take the site down, she said that

she would take it down only if I flew to California to be with her. This was

her idea of a compromise.

And through all of this, her justification was the same: I was destined to

be with her, that God had preordained it, that she literally woke up in the

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