The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck

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
middle of the night to the voices of angels commanding that “our special
relationship” was to be the harbinger of a new age of permanent peace on
earth. (Yes, she really told me this.)
By the time we were sitting in that sushi restaurant together, there had
been thousands of emails. Whether I responded or didn’t respond, replied