Many of us have dreamed of starting over from scratch at one time or another. Many of us have even done it, leaving our hometowns behind for a big city or moving to the middle of nowhere and reinventing ourselves.
But for one man, the phrase “reinvent yourself” is to be taken literally. He starts over from scratch every few years in a way that left Redditors, not to mention the people in his life, downright disturbed.
The man ‘resets’ his life every three years, severing ties with everyone he knows and moving to a different part of the country.
To many of us, this probably sounds like a dream (wouldn’t we all like to leave our lives behind now and then?). But the deeper into his story he goes, the more discomfiting it becomes.
“After I graduated college, 24 years ago now, I have been living life by what I call ‘The Policy,'” he wrote in his since-deleted Reddit post. “My Policy is basically that I commit to resetting my entire life every 3 years.”
“What this means is that I regard that life of 3 years and that version of myself as completely over and done,” he went on to say. “This means I have to cut off any friend or colleague, even any romantic relationships. I move to a new part of the country and start completely over from scratch.”
He acknowledged that this is sometimes painful, but the “very interesting life and in some ways…many different lives” it affords are worth it. “I even try on a new persona of sorts each time… by viewing each new era as an ‘acting’ challenge, I craft a new persona and am able to act it out.”
He goes on to explain that in the eight “distinct lives” he’s lived since college, he has always been upfront with those in his life about it. AS soon as they get close, “I am upfront that at the end of my 3 years I will be moving to a different part of the country and will never see or speak to them again.”
His girlfriend was not able to accept the end of his most recent ‘era,’ and he is disturbed by her emotional response.
The man has just recently begun a new three-year “era,” as he called it, with a new job and home in the Southwest. He held a goodbye dinner with the people in his last “era,” who found it hard to believe he was serious about leaving it all behind.
But perhaps nobody took it harder than his girlfriend.
“My girlfriend became distraught and made a scene,” he wrote. “It was an embarrassing way to end this era.” He then reached out to apologize, wish her well, and let her know she’d never hear from him again.
Shortly after starting his new life he was shocked to find his ex-girlfriend had shown up at his new apartment. “I was astonished and dismayed,” he wrote.
“When I start a new life I consider my prior persona ended and my prior life over, so to be confronted with a person from that old life is kind of surreal and almost like encountering a ghost or something.”
His girlfriend tracked him down and tried to rekindle their romance.
She wanted to reconcile, which, of course, was off the table for him, and after she refused to get the point — because this was all so surreal and strange — he had to threaten to call the police. “She looked at me like I was insane,” he wrote.
He then started receiving texts on his new phone number from her family, whom he was close to “in my prior life,” along with some of his friends from that previous “era.” He blocked them all because “they were violating my privacy.”
“I have done this multiple times and never had people from a prior finished life stalk me into the next one,” he wrote, tellingly adding that this includes his family, whom he referred to as his “original relatives,” a frankly chilling turn of phrase that seems incredibly revealing.
“For some reason this batch is refusing to respect my lifestyle,” he went on to say, and it made him angry as he was honest about his intentions to sever all after three years. “Now, they are intruding in my new life. It has thrown off my new persona.”
This man’s story bears resemblances to symptoms of some psychological and personality disorders.
There’s no two ways about it — if this post is real, it is deeply disturbing and reads like the plot of a psychological thriller. Unsurprisingly, people on Reddit were deeply unnerved by his tale, especially given the way his “reinventions” impacted other people, like his ex-girlfriend.
Sure, she may have gone overboard. But his ice cold lack of understanding for her feelings felt diabolical or even sociopathic to many readers. “The discarding people is what makes it so toxic,” one person wrote. “If (he) didn’t toy with other human beings it’d just be weird.”
And nearly everyone assumed it was all related to some kind of mental illness. Psychology says they’re probably right. Inventing new personas and severing ties with others with such ease are both hallmarks of mental health conditions and personality disorders.
Creating a “false self” is a key feature of narcissistic personality disorder. It’s a defense mechanism narcissists use to either conceal who they truly are, avoid painful memories or feelings, or both. Usually, it’s due to childhood trauma or so-called “adverse childhood experiences” or “ACEs.”
By the same token, easily and frequently severing ties is often a part of borderline personality disordera condition that arises from serious interpersonal traumas, typically in childhood, and can have debilitating impacts on a person’s relationships.
Cutting ties with people on a dime is also often involved with developmental trauma like attachment disorderswhich arise from disruptions to the parent-child bond during infancy and childhood that, if not rectified, hobble a person’s relationships in adulthood. It’s especially common in those with what is called avoidant attachment.
The common theme among all of these, of course, is childhood trauma — which certainly fits with the man’s claim that even his family has never tried to find him during any of his “resets.” As one Redditor put it, “That is dark and probably a big part of why this is happening.”
Whether this man has any of these conditions is of course for a clinician to diagnose. But what seems obvious is that he is running from something and needs help.
Here’s hoping he’s able to find it before putting himself and others through any more upheaval.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.
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