Limerick. August 2026.
I work weekends. At lunchtime I sat with my salad and looked at my phone. My eye was drawn to something, and I looked closer.
A year ago, someone in my life asked me to help them to commit suicide, and I immediately contacted their mental health team and asked them to come out. The person in question was a recluse, wouldn't go to them and wouldn't speak to them on the phone, and I had to badger the mental health service to come out. The person in question had attempted to get the means to commit suicide and I took this seriously while his friends said 'Oh, he's always like that'. I knew before I was trained that if someone is trying to obtain the means for suicide, they mean it.
The meeting which ensued was calm enough, but the person in question was open that they wanted to die, that they had a method in mind, and that they'd asked me to help them. The mental health team engaged, listened, changed the prescriptions, and treated the situation as a crisis which they would monitor closely. This was a relief to me as I had to leave the scene and be away from the person shortly after this. It took a toll on me, along with other aspects around this situation.
The man in question really did want to die, we could find no spark, nothing to give him a reason to live, not even his friends. I had done what I could and the mental health team were the best people to help him if anyone could. Today as I glanced at my phone I saw the news I had half expected for the past year. He's passed away. God rest his soul. But it did upset me, it is upsetting me, at the same time as I'm dealing with Michael's incessant resurgences of showing off publicly and other issues such as unreliable public transport to work.
The deceased inspired me to train in mental health awareness and suicide prevention, because although I was first aid trained, I was not suicide first aid trained and had felt helpless regarding his suicide ideation and pressure on me to help him, and had found local support services of little help at this time. He was a recluse and struggled to be with people, but he did have friends, and he did leave that small legacy of my mental health and suicide prevention training, which I can use to help others.
The most serious thing that Michael did to me was 'gaslighting' me, making me out to be mentally ill for my reaction to his harm to me. Anyone would react to someone taking them over, obtaining their medical and personal information illegally, and holding it up to provoke a reaction, anyone would react to being pushed to commit fraud in relation to property and dealing with the unstable unpredictable behaviour which Michael exhibited, and so on, and a vulnerable, traumatised homeless autistic woman especially so, when fed false hope about a future and then being left with no future and the serious data violation, on top of the things I have been through in the past.
What I realised about my relationship with Michael, thanks to John, was that I placed the same trust in Michael as in John, Rob, Sean, Frank, David and the rest of the men who supported me, I saw Michael as the same whilst also puzzling, because he didn't see himself as a friend, he was kind of styling himself as a social or outreach worker with no training or ability, not in an official capacity and spouting bizarre popular psychology, I had no idea how to relate to him or what was going on, I had a desperate need for accommodation which is why my relationship with Michael lasted two months, even though I tried to walk out on him after three weeks.
My reaction to Michael's turbulence led to him gaslighting me, making out I trusted no one, he bizarrely used Patrick from Techstar as an example of trusted people, even though I saw Patrick wringing extra money out of him and still trying it on when nothing more was needed. Sometimes I do wonder if Michael is a predator or if he's really not entirely normal. But his gaslighting of me was real and hurtful. My life was in his hands because I trusted him just as I would trust the other men in my life.
Michael did this manipulation while he tried to replace my support network with strangers, who he had discussed me with behind my back and arranged with them, not me, to involve them in my life. One of these was his former mentee from the school, alerting me to the fact that he'd been drawing schoolboys out of the school into his life, the more recent ones when he was still accessing schools without a teacher's licence. He initially banned contact between me and the two teenage boys he had in the other penthouse, banning it from their side and explaining nothing to me, and later he tried to push them into my life, at this stage he was trying to push various people into my life without consent and causing me distress and I kept saying no.
Michael was in my life actively for two months, and behind my back and violating my privacy and coming after me a further month at least, it felt like a lifetime. He has done lasting damage and after two years the wounds are raw despite me housing myself and returning to work. It is now August, nearly September and Michael has been showing himself off publicly incessantly since March and it is beginning to really harm me and destabilise my life. The callousness of what he did in throwing me away after tiring of playing with me, when it was apparent he was not going to house me, combined with his coming after me in an equally callous and cruel manner to try to absolve himself to me, has left a wound too deep on top of what I'd already suffered.
Sometimes I think he just totally lacked understanding and was an unusual person, as I said. Sometimes it is apparent that his actions were calculated and he knew very well what he was doing. He's able to run a huge property empire and cut corners, he's not stupid, and holding teaching and mentoring positions in a school means he obviously has been capable of responsibility. If he can pick up vulnerable scholarship boys under the radar, he's intelligent and able enough to know that involving a vulnerable adult in fraud and stealing her data is not mental illness but his own wrongdoing.
Here are a set of boundaries I sent to Michael shortly after his awful email on October 10th, 2024:
https://thestorybehindlifeforce198.blogspot.com/p/boundaries-sent-to-michael-in-october.html
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