The Boiling Smart Frog
If I Was So Smart, Why Was I Being Blackmailed By A Man In Cargo Shorts?
We’ve all heard the “Boiling Frog” metaphor. The idea is that the frog is too stupid to notice the water getting hot, so it just sits there until it becomes a French delicacy.
But let me be honest about my situation. I wasn’t a dumb frog, I was a frog with a PhD in “I Can Fix Him.” I was sitting in that pot, sweat pouring off my face, staring at the bubbles and thinking, “Technically, this isn’t boiling yet. It’s just a very aggressive spa day. If I can explain the concept of boundaries to the water, we’ll all be fine.”
For the last few weeks, I’ve been releasing my memoir, Good Luck Getting Rid of Me, chapter by chapter. I’ve released Chapter 10, and the water is currently at a rolling boil. I’m looking back at early 2025 me thinking, “Guuuuurrrrl.”
How I Became the Fixer
I grew up in a house where “stability” was a foreign concept and chaos was the interior design choice. Naturally, I became a professional Project Hunter. I didn’t want a boyfriend. I wanted a fixer-upper with structural damage and a haunting.
I did become a Fixer. I walked away from that house and built order into my life. I made sense of that chaos and applied the lessons. When I became an IT Project Manager, it was because I had understood one simple truth about myself: I fix things.
If someone was volatile, I would stabilise them. If someone was broken, I would try to understand them. If someone lashed out, I would sit there long enough to decode the why until I could make it make sense.
But I often mistook empathy for control.
Then I met Ben.
Not a Cartoon Villain. Worse.
Ben wasn’t just a bad decision; he was a psychological thriller written by someone on a three-day bender. Imagine a cocktail of the Dark Tetrad, a heavy meth chaser, and enough neurodivergent fixation to make a simple “where are you?” feel like an afternoon in an Escape Room from Hell.
He was not some obvious monster, because that would have made it simple. I’ve written about the monster before. But let’s be clear, if he’d come at me with no skin, insides exposed, we wouldn’t have much of a story.
The ugly truth is that he wasn’t ugly.
He was volatile, charming, fragile, explosive, hyper-focused and very self-destructive.
And he knew exactly when to collapse.
That’s the part people miss about toxic dynamics. It isn’t constant cruelty. It’s oscillation.
Chaos, then tears, followed by blackmail. Then “I panicked.” Then rage, then trembling apologies. Then goddamn fucking hot sex.
Repeat. Rinse.
If you are wired to fix, that vulnerability is irresistible.
The Greatest Hits of Psychological Warfare
By the time we hit Chapters 9 and 10 in real life, the Fixer in me was working eighty hours a week of unpaid overtime just to ignore the red flags that were essentially tenderising my face.
Let’s start with the digital terrorism. He created over fifty separate email addresses and multiple free numbers just to bypass my blocks.
Fifty.
Do you have any idea how much administrative effort that takes? That’s the kind of obsessive dedication I wish I had for the gym, or a hobby, or literally anything that isn’t stalking.
He didn’t want a chat. He wanted to occupy my inbox like a digital squatter who’s changed the locks and started a fire in the living room, and that was before he even made coffee.
Then there was the Passport Heist, a true masterpiece of sociopathic theatre. This man looked me dead in the eye, the kind of look you reserve for soulmates and blood oaths, and swore on his innocent nephews’ lives that he didn’t have it.
He was so convincing I almost felt like the jerk for asking.
Then, the literal second I agreed to see him, he miraculously “found” it by the bed.
A miracle. A spiritual event. He is basically the patron saint of lost travel documents, provided he’s the one who stole them first.
But the romance really peaked with the countdown timers. Because nothing says “I’m a stable, well-adjusted partner” like sending someone you claim to love a ticking clock and a threat to leak your entire private chat history to his husband.
It’s the Hallmark card of the psychopath world. That warm, festive “I love you so much I’ll burn your life to the ground” energy.
And then, because the universe clearly thought this plot needed seasoning, we get to the CCTV parts. The cherry on this trauma sundae.
While I was busy empathising, theorising, contextualising, and generally auditioning for “Most Emotionally Literate Idiot of the Year,” this man was filming me.
Filming.
Me.
There were cameras hidden in the house.
I thought I was in a complicated love story with a damaged man.
Turns out I was in a low-budget psychological thriller directed by a guy who thinks “privacy” is something you uninstall when you run out of storage.
But, that comes later.
Chapter 10: The Boil
Chapter 10 dropped, and by the end of it, you’ll probably question my sanity.
I did. I still do.
The heat was rising, the lid was tightening and I was still naive enough to believe I could manage it.
If you want to understand how intelligent, self-aware people end up trapped not by ignorance but by overconfidence in their own empathy, read it as a psychological autopsy.
Come see how the spell works.
The water is boiling.
Are you stepping in?
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