Trigger Warning: The contents of the piece, as a whole, make references to self-harm (cutting), rape, incest, and molestation. Reader discretion is advised.
Also please be aware that not all cases of untreated Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) are like this; there is variation in cases. Some cases are more severe than others. If you experience any of the symptoms described herein and are disturbed by them, please seek out or return to regular mental health treatment; your well-being is paramount and you deserve to be happy and well.
This is the continuation.
If you have missed the previous chapters, go to Chapter 1: Innocent Beginnings or Chapter 2: The Unease.
If you have already read Chapter 3, you can go to the concluding chapter, Chapter 4: The Danger Remains.
Chapter 3: Her Murder Threat for Her Mother, Still on the Web As This Is Posted
In late May of 2010 over the weekend, near the semester’s end, Inger Johansen simply broke out sobbing to me, “I . . . DON’T . . .WANT . . . TO . . . EXIST!!!!” Upon some quick introspection, she ascertained that it was not in response to any immediate happening; that was just her default mood; it epitomized her childhood and middle school and high school in Tromsø, and the sensation had been periodically returning, haunting her throughout the semester. She also mentioned how all men—especially American men—are lascivious and secretly yearn to rape her.
She put her hands in mine and, tearfully, she said, “[Trevor], promise me you will always protect me.” I did as she asked. But, as was becoming increasingly evident, the greatest danger to Inger was not anything external to her.
She also reflected on her father, Matt Pennington, in a manner similar to how she spoke of Sao—as if he were two completely different, opposite people: one being entirely benign and nurturing, the other wholly cruel and predatory. And in every instance wherein she reflected on this one single-dimension personality of a man, be it Sao or her father, her mind seemed unable to access her interpretation of that man’s other personality. It wasn’t just that Inger acted like Jekyll-and-Hyde: she reacted to every man as if he, too, were Jekyll-and-Hyde. Fortunately, she unsolicitedly promised me that once she flew to Tromsø for the summer, she would pursue regular mental health treatment.
I did not have a Webcam and could not video-chat back then, but when Inger returned to Tromsø in June, we were on Google Chat very often. As gently as I could, I queried as to whether she had yet made a renewed visit to a mental health professional. She brushed this off and sounded as if nothing of the sort had ever been deposited in her memory bank. When I reminded her what she promised, she typed back that there was no need for fulfilling it, for everything was fantastic and she was as happy as could be. I had to fess up, “When you told me you would go back to periodic mental health treatment, I was greatly relieved.” She typed back, “Ouch.”
Once Inger landed in Honolulu for the autumn 2010 semester, her symptoms intensified. Back in May, she had taken me to her apartment and showed me all the clothes in her closet and drawers; she had many tops of different colors. Except for two black garments—one of them backless—every garment was obviously distinct from the others. But in the autumn, she put on the exact same backless black top to class every day for over a month.
Then, on her LinkedIn page, she uploaded photos where she was realistically photoshopped to look like a fresh corpse ready for burial—one experiencing pallor mortis. Her face was rendered chalky white, and this was not for Halloween; it was up year-round. On her LinkedIn page, she has up her résumé and describes herself as a stable, responsible, ever-professional businesswoman. Next to that description is a photo of her photoshopped to resemble a corpse (III; IV).
By October, Inger had someone back in Norway upload, onto YouTube, a video where Inger delivers a monologue in English about being a fascist—quote— “of the Fourth Reich”; unquote, alluding to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Privately Inger said this was a joke. But that it was supposed to be humorous was not obvious from the video itself. The description says “News & Politics.” An English-speaker who saw the video would be reasonable if he or she deciphered it as some indication that Inger admired something about neo-Nazis. Again, it didn’t behoove me to dismiss this as the sort of "shitposting" one might find on 4chan or 8chan; because Inger really has wished for death, I could not write this off as merely perverted satire. I notice that, around 2014, this bewildering video was finally “privated.” But the website known as Radaris still has a record of this video having existed, and Inger’s real full birth name is still visible on the Radaris record.
And it got worse. Inger showed me the publicly viewable Livejournal she wrote mostly in English from 2003 to 2007. A lot of it is about the self-cutting and about how she wants to cut her face up so severely that no one would recognize her anymore. I am thankful she did not slash her face but, with the corpse pictures, she nevertheless accomplished that part about becoming unrecognizable. There is also an early entry from 2003 admitting that she is disturbed that people act as if they don’t notice the self-cutting but that she also thinks this is good because it conveniences her ability to cut herself.
And then there is an entry from 2004 where she elucidates on her fantasy of killing her mother. Inger does not say this is some long-term, conscious plan. Nay; she imagines one evening she will finally become so aggravated by her mother’s nagging that she will grab a knife on impulse and plunge it into her mother. This was not the sort of dumb, terse, empty threat that regularly appears on Twitter or on Facebook, those along the lines of “How dare you disagree with me? Go somewhere and die. X-(” No, the description of how Inger expects the stabbing to commence is long, graphic, and dire.
Below that murder-threat entry (at the same URL) is a follow-up from four months later where Inger says it—quote—“stings like a bitch”—unquote—to read this pathological reverie, because now she is allllllll-betterrrr... But she wasn’t. She told me how she often contemplates using her knife to extract violent retribution from parties in Tromsø who had wronged her. She was not specific about the identities of those parties. I have that murder threat open in a Web browser at the very moment as I type this.
Because the blog entry is from over a decade ago, I worry that people try to dismiss this as long passed. Yet, in the ensuing years, the gestures indicating an enduring fascination with violence and death and child molesters surged on, unabated. Fretful of the direction Inger had taken, I rushed to the local library and devoured its books on abnormal psychology.
As these events transpired, Professor Rothbard put Inger into higher and higher positions of authority and responsibility. She became the president of his SIFE club. She made an official website for Private Hawaiian College’s SIFE chapter and prominently exhibited one of her corpse pictures on it.
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End of Chapter 3.
Go to the concluding chapter, Chapter 4: The Danger Remains.
If you have missed the previous chapters, go to Chapter 1: Innocent Beginnings, or Chapter 2: The Unease.
