I remember him. A man in his thirties… nervous. He sat right there, in that chair across from me, wringing his hands as he told me about thoughts that didn’t belong to him.
“They come at night,” he said. “It’s like someone else is steering my mind.”
I nodded along, trying to make him feel comfortable, taking careful notes. I recommended he keep a journal. It was routine. Nothing special, I do that with many of my patients.
The next morning, I arrived, and as always, I checked the system to review yesterday’s note, but there was nothing. There was no appointment or billing information from yesterday. I asked the front desk if maybe they’d misfiled something, but they looked at me like I was confused. They swore no such patient had ever been here.
That idea of misremembering such a thing unsettled me. I pulled up my recorder. I played back my own session notes, just to reassure myself. And it was my voice, yes, calm, steady… but the words. The words weren’t mine. I don’t describe intrusive thoughts as ownership. That’s not my language. And yet, there I was, saying it. I was repeating what he said as if he’d been speaking through me.
I kept telling myself I was just tired, overworked. But then I started discovering pages in my notebook, entire paragraphs detailing sessions I had no memory of, all written in my own handwriting. Sessions where he claimed the thoughts were spreading. Seeding themselves in others. And every page ended with my own name… as if I was the one being treated.
At first, I tried to laugh it off. Stress, I thought that it was a trick of my memory. But the more I read, the more I listened, the harder it became to draw the line between him and me.
And now… now I understand.
There was never a patient. There was only me.