Storytime: The horror of not being in control

I used to think control was about willpower.

Get up early. Work hard. Stick to the plan.

If something went wrong, it was just because I hadn’t tried hard enough.

That was before the day I watched my own hand move without me.

It started small. A flicker of something wrong.

I was writing an email at work, one of those endless chains that never really end. My fingers hovered above the keyboard, and then before I’d decided what to say, they started typing.

Not words I recognized. Not thoughts I’d had.

Just a string of letters that looked almost like English but weren’t.

I hit delete so fast I almost snapped the key off.

Then I laughed it off, told myself it was muscle memory or some strange autocorrect fluke.

But when I looked down at my hands, they were trembling as though they knew something I didn’t.

Over the next few days, my routines began shifting, but I couldn’t remember deciding any of it.

I’d wake up at 3:11 a.m. always the same time and with a strange taste of metal in my mouth.

Sometimes my phone would be open to the camera app, recording the dark ceiling above my bed.

Once, I found the front door unlocked.

Another time, I found wet footprints on the porch. Like someone coming home after the rain.

They were my footprints.

When I told my friend Emma about it, she said maybe I was sleepwalking. “Stress,” she said. “You work too much. The brain short-circuits.”

Maybe she was right.

But deep down, I knew what it felt like to lose control and this wasn’t that.

This was something else.

Something that wanted control.

It was a Thursday morning when I found the video.

I was scrolling through my phone on autopilot, just trying to wake up. There it was, tucked between screenshots and work photos, a 37 second clip timestamped 3:12 a.m.

In it, I was sitting on the edge of my bed, eyes open, head tilted slightly to one side. I wasn’t blinking. My lips were moving, but no sound came out. Then I turned, slowly, toward the camera, toward me and smiled.

Not my smile.

Too wide. Too patient.

And then I said, clearly this time:

“You can stop now. I’m here.”

The screen went black.

I didn’t sleep for two nights after that.

Sleep deprivation plays tricks on you. At least, that’s what I told myself.

The next few days blurred together in caffeine and exhaustion. At work, people asked if I was okay. I said I was fine, though I’d started noticing gaps, small ones, in my memory.

A missing hour here. A task done but not remembered. Emails sent with my name but not my tone.

Then, during lunch, I noticed something impossible.

My hand, the left one had a smear of ink along the palm. I don’t use pens a work. I hadn’t held one all morning.

When I went to wash it off, I saw words written there in shaky block letters:

STOP FIGHTING.

The letters began to fade as I stared, bleeding into my skin until they were gone.

I pressed my hand against the cold porcelain sink, and for a moment, it didn’t feel like mine at all.

It resisted. Just slightly.

Enough for me to know something else was pressing back.

I went to see a therapist. It felt like the logical thing to do, the last thread of control I could still claim.

She asked about stress, sleep, trauma. The usual.

Then she asked, “Do you ever feel like you’re not the one making decisions?”

The question hit too close.

I told her about the sleepwalking, the messages, the video. She listened quietly, then said something that chilled me:

“Sometimes, when people repress parts of themselves, anger, grief, shame, it fragments the self. Those fragments can take on… independent behaviors.”

“Like another personality?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” she said. “More like the part of you that stopped trusting you.”

She smiled kindly. I didn’t tell her that her expression looked just like the one from the video.

After that, things got worse.

I’d catch my reflection moving out of sync.

I’d blink, and my mirror self wouldn’t.

Once, I saw it mouth the words “You’re doing fine” while my lips stayed still.

It wasn’t a hallucination. I know what I saw.

By then, I was keeping my phone in another room at night, locking my doors, setting alarms. But it didn’t help.

Because the thing I was afraid of, the thing taking control. It didn’t need a key.

It was already inside.

Three nights later, I woke up standing in the kitchen, barefoot, holding a knife. The lights were off, but the moon was bright enough to show me the reflection in the window.

I was smiling again.

I dropped the knife, backed away. My heart was pounding, but my body wasn’t responding my breathing stayed calm, steady, mechanical.

And then I heard the voice, not out loud, but inside.

“It’s easier if you stop pretending.”

I slammed my head against the wall to drown it out. Pain helped, briefly. The sting of something real. But then I felt my hands, calm, gentle, move to steady me.

I wasn’t in them anymore.

There’s one more video. I found it this morning. I don’t remember filming it, but it’s from my phone, my room, my face.

I’m sitting in front of the camera, hair unkempt, eyes wide.

“I can’t stop it,” I say. “I can feel it when I blink. It’s learning me. Using me. I think it’s already won.”

Then, after a pause, I lean closer. The me in the video smiles that same perfect, patient smile and says:

“You should’ve let go sooner.”

The recording ends there.

But the phone camera light is still on.

And I’m still watching.

Only this time, I don’t remember turning it on.

I’m writing this now, though I don’t know if I’m the one typing.

Sometimes the words appear faster than I can think. Sometimes I try to stop, and the keys keep clicking anyway.

Maybe I’m still me. Maybe I’m just the echo, the part that doesn’t get to decide anymore.

But I know one thing: control was never what I thought it was. It’s not a right. It’s a loan. And when something else, whatever it is, it comes to collect, there’s nothing you can do but watch and wait.

Because in the end, the real horror isn’t losing your mind.

It’s realizing it wasn’t yours to begin with.