Mr. Ballin

Barbara was from California and considered herself more of a free spirit who liked exploring new ideas and trying new things.

So over the last three years, Barbara had felt both frustrated and also alienated by the other students' very rigid lifestyles.

She'd been hoping that that would change with her new living situation.

She'd just moved in with seven other girls in January.

But now, just two months into that, it was already very obvious that those girls did not like her.

They were just as religious as the rest of the kids at BYU, and they seemed to think Barbara was weird for doing things like dating around and experimenting with different religions.

It just didn't make sense to them.

So Barbara had decided that instead of trying to change her roommate's minds,

She would just lean in to this kind of weird behavior, as they called it.

Barbara basically started making them uncomfortable on purpose, like by saying she prayed to the devil, which totally shocked them.

And after a while, Barbara had really got the sense that these girls, they weren't just weirded out by her.

They were now actively scared of her, which really alienated Barbara a whole lot more.

And so all of that was why Barbara was now writing this letter.

She was telling her roommates that she was just going to go ahead and leave campus for a while to be with people that actually understood her.

And the people she was thinking of were people like Richard Finder, a self-proclaimed psychic that Barbara had connected with after she'd called into a radio show where Richard had been giving psychic readings.

And the two of them had connected immediately.

Because even though Richard was almost a decade older than her, he understood Barbara in a way that no one else in her life did.

And ever since, they'd had this really intense relationship that felt both romantic and spiritual at the same time.

But since Richard lived far away, most of their relationship so far had been over the phone.

And so Barbara thought it might be nice to be physically closer to Richard and also his circle of friends.