Why Not, Beautiful?

Why couldn't he have just said, some of the time, you are beautiful.

I hear this from strangers on dating apps.

Some of the time, they might have agendas. To get into my pants, etc. But why? Why couldn't my lover, my ex, my husband have told me that he thought me beautiful? How do you never say that to someone you are married to for something like 17 yrs. I work through this shit, daily, perhaps. It's not that I want to be special, or extraordinary or model-esque or some kind of wonderful. I just want to be and feel some kind of normal. I want to feel like there is this one guy out there that thinks me to be great. Beautiful even.

I never got that from my narc. No. Rather, I was tolerable, at best.

Sometimes, he wasn't embarrassed to be with me. Like the time he told me to start using flash cards to memorize GRE words so that I might not sound so low brow, so midwestern, so uneducated at the Philosophy Grad Student gatherings. Sometimes, I didn't sound quite so dumb, to him.

I mean I was never enough. But sometimes, I was not quite as bad. Sometimes he didn't interrupt me or talk over me to tell my story to the philosophy wives standing in a circle around the mustard potato salad.

God forbid I open my mouth at a philosophy picnic and talk to the chair of the Department! Shut up.

I was always less than. Not enough of anything. One that ought be interrupted so as to minimize the damage of what the hell she uneducatedly said.

Never quite right. Just try harder. Be smarter, you dumb ass.

Speak to the philosophy wives about black bean dips. But never ever open your mouth to engage my professors. You are and will always be beneath me and them. You will never be....

But why not, beautiful, just the way I am? Without flash cards or GRE or words or scripts memorized? Maybe for a split second, I am enough. I don't know. Please. Thank you. Perhaps. In the future? Someday? Never?

Fly me Away to the Moon

Everyone in post-narcalypse-therapy-world says you have to go No Contact or Minimal Contact if you ever want to heal from narcissistic abuse. I've been chewing the fat on this truth for three plus years now. With my going back and forth between my two locales I've watched myself lose ground, lose energy, lose momentum in my recovery. Reentry into the narcissistic orbit has seemed more difficult each time I do it, which has been about every other week for the past year and a half.

My own body bears the scars. Organs slip and displace themselves. They tell the story of what is really happening. The carrying is heavy. Perhaps, too much.

You can't keep this up.  It is too much. You must listen to us or we shall scream louder, telling you things you don't want to hear. 

And so, I've had to do the most difficult thing I've ever done (other than leave my narcissist). I've had to move away from my kids. The people I pushed out of my own body. I've had to hug them and tell them they'll be ok, even when I wish I could protect them. I never thought it would come to this. 

I never thought I would have to do this. While things have changed in the past few years and slowly I've pulled myself out of the massive spider web, bit by bit. And I'm back to being more me now than I've been in perhaps eons, I never thought that this would be the path. That this would be the end. I mean who goes, "I'll take the Narc Abuse for like 17 years, Alex, then abandon my own children for $200." But, I tell you dear reader, that there is no other way. The Raven says there is always another way. So let me rephrase that. There is no other way that I can see at this point without some sort of XRAY superwoman vision.

The financial abuse has strangled, controlling so much. Now, my hand is forced. I have to be where I can grow in order to get myself further out of the narc orbit and heal. So that I'm not a shadow of the girl I used to be when I'm with my little--now big people.

And so I've sprung. Done that thing that intensifies parental guilt and pain and shame. I've moved away. My narc says so many things. Of course, he'll spin this in a particular way to them. He'll do everything to brainwash them as he did me. And I can only hope that I've laid down enough of a foundation to help them see through all the funhouse smoke and mirrors trick show he inflicts on all around him.

Pain has a way of teaching us the lessons we don't want to see or learn. It certainly did for me. They are bright, brilliant kids even. And in these past few months, I've spoken more openly with them about some of the painful topics they are only now old enough to get.

And so I must do this, step back into myself and into whom I'm meant to be, for them. So that I can be the parent they need me to be, even if from afar. So fly me to the moon, please now.  

On Grieving the What Mights

Sometimes the most tragic piece punches me unexpectedly in the gut. You'd think after all the abuse, all the hell in trying to escape the narcissist that in escape there would be only relief. But there is a hidden sadness that can sneak up behind you. You mistakenly think, if I can just get the hell out... If I can just survive and move on.... Why then I'll be fine.

And then there you go imagining like you've always done. Thinking of what might have been, if he'd only been able to choose something different. Just when you think you're finished with all the drama, all the death, all the grief and endings of dead relationships. There is a little spot that gets in.

Call it the what-might-have-been grief.

After you've invested so many years trying to love someone who for all intensive purposes can not ever love you back, you've come to intimately know the good friend of what-might-be. For many years, what-might-be has been one of your steadiest companions. What-might-be has been your hope, your citadel. And then what-might-be flies away into the air, evaporated just like everything else.

And this can be completely ungrounding. Cause who thinks of grieving the loss of the shared dreams, the future, the hopes of the growth, the butterfly transformation. But, you've lost so much. Why not this, too? After all, the snake goes on as perpetual death and life cycle.