Realness that You Don't Recognize

Sometimes the realness surprises you at the most inopportune, uncomfortable times when you'd rather not look your own shit in the face..

The times when you're ready to parade the story out and believe your own bullshit about how things really are.

I've dealt with this shit. I'm over it. I totally know what I'm doing....

And then that real friend shows up and is right there in the middle of the storm. Perhaps being scooped into the ice cream cone, himself. Taking the brunt of the ice cream shit show. Feeling the all powerful anger and whatnot and don't fuck with me edge....

And he just shows up. Takes the words and responds to them even if they don't fully make sense. As if to say it's ok....

Often, he doesn't actually use any words. Just shows up with the joke and the half hearted smirk that makes you catch a glimpse of your own bullshit.

Totally over my ex, you say. 

You don't even really get how much he actually sees through the bullshit smokescreen that you happen to believe about the story you tell yourself everyday until he is there dealing with the windmills and cardboard head gear like Sancho Panzes.

Leaning into the Lies

Somehow with the divorce final, I thought the need to lie and exaggerate things would slow down in my ex. Who the fuck cares anymore? We're done. I'd like for the record to reflect that. We don't need to interact except as regards my kids. But alas, my ex, filling the shoes of his father appears to have embraced the path of becoming more pathological in the lying. For no reason whatsoever?

Good news is I've made progress in the healing. I'm getting better at seeing perspective in his antics.

Case in point, yesterday. Had to have a conversation about the upcoming schedule. In the planning, we reviewed my upcoming plans next month.

That's the first I've heard of that... he said when I reviewed the March plans. He pretended that I was springing this upon him. It was so preposterous, I watched myself hardly allow his antics to register. I may have actually been bored. I felt so much indifference, it was as if he was far off and I could hardly hear him.

No. This is not the first you've heard. I said. I can forward you the texts, the emails, the transcripts of the phone conversations, if you like. Yawn. But, I know that I don't need to. Not for me. Go ahead and lay down in your own lie. Allow yourself to be enshrouded in it.

I felt calm. Nonplussed. Unrattled. I had the sense some two year old child had approached me with a plastic sword. Run along child, go play.

This is the first I've heard of that.

No, the stack of emails, texts, and conversations say otherwise.

There was another document from the lawyer. CC'd his name and mine at the bottom--mailed nearly a week ago--a document that stated that for some reason funds were "insufficient" in a financial account only he has access to.

He feigned ignorance. Even going so far as to take a picture on his phone of the document, cause yeah it's not your lawyer who sent it, not your name CC'd at the bottom on record, not you who moved funds out of the account. Right. Of course.

But, he needs to lie. He feeds on this stuff. And somewhere it has drifted past the point of even having threads of connection to reality, past the point of no return. The lies grow more intense, more bombastic, more ridiculous, so that he can have more food to suck down in order to stabilize his own blood sugar that depends upon the lie. I suspect he's unravelling, falling apart at the seams, self destructing. He's so focused on lie creation, nothing else holds relevance.  He's like the insect that keeps flying into the bug zapper, lying to itself about the shiny pretty light. The light can't kill me. The light can't kill me. The light can't kill me.

Of course, it can't kill you, Mr Amazing Logician. You say you are impervious to that! There is no arguing with your logic.

Keep saying that. At some point, it won't matter that you feel compelled to tell the world that your little bug self is impervious to the light. Eventually, you'll get settled into that truth. You'll get to bask in the light of a truth all your own. No one ever need contradict you. The truth is patient. The truth will wait to assert itself. But eventually, your little bug carcass will be found lying in its own truth on the ground. 

Mine

They are sick of hearing the story. They all almost always nod with that knowing look that tells me that they have no fucking idea what the story really is. Rather, it tells that they don't know. And truth be told isn't it interesting that the word "nod" is a verb for what one does to go off to sleep.

But, all the same, they are sick of hearing the story. And I get it.

Truth be told, I'm sick of telling it.

Except that sometimes I must. I am compelled. I sometimes think, if you want to get me, you have to get this terrible piece of my survival story, And so I dumb the volume down, I minimize most of the details--making them seem more realistic, more believable, cause the truth isn't--and somehow I think "my listener" might get some small bit of it if I make it more tolerable. And the new guy that I just met, that I'm on a date with, would most certainly think I'm exaggerating if I tell the actual truth. 

And so I make it more palatable. More ok. I often tell myself the same lie so I can get through my day.

He really wasn't that bad, after all. You created a lot of this shit in your own head. You imagined it.

He isn't really all that bad, still.

This is all in your head, as its always been. You have a massively active imagination, just as your youngest does.

Today, I was told that I was talking too much about me ex. I feel like you are comparing me to your ex, he said.

And there is an emptiness--a sadness that trickles into my soul at those words, cause if you got it, you'd probably also get that there is no one to compare my experience with him to--it's a bit too alien. And so that bleakness clouds me and the feeling that nobody really understands it catches in my throat pit again--and the countless lectures begin that tell of my listener's status hanging outside the ballpark waiting for the flyball to pop over the stadium seats altogether. And my listener is ready to solve all my narcissistic problems in 5 mins flat. Just step up to the plate, girl, and own your own shit.... Cause I've definitely not been trying my damnedest to own my shit for 19 years. Yeah, that is most definitely it, bro. Yeah, uh, thanks.

Truth. This story--the one that I'm telling--isn't actually the narcissist's story. It's not a war story about some fucker who blew up the jungle or threw a grenade into the hole of life. It's a love story about finding yourself again after all the terrible soul stripping, the awful dark night, when you think you just might not make it to morning. It's about the new you that somehow emerges after the volcano blackens everything. It's about that hope spark that somehow smolders on, in order for you to survive, for years. It's about that soul friend that happens along and reminds you of the song of who you are. It's about these important things. And so this story isn't about the narcissist, at all. This story is about the soul surviving. And it's just possible that you might just get that, if you'd shut the fuck up and just listen.

Cause this story is all mine. And I'm taking it back. Right here, right now. It's about the beautiful compassionate piece in me--in all of us--that even the narcissist cannot effectively snuff out, ever. You might not get this, and that is ok. But all the same, please either shut up or get the hell out of my story, cause clearly, it will never ever be one compatible with yours...

For the Interim Time

When near the end of day, life has drained
Out of light, and it is too soon
For the mind of night to have darkened things,

No place looks like itself, loss of outline
Makes everything look strangely in-between,
Unsure of what has been, or what might come.

In this wan light, even trees seem groundless.
In a while it will be night, but nothing
Here seems TO believe the relief of dark.

You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.

The path you took to get here has washed out;
The way forward is still concealed from you.

"The old is not old enough to have died away;,
The new is still too young to be born."

You cannot lay claim to anything;
In this place of dusk,
Your eyes are blurred;
And there is no mirror.

Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust;
You know you have to make your own way through.

As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow your confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might com free
From all you have outgrown.

What is being transfigured here is your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.

                                                    -John O'Donohue

things hoped for

Some days, I hope beyond all hope that I am actually all that He says I am.

I hope that I am the evil bitch He thinks me to be.

I hope that I am actually some sort of vigilante out to destroy him, victimize him, and end all things rosy and pretty in life for him.

Cause that would mean that I am the problem. That would mean that one day three little people—my three little elves—wouldn’t actually have to wake up to the reality that He does not actually care a rat’s ass about them.

They would never have to have their little hearts ripped out in knowing these painful things about him.

And as much as I crave validation. I think I could be ok with just being the problem. I could be ok with just being the fucked up mother who failed them.

And that would be the end of it. I could spare them all of this, by being the bitchy, bitch who never dealt with her stuff. As in mom, needs therapy. Mom needs to work out her shit. Mom needs help. And all of this narcissism shit could just go away. 

Fucked up things you hope for...

Red Pills and Spells

Several days ago, it occurred to me that things are not always as they seem. Well, No shit, Sherlock! You might say. Hear me out, nonetheless.

My perspective as of late has focused on getting out, unlocking, escaping—extricating myself from the spider’s web of my narcissist’s spun entanglements of falsities dominating the landscape of the old, red barn of my life. I've felt trapped. I've seen myself as being imprisoned, abused, and victimized. And while those things are true, they are more or less my experience of the past. Yes, the narcissist continues to wound, but as the GI Joe tagline advises, knowing is half the battle, or perhaps with the narcissist, knowing is the battle.

I suspect, ironically enough, this might be one of the most valuable lessons the narcissist can teach. The inherent value in seeing and knowing the fullness of reality--whilst balancing one's own perspective alongside the perspective of others.

His blindness teaches me of my own blindness. I so oft forget that my own experience is only partial reality--only one perspective. And whilst important aspects for me to see and acknowledge in order to escape the web, the enlightening parts and pieces can become my new entrapment, my new entanglement, if I so allow or become too identified with my own particular perspective. I can shape a new reality around indulging my own victimhood.

This might be the ultimate lesson I take away from the narcissist. 

Trapped by his own delusions, caught by his own lies, he thinks his own perspective, enough. He cannot see that the Fun House is mirrored. He cannot access the infinite in himself or others. His rigid holding of his own perspective bars and locks him in. Other perspectives, other people's experiences are invisible to him.

Recently, my ex informed me that he might have to move into an apartment of all things. Perish the thought. As he went on and on as to how terrible this will be for him, and how he will have to find a place, and how he will have to downsize, and how rough this will be on him, I was struck by his complete inability to see my experience for the past year--of living in a tiny apartment--of moving out under the gun without adequate savings without much time to find something. In hearing his antics go on and on about his plight, the invisibility of my own experience sparkled and glistened while bouncing off the Fun House mirror. Hyperbolic. Comical.

And so I remind myself to see. His blindness inspires me to relentlessly look at my own blindness. I vow to keep looking into the light of the fire, though my eyes burn, though I see pain. 

It occurred to me this week that things are not always as they seem, even inside my own head, inside my own perspective. I think I’ve been looking at this whole thing through the limited perspective of my own warped Fun House mirror. As much as I don't care to admit it, I have focused on the shadows on the cave wall cast by the glow of the fire.

In awakening and seeing a fuller perspective, I afford myself the gift of vision but vision has to keep opening to itself. It must continually take in more and adapt. It must pilgrim down different thought paths. How we think about where we are determines so much of what happens to us, in fact often determines where we are.

Why am I still staring at the wall of Plato's Cave?

I am no longer invisibly tethered. I am awake. I swallowed the Red Pill.

And so, I begin to learn a new way of being in the world, a new way of thinking. “The old barriers no longer confine me, the old wounds no longer name me, and the old fears no longer claim me.” (John O’Donohue). I choose transformation—shape-shifting—metamorphosis—growth and expansion of soul. I choose to journey onward and remodel the entirety of myself. I choose to slip out of this old skin and become who I am meant to be.

The web—the matrix no longer has to hold its spell over me. I took the red pill, dammit. And while there is certainly power in coming to this realization, perhaps even greater power lies in realizing that the matrix, itself, is often of one's own making. So, more red pill, please.