When and And

I abhor the existence in this world of contradictions. I just wish someone, could get it.
But that is far too much to ask, I'm pretty damn sure.

When you move out of state because somehow you can't move on in your life otherwise.
And yet, in your new locale you feel paralyzed because you're stuck in the old place you always longed to escape because little people are there.

When you leave because you don't feel safe--your dreams of someone strangling you in your sleep, keep you from sleeping.
And yet, everyone asks you why and how you think your kids might be safe there. And you really don't feel like explaining for the umpteenth time how image is everything to him and because of this you are banking on him not harming them.

When you feel nothing but judgment in making the horrific decision to leave, to abandon your own children in another state, with him, when that was the one thing you swore he'd never beat out of you. You'd die first.
And guilt eats you for dinner every night when you go on living, even though it feels like the only choice you could have made, but all the same you think daily of dying.

When you're pretty sure they think you to be the Narcissist.
And you're just so exhausted from all the years of dealing that you don't have the energy to argue or fight back and so you just accept it and hope some people eventually see the truth that is too exhausting to fight for. 

A#*hole Things Narcs Say to their Own Children

Sure, I will cover all your expenses for your lovely sport, my dear, just figure out how to get yourself back and forth to practice thrice a week.... Being 13 years old doesn't matter. You can figure it out. There is always Uber.

Sure baby, you can have the new Guinea Pig, just figure out who will watch her when you are at your mom's house... cause I might want to go camping with my girlfriend.

Oh damn, you're performing on the Trumpet in front of crowd  of 5500 that thinks you're genius at 10? OMG. I'm so you're doting Dad. I'll be there.

Oh wait, you made a "B?" You failed me. You're not my child. We only make "A"s.

Oh, you're a sensitive boy? I'm sorry, I don't do that.

Leaving

Somehow my postage stamp sized flat feels empty after the Littles that are no longer littles leave and go back to my ex. The air weighs more. My abdomen becomes a den of squirming baby snakes. I want to climb out of my skin and float away. Instead there are things to do.

Lately life seems to be a freshly skinny dipped body ripe for swarming sand flies.

Things I Remind Myself of When I Start to Waver

One. I swallowed the Red pill. This hell of being awake is still better than the hell of being in the delusional narc matrix.

Two. Even if I'm alone the rest of my damn life, true aloneness is still better than false togetherness which is really just hidden aloneness.

Three. The hidden, narcopalypses that will emerge along the path like trip wires and bouncing betties, start to form patterns. Take for example this Christmas. Predictably, when I have my kids and am engaged in being present to them, my ex will do something to sabotage the time. This is absolutely predictable. There will be a letter or email or phone call or text designed to wound me in some way. Since I've gone "minimal contact" it will be embedded in a communication that has the guise of being kid related. I therefore already have a plan. No opening of anything, no matter how "urgent" until my time with my kids is over.

Four. Focus on the progress. The rattling and emotional abuse used to throw me off for months at a time. Lost in the fog, I couldn't find my path or my way. Now, I'm thrown off for a few hours or a day and then back on track. Decreasing your being rattled time is progress.

Five. I swallowed the Red pill. I chose the Red pill. While it would be much more difficult to choose the Red pill if prior to swallowing I had the horrific knowledge from these past four years of this hellish Odyssey, even still, I would choose again to wake up and get the fuck out.

A Blessing for those Entrapped in Narcissistic Abuse

May you move with an ease that defies the web you find yourself in,
As you awaken in someone else's life and find your sticky spider feet again.

May the light of healing always find you,
As you trudge forward through the dark night of the soul.

May the love of the Ancestors, the history of the beautiful smatterings of humanity surround you and encompass you as you walk through another planet that utterly confuses you.

May the goodness of the Universe infuse your soul, binding it to all things compassionate, all things empathic, all things good, such that you taste kindness in the air around you.

May you sweat this same loving kindness that the Divine breathes on you always
such that you do not feel the flames of the hatred from one whom has no place for love.

Above all, may you find your way out of the deep, dark pain purported by an absent soulless being that has given itself up to the destruction embedded in the lie.

On Imagination

An awakened imagination enables you to inherit the riches of yourself--heart and soul. It enables you to find some of the outlines of the shape of your destiny. And it certainly is the only force of the heart that will enable you to carve from the dark slabs of fate some beautiful sculptures of possibility and healing and reconciliation.

--John O'Donohue

Dear Woman I Never Knew

I don't know what to say to you except perhaps well, you got out. Sure you had to die to do so, but on some level I have come to see your passing as a kind of mercy, a severe one, but a mercy nonetheless. I've supposedly gotten out but alas it doesn't end. Your son, the one I was tethered to all those years, well it just doesn't matter that I moved away to escape, he continues to entangle me. And this, this is the sticking point. I've certainly thought about death, more as a means to escape than anything else. I don't necessarily want to die, its just I'm so tired of the endlessness of the emotional and psychological abuse. Hope as it turns out seems to be a terrible thing. For in spite of all the terrible things he has done to me over and over again, my brain stubbornly refuses to comprehend that someone like him can exist entirely without any compassion or empathy. He grows worse by the day. And in spite of me losing almost everything, he wants to suck more life out of me like a dementor. Why? He has already won a million fold over and over. He now has my children full time. Even still he wants to take more. He bullies. He stabs. He wishes me harm. All that to say, your murderer (your ex) whom fathered this thing that I was tethered to for so long, in so fathering spawned another alien just as his father spawned him. I wish I could say that your tragic death changed him--that he was able to rise above it and break the cycle of narcissist creating more narcissicism. But, I have no such news to write you. I fear for my children. I am hoping and praying that in spite of my not being able to be in proximity to them that they will somehow see through all these narcissistic enchantments and mirrors. I am hoping that I have somehow burdened them with overpowering tools that help them separate wheat from chaff, truth from lie. I pray that the narcissistic propaganda does not penetrate their spirits and souls. I pray that they hold onto compassion, empathy, hope, and kindness toward humanity and that they begin to recognize that there are things in proximity to them that are more alien than human. I'm so sorry that I failed you. When I first met him, I only wanted our relationship to be a source of healing from all of this shit for him. It still grieves me that he ultimately chose this path. They say that the narcissist cannot ever recover. But, alas I am cursed with microscopic hope that somehow this new mother figure in his life will somehow trigger healing in spite of the damning odds. And regardless of what happens with your son, I am hoping that the pattern ends with him. 

Evil Thus I Know

Evil is the other genetic half of your lights in the world as you fight to keep their light--your babies that you pushed out of your body many years hence. Perhaps, because that other part that is mere shell doesn't understand how a mother loves, no matter what. That other part didn't have her--a mother long enough to attach, so He only gets the detachment part. Oh, what a loss.

Evil is the always lying, to keep delusions intact such that one is not causing, nor ever will cause massive pain to one's own offspring and to other peoples on the planet. Perhaps, because everyone is just a pawn on a chessboard.

Evil is a conversation on the phone designed to sabotage sanity in your ex. Where one only cares about destruction and chaos. Where one doesn't care about outcome, other than that it thwart things and people and healing. One that only cares about inducing harm.

Evil is the opposite of the first principle of medicine. First do no Harm. Evil is first and foremost, only care about destroying, causing pain, wielding a sword, even if it causes terrible things to happen to the people you think you might care about. Cause evil trumps people you care about any day.

Evil is stepping into living without meaning and kindness and healing of any sort.

Evil is knowing only the dark side of the moon. Evil is inducing in others, in people who loved you, in those who would have done anything for you the wish that somehow, you'd never, ever met. Evil is in the lie, thus I know.

Narcissistic Abuse in a Nutshell Take 2

Anonymous is

one day waking up and finding yourself

missing

from your own life.

Replaced

by an alien you helped create.

Invisible

you slip toward absence.

Narcissistic Abuse in a Nutshell

The sense of being missing

gone, invisible

from your own life

permeates your being when the Alien takes over,

in time, transforming

anonymity into pure absence.

The Story

One of my favorite books is The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. An apparent, loosely related collection of short stories, with one repeated over and over where Tim kills the punchline and tells you the ending of the story over and over, as the reader, you almost reach the maddenly, irate point at the redundancy. You feel like you've got it already, as if Tim is deliberately insulting your intelligence as a reader. That arrogant writer, who clearly thinks I'm not paying attention to the Curt Lemming story?  Enough, already....

And then it eventually hits you, that you've never felt the story. And this matters to the story. In fact, this means that you've never really heard the story in spite of his telling it over and over. Somehow, you didn't quite get it that Tim held back the pieces that matter. Until, you've really heard the story--which incidentally, is the uncircumcised poignancy of the story intact. And that's when you finally feel it all most acutely.

Today, in this new land of towers. I told the first layer of the story I've been hearing and telling to those that want to hear for nigh on 20 years. The backstory, really--of how my ex came to be evil. The story that birthed my ex on the path to narcissism. How the darkness of death and grief at the ripe old age of two started the cascade and transformation to being a pathological lying sort of person that feels no empathy, in spite of anything.   

As I told it, it struck me in quite a different way, a rather new way, more than it has in the past. My experience of different people listening to the story shaped my sense of the story, itself. Telling it was such a different experience. It was an entirely different story. For the first time, I felt a large distance from the story. And this--this little bit of distance was good.

For the first time, I didn't feel entirely entangled up in the web of compassion and empathy for my ex narcissist. While I was in touch with the traumatic circumstances of his childhood, I could see the steps he has deliberately taken; whereby he decided to sever himself from compassion, cause it might get in the way of getting your way if you're a narcissist.

And I saw anew the power of the story. The power of telling it over and over again. The power of retelling it in a different way, to a different crowd. I saw anew the story itself transformed by the telling of it. And somehow the sense that, just like Tim O'Brien, I've never really told the story in such a way that the emotion gets understood by the listener. And that is the story that most needs to be told.

This is Complicated Grieving

Complication number one. He's not dead. There is no body in the ground with a stone above it. No way for outsiders to recognize that he is as good as dead. The soul went and flew itself away up to heaven or hell or where-ever souls abandon themselves to when those who own them do not take them seriously.

Complication number two. He's not even aware he is dead. Due to complication number one, perhaps because he's not physically dead. But he is very much dead on most every other level. Kind of like the walking dead. Kind of like a Bruce Willis character in the Sixth Sense. Going through the motions of living, but not really there. Hanging around. Haunting the living. Pretending.

Complication number three. His tentacles entangle little people you love--people who aren't dead. Little people who are very much trying to learn how best to live life deeply and passionately from someone who is mostly dead. And right now they have only this example of a dead man walking, ever pretending to be one of the living. And due to complication number two, the lack of awareness factor, they have to live a life amongst the dead.

So there you have it. The complicated parts. Kind of like an open wound of an unsolved murder case where they never found a body. You know you ought get on with your life except that you lack the closure you think you'd gain with the finding of a body. The closure you think you'd gain is just beyond the reach of the grave you don't have. Oh, and there's that ex zombie walking around causing trauma. And maybe this is why you sometimes wish for the closure his death would bring. This is complicated grieving.