Three Babies

Sometimes I ask myself precisely how many times I can let go of the same thing over and over? Precisely, how many times can I pare down to less? I keep thinking I've given up almost everything. Indeed, letting go feels likes my perpetual lesson.

I let go of house and home.
I let go of those things I thought, necessary.
I let go of the parts of myself that I thought were core bits, but ultimately, not true.
I let go of material things.
I let go of friends and companions.
I let go of family.

And there is always more I realize I'm attached to.

There is always more to let go of.

And then there are some things you really shouldn't let go of, I tell myself. 

And so I don't. I won't.

Like my three babies.

Each of these my three babies I will carry with me.
For myself I ask no one else to be mother to these three.
And of course I'm like a wild horse
But there's no other way to be.
Water and feed are not things that I need
For the thing that I've chosen to be.
In my soul
My blood and bones
I have wrapped your cold bodies around me.
The face on you
The smell on you
will always be with me.

And this is the manipulating point my Narc knows.

He knows my love for them means I will not ever abandon them to him.

Each of these my three babies.

I let go of all else, but.

Pilgrimages

(To get us through on this journey a poem by R.S. Thomas)

There is an island there is no going

to but in a small boat, the way

the saints went, traveling the gallery

of the frightened faces of

the long-drowned, munching gravel

of its beaches. So I have gone

up the salt lane to the building

with the stone altar, and the candles

gone out, and kneeled and lifted

my eyes to the furious gargoyle

of the owl that is like a god

gone small and resentful. There

is no body in the stained window

of the sky now. Am I too late?

Were they too late also, those

first pilgrims? He is such a fast

God, always before us, and

leaving as we arrive.

There are those here

not given to prayer, whose office

is the blank sea that they say daily.

What they listen to is not

hymns, but the slow chemistry of the soil,

that turns saints’ bones into dust,

due to an irritant of the nostril.

There is no time on this island.

The swinging pendulum of the tide

has no clock; the events

are dateless. The people are not

late or soon; they are just

here, with only the one question

to ask, which life answers

by being in them. It is I

who ask. Was the pilgrimage

I made to come to my own

self, to learn that, in times

like these, and for one like me,

God will never be plain and

out there, but dark rather, and

inexplicable, as though he were in here?

-R.S. Thomas

chosen

Over and over on this journey out of the fog, I've had the sense that I did not choose this path. It's as if I woke up one day and finally saw the reality of my life. My relationship with the narcissist, finally struck me as the non-relationship that it was. I saw that I was staring at the projected shadows on the back wall of Plato's Cave. (If you knew me, you'd know exactly how ironic that analogy is.) I woke up in the middle of a nightmare only to find that what I thought was a mere dream that I needed to awaken from yet again--a dream within a dream as it were--was the real nightmare of this world of being connected to a narcissist. On and on it has persisted as the reality I am in that I cannot wake up from further. The exhaustion point in fighting it has set in and still it goes on. And thus the feeling percolates that I didn't really choose this path. I keep trying to wake up out of said nightmare. But I am awake. I never chose to be one of those people who always chooses to awaken and face the fucked up reality over persisting in living in some false dreamworld created by some narcissistic delusion. But I am one of those people. I will always choose awakening. In spite of all the work and grief and hell and turmoil to endure. No, I'm one who always chooses the red pill over the blue pill. And perhaps that is why, I've never entirely felt like I chose this path. Rather, for some reason this path chose me.

And it keeps choosing me.

Odd as it sounds, that thought gives me comfort. In some sort of fucked up-ed-ness, I cling to that.

Snake Eyes

If only I could erase the tree of knowledge that came from that look. The look that I perpetually go back to. The look that instagrammed the relationship into one cohesive picture for all parts of me to observe.

That split second that almost seemed to bleed all moments of the past 20 years into one.

Somehow in that look my destiny juxtaposed the Red-Seas-of-my-Egyptian-escapism versus the-slavery-isn't-so-bad bit next to one another. And in that moment, my escape route was hatched. Right down the middle of the walled off sea. The look that was able to break through into my own deluded mind, causing some sort of contrecoup injury to my jostled brain.

I might be choosing a drowning death of the Sea by leaving.

But those frozen far off eyes told me of another death. It wasn't the one I had always thought. It wasn't the pat answer I thought. I realized there must have been a soul murdering way back in the past. For those eyes stared out of a body that had no soul.  

That frozen framed moment crystallized "the why" so that I could mount the courage to enter the threatening Sea that might drown me. The why for how to choose your own death.

That look revealed my real choice was caught in the space between the slow agonizing death of my soul or the accidental death in my escape in crossing the Sea.

The relationship was already dead. There was no resurrection of it. I was holding up a giant empty shell and though already dead, my holding it threatened to kill me--my soul. I had to stab the shell, in order to live or die more authentically.

I looked into the eyes of my own death dream and I vowed that dying in the act of soul preservation was indeed the sort of death worth living your whole life for. And so I stabbed the giant snake.

Church of Stone

What is it about a place that can affect us so?

This year's Christmas, I was dreading being away from my kids as the ex has them this year. So I decided to go back to church. Truth is I haven't been in a while and I knew it would take a fair amount of effort getting there.

In spite of my last minute scrambling, the details somehow managed to work themselves out almost perfectly. I have no doubt that my visiting this sacred church was meant to be.

I set out alone, late morning, down a typically well traveled path, but this time, my fellow walkers were quite sparse. At times I went for several miles without seeing a single other human. I watched a massive storm close in on me, then stalk me on the path for a bit which made me feel like some sort of character out of Pilgrim's Progress.

But, I felt unshaken. I felt 7000 feet deep in me, that I was supposed to be here in this church of Stone baptized by the hushed drizzle. Somehow, this time the stillness had my back in this ritual of awe.

At one point, while crossing a spiny section, forty to fifty mile per hour winds gusted me. My mind's thoughts joined forces with the wind to try to deter me from continuing. However, my thoughts were distracted by my eyes noticing the largest Raven I've ever encountered on the path a few feet in front of me. Intensely staring at me, he spanned his massive wings then almost smirking, playfully jumped into the wind's updraft.

He let some of his calm hang in the air and it quieted my mind and strengthened my heart.

The silence seeped into my soul with the rain as I walked, the cherished gift the Canyon imparts to all who set foot inside her hallowed walls. The untethering of contexts from everything and everyone but my own soul, lent the gift of perspective taking.

The immensity of the soulful emptiness of the Canyon filled me til it seemed the only thing. But, how can such a place most characterized by Her empty space so fill you? I suppose that is the question of the Sacred feminine, after all. I suppose that is also the non-piece to most get in touch with in the recovery from the narcissist--he who often denigrates the emptiness--what to do with the hole of seemingly endless emptiness dug after the taking away of goodness and hope and joy by the narcissist--by the very One thinking you rid emptiness by taking all the material goods you can possibly acquire from others and fill in that crack in the dirt, cause maybe then you won't feel that emptiness?

And this is the catechism of this church of Stone--the experience--the attention to this emptiness, the going there to the absent space, the breathing in the vacuum of apparent nothingness is, in fact, how you fetch soul to the emptiness. Emptiness beckons soul flow, like this Canyon calls water to herself and then the sea.

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...

Somehow I Hope

There is a feeling somewhere between full on hatred and adoration. I'm trying to unpack this feeling and what it feels like. I'm trying to conjure it, I suppose. Because somehow, I can't necessarily feel the hatred that I ought to feel toward my narcissist.

Nobody gets this, really.

A good friend recently told me I ought stop seeing the world in "Narcissists out to get me..."

I had some explaining to do. So explain I did.

I told him how the thing that kept me trapped was not the fact that I see the world as a bunch of narcissists, but rather, my own wanting to see the best in people, in everyone, in my own narcissist for years. This was the piece that held me hostage for 17 years. And only now am I more free because I see his narcissism and that consequently, I can't heal him.

But, even still I'm not to the hatred point. There are times it seems close. There are times I wish for the relief of his non-existence which feels something akin to hatred.

And all the same, he has indeed, suffered so much. There is great pain. Regardless of his ridiculous choices to not deal emotionally with that pain, I cannot add to it, today. There is still a far off part of me that loves the idea of him becoming a different--healthy person one day. Perhaps, the new She will somehow conjure it out of him.

And even still there is this ultimate pain, buried deep that for me is that I would have given anything, maybe everything for him to just step onto the healing path that he never would step onto. And so, I watch my kids pained by a breakup, a divorce. I watch myself, and I watch a woman step into his life who seems kind, sweet, lovely, and good. And though my family gets angry at her, feels all the indignation in the world, I feel hope and gratitude at her being with and near him.

I suppose most ex wives are jealous, indignant, often aiming to thwart things for their husbands that are no more. Somehow, I feel nothing of that. All I feel is hope that somehow she makes him the man he could be. Somehow I hope, even still. Because being him and being her with him is enough burden on its own. There is no reason I need to somehow add to that. And nobody will get that unless they've lived intimately with a narcissist.

Mr. Narcident

Predictably, a full fledged Narc being elected as president of the United States triggered trauma for me. Wednesday whirled. Looking out the window of the plane, I could not stop the tears. They seemed to just want to bleed out of my eyes, endlessly.

It wasn't about the losing. I didn't feel that strongly about the candidate I voted for. Except that she represented me. And for the first time I had the privilege of voting for a member of my own sex. I've never had that opportunity before.

Instead, it was about the denigrating things he has said--over and over--it was about those such as myself that are considered less than--it was about not wanting to be considered just a pussy that a man can grab or fuck in the alley if he has a lot of power or chooses to because he often can and damn it she wore "that slinky red dress" which somehow entitles him to rape her with a gun.

It was about being a woman who stands up to the male establishment and isn't afraid to enter the male dominated pant suit world, but then is mocked for doing just that. It was about being an intelligent woman, exceptionally qualified with massive experience going up against a man who has never held any public office, who has no experience to have the most powerful job in the world and being harshly chastised for sending emails in the wrong way. It was about the standards being drastically different for women than men. It was about having to out-think, out-play the narc just to escape the difficult marriage that occurred when too young where he had all the power of entrapment.

Melania voted. Trump looked over her shoulder. That familiar look of being controlled traumatized me because I recognized how it is no better to be "kept" by a rich, powerful narcissist. She may never get out. How do you divorce the president of the United States of America? Sounds more difficult than divorcing the average college professor narcissist who just wants to disrespect you by sleeping with his students.

It was about the children waking up afraid of deportation because they are darker skinned and speak Spanish. It was about the LGTBQ community being afraid. It was about Muslim families wondering where they should go now because they are all considered evil by the white house.

It was about the future feeling even more unstable. It was about the men that I've dated who "voted" for him all the while proclaiming how much they "loved" the idea of voting for a woman but just "not her." And yet all the while, the majority of the women I know somehow saw something different. Perhaps, they, like me, saw that the standards were and always have been different for her and most men in their sexism have never being able to see their own silver spoons. And this made me sad.

It was about remembering how many times, I've denigrated myself so that some man's fragile ego can withstand the fact that I am a strong woman. Educated. Intelligent. Doctored. Empathic. Compassionate. Aiming to make it in the world.

It was about wondering if she would have run for the most powerful office in the world by staying in her place in the "right" man's world-way, if she would have gotten in? Would it have made a difference? Would she have burst through the glass ceiling for us all? Or would it have ended in the same pussy-grabbing locker room scenario?

Ode to the Ivories

Everything was so black and white about you.
telling
the story of clarity and morality in the world
never any grey realms
to sort out like spouses gone rogue.

People either struck the proper notes and
dissonance
didn't exist
or you were Stravinsky and you had some sort of free pass on
ushering in a new Rite, of sorts.

You held a space
like some sort of sophisticated therapist
parked
waiting with a tissue for the running emotions
to flood the chaise lounge.

And now you are gone somewhere else
banished
from my little world to some never-never land
where I can never see or touch you again.
But that isn't the worst part.
You were never about all the things he was about.
And now
it is as if someone
who once understood me is gone.

In your out of tune way,
You were always about
hitting
the center of the true note like one can with a Bach-Strad and singing "on key"
in a strangely Gramps sort of way,
meaning
charmingly lovable, yet off key.

Damn, I miss you.

On Matter and Reentry

If only I could consult NASA as to how to accurately navigate reentry into the narcissist's orbit. Perhaps, the astronauts would have tips for how to calculate the necessary angle so as not to burn through the heat shield or crash into a mountainside in the middle of the Swiss Alps.

The dread usually begins a couple of days out when my intestines begin churning like a den of snakes reminding me that I must return to his orbit, his planet. Every time I think it has to get easier. And somehow the crash landing feels just as hard, maybe even worse then the last one.

I hyper focus on the only reason I come back to this alien planet--my little people who matter. And all the same there is always some sort of narc designed silliness to divert the space capsule to a more problematic trajectory, amping up the heat intensity and potentially blowing me to smithereens. Sometimes the narcissistic weapon is cloaked in a Trojan Horse designed to bypass my fortress walls. One particular reentry I walked into my apartment filled with 20 boxes full of shit from the garage of my old house, flagged for Goodwill 4 years ago. But my ex narc in all his fake concern was "worried" supposedly on my behalf, that I might need some shit from the garage for my microscopic apartment that I didn't even know I had. He also wanted to make sure that I knew he had access to my apartment while I was away. Another time I returned to an old vehicle without the license plates, registration, or insurance to be dealt with. This the same vehicle that I had requested to drive to my other locale, but he couldn't stop roadblocking. Oh, I loaned it to the so in so family. Yet another, my ex agreed to pick us up from the airport. When he showed up, there wasn't enough space in the vehicle since a "friend" had come along. He only had room for my children who were being transferred to him.  "Oh, I'm so sorry, I forgot to tell you, I don't have enough room for you in the car..."

Ode to the Reentry into the Narcissistic Orbit. How much time does one have to spend dreaming up schemes of sabotage? How much life can one waste thinking of ways to twist the knife? Just pretend that this ball of matter, doesn't matter to you, Mr. Narcissist, please. 

I once had a therapist type tell me that I don't matter. Probably not the greatest idea for a therapist to say such a thing to a client. I suspect there might be better things to be said. But, clinical decision making aside, the fucked up irony of the matter is that now that things are over, the divorce official, the narc moved on--on the surface, I can only dream of narc's actions demonstrating this very thing--that I don't matter. I would like nothing more! He has new supply, a plenty. And yet, it's still important for him to go out of his way, cause himself more work, more trouble, in order to cause harm to me. I'd love nothing more than to be ignored, abandoned, as if I don't matter, cause there are some things that are much worse than not mattering.

D.I.C.

Sometimes leaving the narcissist feels like what I think DIC must feel like. To be sure, I've never had DIC and thus can't speak honestly as to how DIC must feel. But there are certain similarities as far as I can tell. Basically, DIC is a bad ass end stage thing you might come down with after you're already suffering with end stage cancer, or bacterial meningitis, and you've gone septic. Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation perchance you were thinking of other forms of the word DIC. Where even the heroes throw in the towel, shake their heads, and do that thing they never ever do, which is to hope. Cause they have all their Savior Hero shit they can usually call upon, except this time they can't. Cause you don't with DIC. Everyone knows you put your money on the Hail Mary end zone pass and the Prayer, which for the most part doesn't pay off. It's mostly, very, very bad. Like Dragons. Like large Monsters. Or like Harry and his horrible day. Or precisely like Clots. Everywhere your blood moves. We call them strokes or CerebroVascular Accidents if they throw in the brain--Heart Attacks or Myocardial Infarctions (MI) if they throw in the heart--Pulmonary Embolisms or PEs if they throw in the lungs--and DIC if they throw seemingly everywhere at the same time. And at the same time paradoxically, you might also be hemorrhaging. Clots everywhere are almost always bad. Clots and hemorrhage tis a bit of a ghoulish nightmare.

Oh, and then there's Gangrene. It often comes too before or after like the frightening bit in the haunted house It turns those extremities purplishly black. You start looking like the monster yourself. Typically, it's been preceded by something oh-so-benign like Bacterial Meningitis or Hemorrhage or some other unnamed Awfulness with a capital "A." Your organs start to oh-so-beautifully dissolve themselves in the cesspool of typical bacterial overload. Your finger tips blacken as the gangrene chews you up and creeps toward your heart. Above all, you see very clearly that you are in the process of dying. And most people don't see their own death. But with DIC, it doesn't catch you by surprise. No, rather you see your own death creeping up your limb. I'm sure this startles you. You see it like the train on the bridge. And mostly there is no outrunning it. There is no jumping from the train trestle. You are just there powerlessly watching it all happen.

And this is what it feels like to try to escape the narcissist.

Bathing in overwhelmingly endless toxic stew. Beyond the reach of help. Alone in your hospital bed, resembling the monster yourself, waiting for death's company. That's leaving the narcissist, on a bad day.

Fare Thee Well, Ivory Girl

Technically, the ole girl has no monetary value whatsoever. Indeed, probabilities are high that she's the kind you'd stumble across discarded behind some smelly, old tires in the corner of a thrift store, her only companions "Chopsticks," clunking children, taunting their chasing parents with temporary locator spell melodies.

No one, is likely to pay money to take her home for the night.

But She was there, like the Giving Tree, waiting for me day after day to take a seat. She was there in so many of the moments of overload where the lump caught in the throat. She was there when the fingers longing to send the melancholy into her bowels, refused catharsis because the soul yolk was just too deep to spill all over her keys. She held the silence like stone for months between the notes in spite of this being the antithesis of the purpose of her being. She was there, waiting. She had my back, as friend of my soul.

But He was there too. He saw the creative connection we had and didn't understand it or like it. Maybe, he was jealous of her. Maybe somewhere in his traumatic past, the Dementors had sucked his soul away, because he didn't really understand soul anymore, perchance he ever did.

Her fate was sealed by my deep love and soul connection to Her. If only I'd known to hide my love for Her a little bit better. A Michigander we'd rescued, She'd ridden the bumpy road to us on the back of a pickup truck when homelessness had threatened as some church decluttered. But the truth of the matter is that She was the one who rescued me.

She held me close many the dark night of the soul when the light in my thread bare heart nearly disappeared behind the veil. She offered shelter from the emotional abuse and gaslighting swirling in the living room air like desert dirt devils. She soaked up my tears like a sponge when there was no shoulder to cry upon, as I held my breath hoping the thin walls did not betray me, telling Him of my fear in the dark.

During the divorce proceedings, He held her as ransom. She unwillingly became his pawn. He could never understand her creative capacity for space holding. He could never understand Her soul holding. He could never really see Her true value, She was just a decorative piece of furniture to Him that mattered to me.

She was no Bosendorfer, no Steinway & Son, no Fazioli, but she mattered all the same.

He needed Her only for the sake of my isolation. He needed to have Her only to destroy me. He needed to separate us like a teacher keeps the young school girls apart to keep them from giggling in the corner of class too much. He needed Her to crush the good and kill anything soulful, anything foreign to him--that which He will never understand. He will never get the realm of soul. You can't if you have none.

But, he didn't count on this: you can't kill something that has sporified into something more. If He'd even understood the ethereal realm one bit, he'd know from the Velveteen Rabbit that you can't destroy something that has transformed itself by the act of love and sacrificial space holding.  

.....................................................................................

And so I let go of you, dear friend of my soul, ethereal Ivory Girl. I bid thee farewell. May you find your way to another in need of your musical healing. May you continue on in your work. And though mere spinet melody holder to some--to Him, somehow, you were and always will be so much more to me. Somehow, like the Velveteen Rabbit, you crossed thresholds. You became something more real. You came to inhabit the immaterial, invisible land of soul. And I suppose once you inhabit this land, no one, not even a narcissist who knows nothing of real, nothing of soul, nothing of the beautiful, creative invisible realm, can ever rob you of this bit. Farewell my beautiful dancing Ivory Girl.