Who am I Ramblings?

With family in town this week, I'm stuck in a remembering mode of sorts. Returning to the past as mind adventure--but only in a good sort of way. I must admit that there have been years--not yet distant enough--when the returning has been the most painful, most hellish experience I've ever had. And I must remind you, in case you forgot, that I've given birth naturally before...Birthed a 10.8 lb baby sans any drugs or anesthetic, whatsoever. And the remembering and grief was indeed three thousand times worse.

But.

Somewhere, along the hellish way my real self snuck up on me. 

Six years ago I opened up a browser to find the truth in a delusion I was living. My Other turned out to not be who I thought he was. But that story has been written again and again in countless novels and poems. The real story and real delusion was that I turned out to not be who I thought I was. Narcissist be damned. The story has shaped up to not really be about him, at all--at least that is how I'm writing it. 

And just who am I?

Not entirely sure. But. These bits I know...

Resilient. Authentic. Real, in a Velveteen Rabbit sort of way. Weathered by life's experiences, yet strangely young in spite of or maybe because of these experiences.

Honest, to a fault, perhaps.

Highly intuitive. Learning not to buy into the world's and my ex Narc's rendition that this means something is wrong with me.

And then there's the compassion piece that I'm not sure about. Is it who I am? Not sure. It's not that I lack compassion. Far from it, I seem to have an excess of it. But it doesn't feel mine. Reason being, I don't have any control over it. Rather, it is just there hovering around me like a cloud, cloaking me in softness.

"My compassion" appears as if from somewhere else--much more than it should be allowed based on the horrific narc shit I've lived through. The compassion is the part I don't really understand. You'd think it would have been banished somewhere along the way. The narcissist certainly tried to drive it underground by pillaging it. Multiple therapists told me to abandon it as it often makes me vulnerable. Which is why its persistence puzzles me. And why I don't think its really mine, at all. It hovers around me like a cloak from somewhere else. When I'm exhausted and empty and completely lacking in every way it appears more prominently from wherever for someone else who needs it, like magic. Usually feels like some sort of river of energy flowing through me. Something I can neither stop nor start--something I just watch flow at the exact point where somebody needs massive amounts of it.

And so that settles nothing, really.

And just who am I? Not sure--but learning. And becoming more kind to myself.

I guess I'm still becoming as I watch my real self sneak back up on me.

the Authentic Grief

Apparently, he is getting married again. And as much as I knew this day would eventually present itself, I really didn't expect this particular stew pot of emotions. Grief. Sadness. Disappointment. Jealousy. 

My old friend grief has parked on the davenport again. The flavor tastes different this time around. Waves merging into one another, I float on a raft in the middle of the water. Last time, the open ocean washed over my raft-less form, pushing water into my lungs. Last time, I was certain I would drown. Last time, I cried myself to sleep for a solid year. This time the water from the ocean is spraying me, but I am floating more than not.

This time it's strangely different.

I can't exactly put my finger on it but this time it is as if I'm grieving on humanity's behalf. Not really my own grief.

I'm sad at the loss--but it isn't a loss of the past, rather a loss of the future. I'm sad about what never was. I'm sad about what might have been. I'm sad with a strange acceptance and without hope.

It likely sounds dark. But his story is so sad. He was dealt a bad hand--a tragic hand in life. I see that. I feel empathy on that front. Not so much empathy that I would ever have contact with him again, but still empathy is there at the tragedy. And all the same he had so much potential. Gifts. Strong intellect. Wit. Brilliant mind. Artistic capabilities. Creative leanings.

And as in the Parable of the Talents told by Jesus, the potential authenticity was buried, submerged under the water of unexpressed grief that he never got near enough to work with.

Last night, I cried for the tragedy of it all. I cried for the sad story that doesn't have a happy ending. I cried for the lost authentic self that he might have been if he ever would have approached his highest calling in life to just become. I grieved that person he might have been. I grieved his incredible lost potential. I grieved what I now think might be the real tragedy of it all. And that is the fact that no one--nobody--not me--nor anyone else will ever know the real authentic him. In 20 difficult years, I might be the person who got the closest to knowing something we might call the real authentic him.Which was nothing of the real him, I might add--only shallow and empty longing for the real, lacking anything even remotely resembling emotional intimacy.

And in 20 more years, she--the new fiancee--is not likely to get past the narcissistic walls keeping him from what used to be the authentic self's potential.

That core self certainly had potential years ago. But after being buried for so long the core self eventually atrophies and dies, or so suggests my epic dream.

I've come to see that my gift in life and at times, curse, is in seeing potential.

And so today I sit with my old friend, grief, speaking of what no one else will.

In my grief, I vow to learn from this his fatal flaw of not stepping into his own authentic self. I vow to keep becoming more me even if that means I end up walking this path of life, alone.   

Nobody Gives

There is no word, no emotion, to describe the feeling you get when it all ends up somewhere you didn't actually choose and you wake up in the green space wandering at night. Suddenly, awake in that field. No idea of how you got there.

And this is the case in your case load that speaks to you. The person whom is most dissociated. It all feels so familiar.

And nobody gives a shit. 

Grief Again

I wonder how it can be that life can take such dramatic turns, with such massive overhauling change--divorce, death, moves, endings, and even beginnings so jarring that you feel displaced from your own self and life. Nothing is the same. It is as if you aren't you anymore. There is a strangeness, an unfamiliar that can make you want to latch on to the old, no matter how terrible it once was--to run back to something--to anything you once knew.

But that isn't the plan, if you want to heal. 

One of the more jarring pieces when you enter into this land of disturbed time where you sit with loss and change in this act of grieving, is that you feel separated, isolated from other people not currently in the midst of disturbed time. You see the fragile world. You see life's precariousness. You see through a different lens. It isn't even the same world you see. It is as if you have been sucked into the Upside Down with Will.     

And the rest of the world spins madly on.

Far off. The loss not only of what you grieve--but also the loss of connection to those still in the non Upside Down. The ones who don't know or haven't been here to this displaced world can't understand it. 

And so the world spins madly on.

Unicorn Guy

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever be the same.

Ok, no. I know I'll never be the same.

I guess I wonder if there will ever be another significant other relationship.

Hate to admit it, but I've mostly given up on that front.

And this--this is incredibly depressing.

After something like 101 first dates--coffee or a drink after meeting on a dating site, I realize I'm not willing to put up with a lack of emotional intelligence or somebody treating me like shit.

I dare to dream of intellectual, stimulating conversations about ideas.

I dare to dream of emotional intelligence where rather than running from tears or grief somebody asks why or tell me more about what you are feeling?

I dare to dream of sex with an emotional, spiritual, and psychological connection beyond the physical.

I dare to dream of  someone wanting to know me, even the highly sensitive parts of me that are not wrong or pathological, but just different.

I am so tired of men thinking and acting like my emotions are something to fix and suppress--as if clearly if I had my intellect ruling as it ought, I'd be better, different.

I am so tired of guys staring at my body at the gym, clearly interested, but not seeing me as a whole person. What about knowing me beyond the physical? What of assuming or at least having slight interest in if I have an intellect and that I read and write and play the piano and pool and think and have emotions? What about wanting to know the real sensitive me? The me the ex narc never ever really knew? What about somebody finally seeing the invisible me and seeing value in me? What of someone wanting to desperately know the parts of me that desperately want to be known. My ex missed out on so much. This I am finally getting.

But the highly sensitive males in my age bracket out there are afraid to show or be their highly sensitive selves and thus for all practical purposes, I can't find them. They don't exist, for all practical purposes.

That masculine guy who lifts and boxes and cares about health and yet isn't afraid to cry, and read, and write, and ask extensively about emotions or talk about my narc past--that guy is clearly still a unicorn. Trying not to lose hope.

So Says the Voice in Your Head

The ex used to talk disparagingly about what I do--the practice of medicine I do in a different sort of way. It's never actually worked, in his mind. At least, not in my shitty prescriber hands....He likes to wonder aloud if it works to my kids, enjoys telling folks that he just hasn't seen results, in spite of the instances to the contrary that he seems to conveniently forget.

This week I arrived on the East coast for a family visit. Unfortunately, the night before one of my DNA donors had collapsed and been hospitalized. Febrile, convulsing, and delirious with labs and imaging revealing nothing out of the ordinary, my other DNA donor was in a state of overwhelm and constant panic....

I thought he was dead when I found him on the floor....

Nonetheless, he'd come to a bit for the paramedics....  Tylenol was given. IVs, Pharmaceuticals followed. Plain Film. CT. EKG. MRI. Many labs. DNA donor seemed to grow worse in the hospital. The Tylenol, et al would not suppress the fever nor the violent convulsions and chills nor the delirious hallucinations. By the time I saw him, he was acting strangely, loopy, not himself, expecting a miracle from the Miracle Max who worked for the king for all those years.... But he didn't want to help me help him. He was too loopy for that. No pressure there.

Did I mention, I'm no Miracle Max?

Did I mention, that I'm actually trying to take a much needed break from my work? 

But that is always seemingly the timing for when somebody nearly dies or needs an acute prescription of the little nothingness that I do. And ultimately, these things matter not. When your own family member is in danger of dying, and you're a doctor you do whatever the hell you can in spite of the voice of your ex ringing in your head telling you just how fucked up at prescribing you are. You try to shut down the echo of how he thought you'd fail out of med school. How you suck at being an entrepreneur. How you will never amount to anything....You try not to focus on all that and the fact that the practice of this holistic medicine is pretty damn difficult....

Focus on what is Strange. Rare. Peculiar. Those chills and tetanus-like-convulsions and violent trembling as part of the lead up to the fever are strange as far as fevers go.

And so you do.

And that is when everything absolutely and dramatically shifts for him or so he tells you the next day in his old self. He's normal. Non febrile. He tears up and seems to think you saved his life. They are going to discharge him, he tells you.

But you--you still aren't sure. Perhaps it was something else. Or so says the voice in your head, at least. 
 

Emotional Literacy Kindergarten, Maybe

I've thought myself to be in the emotionally literate class most of my life. Indeed, I am in that class of people who seem to not merely feel things deeply, but am highly sensitive to the feeling class of things. Indeed, I've prided myself in being "in touch" with my feelings. Been there, done that. If you must know, on the MBTI I'm strongly into the F region. As in a Feeler. And so maybe you can possibly imagine my surprise in sitting down to write a letter to someone I felt wronged by several years ago. Such things I have needed to heal but seemingly, can't.

The shit runs deep. A friend of mine whom happens to be a therapist suggested that a particular piece in my past was holding me back. This was a situation, where things blew up in my face when I was in the throes of all the shit with my ex. She recommended that I do something to "let go" of said situation.

And so, naive me sat down to compose a letter that I never intended to mail to said person who in my mind, dramatically offended me. And sure there were things that were done unwell. Things that were painful. Things that could have been done in a kinder way, you know. Of course. But as I worked through what happened, I was shocked to discover how much crap I created, myself. Crap that was all mine to own. Just goes to show you that when you are warring with yourself, you often invent an enemy outside yourself in order to engage in battle. You pick up on minor things, shit in the air around you, and then you transform it into an epic Odyssey.

I have done this.

And what shocked me was how much of the shit in the air as regards the past, was actually mine to own. How long have I worked with this shit, exactly? A long time....

And there it was hanging in there as blame for someone who basically helped me on my journey more than almost anyone else. But He all epic-esque failed me. I didn't fail me. He failed me. That is how I have written it. Asshole. Narc?

Perhaps this is the power of writing.

Perspective.

I seriously looked back at the circumstances, of what happened. And I fucked up. Mostly, by not owning my emotions. Me not allowing myself to feel the truth of what I was really feeling. How ironic. Me, the epic feeler. Me, who has always been told, I feel too much.

How ironic.

They morphed--my emotions--into states I could not recognize. And up was down, right was left, and something akin to admiration and love was anger and shame.

I realize now, I must be in kindergarten, emotionally speaking. Will keep you updated, when I make it to first grade.

On Integrating Feeling and Thought When Someone Does you Wrong

It seems to me that the balance point on this healing path is in the holding of what happened, what the abuser did, how you've been wronged, grieving, feeling, weeping on the sofa with tissues and yet not staying there in the land of Narc Victim-hood--not allowing your new sepulcher to seal you in as victim, forever.

This lesson seems to return again and again on my journey. Allow but don't over-indulge. Give space to feelings but don't allow feelings to banish thought. As I've crawled out of the web, through the fog, I've had some difficult situations, where the dark emotions and the feeling wronged bit seemed so intense as if in boa-constrictor mode, I wondered if they'd ever let up. The temptation has been to perpetually indulge in my own victim-hood. To be swept away into the current of self pity, woe-is-me and all sorts of rivers that lead me to plant myself and grow roots in Victim Land. And as important as it is for healing to visit Victim land, one has to be careful not to buy a house there.

And so, the work of integration means marrying the poles in myself. Truly feeling. Truly experiencing and acknowledging what I've been through. And yet also allowing myself to emerge from the cocoon as butterfly when the time is right. In looking back on the past 5 years, my perpetual work seems to be finding the voices whom can lend new perspectives on my landscapes of experience. Reframing destructive situations not to let someone off the hook or minimize their destructive actions, but rather for my own healing, so that I can move beyond the land of victim hood and back toward my own becoming and purpose, so that I can do at last what I came here for. It's been especially difficult to reframe said situations when I have felt wronged by others. The following words are helping me to continue to let go and get traction in this dark healing work.

For Someone Who Did You Wrong

Though its way is to strike
in a dumb rhythm,
stroke upon stroke,
as though the heart
were an anvil,
the hurt you sent
had a mind of its own.

Something in you knew
exactly how to shape it,
to hit the target,
slipping into the heart
through some wound-window
left open since childhood.

While it struck outside,
it burrowed inside,
made tunnels through
every ground of confidence.
For days, it would lie still
until a thought would start it.

Meanwhile, you forgot,
went on with things
and never even knew
how that perfect
shape of hurt
still continued to work.

Now a new kindness
seems to have entered time
and I can see how that hurt
has schooled my heart
in a compassion I would
otherwise have never learned.

Somehow now
I have begun to glimpse
the unexpected fruit
your dark gift had planted
and I thank you
for your unknown work.

-John O'Donohue   

the endless "Giver"

The narcissist is the gift that keeps on "giving."

If the narc is bad enough, that is. My ex, apparently is, bad enough. He learned from at least two lovely generations of Narcs--his grandfather and father--one dead, one in prison.

I wonder at the hours, the days he must spend dreaming up new schemes, new ways of trying to be important, new ways of having to email or message me--all for negative attention. All to stir the pot, rattle, thwart, some sort of attempt to make me sorry for leaving? Doesn't it get old eventually? Isn't he tired, bored with me? I'm just one person in the world trying to move on. We're done. We've been done officially for two years now. I've been done since I woke up on swallowing a Red Pill in 2013. Five, fucking years ago I said, I want out. I want a divorce. 

I'm out. Divorced. Moved states.

He has new supply, a plenty. New live in GF. He has his students to honor him with chili peppers and inflated reviews on rate your professor dot com. But alas "supply" is never enough. He is an addict. He has an irresistible longing for more and more supply. And I am the negative supply. I am she whom must be destroyed because I dared abandon him just like his mother. I dared point out the Emperor's lack of clothes. And this was my mortal sin.

Truth be told, it's not me that he really battles. He wants all to recognize he wears only the finest garments. I only symbolize the nakedness. I'm not actually the nakedness. But, if you can't even see the nakedness of yourself you will endlessly stab in order to identify the invisible nakedness in things you can't see. And so, he blindly wrestles against a deep seated idea, a philosophy, an emptiness deeper and greater than the Grand Canyon itself that can never be filled by anyone else but himself. And I represent that emptiness, that nakedness that he could never confront in himself. He projects all the nakedness in his world onto me so that he can continue to pretend that he wears only the finest clothes.

And this is why he must still waste his time dreaming up ways to give away shitty clothing and the only thing he is capable of giving to me, destruction. All this because he isn't wearing any of his own shit. 

Don't Mess with Me When We are on the Cusp Betwixt Pisces and Aries...

And back and forth I go....

Had to converse with the ex today.

Oh-so-surprisingly, he pulled out all the stops. I mean, not surprising, at all....Bullying. Insults. Misrepresentations of the truth. Exaggerations. Denial of reality.

He was ANGRY that I said "No." No, I won't bend to your will for the umpteenth time. He couldn't be reasonable, a human being. He couldn't see anything other than his own delusion of the truth. And his own story.

None of the above was surprising.

What was surprising was me. I said, No. Boldly. Surely. Strongly.

Even in the space of the threats of his getting the law to assault me, I felt calm. I felt like I was addressing a two-year-old with a plastic sword. I'm sorry. But, No, I won't, Junior. 

Perhaps, I didn't say No enough all along when we were together. He is most certainly not accustomed to it. He most generally flips his shit and becomes some sort of two-year-old child when you say, No.

But somewhat miraculously, this didn't phase me much. Distance is charming that way. You get perspective when you finally get away!

And so today, I relish being out of his orbit. I relish saying, No. I relish not explaining myself because I don't have to. He doesn't have the right to demand explanation of me. I am an autonomous human being. And the longer I am out of his orbit far away from him, the stronger I grow!

And so today, I relish this little bit of freedom. Resilience. Empowerment.

And while it is still possible I may have felt a little sorry for him, I choose this lovely space of away, out of orbit, free. I might have felt sorry for the fact that this is where he shall remain the rest of his sad life. Stuck. Walled off from growth. His own narcissistic gravity keeping him from leaving his own delusional shit. He doesn't get to transform and become! He doesn't get to fly away with another to some nostalgic, dreamy, tower to have Orange Pekoe tea while floating. He has to tolerate his same old fragile, manipulative self. And that is burden enough.

So for now, I relish the fact that it is my time of year. My Spring. My season. The Equinox. My birthday month. The time when I feel most right. The time when the planets align for me. The time not to mess with me.... cause dammit, I'm healing!!!

You Know You're Not Healing from Narc Abuse When

You Know You're Not Healing from Narc Abuse When....
You are definitely stuck in some sort of time warp that repeats itself every few days or weeks.

You Know You're Not Healing from Narc Abuse When...
You revert to childish, junior high behaviors.

You Know You're Not Healing from Narc Abuse When...
You dwell continually on all the ways the planet, your kids, everyone would be better off without you. You know should fight this but today it just seems so much more true.

You Know You're Not Healing from Narc Abuse When...
You feel like you are stuck in the same place as a year ago, except all the head clearing from a long hike has gone far, far away.

You Know You're Not Healing from Narc Abuse When...
You don't feel like you ever left the web and there is still no way out.

Cycles

There is a cycle I predictably engage in every time my little people visit.

First, there is the anticipation of magical moments of connection with a trifecta of teenagers. The excitement of catching up, hanging out and just being together.

Then there is the merger with reality, when they show up, want to veg out, lounge around the house, sleep til noon, and play Minecraft all day. My own circadian rhythm gets thrown off as I stay up to bond, then sleep in with them. And expectations drift downward a bit--ok truth be told--they drop into the toilet.

And then there is the knowing how much shit they have to endure in living under the iron fist that is my ex, how they are not respected as autonomous human beings, how he steamrolls over their free will, teaching by example the art of manipulation. I feel that I must balance this yuck in the other direction by teaching by opposing example the art of respect for humanity. And so I need to invest in their kindness banks, filling them up with home cooked meals, less work around the flat, and more chill time as their dad is harsh on those fronts. But it is more than that. I often feel like I need to somehow not merely be a good parent, but make up for the asshole parent by being an exceptional parent to make up for the badness that is to have an NPD parent. And that is a huge problem. I'm only human as it turns out. I'm flawed like anyone else. All of this is iced with a disgusting frosting of guilt in moving away from them in the first place....

Which is reinforced by the fact that my ex constantly blames me for moving away behind my back. He oh-so-wonderfully helped create the hostile context whereby moving away seemed the only option. And now he uses it as weapon against me, as in, "Well, she did move away and go abandon her own children..." He makes sure that everything wrong in their lives has nothing to do with him, nor his narcissism, but rather their evil mother abandoning them. Which is how his own life went.

His own evil mother did the same and abandoned him in death. And he's never dealt with that emotionally--only intellectually--murdered by his own NPD father. But all the same, it probably comes back to the same feeling. He's angry at her getting herself killed by a narc. And so he became a narc in order to not deal.

Which brings me back to why I sit in the stewpot of my own jumbled, disparate, ridiculous emotions. I try to label them, understand them, watch the cycle of them.

After my littles leave, the crash is predictable, as is the impinging guilt that will move in close like a boa constrictor. I'll suck in air for the oxygen deprivation now.