The following is a long form piece, the second draft of a novel in blog form. For ease of reading, is a table of contents:

Part One – Prelude

Part Two – What Sets the Stage

Part Three – It Was All Just Like a Movie

Part Four – Best Laid Plans

Part Five – Ball and Chains

Part Six – Death

Part Seven – Life

Part Eight – The Monster At The End

I had the shit till it all got smoked I kept the promise till the vow got broke I had to drink from the lovin’ cup I stood on the banks till the river rose up I saw the bride in her wedding gown I was in the house when the house burned down

I may be old and I may be bent But I had the money till it all got spent I had the money till they made me pay Then I had the sense to be on my way I had to stay in the underground I was in the house when the house burned down

I was in the house when the house burned down I met the man with the thorny crown I helped Him carry his cross through town

I was in the house when the house burned down

I was in the house when the house burned down I met the man with the thorny crown I helped Him carry his cross through town I was in the house when the house burned down

I had the shit till it all got smoked I kept the promise till the vow got broke I had to drink from the lovin’ cup I stood on the banks till the river rose up I saw the bride in her wedding gown I was in the house when the house burned down

I Was in the House When the House Burned Down – Warren Zevon

***

Prelude

I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees.

Cross Road Blues – Robert Johnson

Aspiring writers examine the topic of why we write, while an established group of writers will more often deliberate over why we stop. What is it that gives us frantic inspiration one moment and blocks us from stringing together two sentences not a week later?

I launched this space a year ago as a way of collecting/archiving/showcasing my writing career. I figured that with a public space I would circumvent an upcoming cases of the dreaded writer’s block and just keep going. Anyone that has ever done this in any professional capacity can tell you that while inspiration may seem to lend to quality or at least genuine heart – it does not pay the bills. Writers gotta write. I have been actively writing and publishing as a journalist, playwright, fiction author, and poet for more than twenty years now – but this is not a story about why I write, it is the story of why I stopped.

I was proud of this space once I hit the publish button, as both a repository for samples of past work, but also a fresh place to do more creative work. I had just come off a year of hiatus, having spent the prior three publishing hundreds of editorials and news pieces to eek by a living. I was in between jobs and living spaces and encircling level nine of the freelancing abyss – the only place where you can have a piece reach 500,000+ readers and be tossed $40.

Except for writing a play each year and some poetry here any there, journalistic efforts had largely sapped me of every spark of drive and imagination I had left. War is hell, and journalism is too. Years ago I was upset with my Mom when she advised me to avoid the newspaper man’s path – knowing what I know now, could I travel back in time I would give her a standing ovation. In any case, I wanted to start collecting everything in one place, since my usual response when asked for a business card or a website was to shrug my shoulders.

With the launch here – I was also proud of my ambitious release schedule. I would keep to releasing updates and various bits of writing each week – and see where the work took me. Ninety-nine percent of online writing efforts fail as fast as the ambitions are high, but the commitment in the face of minimal payoff is low. So I promised myself that if I started that I could not stop. And yet, only a couple months into this venture – I stopped cold.

I hadn’t given up.

I had not been lazy, busy, or disinterested.

I stopped writing for the same reason I had given up everything else for the past five years. The same reason that I worked even harder those first few months to breathe life into my words words was what killed them in the womb.

I wrote my best piece of poetry last fall, and a fantastic little play a month ago – yet except for these two aberrations, I have not been able to pick up my pen or tap my keys about anything that hasn’t ended up a false start wadded up in the digital waste bin.

The most epic case of writer’s block, one that would not give way even in the face of monthly writer’s meetings and numerous inspirations. I was bursting with ideas, but as I sat down each of them were stillborn.

I want, or rather need to tell you why.

I cannot writer while the gnarled claw remains over my mouth, silencing me in regard to what happened these past few years. There is a story clawing at my brain and rattling the bars within its cage in my soul. It will not rest until it is told. It will not allow me to tell a fiction until fed by telling its truth.

I thought about writing this truth as a play, and even wrote half of it as a fictionalized novel. I have kicked around adaptations across the spectrum from fantasy, sci-fi, noire, and a half-dozen other imaginative ways to tell it. But each and every approach served only to dilute the sadness and horror and sidestep genuine pain with a label of entertainment.

Instead, like a conversation across a table at a diner that smells like cigarettes, I just need to spill the beans – with no frills or grand attempt at making a point or somehow romanticizing or demonizing any of it.

This is my story, direct as I can tell it, of how my life forever changed on February the 21st, 2012. It is absolute and irredeemable darkness – but I can promise you that a story that begins with detailing how love can lie will end with how love can mend.

My tone and delivery will change throughout this piece. This is intentional. In an effort to detail recovery as accurately as possible, I have restrained myself from stylistic alterations in the editing process as long as the delivery still makes sense. I began this writing to tell the story to myself, first and foremost. In doing so, my mood and perceptions changed the more that I opened up to and remembered. New truths revealed themselves. Doors long since locked off out of self preservation swung open and I allowed myself to look – first through my fingers, and later without flinching.

This has changed me.

So, without restraint, and in an effort to claw the gnarled and vicious hand from my lips and reclaim every spec of my soul – this is my story:

Names have been changed to protect the innocent and deter retribution from the guilty.

***

What Sets the Stage

Wish

I was only eighteen, and had been for a few months when I was married. At the time I claimed my adulthood loud and proud – though now that I have doubled that age, the thought that we regard anyone 18 as an adult terrifies me. I was the oldest child of a preacher that had spent the last two years of high school in a tiny town in a new state. I wanted escape. The gravity of matrimony only fully hit me a couple weeks before the big day, and I didn’t want to do it, and yet I did anyway.

Her father had tragically and suddenly passed away just a couple weeks into our dating. It was a make or break moment that created both a sense of urgency and a place for me to be – while I had felt so desperately out of place since our family had arrived. This meant that I both fell into serious relationship more quickly than I could comprehend the far-reaching consequences of such choices, and that I felt unable to back out even once I did. After all she had been through, I needed to stick with it or I would be a jerk. This is not to mention the giant spotlight that my dad’s job created, and how much I felt the already bristling criticism I endured would intensify.

As a green-haired, pierced eared musician now living in a conservative Mennonite town, I felt fish-out-of-water and terminally unwelcome. I had spent a majority of my life as the son of a city firefighter, before dad felt his big calling, and changing states, schools, and cultures my Junior year left me feeling incredibly lost. The experiences of my youth and dealing with “life in the church,” while contributing most certainly – would be best served by separate writing of its own. Suffice to say, my seeking to belong was a life-long struggle that kept me looking for a way out by my early adult years. That way out ended up being marriage.

While this ultimately doomed choice had some serious ups and downs – two of the very best things came out of it. The two most wonderful, kind, intelligent, and beautiful little girls I have ever known arrived, and I became a father. I can’t believe life ever yielded me the privilege of knowing two people so brilliant in every way.

But the day still came when I failed them so utterly and completely. It still stings just as much as the first day, the day I chose to leave. Life is a grand collection of coulda, shoulda, woulda’s, of every degree – but not being able to tuck them in each night has left a wound that healed but a scar that will not leave me. I truly do not feel that their mother and I were all that compatible. We were young and we tried – but in the end I just wish I had at least stayed as close as possible for them.

Let me also say this – I take full responsibility for my own choices, and do not wish what comes next to confuse that fact. I also would say that this did lead to many great things, along with the bad – life is never all good or all bad, except when you give up. I have two daughters that did not – and neither did I.

Divorce is the worst thing that anyone can go through. As much as I have advised younger people to wait to get married until they are done cooking (25+ in most cases), I have also strongly advised anyone that has asked about heading for the big D about what to expect. It is not a breakup – it is an active choice to tear a heart and a home in half. It brings out the worst in all involved and costs nearly every last penny, tear, and friend.

After twelve years – their mother and I were living separate lives with the only emotion remaining for one another being contempt. The home had gone from cold to toxic, and my daughters were starting to pay the price for our mistakes. I began to consider my options. My family and circle of friends had chosen a side immediately, and it was not mine. My best (and seemingly only) friend was out of state.

Leaving me with only two voices left to consider.

One voice was that of a new friend – let’s call her Mary. Mary would be one that would go on to become another best friend of mine to this day. She was at the time one of the only local persons I could fully trust. Mary would also unfortunately and unintentionally incite the entire situation from disgruntled to hostile via her gender. To anyone watching, this friend was the “other woman.” Her name became total mud by association, though she stuck with me anyway. Her advice and care have always been at a level of kindness and self-less love that I have rarely seen its like. If not for her, I don’t know if I could have survived it. No matter how much we talk or don’t, I will always care a great deal for her.

I had owned a store in town, and from it the marital circle of friends had grown. As a family, we were well known. This made the entire looming divorce a massive scandal. My soon to be ex thought that telling everyone about the pending divorce would actually somehow stop it – instead, it killed it for me completely. Regardless of her initial intent, the plan backfired, and her increasing anger fed a mountain of hostility against me. I felt betrayed absolutely, and betrayal was the one unforgivable sin to me. Though I think some thought, even in their hostility that I would be “scared straight,” I was already half way out the door.

There was another friend that I talked to and leaned on for advice. The other voice in my ear; one that had been there increasingly for several years.

As easily as this flowed up to this point – this is the moment where my fingers do not want to continue. It enters the realm of things I don’t want to talk about, but need to. It is strangely easier to talk about severe levels of abuse than it is manipulation. Telling others that someone hit you or cussed you out gives no pause, but telling others that someone duped you is much more private and difficult to admit. I was tempted to skip this entire part and just talk about what came after – but that would be ignoring the groundwork of the perfect trap laid for me that would seize the next five years of my life.

The other voice, we will call Emily.

I don’t care if it hurts I want to have control I want a perfect body I want a perfect soul

I want you to notice When I’m not around You’re so fuckin’ special I wish I was special

Creep – Radiohead

***

Emily

She was my very first “real” girlfriend. Side note – sorry (name redacted), I still give you honorary mention because you were an excellent Junior High girlfriend as well – and are still a fantastic friend.

At 16, I was an awkward kid that wanted nothing more than to rock and roll and find the love of my life. I had a great group of friends in high school, up until my family moved to a small Ohio town (1500 people small) for my dad’s job. He would be the new town preacher, and it would be the first time I was in that environment. The pressure would ultimately crush me – and lead to everything above, but would also provide two of the things I wished for. Within in a year I had my band – before that, I had her.

She was everything I would have wanted if I had made a list on paper – tall, with short and punky red hair. Her parents were artists and she was as off-the-beaten-path as this town could handle. As the kid coming in with bleached blonde hair, a pierced ear, and buttons all over old army fatigues, the match seemed preordained by the heavens. Those I had met only talked about how weird of a girl she was, and I was no stranger to the same descriptions of myself in my younger years – so I paid them no mind. I went on a few dates prior and was already a few dozen crushes deep, but now my sights were set completely on her.

It took me several months to work up the guts. For me it was always easier to live with the possibility of someone liking you than the certainty of finding out they did not. Even still, on a crisp October evening after a high school basketball game we found ourselves alone in the woods at an old cemetery at night after everyone else chickened out. Once we stayed long enough to spook ourselves out completely, we fled to a neighboring town for food. There, after two hours of sitting in a car trying to rally the courage, I confessed by feelings and she became my girlfriend.

In my mind, she will always be that 15 year old girl with the big smile, and everything that came after a ghost of that memory. I remember working on and selling the school newspaper together, surprising her the first night she started fiddling with makeup, and long nights watching scary movies when her parents were gone. It all started so sweetly, on the surface, and in my mind is the only memory of her that is clean and pure.

My parents weren’t the biggest fans of her – a fact which would alter my perception of what things were like. I would credit their dislike of her for why I broke up with her three months later, creating a potent kind of mystique that would bury itself deep in my brain for the next 15 years. In reality, my parents were concerned. I was losing weight at a drastic rate. I started looking pale and was increasingly unhappy. I was not the ridiculously bubbly and annoying person under the influence of young love. I just kept feeling a little more sapped of energy by the day. Her and her mother were dictating what I ate and when – a connection I never even made until I was an adult. Those times spent in drive-thru’s ordering a chicken sandwich that wouldn’t upset her, settling for less than usual to keep the peace.

I did know that I was starting to get really sick of not having any time (or money) to myself anymore. I credited this to being about the realities of juggling dating and personal time being relatively new to the game, but it was more. She never had enough of my time, or of me – and the artist parents I was so impressed with were something much different under the surface. Years of substance abuse and past generational child abuse mixed with the eating disorder she already carried along with her mother created a eerie environment combined into a toxic cocktail. Most of this was hidden from me at the time, but sometimes it creeped through. I remember once saying that Uma Thurman was attractive, and Emily’s mother telling me that she couldn’t understand why I was with her daughter then – since she had round, rather than sharp features.

Since I was the preacher’s kid, it was like everyone was trying to be on their best behavior, but the masks and fresh coat of pain on everything were always peeling. The family appeared, or tried to appear to be not much different than my own while I was around.

I never considered breaking up with her until I was back in Kansas visiting family and friends for Christmas. Once there, the allure and the spell lifted and they all just seemed like a major drag. Instead of missing her, I was annoyed with her phone calls while away that she wanted me to keep up with. The trip had also rekindled interest in an old flame that made me realize that I just wasn’t feeling it anymore. I felt incredibly guilty for being interested in someone else while away, and decided that I should break up with her – it wasn’t fair to have a girlfriend and like someone else. Short-sighted and teenage, but sound logic to a sixteen year old. Question nothing bigger and make all decisions based on the spot and on emotion.

Once I was back home, I spent a night out at a youth gathering that she did not want to attend. I went back to her house after meeting (as fate would have it) my children’s mother at the youth event. It was the last night I spent with Emily, and I can remember being completely annoyed. I should have been excited to see her, I started to see her as just too clingy. Days later I broke up with her.

Emily never wanted to go anywhere. She didn’t come with me to the youth center I went to each week to play music and shoot pool. She didn’t come to youth group. She didn’t hang out with my friends and she didn’t want to hang out with the friends we had been before we started dating. I started losing the few friends I had over it, that felt like Emily was stealing all of my time.

We had a very chaste and innocent young relationship over those three months. We were each other’s first kiss. This was also the very first lie she told me. She had made out with a much older person at a bonfire a year prior, and when I was informed of this by one of her friends – she denied it. She has continued to deny it to this day. While this is not seemingly the most significant detail, it is also the most significant – because a pathological liar must defend every single lie, no matter how small. To admit one lie is to risk the exposure of them all – and so they will defend them to the death.

Kissing and holding hands were our physical limit – something I thought was the best choice at the time, and that she echoed. My parents had strict rules about physical contact, and I tried to keep them – even though it drove me crazy. Emily told me it was what she wanted too, so I respected that even when I didn’t want to. We took things innocent and slow.

Two weeks after our breakup I asked the girl I would eventually marry the homecoming dance. We shall call her Tara. I had sworn off dating after breaking up with Emily, but had changed my mind after having pizza with a bunch of new friends that included Tara. She was everything that Emily was not – she was warm, kind, and genuine. Though we were not great relationship material in the end – this was, and still is true.

Emily was enraged that I had asked someone to her dance, and in response (and in the same two week time frame) got a new boyfriend and began sleeping with him. She then distributed that bit of information to me via the rest of the school. The intended effect was reached. I remember hearing the news in the band room before practice – and almost throwing up all over the floor. It was the worst punch in the gut I had experienced to date (and way worse than all the physical ones from schoolyard fights).

Emily would continue to ask me to come see her for weeks after our breakup, until I finally did one day after school. We talked in her bedroom, and it was the first time I had ever been inside it – because that was inappropriate. She had started sleeping with the new guy already (but had not leaked the news), and asked me one more time to work things out with her. When I refused, she focused on revenge. Her boyfriend had to be a musician, had to be from out of town, and had to be an outsider – which made it more effective. She incited rivalry between the two of us at every turn. She even pushed him to pick a fight with me at prom when they played some of my band’s music. I started to oblige until Tara pulled me away. When that didn’t work, Emily sang “Like a Virgin,” at karaoke to continue to fan the flames. By the end of the night I was angry, upset, and even a bit jealous – something that was not lost on Tara. I regret that part, allowing Emily to still hold a piece of me – yet neither of us knew what kind of person we were dealing with.

I continued to focus on playing music, now playing concerts at my school and others as well as house parties and venues. Emily would try to start her own band in response and it would fizzle – but even competition there would not. Whether it took months of years, Emily’s desire to “win” knew no bounds.

The steps that I retrace, the sad look on your face

The timing and structure did you hear he fucked her?

A day late a buck short I’m writing the report

On losing and failing when I move I’m flailing now

And it’s happened once again

I’ll turn to a friend

Someone that understands

Sees through the master plan

But everybody’s gone And I’ve been here for too long To face this on my own, well I guess this is growing up Well I guess this is growing up

Dammit – Blink 182

***

Back to the Future

It’s February 28th, and on this day in 2012 I announced the separation of Tara and I to the world. It was also the day that my already strained relationship with my brother and his wife effectively ended. Neither of them have forgiven or gotten past my leaving or the events that revolved around it to this very day. It is strange to look at it all from above now – knowing how the pieces should have moved and how to deal with things soundly, but at the time I couldn’t do anything close. I was in a complete and total tailspin. I would like to say it was just about the divorce, but in large part this future was always coming in some form. The past hurts, fears, trauma, and feelings I had run from for some many years all came flooding in at once. You can’t run from these things forever – and the trying only leads to eventual collapse.

I will say only one thing about the girls during this period. The sound of their reaction when I told them that their mother and I were going to get a divorce will haunt me for the rest of my life. It was the most terrible thing I have ever experienced, and regardless of how anything “should” have gone – I will be eternally sorry for my role in putting them through that. Any attempt to act like I had everything all figured out after was merely a cover for how awful I actually felt.

And how deeply sorry.

***

She Comes a Reaping

Leading up to the separation I had one other voice in my ear other than my newfound friend Mary. I had been off and on talking to Emily for the past several years. As the marriage worsened, our conversations increased. As my own unhappiness and depression over my life grew I began to see the past in a series of regrets. I regretted that I settled and got married so quickly. I regretted not going off to college. I wished I had time to myself to explore and have wild days – so much so that the thought of such freedoms made me bitterly angry.

None of this is surprising or unnatural. Many people that settle down early can and will go through similar feelings at some point, as the reality of age begins to set in. I always felt sad around my birthdays, like I wasn’t accomplishing enough. Each trip around the sun a reminder that I was essentially nothing. My upcoming 30th became the catalyst for sending me into a full on quarter-life crisis.

During this time I also regretted breaking up with Emily – with the rise of social media creating the ultimate grass is greener lie that killed numerous marriages. It was a time before it was as easy to recognize how carefully tailored profiles and personas can twist up any unhappy person into believing that they are alone and behind everyone else. I began to think that my parents had made me break up with her by not liking her. I began to shift most of my blame for my woes onto them. They should have stopped me from getting married so young. They should have never moved me to Ohio. They should have given me more freedom to be who I wanted to be. They had ruined my life.

My feelings of wishing I had spent more time finding myself before I settled down were real. My anger toward my parents for taking me to Ohio was also real. Everything else that developed out of these feelings into actions was due to the methodical curation of ideas from talking to her.

Emily was angry with my parents for the breakup, even fourteen years later. She hated my marriage and hated that I had children, and hated that I had a kind of life she could not – but portrayed none of this openly. She listened to me and stayed up for hours helping me talk through my feelings – and though I did not see it for six years, support was never the purpose. Communication was sprinkled with influence – a taste, to get me used to things to come. She told me that my parents hated her and made me break up with her. She told me that I had “such potential” and that she was “sad” to see me throw it away by settling down. My young marriage was “basically child abuse” in her mind – that my parents had abused me by even allowing it.

She told me that my wife was stupid, and that she would never understand “someone like me/us.” She told me only briefly to consider my children, and how much better an environment it would be for them to be away from an unhappy relationship. She encouraged me to get out there and experience life and apply for graduate school, even offering to help me do so.

It wasn’t long before I could see little else other than I had made the biggest mistake of my life by breaking up with her – like it could have all been different somehow. It began to consume my thoughts and drive me mad. I stopped sleeping much, and became progressively more bitter.

Emily would talk to me for hours, stirring up a lot of emotions and then disappear for weeks. It went off and on as she would disappear when I expressed feelings too sensitive and reappear when I talked about actually working on my marriage.

Then she stayed away, leaving me with just enough remorse, confusion, and jealously to hold onto until I finally gave up. Life was chaos at home, and I became detached. Tara initiated a friend to come and “set me straight” physically. She told me later that like always, it wasn’t her intent – but I was over it. I told her about Emily shortly after, and how much we had been talking. She wasn’t surprised. Tara went to my 30th birthday party that I had been uninvited from, and I spent it alone at a dive bar. I felt like I had nothing to lose, so I actively started trying to get Emily back, against all odds.

It was a messy time, but I became convinced that I needed to try and get back together with her. We were a thousand miles apart, but all of my sadness was building into a “love conquers all” belief that I was being given a second chance by the universe. I pushed away my sadness and gave up completely on fixing my marriage, putting all energy towards some romantic idea that I was finally going to end up where I was supposed to be.

What I did not know is how terrible unhappy a person Emily already was. At 21, she had gotten into a relationship with a man 17 years her senior – and now as she approached 29, the age gap was slapping her in the face. She had been in love with his music scene, his real estate, cars, and money. Yet just like The Eagles Lyin’ Eyes, it had long since ceased to be worth it.

He had been over her for a while, but still didn’t want her to leave. Her charms no longer held sway over him either. So she strayed and did as she pleased, but it could never make her feel what she wanted – which was for someone to be consumed with desire for her.

But she didn’t want to let him go either, because to do so would be to relinquish the material and financial security she had signed up for. She had become very comfortable having whatever she wanted and doing whatever she pleased. She did try to get her own place and move away in secret (with my help), but no one would lease to her on her own. She had told me how great he was for years, but the story started to shift.

Now that she was having trouble getting a place to rent and feeling neglected, I was told a different tale. He was controlling, and frequently called her out and embarrassed her in public. He was suspicious of her and didn’t let her talk to men. She didn’t understand why, because she had always been faithful (she hadn’t, and I wouldn’t know this for another year). He ignored her and their conversations amounted to little more than grunts. He made fun of her art and wouldn’t help her when she needed it. She was always on her own.

Telling me now, because I had been graduated from plaything to a possible way out.

***

An Aside

I decided to chronicle my years of abuse and what its like to live with an abuser.

It is by no means meant to make me sound perfect or as if I have done everything right. I am myself a flawed individual who has learned much through many mistakes over my younger years. I do not share them to spark pity, but rather to lay the ground work for how. When people hear about abuse, one of the most common questions is how did it happen. How could they have stayed and allowed it?

There are different forms of abuse. The following will contain my experiences in living with someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Before diving in, I do feel the need to explain the lengthy intro above. Why air so much dirty laundry? Am I seeking pity? Absolutely not. I am who I am and have lived how I have lived, and like all others have made my own set of mistakes. I gave all of this to help try and answer the how. All of the above is how it happened, because healthy and fully centered people don’t end up with abusers for lengthy periods of time. It is not to say that healthy and happy people are immune from abuse – it is to say that they are healthy enough that they are far more likely to recognize it and get away from it when it does happen.

At the point that I “met” my abuser I was already at an all time low in terms of self-esteem. I felt such massive guilt over what I was doing to my children and to my soon to be ex-wife. I had lost most of my friends and a majority of the support from my family. I was angry, depressed, and looking for something to fill the void. This exact state is the perfect environment for a Narcissist to pounce. Since my abuser was a childhood friend, it made it even easier. There was pre-established trust that made me more likely to ignore concerns or the apprehension others had toward her once they found out. They simply “didn’t understand” our love.

After one particularly bad night at home, over a teary plate of french toast at IHOP – I told my friend Mary that I just wanted someone to touch my face and look on me with love. It had been years since this had happened, and why I began to place all my bets on Emily. I idealized her and her interests. She was an artist and a creative person like me. She was intelligent like me, and I craved intellectual conversation that did not happen in my current marriage – but most of all I craved love and affection.

She was everything I didn’t have. This was no coincidence. Emily was already morphing and changing herself to make the web she was spinning the most attractive to me specifically. She did not care about me and never would, but she would make me feel like the one and only – just like she had to everyone else before and would to everyone else after. I was her first boyfriend, and the only one to ever break up with her – something she brought up early on, and was surely part of the thrill of toying with me to begin with.

Narcissists don’t get broken up with. They carefully select targets and then use them up and spit them out. They enjoy spinning the trap, get off on dangling you off the ground, and climax with discarding you. It is a euphoric cycle that keeps them prowling for another target and meticulously designing every single part of their presence from their appearance, clothes, possessions, hobbies, and even their job. They are predators. Like the slow death of David Bowie in The Hunger, this is how a Narcissistic relationship operates – the film a manual for narcissism in all of its phases.

I remember one night Emily stayed up late crying to me that men didn’t all turn when she entered a room anymore. I was mortified when she said it. It sent my mind reeling as to how anyone could even think that way and not see it as shallow and disgusting. And yet, she continued to sob to me how all heads turned when she entered a room, and that she missed that – blaming age for the cause. We spent hours of an evening while she moaned and wailed about the house over the fact that she could not entrance and seduce as effectively as when she was 20.

This, as with all narcissist strategies, served multiple angles. She showed me her true self (which is exceedingly rare, and lets off some of the steam from keeping the mask on 24/7) but it also made me feel incredibly jealous. It served to help me feel insecure, like all eyes were on her and I had better really live up to earning my place by her side. I needed to reinforce that she was only getting prettier, hadn’t aged a day, and keep in mind that everyone wanted her. I was really lucky, and had better remember that.

It also highlights the only real fear I have seen in her and the other definite narcissist I have ever met – the fear of age. Like a wolf losing its teeth, losing looks, resources, and status – losing the tools required to trap their prey is terrifying. To a narcissist, the abuse is both a hobby and a profession – it is how they will entertain themselves and how they will literally survive. Through allure and desire they weave a web to capture a victim to worship, feed, cloth, house, and pay for their many wants.

This is also why they can be some many things to so many different people. They will cheat repeatedly on one person and keep (mostly and only on the surface) faithful to another. With one person they are an artist. With another they are a musician. To someone else they are a professional or an academic. Short hair, long hair, clean, tattooed and pierced, well mannered, or foul – they shift and change as much as a CIA operative. They do not this both because they need to in order to attract prey, and because they have no idea who they are.

I was a target, and while I was completely unprepared for this form of attack – I had prepared myself to become said prey by the way I had been taking care of myself and living my life. It is the duality of responsibility that contributes to why narcissists typically seek co-dependents or the insecure. It is easy to convince someone that they always need to earn every scrap of love and affection and tolerate abuse when they feel so unlovable and deserving of said abuse. We really do accept the love we think we deserve.

The manipulation began immediately, but it took months for the first signs of abuse to set in – and once it did I allowed it.

The above sentence is wrong, and highlights how I still struggle to see abuse clearly from the inside. Manipulation, mind games, and lies are abuse. I was already being abused before the first plate or dirty word had been hurled.

I did so because I felt like I deserved it. I had destroyed my family, and this was God’s punishment. I believed that I had been awful to my ex-wife, and that I was now experiencing awfulness.

I also believed that I had changed, learned, and had become a better person on the other side of it – so that she could and would too.

I had hope.

***

Part Three – It Was All Just Like a Movie

First, a Romance

I opened a credit card and maxed it out buying plane tickets, a hotel, clothes, and food on a trip to go and see Emily in at the start of 2012. At the time, I wasn’t even hoping for a relationship. I had just asked her to have dinner with me, and I just wanted to get out of town. I had hopes, but no goals. For me, my life was in flames and I was putting all my chips on one last adventure before I died. I focused on nothing other than that trip to keep me moving forward. The focus and the effort taken to make it happen gave me reprieve from the pain and drama at home. It gave me the energy to keep finishing my second degree and to survive my student teaching.

The plan was for me to take a trip and visit my brother and his family and for us to reconnect while I did. She had told me a month before that she loved me. She only did this after I told her that I was considering dating someone. Hours later, she called me crying, saying “Don’t you know how much I love you? Fine I’ll say it clearly – I love you.” That night we talked for four hours and the plan to come see her took life. There were no promises made, but after so many years – we just needed to see each other.

We traveled to various towns, dined out, walked, talked, smiled, and kissed. Every part of a cliche romance film on fast forward. I suppressed any thoughts that questioned the intensity and secrecy of the entire thing – because for the first time in such a very long time, someone looked on me with love.

She told me days before my flight that she wasn’t leaving her boyfriend, and that this was just about seeing each other. We spent the next few days together anyway, under the lie she told that she was at a quilting convention in another state. Other than her paranoia about being found out – the days past happily, with only two strange events.

The first, was when we visited her college town. She had insisted that we go there, and had an uncomfortable obsession with it. Like a sports star unable to let go of his glory days, her college years were the best time of her life. I didn’t enjoy any of it. What could have been one person taking another person somewhere that meant something to them – became a showcase of how great life was a decade ago.

All she wanted to tell talk about was her wild party years there – the men she met, how drunk she was, and how everyone thought she got ahead by sleeping with her professors – but she wasn’t, of course. If I showed any signs of being tired of it, she told me that I needed to accept her and her past. Though as a fully functioning adult I can now easily see how bad of date etiquette is was on the surface – I mean who wants to go out with someone that only talks about how much they drank and who they slept with as a teen?

It served a deeper function for her though, because a narcissist starts every relationship by testing the fences. I thought this was a visit, but she knew already that I was her next supply (of energy and resources) and was laying the groundwork. This included finding out what I liked and didn’t, where I could be pushed and where I couldn’t, and most importantly where my sensitive areas were – areas most vulnerable to be exploited.

Being someone that had married and settled down young, she already knew via chat and email that I regretted not having traditional college years and how much the topic bothered me. Now she also knew that she could push me on sex. Each bad reaction to to a topic is not a sign to stop for a narcissist. It is the discovery of a vulnerability and place to exploit.

This is when she began enshrouding me in the fog, a place of confusion where I would not know what was up and what was down. This was not who she was or how she had behaved through our many conversations and letters back and forth – so why why she acting this way now? She had been romantic and sweet, but was now behaving petty, arrogant, and vile. It didn’t make sense… It doesn’t make sense – the mental question that will be on repeat for the rest of the relationship and base from which a narcissist operates.

After, at a bookstore some guy recognized her and started up a conversation, having apparently been a former classmate. They chatted away as I stood there. She did not introduce me or acknowledge that I was in the room. Once they had finished talking she walked away with no mention of who he was. With the subject of the afternoon’s conversation, one can imagine how I was interpreting the interaction. I dared not say something – otherwise I would be judging her past. I was quiet most of the ride back.

The second strange thing took place that night after we got back. We had stopped at Target o grab a few things and bought a cheap chess board from the check out aisle. She had talked at great length about loving the game over the past few months. She was all smiles as we set it up on the hotel bed – another seemingly romantic moment after a confusing afternoon. Then I beat her, in only a handful of moves. She stopped smiling. She demanded a rematch, and I beat her again. The room became tense and full of ice. She didn’t want to play anymore. I tried to joke about it to lighten the moment, but she grew quiet and asked that we watch a movie. We never played chess again.

The dinner plans had quickly changed into her staying with me. I had worked up such a romantic image in my mind of how it would all take place, but everything was happening faster and more frantically than felt natural. Even when she came onto me, it was too fast and uncomfortable. I stopped her – it did not feel right. The “visit” became her staying with me for a few days. My plans to visit my brother all but disappeared.

The original dinner plans turned into a few days of seeing each other, and her wishing me goodbye with eyes full of tears. I had no idea why, but something just felt off in that moment, and deep inside I was ready to go home. I did my best to act the part of being so sad to go – but I just wanted to be home.

As I left, she slipped a letter into my hand and told me not to read it until on the plane. I waited until an hour before home to finally open it. I remember thinking it was the most romantic thing in the world that she had written me in such a way, and with some distance from her the strange parts melted away and I determined to focus on the positive. She was my dream girl after all, right? I had no idea what the letter said, she made no mention as to its contents. She had made no promises, and I knew full well it could say that she didn’t want to speak to me again.

I had already taken the bait, and this was to set the hook.

The letter was several pages detailing how wonderful the week was, and telling me how much I had opened her eyes to living again and changed her life. She wanted me to do whatever it took to come and steal her away from that place. Before meeting, I knew that she didn’t believe in marriage, nor did she want kids. The letter said that I had changed all of that. She wrote that never imagined having children, but that she wanted to have them with me. I was the love of her life. I could save her.

It painted all the pretty things that spoke directly toward what I so desperately wanted. It said absolutely everything that it needed to.

It didn’t line up with her words or behavior the few days I was with her, but it told me everything in a format I couldn’t argue with – everything I wanted to hear. Any reservations fell away with the pretty and articulate cursive of her words and I fell in love.

Like a dog lying in a corner, They will bite you and never warn you, Look out, they’ll tear your insides out. ‘Cause everybody hates a tourist, Especially one who thinks it’s all such a laugh, Yeah and the chip stain’s grease, Will come out in the bath.

You will never understand How it feels to live your life With no meaning or control And with nowhere left to go. You are amazed that they exist And they burn so bright, Whilst you can only wonder why. Rent a flat above a shop Cut your hair and get a job Smoke some fags and play some pool Pretend you never went to school, But still you’ll never get it right ‘Cause when you’re laid in bed at night And watching roaches climb the wall, If you called your dad he could stop it all Yeah

You’ll never live like common people You’ll never do what common people do You’ll never fail like common people You’ll never watch your life slide out of view

Common People – Pulp

***

Kodachrome

I came home happy for the first time in literally, years. How could there have been any better of an outcome? My life was just like a movie – a romance, where everything works out against all odds. I wouldn’t stop to ask questions. I had made the biggest gamble to make this happen, and it was happening. Just be happy for a change, why don’t ya?

I began to put everything into making her request happen, just like she asked – building a place to steal her away to. I was now essentially homeless, having just moved out after months of living in different parts of the house. I had no money and (having just finished college and applying for teaching jobs) few possessions. What little I did have, I sold all the way down to my motorcycle and my laptop.

Fifteen years worth of things that used to matter to me, I sold in the blink of an eye. What did it matter, if I had her? Of course, I also knew that she wouldn’t want all of my nerdy stuff in the house anyway. Might as well make a few bucks.

And it feels right this time

On this crash course with the big time

Pay no mind to the distant thunder

New day fills his head with wonder, boy….

Says it feels right this time

Turned it ’round and found the right line

Good day to be alive Sir

Good day to be alive, he said…..

Don’t it feel right like this

All the pieces fall to his wish

Sucker for that quick reward boy

Sucker for that quick reward they said…..

Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel

Is just a freight train coming your way

No Leaf Clover – Metallica

I listened to the song many times leading up to divorce, my Ipod (temporarily Zune – ha) a mix a loathsome depressed laments or weepy renditions of pining after lost love. I heard the song again yesterday and my mind shot back to studying foreshadowing in grade school. It feels eerie now to think a song that so heavily resonated with me, chiming into my brain again and again was interpreted so poorly. It served as self pity about losing friends and a life, but now felt like my future self waving hands desperately in the air trying to stop me from the real danger straight ahead. I just didn’t see it. I see it now.

I started a long month of living with my parents while I found a new place of my own. I was working toward finding a place in town that would allow pets – her own stipulation for moving in with me. It wasn’t easy.

Finding someone that wanted to move across three states to live with me after seeing each other a few days should have been enough of a red flag, but to me I saw this all as just highly romantic – fate, even. It was the grand second chance no one gets. I already felt like such a failure at relationships in general, at least someone wanted me.

But I was already hooked on a drug I didn’t know I was on. I was lonely and needy at the time, giving reason enough to make some grand mistakes – but there was already much more at play. I was not just being foolish, I was also being taken advantage of and had no idea. I was a ticket out for her, since she couldn’t do it on her own. Pretending to feel something to get something wasn’t new for her. It was a refined craft.

The multitude of red flags began to pile up, but for each red flag planted she would distract with some grand gesture. After writing me that letter, she went back to her boyfriend and went on a trip with him out of state (though according to her she hated every minute of it, of course and “had no choice”).

Emily focused on what she described as time she needed “to plan how to get out.” It was in actuality an evaluation phase – a test, to see which form of supply would perform the best. Her current supply had become boring – a narcissists worst nightmare, the threat of being bored. A regular person fails to get off the couch or spends too much money on another hobby attempt on Amazon. An narcissist shaves their head and has sex with a stranger.

I spent the next chunk of my acquired (and dwindling) resources on a camping trip for her and I in Kansas. It would be a chance for her to come down and see what she thought of things – and Kansas in general. On this trip, she further declared her love and surprised me with the news that she wanted to get married. It was another complete change and shift in expectations – which of course made and skepticism melt away.

Skepticism about things like the fact that she was covered in rings and jewelry each day that were from her ex-boyfriend (she currently had him watching her dog and lied about where she was). Or that she spent hours one night cuddled up at a campfire talking about her second boyfriend (the one she slept with to get back at me). A lengthy retelling of their past trips and romantic moments, and what he had been doing with his life since. Or maybe that she found out I had a stash of oxy from a recent toothache and began taking all of it, being so high before her flight back that she barely even registered that I was in the room.

Each of these actions, and the worse ones to follow will likely cause any sane person internally scream “Why would you put up with this, what the hell is the matter with you?!” I feel the same way now, removed from it. It seems nothing short of insanity.

And yet, like the pheromones of Poison Ivy or the Siren’s song – the call of an narcissist is perfectly crafted. A perfect blend of torture and the most attractive and addictive words, actions, and deeds. There is nothing more exciting for them than to make you feel better than you ever have, and then slip in some jabs to keep you off balance. With these acts, increasing in intensity in both directions, your perception of reality begins to fade. They are becoming the only author of what is real.

Our days were usually spent hiking or some other sort of activity I planned that she would enjoy, or that she requested. As long as the attention was on entertaining her and doing what she wanted, she remained kind and sweet. During these times, the relationship felt like a dream, even if it was exhausting to keep up with.

When I complained to her that I didn’t want to hear any more about past boyfriends – she again started a fight with me for not accepting her past. After an hour of arguing, I took this to heart and decided to try harder to do so. This was the first time the line would move, until eventually there wouldn’t even be one. It was after this choice, for being a good boy, that she said that I had “changed her mind on marriage.” As a reward for doing what I was told, she would happily marry me. Just another inexplicable shift in behavior that helped me keep falling in love with Dr. Jekyll and appeasing Mr. Hyde.

***

Scraps From the Table

Being chastised for an increasing number of failures on my part in messages or over the phone became the new normal. It always came out of the blue as I groveled and apologized – because then she would tell me how much I meant to her. And it was taking months of gently expressing displeasure over her living with her ex-boyfriend (maybe) in separate rooms before she finally moved in with her mom. The first sign of committing to move out west that she was dragged toward kicking and screaming.

All I had heard about him for years was of him openly running her down in front of others, being neglectful, and caring only about his cars and his money – but this changed once she was out. He was now still a really good guy – and I would need to understand that after eight years they were still going to be friends.

Small slight after small slight, I kept being taught how to keep silent. On a visit to Chicago to see her, she was an hour and a half late to get from from the airport. Late because she was still enjoying her coffee a mile down the street.

On the phone, she would tell me how guys at the bar hit on her at least once a week, and then tell me I was not respecting her as a woman if I didn’t like it. I needed to trust her to handle herself. Which is on one hand true, and yet the entire point of telling me was to create anxiety and jealously. It kept getting harder to tell if my feelings were valid, or if I really was the “old fashioned” person she constantly made me out to be.

Talking on the phone was a nightly trip through a field of landmines. Anything said or responded to incorrectly could easily and quickly be twisted into something I didn’t mean. This would lead to another hour of trying to calm her down and apologize. Each morning would follow with an apology for the misunderstanding and a bunch of flowery language about how special I was to “put up with her.” It also meant that I was frequently up until 2 or 3 in the morning and then back at the school at 7:30. I was too tired to fight her on anything I really didn’t agree with.

I did finally find a house and put the rest of my funds into putting down a deposit and going out to Ohio to pick her up. Through the first two days at her mom’s boyfriend’s place (where she was now staying) she was in good spirits while we packed. She was going through another period of being highly annoyed with her mother, and was ready to leave.

Once we were actually on the road she was cold by an hour into the journey. She stared out the window silently and cried at stops. I chalked it up to it being a big step and tried to be supportive. Inside I was scared and crumbling, but I had learned better than to make it about my feelings.

She was in a bad mood all the way through arriving an unpacking, but then surprised me with a romantic candlelit dinner after we were finished. The seesaw swung back in my favor and I let it go. It would be the last time I saw her happy in that place.

Two days later I had plans to meet a friend for a video game launch party – we had a tradition of showing up early and hanging outside shooting the shit, since life provided less opportunities to see each other anymore. So a group of us laughed and talked from nine to midnight, and then I went home. It seemed like a normal thing to do, spend a couple hours out with friends, but I would soon find out that time had ended.

The day after I found out Emily had spent the entire time on the phone with her “ex” boyfriend. She acted betrayed when I found out, but of course also meant for me to discover it. That way I could both get into trouble for invading her privacy and also learn that doing things without her was risky. This is when I began to experience the next part of a narcissist’s toolbox – how they train you through punishment. I don’t want you to spend time with anyone but me – so I’ll let you find out that I might be unfaithful if you do. As well as don’t invade my privacy, I only want you to find out I’m lying when I want to teach you a lesson.

This was followed by lesson number two, smear campaigns. I won’t tolerate you ever criticizing my behavior – so when you do I’ll talk bad about you to anyone that will listen. When I protested her behavior, she told her best friend how controlling I was, and how I invaded her privacy. The “hey look over here” response to wrongdoing characteristic of 2018 politics.

Shortly before moving in, she had told me that she did not want me talking to/spending time with Mary anymore. I had invited Mary over once to meet here, but it was oddly tense. To Emily, we had once been interested in each other, so being friends wouldn’t be right or fair. By “interest,” it meant that I told Emily that we had once discussed whether or not we should ever date. A conversation that ended definitively in a giant no. She was a sister to me. A relationship was never in the cards, but the very existence of said conversation meant that we could no longer speak.

I understood where Emily was coming, since her conversations with her ex bothered me, and agreed to put some distance between Mary and I.

In keeping score – this meant I could not longer have access to my closest friend because of a single conversation, but she was spending hours on the phone with the man she lived with for eight years. Something I wouldn’t know if I hadn’t invaded her privacy, and was not my business.

I tried to push back on this, and we were back to lesson two. She left the house, even as I begged her not to, with no information about where she was going or when she would return. She just vanished, for hours, spending that entire time on the phone with her parents and friends talking about how controlling and possessive I was. I knew this because she came home and told me. I was such “a controlling dick” sometimes.

For me, I sat in silence – terrified and devastated. My gut reaction was to call Mary and get her advice, but I knew wasn’t supposed to. I didn’t want to break trust, so I didn’t. The first lifeline I had was now effectively cut. I couldn’t leave to see anyone, because I didn’t know when she would be back – so I stayed put. She had already told me that I could not trust my family, so talking to them was out.

My parents had the audacity to say that we could not share a room at their home while unmarried. With my dad’s profession it wasn’t something they could allow. To Emily this was definitive rejection. This slight would never be forgiven or forgotten, and would come up again, and again, and again. Even months after she was out of my life she would mention it in a hastily scrawled hate mail.

So I sat alone and waited for her to return, and then endured several hours of fighting with her in person. This is when I received lesson number three in life with a narcissist – you cannot reason with a narcissist. They interrupt while telling you not to. They bring up things from four years ago but bemoan you bringing up an unresolved issue from last week. They twist your words. They change the subject. They tell you it didn’t happen (when it did). And the focus just keeps on shifting off of them to you. They will continue it all night if that is what it takes, sapping you of all strength to fight until you give up – themselves a font of unending energy to defend their version of truth.

The next stage is verbal abuse – but that bullet wasn’t ready to be fired from her gun. This was the first fight, and I needed to be taught to allow it first. It was just time to dip the toe in the water with “controlling dick,” and calling me a baby when I said I didn’t like it.

She would eventually apologize, only after I had done so adequately and at length. But then came lesson four – if you act upset about this tomorrow I will crush you. Any attempt to ever say that I was still a little peeved about a previous night’s behavior was met with anger about “holding things over her head,” and being “too sensitive.”

***

Emptying the Vessel

From then on, leaving me at the house anytime I dared disagree with her became common. She expressed displeasure with who I was at every turn. She hated the “white trash” food that I ate. So she took control of the cooking, but there was very little eating going on. I had already started running and getting into shape during the past year, had cut down to a lean 175 and was in my prime, but there was no such thing as too thin for her. My doctor saw me weeks into her stay and told me that I was dangerously underweight. I could not afford to get any slimmer.

I was raised by a long line of those with a sweet tooth – fresh baked cookies and brownies being love from my grandmother and mother. Now I kept none of it in the house and politely declined desert at family gatherings – of which our attendance was both brief and rare. When we did attend, she would stay quiet and keep leaving the room until her discomfort was being announced with a bullhorn and we would a leave.

Along with the rules about eating, she took over music next. I had been a musician from age 16-23, and ended up touring and recording two albums. It was something I was quite proud of and always wanted to share with my daughters – but it was not to be talked about around her. Any reminder of a life before or without her was out of bounds. She played bass in her ex-boyfriend’s band, a fact she talked about all the time – but any attempt to join the conversation with stories of my own found the subject quickly changed.

Suffice to say, music was central to the core of my being – both of my own creation and in listening to albums of others. Half of my teenage years were experienced with headphones on. The first time I tried to send her music that I said reminded me of her she ran it down as “white trash.” Then she started running down every band I liked and genre I enjoyed until I stopped bothering listening to anything I wanted to altogether.

She would still always ask what I wanted to listen to in the car or at the house, wait for me to say “I don’t care, pick what you want,” (correct answer) and then play what she wanted.

Conversations about music were quickly off the menu too, even though you would expect the topic natural for two musicians. What I liked was always wrong and always trash. Any attempt to disagree led to a fight. We once had an explosive three hour fight because I had the audacity to claim Johnny Cash was on par with Waylon Jennings. This included a public display of stomping out of the bar we were at and screaming at me all the way down the street.

I didn’t listen to the right music. And God help me if I didn’t know the exact lyrics of some (god-awful) Canadian hippy schlock or obscure hipster album. Then I was little more than uncultured swine next to her and her refined palate.

My hobbies went next.

She also hated video games, one of my go-to wind down hobbies. “I just don’t understand it,” she would say with shriveled nose. “It’s just such a waste of time. People should be creating. You’re so talented, why don’t you spend your time writing?” I already spent almost all of my time go where she wanted and doing as she pleased. The few minutes a week I could even steal away from her to try and play were met with enough huffing and puffing and stomping around the house to get me to quit.

My gamer buddies, another outlet of talking about life and blowing off steam now also removed from the equation. People stopped calling, stopped texting, and stopped including me in anything.

She asked me to pick a movie one night and then made fun of me and refused to watch it. She continued her rant to include anything else she thought I liked (even though I never asked her to watch it). Star Wars was stupid. Super hero crap was childish. Action movies were filled with sexism and tropes against women. Anything close to romantic – mindless garbage. She hated seeing romance in film more than anything else.

The only films worth watching were long depressive films about self-destructive women and psychotic artists. No comedies. No action. No sci-fi. No love – absolutely no love.

I was now staying as far away as I could from my friends, hobbies, music, and interests. Being emptied and remade in her image.

If your head isn’t spinning already – wait to hear her opinions on all of these things three years later as geek-chic takes the mainstream by force, and once the snake needed to shed its skin.

All I had left were my children.

How I made you I wrought you, I pulled you From war I labored you From cancer I cradled you And now

This is how I am repaid This is how I am repaid

Remember when I found you The miseries that hounded you And I gave you motion Anointed with lotions And now

This is how I am repaid This is how I am repaid

Repaid – The Decemberists

***

Let Me Take the Last of You

She would hide in the bedroom with the door closed half the time when they came to visit. I guess there is nothing scarier than 6 and 9 year old girls.

Desperate to please her and give her a chance (rather than being dismissive as could have easily been the case), they welcomed her with open arms. Emily paid them as little mind as possible – unless of course, they were doing what she wanted to do. So they did what she wanted them to, but even then she tired quickly and played favorites pit them against each other. She adored my oldest daughter (a pleaser like myself) and was “annoyed” by my youngest.

This continues to be the hardest part to write about. Editing now, and trying to go through it again just makes me want to quit. The mental images of their confused and scared faces and the damage that was done to them is more than I can bear.

They did their best to spend time with me in the most uncomfortable situation possible. Emily didn’t want them there and meals were a nightmare. I found out later that they were sneaking crackers into their bags so that they would have something to eat. At home they were complaining about how “Dad never had any food.” I always stayed up late with them, wanting to spend every minute I could showing them some old movie or laughing over game together – but now I was ushering them off to bed as early as possible to escape the frigid environment created by Emily . She would go from welcoming to stomping around the house as the night wore on, letting me know that her patience for them was up.

As I tried to wrap up the divorce and manage co-parenting, Emily made it worse as much as she could. The kids were picked up early several times due to fighting, and once because Emily had left the home and I needed to go and find her. It was all about making me so uncomfortable with them around that I would seek to have them over less and less. And it was working – not because I didn’t want to see them, but because I couldn’t take the stress and pressure of regulating them and Emily’s moods.

After one fight and early pick up, Emily went out on the porch to verbally assault my ex in front of my daughters for being such a horrible mother.

How could I handle all of this? I couldn’t. The new relationship shininess wore off quickly and Emily was just too volatile. She craved me one moment and avoided me the next. She talked positively about the children and then treated them like shit when they were there.

This entire first period did not last long, and was a little less than six weeks. She was too unnerved by the move and without her usual cabal of followers and becoming increasingly unstable. Though she continued to try to compensate by being sweet in between – the behavior was too bizarre to me and she had shown her true self too quickly for me to allow it. The stark contrast between who she had been months before and this allowed it to continue past two weeks, but it was too much to go on much longer.

This was the time I learned lesson five – I will not tolerate anything that annoys me. My food, clothes, hobbies, and friends were changed. The next change was something that still affects me to this day – her hatred of any noise. She was enraged by the sound of the air conditioner or the sound of a computer fan. Traffic or a barking dog could ruin an entire day. It was approaching the heat of the summer and the air needed to be on. The temperatures inside the house soared over 90 so that she wouldn’t be annoyed by the sound of it running.

It was on one such day after ranting about how awful Kansas because of the heat followed my raging about the sound of the air conditioner that she fled the house again.

She left her phone was on the counter and unlocked, face up. Placed there “on accident” for me to find. After she had agreed to stop talking to her ex, a string of texts and calls showed that she never had. My heart broke again as I read through their private and romantic conversations that had gone on when I was gone and in secret when I was sitting right next to her. One single line from one conversation with him caught my eye “At least you don’t have children.”

I was pissed.

When she came home I told her exactly what I thought of her and her behavior for the first time without holding back or worrying about reprisal. I told her that she had to leave. She apologized and put up no resistance, planning to leave in the next few days. She couldn’t just leave, she needed me to kick her out – that had to be the narrative she could play to her family and friends (so none of it was her fault, nothing can ever be a narcissist’s fault) and so that she could continue to manipulate me.

Then, like flipping a switch she went back to being the sweet girl from the letter. She apologized and tried to make each day wonderful. Her own bizarre nature went through every phase throughout those 72 hours. She encouraged me to go home and work things out with the kids mother. She ordered gifts for me to arrive once she left. She put in place a respectful plan to keep our matter private and remain friends.

The contrast began to rip out my soul in a fury of confusion and regret.

The last night she finally pushed it too far – she had dressed up formally in a black dress, and spent hours on herself in the bathroom trying to look perfect for our last night together. Manufacturing some incredible last experience – caught off guard and oblivious when she realized how terribly it upset me. She was fully willing to make a grand gesture and seduce me the night before returning to another man, and saw nothing wrong with this. I was in agony.

The next morning she worked up some tears about leaving, but she sang in the shower. I will never forget that sound of her happily singing songs loved by her and her ex as she excitedly got around to return to him and I endured each horrific second it took her to finally leave. She couldn’t leave me without first doing a couple hours of hair and makeup though. She also refused to take half her stuff, which I now know is a effective tradition of hers. Leave enough stuff to torture them with memories when you go, and give reason enough to return.

None of it was real. I was young and naive and just not aware that people were even capable of such things.

This was all only days old for me, and my head was spinning to quickly to see any of it clearly. She had planned for weeks to go back to her boyfriend. The execution of everything that happened that last few days was meticulously played out, and I played my part perfectly.

She couldn’t take the kids or the drop in lifestyle. Her ex provided her money, a big house in a historic district, and riding around in a Mercedes to the grocery store. But being an narcissist, it all needed to fit a story to play everyone involved perfectly. I had to kick her out so that she had a sob story to peddle to the ex. She needed the “nowhere else to go” to be (sorta) real.

Things also needed to appear amicable between us when she left – to leave that little bit of doubt, and if nothing else, to stomp on my heart as much as she could on the way out the door. A proper revenge for breaking up with her at the age of 16. And if things didn’t pan out with her ex, well – I would be left missing her rather than hating her. So she took pictures with me, left a lock of her hair and a flower, and gave one last kiss goodbye.

Then she was finally gone.

I didn’t know that Emily was going back to her boyfriend. She had promised exactly the opposite. She just needed to go home back to her family that she missed. She needed to work on herself. For once, Emily kept putting the focus and blame on herself, apologizing and making it seem like it was best for involved. She even spent a long hour telling the girls goodbye at the park the day before she left. At the time I thought it was a kindness, even though it just broke their little hearts open all over again. There were so many promises of keeping in touch and being a friend.

The girls had now experienced the split of their parents and Emily leaving within the course of a year. The three of us were in pieces.

After a roller coaster of romance and hellfire, she was gone.

Of course all of the promises made were dismissed the minute she left the drive to the girls and to me. One was that she would not change the Facebook status for a couple weeks to avoid drama and give me some time to process without the news being public. Hours later she had already blasted our breakup across social media. She re-friended her ex right after. She had to be single when she re-friended and drove home to him.

Emily called to tell me she made it home safe two days later and lied for fifteen minutes about how much better this would be and how she would finally fix herself – while she got herself around to go out with her ex-boyfriend that night. I knew it too, just in the sound of her voice.

I cracked up that night, staying out too late and being late to pick up the girls the next morning – deep on a bender in a few locations. I felt so worthless and was falling completely apart. Being discarded and replaced by her ex, than man she had been cheating on me with was too much to bear. I had gotten myself straightened out, but then for a few days spent time sort of lost again. I drank too much, slept too little, and was not a good person to be around. Fortunately, it did not last long.

***

Part Four – Best Laid Plans

A Whole New You

After a few bad days, things began to improve back at home. My dad came over to help me fix the regulator on my grill. It was the first time I had really seen him in weeks. I told him how much better things were going to be. He tried not to show it too obviously, but he was relieved.

It was also the first time I had felt any sort of freedom. I have no idea how many cheeseburgers I ate that first week. My daughters recovered more quickly than I expected and we were able to start spending better time together. It wasn’t easy, the cost of the Emily’s brief stint in our lives being that my confidence in how to parent was cracked. I was now more strict with them about things I had not previously cared about. I had a hard time feeling settled or calm when they were around, the feelings of those intense few weeks still causing me to feel uneasy too much of the time. I could feel the temptation to blame them for her leaving. It wasn’t their fault, and it wasn’t mine for feeling that way. It was exactly the sort of turmoil Emily had hoped to create in me.

But life went on – and things did get better. I had gotten my dream job. An offer had come from the high school I had most wanted to teach at. I was already spending a lot of time that summer in my room getting things ready for the school year. I had such a sense of excitement and purpose for the first time in forever – based on myself rather than someone else.

The house I was renting had a flooding problem that the landlord refused to take care of – and so I moved out shortly after Emily left. Instead of a shack at a busy intersection I now had a beautiful brick ranch house with a lovely patio and backyard. It was in a neighborhood right across from the high school. My neighbors were kind and good people that made me feel welcome and helped me get adjusted. Aside from my one neighbor with a heavy Mrs. Robinson vibe that was always finding excuses for me to repair something at her place – life was quiet and calm. The girls and I finally found some peace.

I had money. Not a lot, but enough to finally live my life. I bought a mini-cooper, which I had wanted since watching The Italian Job as a kid. I now had transportation other than my motorcycle. I still took the bike on long drives in the park to clear my head, tinkering with it in the evenings as a hobby by modding out the shield and lights. I also took up running and was taking much better care of myself. By a few weeks in, I was hitting 2 to 3 miles a day. There were no hard feelings that a bunch of sweat and headphones jammed in my ears couldn’t satisfy. I started talking to friends and family again, and set my sights on the coming school year.

***

[sta_anchor id=”liessexandmeetinghalfway”]Lies, Sex, and Meeting Halfway[/sta_anchor]

Once I rose above the noise and confusion Just to get a glimpse beyond the illusion I was soaring ever higher, but I flew too high Though my eyes could see I still was a blind man Though my mind could think I still was a mad man I hear the voices when I’m dreamin’, I can hear them say

Carry on my wayward son For there’ll be peace when you are done Lay your weary head to rest Don’t you cry no more

Carry on Wayward Son – Kansas

It was the anthem of my rediscovery, on repeat as I ran each day. I was on the right path and doing well for myself for the first time in years. I had my own house, car, potential, and future.

But though my eyes could see I still was a blind man, and though I could think I still was a mad man. I just didn’t know it yet.

When you look back on something after a few years the entire thread of the narrative becomes so much more clear. I would almost be impressed if I didn’t live its madness – the intricacy and sinister perfection of the plot so well executed. I was on my way toward good things, and for a couple weeks did not hear from Emily. Then, late one night as I was talking to a new possible interest (I swear they can sense it somehow) the new message icon flashed on my screen. It was Emily.

I didn’t even open it at first, not wanting her to know that I was online or see that I read it right away. After waiting a couple hours, I opened it. Inside, she apologized profusely for her behavior while she was living with me. She admitted that she had come home and gone out with her ex- but said that it had been a disaster.

According to her, she had spent the afternoon at his house and then they had gone to dinner. She told me that he was rude to the waiter and that her eyes were opened to how awful he was – so she excused herself and went back to her mom’s place, letting him know that she was done with him for good. She never let him lay a finger on her and was disgusted at the thought. He hadn’t touched her since back before I ever flew out to see her the first time – honest.

Being near him had opened her eyes to how amazing of a person I was, and how mistaken she was to take that for granted. I was “kind” and “good” and treated people with respect.

I believed her. I let her have it a bit for lying to me about her ex and she took it, saying she deserved it. All she hoped was that we could repair our friendship, saying that knowing each other for 15 years was not something worth throwing away.

I kept on believing that account for years. Now, let me give you my own guess at what the real story was: She took her stuff to her boyfriend’s house, planning on just continuing on like nothing ever happened. She slept with him immediately, hoping to buy her way back in with sex. She found herself annoyed that he didn’t fall all over her with glee at her return, or that at dinner he set down some ground rules if she was going to stay. This enraged her. She verbally assaulted him until satisfied, made a big public show, and left. Narcissists don’t accept rules. Then she went home and looked me up on social media, and upon seeing the new and improved me (new house, job, and fancy car) and decided she had backed the wrong horse.

Or perhaps I wasn’t new and improved at all. Perhaps all I had done was in response to her abuse and criticism, and had now made myself a more worthy candidate in her eyes. I have no idea how the web is weaved. All I do know it that even to this day I think I was more in control than I actually was and making more decisions than I was actually making. The illusion of choice crafted so perfectly for me.

I did not immediately bite though. I was pissed at her for what she had said about my kids and for the lies. But I did agree to be friends, and the door was cracked open to her. Enough for her to weasel back in.

Let me say here that all people should know this one thing: You don’t have to be friends with anyone. You don’t have to be nice. You don’t need to keep appearances up. Don’t be friends with toxic people. It is NEVER worth it. I wish I had known that then, so that I could have walked away when I was least broken and hadn’t lost anything yet.

But I let her back inside my head under the guise of friendship.

She started messaging and emailing me frequently. I listened when she had a bad day or read something interesting, and her talk eventually became more and more about her feelings for me. They also became increasingly sexual.

There was another purpose behind the rekindling. Emily had been living with her mom since she split with her ex, and her mom had decided to move out of state. Her mom’s boyfriend, a much younger college professor, had gotten a job offer at another college and was taking it. Though I would guess that he had hoped she was staying behind since their relationship was not very serious, she had insisted on tagging along. Otherwise she would be without a place to live. The undeniable similarities between the way to two operate should be plainly obvious.

This would leave Emily without boyfriendless/homeless for the first time in her life. On the short term, she ended up moving into her mom’s art studio. It was not a residence, and she did not inform the owners. She slept in a closet and bathed in the sink of the public restroom at night. During the day she used the password for the floor below to steal internet to keep her job. Emily had a virtual job with an education company that she had held for years which helped her navigate wild swings in her living conditions and locations.

Though she liked to make it sound like she loved her bohemian existence, since Emily had her first taste of the good life back when she lived with her ex, she could not handle anything less. My new house and salary began to look incredibly appetizing.

So, she continued to apologize, send gifts, and write long love letters. We never fought. We did not have disagreements over the phone. She continued to increase offers of sex, saying that we had such great chemistry that we could at least keep things casual and be friends with benefits.

Sex was always her perfect weapon, though she was also violently defensive of her sexual past. Her best friends were ones that “didn’t judge her.” Anyone that had ever not approved her choices or her appetites, or even tried to slow her down was a “jealous bitch.”

She would tell me that her past “was behind her” and that she didn’t want to talk about it. She had changed.

She had already given me a detailed recount of her history when she first moved to Kansas. This included not being able to remember the number of partners – a few dozen was the guess. I really did not want to judge her, even still. It was not my business and did not want her to feel less than. The problem with all of this information being given to me was two-fold.

One, the salacious details were intended to scramble my thoughts further and make me want to “prove” myself worthy. It made me feel inadequate when she had moved in and like I had something to live up to. It made saying no less and less possible.

Two, it was not about female empowerment or freedom. She was a serial cheater and engaged in sex for either the thrill of risky encounters she could have or for power. Sex was what she used on everyone. I had to be in a place to not judge her so that I couldn’t criticize her for using people, since she wanted to start using me.

So to twist and confuse, she told me all of it. A hundred horrible movies to start playing in my brain on repeat.

She seduced those in relationships, and the best friends of her boyfriends. In years past she had starting sleeping with a youth pastor and scores of random people whenever she wanted attention. With almost everyone – she slept with them the day they met, hoping to put the hooks in quick. It rarely failed. Once, her neighbor had stopped her in the middle of it, saying that she was only using him. She had cried for a week. She told me all of this in the span of a single two hour conversation after we had first moved in together.

Stories of weird come-ons, threesomes that almost happened or that she or someone else wanted to happen, homosexual attractions and a multitude of other fetishes and experiences flowed out until I went pale. She was completely puzzled when I was turned off by her initial aggressiveness when we had first met again. Later, she became angry when I asked her to stop telling me about it. I didn’t want to know, but not being able to handle it meant not accepting her. So I asked, let, and allowed her to tell me all of it.

For me sex meant everything, and was a deep and sacred connection. I began to see it as naivety. I began to feel that I was wrong. If I was more experienced, like her, I wouldn’t have a problem with any of this. That was what she told me, and so it was what I began to believe. I saw intimacy and sex as something she couldn’t, so she intended to smash that.

When told all of these sordid details, a person has two options with how to react. One, would be to be to feel intimidated or disgusted and turn away from all of it, seeing it as just too foreign from oneself. The other option is to throw oneself headfirst into all of it, to prove that you can handle anything.

With my idealized view of her, I cared about how she saw me. So I chose to throw myself into her worldview of sex and intimacy. I felt like I had been naive, and I needed to start being more open and less serious about any of it. I challenged her frequently when she had first moved and first told me these things, but after she left and went back to her ex I decided that the problem must have been with me and the way I saw things.

Sex is about what is comfortable for you and what is consensual and mutually pleasurable. I wasn’t naive to see it as reserved for imitate relationships. I was naive for failing to understand that a casual approach to sex did not make one “better” or “elevated.” It was different, but it wasn’t wrong. Being cheated on made me feel like I was, and I was seeking to change that.

From early on she questioned my viewpoints on sex and physical love constantly. By the time we were talking again, the guise of intimacy being at all important disappeared completely. She wasn’t suggesting that we get back together. She wanted me to just have a more casual relationship, a friends with benefits situation that would work better than living near each other. We already had great chemistry, so it would be an arrangement that would benefit us both.

This of course would also be a means of preventing me from seeing anyone or moving on, but also keep her from any real or outward attachment to me.

The flirting and the sweetness, attached to the doubt she had left when she did and the illusion that from this distance I was in control made me amicable. My dad warned me against it once, but tried not to interfere – without her even having to ask, the former training kicked in and I slowly stopped talking to friends and family as I increasingly talked only to her. I didn’t even notice it happening all over again. I thought I was just avoiding drama by explaining myself to anyone of why I was speaking to her again. I was an adult and could do what I wanted.

The distance made me feel safe. I could quit anytime I wanted to.

I went to see her twice late that summer after I bought my mini-cooper. The first time was the weekend after I bought it. I was overjoyed at the freedom it brought back into my life, having been limited to town with only the motorcycle. The love-bombing phase was still in full effect, and nothing happened that seemed to raise any red flags – save one. She was overjoyed to see me and made every moment into some grand romance like the first time I had gone to see her.

Until…

It was late at night returning after only having eaten lunch that day. I said I was hungry and began looking for something to eat – of which the options were few in this Indiana town. I finally settled on swinging by a Sonic before heading back to the hotel. I could tell that something was wrong by the time I pulled up to order. Within five minutes she was hyperventilating and acting erratic – so I left at once. Leaving after I had placed my order but before it had arrived.

Back at the hotel she told me that the fumes on the road had bothered her, and I believed it, even though the reaction was clearly an anxiety attack. An hour later she confessed that she didn’t like being around all of the “white trash” food and that the smell made her sick.

I didn’t eat anything the rest of the night – I didn’t want to risk getting something from the vending machine and upsetting her. We had such a wonderful day, why risk ruining it?

“Love bombing” is a topic that you can read at length about from a multitude of other sources. My focus has been and will continue to be on the experience, rather than the clinical description of the disorder behind it – there are plenty of other materials which already cover this. But it must be mentioned as one of the key elements a narcissist uses to make abuse work.

They shower as much love, care, gifts, activities, sex, or any other thing they can think of on their target – whatever they find that works to keep them from leaving them. It causes severe confusion for the abused that sees both being catered to more intensely than in any other relationship prior, while also experiencing the worst treatment at other times. One cannot exist without the other. This trip was no exception. It was beautiful and memorable because it had to be. Besides the one slip, she needed to make me want her. She needed to know that I was back in her grasp.

It started small. When we agreed to meet “half way,” she picked a town that was a four hour drive for here and an eleven hour drive for me. I was irritated, but I went anyway, and didn’t complain. From there, and seeing how much I could be made to compromise, the sky was the limit.

Since I had kicked her out earlier that summer – almost the entirety of our communication was positive. So were our interactions and time together. She showed me new restaurants, new places, and we had the long intellectual conversations into the middle of the night I had craved. This change made it seem to me like she had only treated me the way she had a couple months ago due to culture shock, work stress, etc. She wasn’t really that way – or, she had truly seen the error of her ways (and my value) and changed.

The very minor instances like the attempted visit to Sonic above was an instance where her efforts to maintain the illusion collapsed. But it also provided opportunity to start testing the fences all over again. Eating was something she had been taught to fear since childhood, the abuse and eating disorders of mother and grandmother being brought to light around any cheeseburger – which meant that she would also need to control what a partner ate entirely. Her eating disorder must becomes theirs as well. So she had to see how I would act when deprived of food. I taught her that between being hungry and being with her, I would choose her.

On a base level, I was choosing her over even my own survival. A powerful message to the narcissist’s psyche.

It didn’t matter much to me though, because my investment was minimal. I still liked her and enjoyed spending time with her – but there was no thought of her moving back to Kansas. It was a loose long distance relationship. I held no thoughts about anything serious or long term. In fact, this allowed me time to work on myself and stay out of dating altogether. It was just casual fun and I was not in any danger.

***

[sta_anchor id=”anasideii”]An Aside II[/sta_anchor]

After Tara’s father passed we became inseparable. I helped her and her mother with housework, got to know all of her extended family, and even began spending the night out at her house quite often. It was not something my parents approved of, and there were rules surrounding it – but I stopped heeding any of them anyway, making it known that my taking care of her after that loss took precedence over anything that asked of me.

I forget about this fact sometimes, surprisingly. I feel so much guilt about the divorce and the broken hearts that I mostly just see myself as too young or too selfish or unstable to make it work. I blame embarrassment for being why I went through with a marriage that I didn’t want to – and yet there was also a 16 year old me standing over a grave, making a solemn vow to take care of somebody’s daughter. A promise I also made to her family.

A promise I stood over that same grave I cried over twelve years later and apologized for not being able to keep. I felt such a need to help, and I felt a responsibility to take on that superseded any plans I had for myself.

The day eventually came that this decision soured into bitterness, and the responsibility a source of anger. I thought that my reward would be to finally be happy – blaming her for not making me so and failing to acknowledge the many pains I left unresolved and my own weak sense of self I neglected and tried to win back through accolades and achievement.

Since my younger years included so much bullying and surviving of a different sort – I had a yearning for acceptance and for defending others. My dad once warned about the reality of standing up for others – not to stop me from standing up for people or confronting evils, but instead to try and teach me the reality that the novels and great films of the world were not reality.

The hero is seldom celebrated or thanked – and often ends up hated and friendless. To challenge the status quo is something that causes a person to stick out, which is a state that most avoid. I couldn’t understand it at the time, but he was trying to encourage me to listen to that internal drive to help or intervene – but accept that it would not make me happy as a result. Doing the right thing often leads to more heartache than it does peace.

I expected happiness as a reward for doing the right thing – which is why I never considered myself in the face of huge life choices. If I was selfless, and took care of people, I would be happy. I wasn’t.

Standing up against bullies made me a target. Challenging teachers made me an outcast. Questioning traditions for traditions sake made me a troublemaker. My brother’s experiences with the moves and new schools went so well and mine so poorly – not because of the moving itself, but because of who I was. He was always able to adapt and assimilate into any culture. I had no interest in doing so, nor did I let something wrong I saw slide.

I kept fighting, until I couldn’t remember what it felt like not to be at war.

It’s easier than facing yourself.

***

[sta_anchor id=”capitalizing”]Capitalizing, Comforting, and Cycling[/sta_anchor]

The casual nature of our relationship would not last. Something would blindside us both after I got back from the trip to Indiana. Late one afternoon I received a panicked phone call from her that would change the course of my entire life.

Emily had just found out that her brother (one of two and her closest sibling) had been molesting his niece multiple times over the past six months. His brother was his best friend, but that had not stopped him from assaulting his adopted daughter on multiple visits throughout the summer. They did everything together – so it was natural that he spent so much time staying with his brother’s family. The visits were a ruse, an opportunity to attack one of their children in their own home.

The family had just found out, but the matter was being kept quiet and dealt with internally. Emily was freaking out, both from the news and the fact that it was not being reported to the police. Emily had two half brothers (from her mother’s former marriage). Her father had a daughter from his first marriage. She was the only child of both parents in the home. Then it came out that her half-brother had also molested her half-sister years while they were growing up, and had raped her repeatedly.

After, he had engaged a full blown “sex addiction,” and had multiple affairs and multiple marriages. His job sent him around the country, where he had continued to cheat on his current wife and have affairs.

Emily’s mother wanted to focus on the fact that he had a problem and that he needed help. Turning him in wouldn’t accomplish anything for anyone. He was a victim.

Emily disagreed, and I did too – he had committed a crime, and a cushy therapist and escape from consequences to his high society life would only encourage repeat behavior – not to mention that sickening reality that the niece was probably not the first.

I asked the question that had to be asked – if it had also happened to Emily. She told me that she had no memory of anything, but that her ex-boyfriend had always been uncomfortable about them spending time together. Her brother liked to “wrestle” with her too much, and her ex had put to stop to it after witnessing it at one family holiday and becoming very uncomfortable.

It was heartbreaking and terrible, and I wanted to listen and provide advice when it was asked for, but it was an event I was removed from. I had never met these people beyond her mom and dad. It was not my issue to get involved in.

Then she told me that her period had just begun from the trauma. After some quick google-ing I told her that it made sense and tried to calm her. These things could happen with intense trauma. But she added another detail, saying that she had passed something when she went to the bathroom. She hadn’t just started her period; the stress had caused her to miscarry our child.

The terminology was key. “I think I may have been pregnant. There was something in the toilet.” She hadn’t tested herself, but we had seen each other just a few weeks ago. She let me connect the dots and see that the trauma had caused us to lose a child. Her brother had just killed our child.

I was no longer an observer or outside support, but involved and affected. The news cut through me like a knife. She had told me when we first met that she could not get pregnant – but she knew how much I wanted to have another child.

She had also told me that she had a miscarriage once while living with me in Kansas – which she didn’t even think was possible.

It had created a spark of hope