Grjótagjá, Seegrotte

I licked your unclean asshole for at least 20 minutes the night before last- the least you can do is read this. As we deadbolt our doors to each other, for everything we ever went through our whole lives, hear me out and read this in its entirety. I will not insult you or hurt you, I will merely give you my point of view, my truth. I’m also not interested in getting you back, don’t worry.

My dear lost love. You kept having all kinds of preconceived notions about me, and making matters worse, you didn’t want to believe anything I said. Yet, between the two of us, I was never untruthful. I’m not trying to talk you out of anything- I don’t want to get back with you partly because right now you would only finish the job of destroying me (as much as I wish I could leave this whole fucking world behind sometimes). Again, if you ever felt anything at all for me, love or lust or hate, listen to me with your whole self one last time.

This is the first music I ever bought. In a Sears. I was 9.

I don’t know what grabbed me about it. Maybe because it sounded like a soothing lullaby…I was a girl that couldn’t realize how scared she always was, and I was having Sleep Paralysis episodes during those years. (I didn’t have a chance to tell you about that- they’re terrifying- look it up, it’s interesting.) You may have seen that previous photo of the Overkill 45- my brother bought that one the following year (the first record he bought was With a Little Luck- another soother). Btw, that’s the same brother who was so awful at Thanksgiving- the same brother I awoke to one night, around when ‘Eye In the Sky’ was on the radio. One night at the lake, my secretly troubled 12 year old brother stayed up to secretly drink himself nearly to passing out on our father’s alcohol and staggered to the bed where I, his secretly troubled 9 year old sister slept. I awoke in the middle of the night to see a horrifying zombie of my brother, swaying over me, holding his penis, pissing on me in the dark. Screaming, angry parents, “why?!” “he was drunk” “go back to sleep” and then the whole “it never happened” way of moving on that was the unwritten House Modus Operandi modeled and perpetuated by our parents. That episode and the family dynamic it took place in are icebergs that broke off of the ice sheet of bad shit I’ve experienced. (There’s been some tectonic shifting around here lately.) These experiences still resonate, still inform our behavior decades later-they’re very damaging.

Now, for a moment, let’s go to yesterday morning before work:

8:00AM Saturday morning 2/12/22

At least last night I was relatively prepared for what went down. That made a big difference and softened the blow. I knew that he tended to make impulsive decisions, significant and insignificant, without considering how they might affect other people emotionally.

So last night, he did it again to me- drunk, but quite lucid as always, he talked about how I belong to him, how I would be his girlfriend, told me he loved me, only to suddenly make me get out of bed 3 hours later at nearly 2:30AM so that he could surprise me by dumping me off like a bag of garbage after a curious, brief hoverboard session (which seems to have served as a decoy activity).

I was looking forward to waking up with him in the morning…like before. But apparently, he wasn’t. That hurts- so much.

He won’t ever admit this, but for a good while now he’s put verbal and nonverbal messages across to me on his posts, which he knows I read. He mostly never admits in person that he reads anything I’ve written, but sometimes my details were responded to, replied to, usually with un-captioned images or songs. Easy for him to deny later, which he’s done. This is called gaslighting. A hallmark of the pathological narcissist.

To make this pain stop for good, I have to stop looking.

1:00 PM- at work, during lunch

I realized this morning that I must have left my glasses and necklace at his house. I’m not surprised- when the person you were just sleeping next to moments ago tells you to get up and pull your clothes on in the dark because “I want to show you something” at 2:30 AM…you may forget and leave something behind. I don’t need them back- I have other pairs and they weren’t expensive. He can keep them or do whatever he wants with them- I don’t expect him to return them, & Lord knows I’m not getting in touch with him again. I’ll miss that necklace a lot, but it’s ok, because I have to stay away from that man. Who knows how he feels at the sight of these things, wherever they are- probably in his room- he may be pissed, thinking I did it purposefully. Which isn’t true, but for some reason he doesn’t believe anything I say. Strange & hypocritical behavior, seeing that he is the one, of the two of us, who compulsively lies. I’ve been nothing but truthful with him, which is a big part of building trust, and I had nothing to hide. I was up front honest from the beginning. Since he isn’t able to empathize, he isn’t able to share someone else’s feelings- which is different from sympathy, by the way-

“Sympathy often involves a lot of judgement. Empathy has none. Sympathy involves understanding from your own perspective. Empathy involves putting yourself in the other person’s shoes and understanding WHY they may have these particular feelings. In becoming aware of the root cause of why a person feels the way they do, we can better understand…

I have to say: I’m really worried about him. Believe it or not, I’m not really angry at him for how he ended last night- even though it was certainly a shitty thing to do and didn’t make me feel good at all. I’m mostly worried and concerned for him. He seemed very depressed, scared, and he seemed broken.

I should mention that I’m speaking only as an observant, intuitive, reasonably intelligent 48 year old woman that knows and cares about him and I’ve had a fuckton of up-close life experiences with the clinically depressed, the scared, and the broken (both in my family and out). I also grew up surrounded with adult medical professionals- well, not surrounded- they weren’t around much, but when they were, all things medical tended to dominate conversations. All my life I found it all very interesting, thank goodness. I am not a doctor by a fuckin long shot- but I’m more informed than your typical civilian. He showed nothing but contempt for the psychiatric care I was getting last spring- he seemed glad I was recovering, but he didn’t agree with their treatment for some reason, even though it’s all on-target, boilerplate, current-best-practices, peer-reviewed-evidence-based science of the always-evolving treatment of mental illness. At the time, he spoke of it as though it was Scientology. But I wish he would get some of that support, and most importantly: accept that support. Because I heard and saw some concerning shit last night. He was cynical and despondent, full of grief, anger, pain, and fear, all of it sealed up, like one of those massive underground lakes of immeasurable depth hidden deep in mountain ranges and caves. And elsewhere.

I’m worried he’s going to have a stroke or heart attack or do something reckless and destroy himself.

They can be very beautiful and very dangerous. He knows this- he said he’s been cave diving.

One detail of many, for example: the ongoing vomiting concerns me. That’s not okay. He’s under stress from different directions. He keeps descending, he’s seemed more lonely and strained and frayed each time I’ve seen him, yet he keeps himself unavailable behind a literal and figurative closed door. It’s very hard to watch someone you love so much sink into more and more suffering. He knows that very, very well. He’s currently being haunted by it.

6:00 PM, after work

Well, that was a surprise. He brought my glasses and necklace back while I was at work, sticking them on my garage door. I wonder if he tried my front door, to see if I was home. But he may not have heard me when I told him where that door was- he was already moving, dying to get away from this lone woman, this human being he was dropping like a hot Chernobyl potato at 3:30 in the morning. I wish I could thank him for returning my things, but he won’t let me. And I still suspect he thinks I left them on purpose. He seems to expect subterfuge from all others, as a default. And a defense. But I fell in love with him- I care about him- I don’t want to be controlling and manipulative, and I’m not. So it hurts that he thinks I would do shit like that. But that’s what he does. He hurts. Because he’s full of hurt.

Today, Sunday 2/13/22, 1:00 PM

And here we are. The day before Valentines Day. And the cycle completes- the posts show up on your Facebook. You paint me as the bad guy, the giver of pain, lies, insulting behavior, manipulation, usury, all of it. All the things you did to me, you ascribe to me instead. People like you do that, consciously or not, to keep from feeling bad about being that shitty and that mean to innocent people. And to make themselves feel better, as well as to deflect responsibility for their actions. They’re always running away from their own behavior, their own deeds, or projecting those deeds on others, and I’ve seen you do a lot of that, firsthand.

Ensnare with considerable charm, then devalue, then dump- that’s the pattern. It’s not just you alone, its a behavior pattern of people with that disorder. The cause of your behavior pattern is not your fault, but your actual choices, your actions, that inflict non consensual pain on others- that is your fault.

And when you push people over the edge with your abuse and they retaliate or stand up for themselves, your own responsibility for the situation is invisible to you, and you can only perceive them ‘lashing out’ at you. So you get to think they’re the bad one, not you. That’s what’s been playing out with you and I over and over again.

People with that disorder are also very good at drawing the objects of their attention back to them insidiously and in more forthright ways. They get to keep feeling better by attracting the other, then diminishing the other, then discarding them.

Everyone who knows me, for a long time or not, trusts me. You never met anyone who knows me, though. If you did, it might have helped you to trust me. If you had asked any of them about me, they would have told you for hours how safe, caring, loving, and trusting I am, among other nice things they’ve kindly told me. When I told anyone about the kind of hurtful things you thought I was capable of, they mostly laughed like hell at the absurdity of such a notion, and a minority of them wanted to beat the shit out of you for the way you treated me. You may be thinking ‘but hey, you’re the Destroyer, you dropped in and fucked everything up and slapped me’. The fact that you try to blame me for delivering consequences to you, the consequences of your scores of lies and betrayal, is another symptom, another hallmark of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (which is frequently concurrent with other disorders, including Antisocial Personality Disorder). And denying that you might have that- denying a perfectly plausible explanation- denying the possibility that you might be wrong- denying scientific information- denying products of proper critical thinking- does it sound familiar? None of us are immune to Trump-supporter-like behavior outside of politics, neither you nor I. It’s a dangerous thing. Why am I telling you all this? No, I’m not trying to get back at you or destroy you or tear you down or hurt you. Please listen, dear love, because I love you:

You deserve to not have to bear the pain and suffering that you compulsively bring on yourself. You deserve proper treatment and care. You deserve to forge true connections with fellow humans; positive connections both of you enjoy that build on mutual trust and respect as well as chemistry. These are connections that can grow into relationships of all kinds that properly support and benefit each person. These are relationships that are not based on false perceptions, or on fulfilling a compulsive, pathological need or drive.

My fierce, lightning-eyed darling: I say this out of experience, in addition to accepting the current science.

My own disorder/s are much more common and garden-variety in comparison. Major Depression, C/PTSD, Anxiety, blah blah. Yours is much more rare, although the research shows your numbers have been increasing steadily over time. But they both develop, with variations, from the same kinds of emotional damage or physiological conditions. Nobody shares the same childhood, not even siblings in the same house. Because nobody shares the exact physical chemical makeup, because each person has a different point of view, different intellect, and each person plays a different part. People evolve differently from the same kind of damage over time, adapting in different directions. Some had enough good environmental factors to counteract the damage, and they’re ok. Some may not be so fortunate, through no fault of their own, and develop a disorder as a result- it’s a maladaptive reaction to having to accommodate more damage than we could withstand, in order to survive.

You and I share a lot of commonalities in our background, which is interesting. And we both have a good amount of time lived to look over and judge what behaviors are long term patterns. I wanted to not be haunted by how inferior, how unloved, how lacking I always felt. no matter how hard I tried. Medications helped, but they weren’t enough to stop the behavior patterns. My doctors advised it, and I decided to try adding cognitive behavioral therapy. Slow and difficult treatment, forming new neural pathways, but compared to medication alone, it’s been vastly more effective in a fraction of the time, in ways that are self-sustaining. I was able to recognize that my relationship with my husband wasn’t working the way it used to for either of us, and that I was trying to convince myself I was ok pleasing everyone else over myself, who didn’t deserve such things, maybe didn’t deserve to live.

It’s challenging though, because sometimes people will treat you like you’re worthless, so you feel worthless because you’re used to feeling worthless instead of recognizing that they don’t have the right to do that to you. And that you’re not worthless. The brain is not a plaster cast- new neural pathways can be constructed that work better than the ones you have in place currently that were constructed a long time ago and are not working anymore. It’s not some cure-all trendy bullshit. I still feel shitty a lot, but I’ve been able to change my life for the better in several concrete ways. I’m not always going to feel like this.

As a result of all the work I’ve done, today when I read how you were coloring me as the one at fault in our relationship, it hurt very much; however, today I did not feel like I was unloveable and worthless as a result of being treated as such by you. Instead, I remembered that you try to tear me down because you are compelled to, because of the way you adapted, not because of who or what I am. I remembered that the truth of the matter was not what you were saying, for various reasons I’ve gone over. I both know and accept what the actual truth is about what happened between us. I hope you do too, either right now in your gut, or in the future.

You deserve a better life, and you deserve to be happy. I want that for you- I love you, but you can only keep hurting me in your current state, and that is not my fault. It’s too bad you couldn’t empathize with what happened between my ex-husband and me. You never could, and it kicked up your overactive suspicions and old behavior patterns. You couldn’t put yourself in our situation and understand what we were feeling- you couldn’t empathize. So to be ‘safe’, rather than trust me, which was too scary for you, you developed your own faulty perceptions, and you told yourself we were lying somehow. And you wouldn’t hear any more from the people actually experiencing that relationship. You let your suspicions fester, and you let them undercut everything about me. Ruining me for you, ruining a beautiful opportunity for you to be happy with me. My belief is stronger now in the truth that I am a beautiful, caring, insightful, loving, funny, smart, imaginative, interesting, intelligent, intellectual, graceful, generous, creative, and talented woman who is not to be exploited, mistreated, or underestimated. I admit I have flaws- but that’s to be expected, seeing as how I’m a human being and all. Flaws don’t make a person weak or worthless. How we deal with our flaws shows our strength and worth.

I love you. I can’t be with you, but I’ll always love you. I wish you could have known what you had while you still had it, and that you might have used your intimidating intelligence to see what the evidence was telling you. But that’s the rat-bastard that mental illness is.

You’re smart enough to manifest the impressive castles you are building in the air. Smart enough to take proper care of yourself. Smart enough to construct new, better neural pathways and connections. Smart enough to treat yourself and others better.

Smart enough to recognize the truth.

I love you, no matter what- that’s how love operates. Thank you for the lovely times you let us have. Thank you for the times you made me feel delicious, attractive, and desirable. It was intoxicating. Thank you for all the songs. Thank you for the beautiful things you wrote about me. Thank you for being intellectually stimulating. Thank you for all the intoxicants you shared.

Thank you for sharing what you were able to share with me. I’ll appreciate all those wonderful things.

I hope you can think of me with truth and love, and know that I do love you and always did. And I always will.

Love,

Amy