#54

I took a weekend, huh? Didn't plan it, but according to physics, making a double-post would naturally incline me towards taking two days off on a row.  And what I did (besides work, and stuff I'll get to later in the post) is make a present for you! You just have to give me seven dollars, first.

Paperback versions of my books! I made new covers so they would be different than the kindle versions and everything. Seven dollars. Seven dollars is, by my lights, a reasonable, honest, and round price, and if you give me seven of your dollars, I will love them forever. Six would have been too cute.

*

One reason I didn't make posts is, of course, immediately after I wrote about friendlessness and abandonment, people came out of the woodwork to make me feel loved and wanted. No one I know reads this blog because while I might mention offhand that I shit out a blog, I do not share links, or generate traffic by word of mouth*, so it was a classic case of screaming into the Void and the Void demonstrating that it contains a universe which can, at times, gently move one of its threads in order to make an idiot know that he is needlessly squaring his own misery.

So when I wrote that I have no friends, I was being way rough on myself and on my, you know, friends.

It would have been more precise to say that my oldest friends have scattered to the winds, some with the possibility of  eventual reunion and some most likely not. It would have been more precise to say that the friends I had made in the years when I was with my ex-betrothed were really mostly her friends, or so their general silence and uneasy tones towards me after I ended things (things were real bad) made me feel like they cared nothing for me. This was compounded by other factors, and when my next partner (a narcissist who had me cut everyone out of my life except for her and my parents, and she wouldn't have had me seeing them either if she'd had things entirely her way) started to get me acting so crazy last spring, I doubt those who did bear me affection and trust will ever speak to me again. Not that my shame would let me so much as meet their eyes, or in a couple of cases, that my fury and hurt would let words escape my locked throat. It wasn't all the narcissist! She needed something to work with, to twist and warp.

But there are a few people around these parts who it turns out still want to know me, who I was able to talk to and whose empathy and care for me, though tested, remains, and remains strong. I played Mario Kart with some of them on Friday night, and helped another couple work on a truck then sat down for real talk on Saturday night, and tomorrow or Tuesday I will see yet another for co-op games and real talk.

My outlook has morphed dramatically based on those hours, and it is difficult--raw enough to ooze--to express how much the words and gestures exchanged during those hours meant to me. The preceding paragraph doesn't sound like much, but it was everything. My last partner is still lurking in the back of my head, insisting that no one can be trusted, promising me that I am truly alone, that I am abandoned.

Not true.

Those who have had their lives turned upside down and inside out by a narcissist will understand what a knife through the heart of confidence and self-conception it is. I'm not a stupid dude. The inborn talent of the narcissist is turning one's own intelligence and empathy against the other sources of life in one's existence and directing them, and every other good thing, toward themselves alone. Then they get bored, or another supply for their narcissism catches their eye, or both, and you're lucky to get out alive.

In my case, when this lady found me, I had a car, a wardrobe, a regular amount of stuff, a library of books, several instruments and an amplifier, my name on a lease, a little money in my pocket, a job, and a broken heart. When I got away, I had no car, no home, no money, less than half the books I once did, and two bags of stuff--mostly the few clothes that remained to me--one box of papers and notebooks, my trumpet, my cornet, and my acoustic bass. I don't know where my heart is, even.

For now, now that I am out, there is only horror at myself, at the lies I fed myself; at the colossal imbecility of letting myself be abused in such a fashion, horror as every memory reveals poison, as every gesture and word turns to dross and the bloody game of it all has light thrown upon its dark heart. I had no idea, really, that a person could do this to another person. 

Ah, and the feeling like a fool. Call me what you will, but feeling like a fool is, to me, worse than any physical pain I have ever felt, and I have not led a sheltered life; I am the best of friends with all manner of pain.

Friends help.

*

I'll write more about friends tomorrow! I need to go to sleep, I slept like absolute nonsense last night.

If you've been fucked with by a narcissist, even if you are a narcissist, may God bless and keep you. I am so sorry.


--JL

*(edit) this has become untrue, I have told some folks about what I make and pointed them in this direction. So what.