dial-up-heart

[dial-up-heart]

The way forward is together

I thought this was going to be easy. I'm not sure what I really thought because what I did is crazy. There are no blueprints for what I did and what I'm doing now. I don't really need that anyway because I like solving puzzles. I am transcendent when it comes to unravelling knots in delicate necklace chains. For years, I was unable to unravel my own Gordian knot, even though I made my fingers bloody trying.

As you're no doubt aware by now, the knot is unravelling, albeit slowly. I am gaining control and confidence over parts of my personality that weren't fully developed. One thing I've learned is I don't need anyone to fix me. I need someone to walk steady beside me while I find my own footing. I don't need anyone to be perfect because I certainly am not. I don't want perfect, I want authentic and genuine. I want to slide into an old pair of jeans and find $20 in the pocket.

Trust has never been a problem for me because I'm pure at heart. I treat people well because I'm a good person. I can only control how I treat other people, not how they treat me. It's important to be kind to people even when it's not being returned. People notice and it matters. It can be very hard once trust has been broken a few times to be able to trust someone new. It's easier sometimes to feel safe and not open yourself up to something that may have hurt you in the past. I have been through it a few times.

I'm buoyant. I rise above and I overcome.

I'm going through the biggest challenge of my life. I'm not scared or nervous, I'm aspirational. I see the path ahead and I can't wait to walk it. I don't need anyone to carry me, I don't need anyone to fix me. I don't need anyone perfect. I need a presence I can lean on when things get heavy. When I falter and lose my footing, I need to know I'm not walking alone.

That is also what I am offering. I've never been able to truly offer that to another person before. I kind of thought I knew what that meant but that was just another self-delusion dressed up as love. I hadn’t yet found steadiness in myself. I only ever got brief flashes of it, performed for approval, anchored in fear. I now know what it means to hold presence. Not to chase, not to fix, not to swoop in and save. I know how to stand still and stay because I've finally found the calm within myself and my grip on it is tight.

We don’t always need someone to carry us. Sometimes we just need someone who will walk beside us while we relearn how to walk. No hand-holding, no pulling, no coaxing. Someone who stays close enough that the silence doesn’t feel like a void.

I have been carrying around my past like glass. I held it tight with both hands, afraid that if I loosened my grip it would shatter and there would be no one around to help me pick up the pieces. I spent so much energy gripping the glass that I forgot to let anyone in. I kept connection out of reach because if I let someone in maybe the glass would shatter and cut me all to pieces.

I'm no longer gripping it so tightly anymore. I've learned to trust that if I set the pieces down, I can sort them out. I can let someone sit beside me while I figure it out.

I can let someone sit beside me, not to help me put the pieces back together, not to tell me how to do it. But just to sit beside me while I do it myself. To provide a calm, reassuring presence that someone believes in me, because they know I can do it.

It doesn't require me to perform tasks I cannot do. It doesn't require me to offer things I can't offer. It just asks me to show up, to be a steady presence. I know how to do that now. I know the path forward and the pace no longer matters.

The way forward isn't fast. It's together.

[dial-up-heart]

I've finally arrived

A few months ago something happened to me. Something had already been happening for a while, but I didn't know what it was, or why, I just knew something was different. I was different, or I was becoming that way. I was depressed and married and now I'm no longer depressed and getting a divorce. I was under the thumb of an nparent and now I'm not.

The analogy I arrived at was a run of dominoes falling. Some dominoes were larger than others. When a large domino fell, several of the smaller ones in front were also knocked down. So much was happening all at once. I was gaining confidence through my performance at work. I was listening to old music that reminded me of a better time in my life. A woman who I had a crush on was starting to pay attention to me. Then my stepdad died and I saw an opening. I saw a way to get out from under it all and get what I truly wanted out of life.

My stepdad died on a Friday. By Monday, I had decided to move in with my mom and leave my wife. It was an agonizing decision in part because I was in a period of massive uncertainty. I had spent a couple of days already working over something else in my mind. I had developed a crush on a work friend. We didn't work the same shifts on in the same department, but she was beautiful and charismatic. I was jealous, as every other person at work approached her like family except me. She cut up with everyone, but I didn't know a lot about her yet.

I've never had success with these things in the past, so I never even thought about trying. She's beautiful and friendly, so I know men hit on her constantly. I didn't even know if she had someone in her life, although I suspected she didn't. One day someone told me she had sold a turkey and that was kind of a wake-up call that I needed to find a way to get to know her because everyone else did. It was very hard because any time we talked it was in passing. Or she would walk away from me after a second. I have a lot of anxiety, so naturally I thought she wasn't even interested in being work friends.

One day she stopped me and complimented me and I didn't even realize she was paying attention. It was touching. It gave me a boost of confidence. Because I was in such a rut I started obsessing as I always used to do. But this time things were different. A process was already underway inside my own personality. Every day I would have a reset, like a bobber on a fishing line, no matter how far I sank from my own spiraling anxiety, I would rise to the surface. When I saw her, things were fresh again, and my anxiety would fade. It made my personality more magnetic because the one element I had always been missing was slowly coming into focus: confidence.

When an nparent makes all your decisions for you, you never have the room to gain your own confidence. When your dad swoops in and prevents you from failing, you never learn from your own mistakes, proving to yourself that you can navigate the world around you.

This is going to sound crazy because it is. However, it will give you a good idea of the mental state that I was in at the time. I asked myself a question, and I wrestled it for two days. If this woman is interested in me, am I prepared to throw out my entire life: my wife, my house, my job to make a life with her if I believe that is the path to true happiness. The answer I arrived at was 'yes I am'.

I didn't know how to make any of it happen but I was ready for a change. It's not normal or maybe realistic to make a decision like that. I told myself that if she was not truly interested, it would be okay. At least I tried. I would have my answer either way and could deal with that. If she wasn't interested, I was also okay with just figuring everything out alone. I was starting to arrive.

I was lucky, not everyone is. I'm privileged, incredibly so. I had an escape hatch, a place where I could go to both avoid double rent payments and seek psychological refuge and comfort. I moved in with my mother because her husband died. I had to find a way to help her because she's never lived alone her whole life. It was a perfect set of circumstances. I told myself that everything was happening for a reason. in the world of cliches this one might be king. The phrase lets you off the hook. You don't have to be responsible for your own actions if there is an invisible guiding hand. I had always dismissed fatalism because it removes your agency. It's ironic for me to say this now because I never had agency to begin with. I may not have had agency during my depression but I was a superb liar, most of all to myself.

I became comvinced that I had to embrace the cliche. Too many stars were aligning. You simply do not get a better chance to leave a marriage scot-free like I did. I told you I was immensely privileged. I decided to use it for once instead of doing everything myself. I'm also Gen X which we'll get into in a future post. I told my Mom that we could help each other and that it would be good for both of us. It was true then and it's true now. We are getting stuff done around the house that she wrote off as being possible. On Monday night at 7 pm, I finally arrived at the decision to leave. Twenty-four hours later my mom agreed and by 9 am the next day I was moved in.

Things have been crazy in my life for a long time. I was searching for happiness in all the wrong places. I didn't even know what it was, much less where to start looking for it. Then one day, so many things dropped into my lap at once I had no other choice than to think that maybe all this *was* happening for a reason. It's not an easy conclusion to arrive at for someone analytical like me.

Now I see it as just another remnant of a past life to discard. I'm building a new life. Most people don't get that chance. One of the best decisions I've ever made was to leverage that privilege while it was still available to me. I had an epiphany. And I acted on it.

I'm building a new life with the help of two women. One of them gave me life 52 years ago. One of them is helping rebuild a sustainable life so that we can have a future together. I've always been emotionally intelligent but never available. I've always been present in body but never in spirit. I've always been late to the party because if I didn't arrive perfectly no one would ever like me.

I'm building a new life now. Some people are helping me, they're making it easier. But I'm the one building. I'm confident and emotionally available now. I have agency and autonomy.

And I've finally arrived.

[dial-up-heart]

Why I left my wife

When I met my wife, I thought it was a storybook. We went to high school and were in many of the same classes. At the time, I had a crush on a girl who would go on to marry one of the most famous athletes in state university history. Indeed, he has won multiple World Series and is in the MLB Hall of Fame. That is the bar I set for myself because my upbringing required me to reach for unobtainable standards of perfection.

I never noticed women who would have been a perfect match for me. I might have even met one who could have helped bring me out of this earlier. But even at the age of 38 I still didn't have enough life experiences to realize any of the things that are dawning on me now. Don't ever go into business with an nparent because then there will be no area of your life they don't have control over.

Things were excellent until she moved in. Later she would tell me her dad told her she was making a mistake moving in without first being married. I needed a roommate to help me pay the mortgage on a 3000 sq ft home. She lived 30 min away. We had both found each other at a period in our lives when both of us had given up on ever finding someone. Somehow I'm getting a second chance on that very same thing, and the only conclusion I can come to is that God is blessing me despite all I've ever done to distance myself from Him. I just do not know what else to think about the person he's sending me today. She's everything my wife never was, everything she never could be.

I was devastated when my wife cheated. The first person I ran to was my nparent, my stepmother. That was a huge mistake, but I didn't yet have any strategies for dealing with roadblocks in my life. I don't remember everything that happened because to be honest, I was taking a lot of drugs at the time to shut my mind off so I could get through everything. The decision I arrived at was that I would have to find a way to cope with it, make my peace with it, and move on. At the time, my stepmom was telling me that I was not allowed to hang out at a sports bar with my friends because we also owned a sports bar. What would people say if they saw me there?

In the middle of everything I was going through, my stepmother was controlling my physical movements. At the same time, she was ambushing me at work. I worked in a restaurant as a manager and she would drop by unannounced to eat and visit with me. Each time, she urged me to get out of the restaurant and into a job at a health insurance company. If you know anything about me you'll know that I think health insurance is immoral. So the irony was delicious. She never listened when I told her I wouldn't be happy doing that because my happiness was never a concern of hers. Even when I started parking my car half a mile away, she would still drop by. I hid in the kitchen for an hour each time.

Eventually, enough time went by that the hurt from the cheating faded into background noise. But it did have an effect on our sex life. My wife was more sexually experienced than I was. She had a mental condition that I would later learn had one side effect: promiscuity. A disproportionate amount of experience is usually not even a concern when two people love each other because each one is willing to make sacrifices for the other. That's not what happened to me, and I didn't have a way to process it. I don't remember the words she used, but the gist was this, "I'm not here to help you get caught up sexually". It was hurtful. Why wouldn't you do that for your partner?

Not long after, things fell apart entirely, and we entered the dead bedroom phase of the marriage. In the modern age, being intimate is another strategy, it's an investment in yourself and your partner. I hadn't yet opened an investment account with myself so I made excuses. She works third shift, I work first, so there isn't time. You have to sleep in separate bedrooms when you're on those schedules. On our nights off, she's asleep in the chair, so sex before bed is out of the question. How are you going to ever find time for it when she already told you she's not here to coach you up sexually? Our sex life was good when it existed, but it died way before the marriage did.

A few months ago I started thinking, 'hey, what would it be like if I lived in an apartment by myself and I didn't have to deal with any of this when I come home.?' We would sometimes take separate vacations due to new jobs, old dogs you can't board, or other issues. When she was gone I was really lonely, so it never went any further than the idea stage.

When she came to me one day with a plunger and said her toilet was stopped up and had been so for two days, I raised an eyebrow. When I went in and barely put pressure on the plunger and released the clog, an air raid siren started going off in my head. When her shower handle fell off, and I put it back on, that was another siren. When she brought me the handle a second time, my inner voice started screaming.

I've always had a problem with procrastination because I was depressed. But she did something that made even me stand up and take notice. Her tire developed a slow leak which got worse over time. To avoid the air pump at the gas station, she bought one off Amazon. She started pumping the tire each day before work. Now she's doing it before and after work, now three times daily. Eventually the tire was flat in the driveway. I was off work, and I said to myself: she's going to call out of work and stay here with me all day on my day off. So I pumped the tire, charged the pump up again, and drained the battery again. It was just enough to get the tire full so she would go to work. The next day when it was flat I had to call a tow truck for her to take the car to get fixed. Then I had to Venmo her $50 to cover it. She repaid me, but the following Saturday she door-dashed $50 worth of gourmet cupcakes. 6 of them for $50.

I found about 2 dozen spoons in the sink drainer one morning and was so confused, until I saw two empty jars of cookie butter she had gotten from Amazon the previous day. I had bought a red velvet cake mix and some cream cheese icing because I knew she liked that. One night she was eating the icing out of a jar in her chair and I was like, "hey, what's up with that". She said, "it's embarrassing how many of these I've eaten and replaced before you noticed." I told her to go ahead that I wasn't going to make the cake after what I saw.

When people invite you to do things and the answer is always no, you condition them to stop asking. I stopped asking her to come on vacation with my family because I couldn't handle the rejection. They never understood why my wife never came to family events. She would come to just enough of them so that she wasn't totally invisible. Last year I never even asked her, never even told her about it. However, my mom asked her. She was embarrassed because she didn't even know about the vacation even though we've been taking the same vacation for like 30 years. She was angry and we fought over it.

About 10 weeks ago she asked me "Are you going to be okay if I just go on vacation with my family this year and take the dog"? Initially I said yes. But then I remembered that I had recently asserted myself with her for maybe the first time ever. I said no, I wasn't okay with it and she replied that there were only two single beds or something. I don't remember the exact words but the message was clear: I don't want you to go, and I'm making excuses for why you can't go.

She's a psych nurse but she never saw the psychological changes in myself. She did respond when I asserted myself but by the time I finally did that the relationship was over. Our dogs noticed the changes in me long before she ever did. She had to be told about it in an email.

I will be 53 this year. I'm entering my four-minute drill. It's time to start looking ahead to make sure I'm set up properly for the rest of my life. I was never able to do that before because my parents decided it would be better to sabotage my life than deal with their own insecurities. I can't be in a relationship with someone who is not mentally strong enough to clear a toilet clog. It took no physical effort to clear it, plungers are not hard to use. I can't be in a marriage with someone who prioritizes cupcakes over tire repair when they use their car for work. I owe it to myself to find someone who is a true partner in mind, body, and spirit.

I recently found a family newsletter from 1974 where I was described as very energetic and talkative. I was two years old and they were already aware.

I've finally found someone who can match my energy. I've found someone who is strong mentally and physically. She's setting herself up for the rest of her life in a way that is authentic, organic, and sustainable. And I'm part of that now and it feels incredible.

[dial-up-heart]

Permission to be present

I can finally be myself because the person I am today is not the person I was yesterday. I'm becoming someone that people respect, someone they want to be around. No, that is not true. I have always been that person. Everyone around me could see that, but somehow I was not able to. Well, I could actually see it, that's also not true. But I couldn't understand it, not really. You can tell this is all new for me. The thing is that you sometimes have to lie to yourself to survive. My brain created coping strategies for me because my parents didn't teach me any.

The difference today is that I am catching these lies and correcting them in real time. Soon I will give myself permission to not even do that anymore. Every day I give myself permission to be myself and it's liberating. There is a person in this world who is showing me how it's done. She would probably reject the idea if I said it out loud but she is providing me with a touchstone for life.

Something happened when I hit 50. I lacked all vocabulary to describe it until recently. Things have been slowly coming into focus for the first time ever. Ironically I'm losing my actual vision at the same time but that's okay because my new glasses reflect a sophistication that had always lain beneath. I also lacked the skillz with a z to translate that to other people. That's exactly what it was a failure to communicate. Listen I know that I am an intense individual. I overthink things, I fixate on sometimes meaningless details. When my light shines on people it has often blinded them entirely. My light is brilliant but also very messy. For decades, I tried to hide that mess and failed miserably. I thought being perfect would make me desirable because my stepmom demanded perfection.

I heard a line in a song that I can't get out of my head. "No perfection can ever bring joy or there's none without it". I never gave myself permission to experience true joy because I never knew how. I was never taught what it was, how to get it, and then given permission to find my own path to it. I spent all my time trying to be perfect Even though perfection was unobtainable, I never stopped trying. Until one day I actually did stop.

I thought I knew what joy was. I had to find it within myself before I could find it with another person. I know I am finding true joy now. I find it every day, sometimes immediately, sometimes eventually.

I cannot change the past, and I don't even want to. That would require energy. I don't want to waste any more energy on people who don't deserve it. I want to spend my time and energy on people who are worth it, people who deserve it. I want to put all of my effort into people who love me unconditionally because they deserve all of my energy.

I never knew how to avoid putting my energy into the wrong people, and that's not my fault. Parents are supposed to teach you these things. When they don't, most people are simply not lucky enough to have other people in their life who are strong enough to help them overcome it. People willing to keep throwing you lifelines until you are able to finally catch hold and not let go.

I have a lot of anxiety, we all do. I know I'm not alone. I've finally found a person who doesn't punish me for my anxiety. She doesn't hold it against me, she has a way to brush it aside like it doesn't matter, because it doesn't. No one is perfect, and no one expects anyone to be. I get that now. Maybe I've never been around people who also understood that.

There are people in my life now who matter. People who are worthy of and who deserve my time and attention. I've already been given permission to be myself now I just need permission to be present.

[dial-up-heart]

Driving your own car

It took me a long time to understand that life requires strategies. Once you reach the level of professional football in the NFL, you don't need much coaching on technique, or conditioning. This type of coaching still happens of course, but at this level the focus shifts to one of situational awareness. In the NFL, very little separates the Super Bowl winner from the worst team in the league. In the deep south where football is often the primary religion, a common trope is that the best team in the SEC could beat the worst team in the NFL. This is false, of course, but I guess it's fun to talk about.

In the NFL, situational awareness is much more important. When you're down 8 points late in the fourth quarter you need a plan for how to dig out. Professionals spend a lot of time on planning and preparation so that when they perform, they can do it at a high level. Teams practice scenarios known as the 'two minute drill', or the four minute. What is your plan when you're down 8 in the fourth? You need essentially two touchdowns on two consecutive plays to tie and preserve the chance to win. If you don't practice it often, when the chips are down, you won't have that muscle memory necessary for follow through.

Nparents (narcissistic parents) teach their children the wrong strategies and set them up for failure. Setting the child up for failure ensures they will come running to the parent every time they have a roadblock. Since you were never taught any strategies for a successful life, you're trapped. When you're trapped like I was, you are in a transparent prison for all the world to see. It's even worse if you have a pleasant face or are attractive at all. It's very easy to get someone on the hook, but once they see the ugly person inside, they run as fast as they can. There is a beautiful person inside sure, but that person is also wearing a mask and they don't know how it got there or how to remove it.

People are telling you how great you are, how funny you are, how cute your dimples are but you just. cannot. capitalize. You don't know how because you were never taught any strategies. Furthermore, when you were in your most impressionable years, the years when you were most curious about the world around you, you were never allowed to develop your own strategies. If you did that, you might discover that your nparent had you trapped in your own version of the Truman Show. Only this version of the film was much worse because you could see the world around you. You were in the world, not trapped on a movie set. You were in the world and were part of it, but apart from it at the same time. If you could just make people see, then they would understand. But you don't know how to make them see because you are so blind yourself you don't even know what vision is. When you're blind and someone asks you what purple is, how do you even begin to describe it?

I only started developing strategies after I got back into programming. The first program I ever wrote was for the Commodore 64 circa 1986. It was very simple. If someone had encouraged me to stick with computers, I would probably be retired by now, maybe one of those people who destroyed all of our traditions in exchange for engagement and content. But that's neither here nor there because I didn't have that person in my life to encourage me to stick with it.

I went to college to escape an nparent, not to find a career. That's another strategy they didn't teach me.

I got back into programming a few years ago as a way to automate another hobby of mine. The great thing about programming is that you can spend countless hours writing code so that you can avoid having to press a button on screen 2 or 3 times which takes 2 seconds. However tedious it may be, programming is the ultimate strategy because any routine must be letter perfect. It must be tested and debugged until every unforeseen variable has been accounted for. You have no way to see all the variables when you write code. That's why computers often make things harder rather than easier. You cannot see everything that could happen in the real world.

Python is fun and it's elegant. The first time your code runs successfully it's a feeling like you've never felt. A sense of accomplishment overcomes you and you feel superior. Most people will never be ale to do this.

From there I learned that life also requires a set of strategies. Because life is hard, and you don't have the luxury to be caught unaware in any given moment when it gets much harder. Not if you're trying to reclaim your life after an nparent motivated you to ruin it.

I moved in with my dad and stepmother when I was 15. I knew they would buy me a car when I turned 16. I wanted autonomy and mobility. I thought a car would help me just like I thought moving to college to get away from them was the answer to all of my problems. My dad taught me to drive a car, but he never taught me how to drive my metaphorical car. I was never even given a license because I guess I might drive away and never return.

You can't afford to be a passenger in your own car. Driving is a strategy. My stepmom drove my car with a death grip on the wheel for decades. Eventually the car became a self-driving one which she could safely exit knowing it would stay on the same path. No one showed me how to stop that car and get out.

People could see me furiously and recklessly driving past them. They had no idea where I was going or why. They wanted to get in the car with me or drive me somewhere, but I didn't know how to slow down enough for them to sync up with me. The car had millions of miles on it before it wore out. It wasn't built for that and eventually the tires wore out or a belt broke, I don't even know. But that car finally did slow to a stop.

And when it did, there were a couple of people there who had been patiently waiting for me to come to a stop. They gave me permission to get behind the wheel and put my foot on the gas pedal. I'm driving again and it is exhilarating. In football terms, I am nearing my four-minute drill, but that's okay because I have strategies now. I have people in my life who have already learned how to drive. They place a steady hand on the wheel whenever I falter. They don't take over and put me back in the passenger seat. They love me for who I am and they tell me that I'm a good driver, maybe not in the real world, but at least of my metaphorical car and that's enough.

[dial-up-heart]

Why I stayed with a cheater or how I learned to stop worrying and love the self-delusion

It turns out that when you're deeply depressed, in thrall to a narcissist, 38 and unmarried, and a victim to a failed series of unrealized crushes you'll settle for pretty much anything. I didn't plan to get married, in fact I was resigned to a bachelor's life. My own family thought I was gay and others in my life did too. I can't blame the others, but my family can fuck right off. They did this to me and then had the audacity to question my sexuality?

I went to a friend's wedding and met her. We were in the same high school class but didn't know each other. She lived 30 min away and facebook was in that stage where it was still useful and cool before it destroyed everything our ancestors built over the course of hundreds of years. That’s how we got to know each other. This was 20 years after graduation and I took it as a sign. Or at least a great story. And it really was, especially at the 20 year reunion. Everyone was so confused. I was pretty happy. She was smart and funny, our worldviews aligned. She was pretty and attractive and I felt lucky because at 39 things like that don't just fall into your lap. Especailly someone in my situation.

If it weren't for my own depression I might have taken notice when she told me she was bipolar. I didn't even know what it meant. She acted normal so I didn't understand. Things were good, no they were great for a long time. I think my stepmom even chilled out a bit before she started using my girlfriend to manipulate me. Never go into business wtih a narcissistic parent. Let's back up, you never had any choice. She would have found a way to convince you. Promise you things she never inteded to fulfill, whatever it took for you to give in. Free will is an illusion the nparent uses to control you.

Nparents will never stop until you give in so you learn to give in automatically because life is easier that way. And when you're praised for doing so, it reinforces the behavior. Dogs don't get this kind of training. Intelligent, energetic children prone to rebellion need even stricter discipline, though.

My live-in girlfriend got a job where the amount of male attention increased exponentially and she was intoxicated by it. It didn't help that her best friend was sneaking into a married man's house through a sliding glass door to sleep with him. I didn't know, how could I know? I was depressed and I had never had a real relationship, not one like this.

I noticed she started texting a lot and was laughing and listening to music and her phone was on fire for how much she was using it. Note to potential cheaters: If you NEVER use your phone and all of a sudden you are texting like a schoolgirl, even severely depressed people take notice. A few days later I came home from work and she was out with friends. At like 3 am I started to get worried. Bars close at 3. She came home at 5:30am. She was a nurse working third shift so sleeping in separate beds was often a requirement.

The next morning I read her phone and then used an app to extract all the texts. ICloud security was in its infancy and "The Fappening" had not yet happened. I knew snooping was a problem but I was blind with every bad emotion in existence. One night I was on my way home and saw her car was at a strange location and I went to that location. When she got home I grabbed the receipt from the grocery bag and read the timestamp and was crestfallen.

A friend of the family was to be buried that morning at the church I grew up in so I went there, as emotionally raw as I had ever been. I was thoroughly assassinated, and my self-esteem wiped off the map. Guess who was waiting there to comfort me and begin driving a wedge between us?

My stepmom pulled strings to get us into that house, she decorated it, she willed it into existence. I paid the bills though and she paid me and it was never enough. I never even knew I could just sell the house, we could go our separate ways, and I would be fine.

Instead, I found a way to cope with it and a sick thing happened. I leaned further into the relationship because my stepmom didn't want it to continue. We ended up getting married and she and my dad made a huge scene at the wedding. She never cheated again, I am pretty certain. Nothing is 100% but I never even suspected it. But I was trapped in a state of distrust for almost two years before it subsided on its own and we got married.

Things normalized as they often do because people have to cope to survive. They are exceedingly good at it. The human brain will tell you whatever you need to hear to survive. It will tell you that spending all of your money on narcotics is a good thing, in fact it's a necessary tactic for survival. When you lose a pill because you have a hole in your pocket you're too depressed to fix and your wife finds it on the floor, your brain will create a narrative on the fly that sounds just plausible enough for people to live in denial.

Everyone does bad things in their life. No one is perfect and no one expects anyone to be. Trying to be perfect so my stepmom and wife would love me nearly killed me. In 36 years I was never able to win my stepmom's approval and then one day I just stopped trying.

Today I am winning the approval of people who matter. People who are in sync with the world and the people around them. The people in my life now who love me don't ask for anything in return. Wait, that's not true at all. They do make one demand, and it's not up for debate: that I love myself for who I am and that I never try to be anything other than myself.

[dial-up-heart]

The unfortunate techniques of the nparent

A narcissistic parent (nparent) views their children as an extension of themselves. They view their children as property to do with as they choose. In the narcissist's household the roles are strictly defined even if they aren't defined at all. The nparent is at the top of the pyramid and the children are at the bottom. You must know your place in the hierarchy because if you forget yourself it could be painful. Whether it will be psychologically traumatizing is not even up for debate. Psychological abuse is the nparents favorite weapon and they wield it every minute of every day.

Some of them stop at straightforward abuse, while others work a good-cop bad-cop routine in which they play both roles. Such a scenario is often sufficient to keep one or all of the children in thrall. A good-cop bad-cop routine is a tool that abusers of all stripes employ. It's very simple, a child does something the nparent doesn't like and an a wildly disproportionate amount of justice is applied by the parent. The use of the word justice is calculated because in the mind of the parent they are never wrong. Later after the child settles down and is getting ready for bed, the nparent will come in alone and tell you something about how they are only punishing you because they love you. So now they're throwing all of your emotions in a bowl and mixing them up so you never know how to feel.

The independence of the child from the parent is a thought that never even enters the nparent's mind. An independent child is very dangerous to the mind of the narcissist, who can never be wrong or make a mistake.

Only bad people make mistakes. I love my children and I would give anything for them. So why are they so bad? They must not love me.

I'm sure they all tell themselves that what they're doing is good for the child, if they even ever think about it at all.

When you're not yet a teenager you're very suggestive and a bad-cop good-cop routine where the good cop is really friendly can be enough to persuade the pre-teen to do just about anything, even abandon his own mother. Your stepmother could even tell you that the term mother applies to the woman who takes care of you and who loves you, not the one who gave birth to you. All things being equal, that is a true statement. Taken in context, it is quite something else. A nine-year-old child begins to believe it when they hear it repeatedly.

A narcissist will do anything to get their way. And when they have more resources, things simply get easier for them. Money talks, and when it does it has the tendency to drown out all other voices. That's just a fact of life in a country that places financial success above all other considerations. It's always been that way, of course, but in the age of social media it's pretty much the only thing anyone cares about anymore. We certainly don't care about each other and it's not looking for good for ever getting better. It goes beyond garden variety apathy, though. We actively hate each other, and we spend all day long trying to find new things to hate and new ways to express it. But I digress.

Always having to get your way to protect yourself from ego death requires strategies. Some of them take years to bear fruit. But that's ok because the narcissist operates on all levels and all planes of existence. The nparent plants trees 20 years ago as well as planting them today and every year in between. When the forest matures, the child is lost and trapped within it. The child is never given a saw and never even informed of their existence.

One strategy could be having a son and a stepson but treating them recklessly unequally. How is a child supposed to process the fact that when moving into a new house, the youngest son with a terminal case of learned helplessness is given a massive bedroom while you're in a broom closet? What if that son is so incapable he is unable to open a coke can and has to hand it to his mom to open while you sit there incredulous? You're 11 years old, and you already know this guy will never be able to tie his own shoes. But he's being given the world while you're being grounded 30 days for watching Good Morning Vietnam. The mistreatment happens in plain sight, but the nparent is telling you the treatment is equitable. In an extreme case such as the above bedroom story, a justification can easily be created out of thin air to dismiss your concerns and make it your fault all along. You could have had that bedroom if you had abandoned your own mother a few years prior.

Don't get me wrong, she did eventually succeed in getting me to abandon my own mother, but it wasn't soon enough for her so she wanted to constantly remind me of that with a physical reminder.

The nparent has so many tools at their disposal it makes Home Depot look like a hotel room sewing kit.

Another one could be a textbook case of entrapment. But hey, you're 15 now and even though you watched "Hill Street Blues", you aren't aware of this classic technique.

My parents went out to dinner and left a copy of Good Morning Vietnam out in the open. It was rated R. We weren't allowed to watch rated R movies. Of course, we watched it and it was fantastic. The next day when asked if we had watched it, I said something like, "We started to…" and trailed off. My stepbrother then spoke up and offered that we watched it. Guess who got punished, and who got grounded 30 days for lying?

Doesn't really matter that you are getting punished for lying again, you already know you'll never be able to tell the truth in their eyes because the truth is whatever they want it to be. The power dynamic keeps you in a box, and your maturity level at 15 tricks you into thinking you have good negotiation strategies.

You are so naive that you think words have meaning. Several years ago you tried to light one firework, but the matches were too wet, and you couldn't get it to light. No fireworks were set off, there was no spark, no explosion in the sky. But your parents are upset that you were “lighting fireworks”. In school, you learn that words ending in '-ing' are called Gerunds. It's a verb form to indicate action that is occurring at that very moment. Present tense can also imply this, but a gerund is specific. But who gives a fuck about what your teacher told you when your parents tell you its all wrong. I never lit a firework, but that didn't matter, they said I did, and that became reality for all four of us forever. A trap was set for me that day that I was never equipped to evade and that I would spend decades trying to escape. I was stuck on the meaning of words, but my parents were on another level entirely. That moment stuck with me for literal years. I was unable to process it until much later. I still sometimes fall prey to a childlike naivety about the world and I don't know where it comes from.

But that failure of understanding pales in comparison to the failure to understand the true nature of an nparent, how to deal with and defeat them. Here's the sad truth: Victory can be fleeting. It will never be total. You will never defeat an nparent. You can only hope to mitigate the damage and control. Likewise, you can't go back and change the past, and no one expects you to. The nparent controls everything you do because you are an extension of themselves. You are their literal property. Without self-determination, a person is unable to grow into their own person, which is exactly what the nparent seeks to prevent.

There is great power in understanding what you can control. But you can only exert this influence over your own life once you are no longer in thrall to the nparent. How to get there is up to each individual. It nearly always involves a forced distance.

I had it very bad, but some people are not as lucky as me. Some people do not have the privilege of having quality people in their life willing, ready, and able to throw you as many lifelines as you need until you finally are able to reach one and grasp it without letting go.

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Perseverance

Waking up one day and deciding that you need to change everything about your life is a strange feeling. It's both liberating and terrifying. Realizing that you've wasted decades in a deep depression that you didn't cause, that was made for you by a parent, is a feeling that is hard to deal with. When you climb a mountain, you first need a foothold. With psychological trauma that foothold is slippery. There are so many factors working against you. The deck is stacked and our society and economy do not help. In America there are the wealthy, the rich, the poor, and the homeless and I'll give a couple of guesses which slot I'm in. How are you going to battle your demons when the demons simply have more resources? I know what I did and it was utterly unhealthy and destructive. I lost my house in part from the decisions the depression my parents created for me made me make. I get that the previous sentence is an exponential escalation of the passive voice, but that is exactly what happened. When you're nine you have no agency, no autonomy, no ability to understand that what your parents are telling you is not true. It didn't really reflect the real world but how could I ever know that? I was a child. From doing research it appears that once you cut four or five toxic people out of your life forever there is a grieving process. Grief is important because it puts you in touch with your deep emotions so you can process them, move on, and experience personal growth. It's key. I didn't realize that I was grieving for years until the veil lifted. The veil started lifting somewhat on its own. One day I asserted myself to my wife like I had almost never done and it worked. That was maybe the first domino. But in reality it's impossible to track this to the first domino and it's not cost-effective to even try. I do know that there were a few dominos that were larger than the others. I could never see the next one so I had no way to anticipate its size. But one day the first big domino fell. A woman that my depression caused me to ignore stopped me and gave me a compliment and the floodgates opened. To say that moment changed my personality is way too hyperbolic to be true, but it was important. A person that I had put on a pedestal was now putting me on one. I never thought I deserved that and that moment made me see that maybe I did deserve it.

I can't describe to you how difficult it is to approach women when you are in the mental state I was in. What my stepmother did to me made it impossible for me to be the type of person capable of a real relationship. My 20s and 30s were an endless cycle of failed crushes that made the depression worse. Then I met my wife. My wife was the only one who ever accepted me and that was because she was more broken and damaged than I was. My depression prevented me from seeing that our marriage was not a healthy relationship. I settled for her because settling was my only option. Or suicide. None of that matters anymore, except that a person can only ever be an amalgam of their entire experiences. I cannot change the past, I cannot change my stepmother and her toxic son, I cannot make my dad apologize to me for not being strong enough to protect me from his wife. I can only control myself. I have agency and autonomy now and I can see the path that lies ahead. God sent me an angel and I didn't even believe in Him at the time. I am struggling with this too because I thought I had everything figured out. None of that matters anymore because the woman who finally gave me permission to be myself is now my best friend.

[dial-up-heart]

just wasting my life at red lights in east brainerd

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Health care in America is fucked up and we all know it. I'm running out of 'it is what it is' and I don't know what else to do. We used to chase dreams. Now we chase engagement. We used to read books, now we read phones. We used to solve big problems in America now when someone says the ocean is blue we ask what their source is.

Your aunt used to post baby pictures. Then she was in a QAnon facebook group asking if JFK Jr. was alive and most importantly is he single?!? Now she's falling for AI posts claiming some 7 yr old Nigerian kid built a realistic Jesus statue out of a bunch of old coke bottles.

I stopped using Facebook in 2010 after a relative told me I could have gotten him fired… because I clicked ‘like’ on the public option, as a flirt. I guess that's when I first realized online interactions had real world consequences. I became utterly disillusioned with facebook at the only time it was ever good. Think about that for a second and how isolating that was. Everybody and their grandmother was joining Facebook. Posting bikini pics, sharing everything. Not my grandmother. Man, I was 40 back then, so let’s just put that thought back in the vault. Or don’t. Look, I’m not here to kink shame you. If 'Depression Era Thirst Trap’ is your thing, live your truth. I’m just saying: if you’ve ever seen a swimsuit captioned ‘Rosie the Riveter could never,’ you need to log off.

The internet used to be cool, now it's like 5 apps and a bunch of meaningless nonsense to fill up that little red bubble on your phone screen. Facebook turned me into an emotional hostage just so I could get someone else’s church casserole list in return. How did we ever we allow this?

We used to chase dreams, now I'm chasing a refill on my blood pressure meds while my aunt gets scammed by a fake AI coke bottle jesus. Health insurance is a subscription plan for a 20% discount on your bills. You know what, that's fine, just hand me that $8000 stick, give me the whiskey to chug, and let Brian Thompson amputate my soul while I scream into the algorithm like a man with nothing left but a bucket of leeches and a microscopic glimmer of hope. Please just tag me in the fucking post.

[dial-up-heart]

Healthcare’s gotten so bad in this country, I think they’re gonna start bringing back Civil War medicine. I went in for a routine check-up and the doctor told me to bite down on a stick, handed me a bottle of whiskey, and started sawing into my leg. You think I’m joking, but somewhere, deep in the bowels of the hospital, there’s a guy yelling ‘Hold him down!’ like it’s 1863. And I was like hey, I need that leg, there's nothing wrong with it. And he was like that's great news because we really need you on the front in Gettysburg. And I was like, hey wait a minute, on second thought go ahead and take the leg.

The only difference between now and 1863? Back then the "doctor" cutting off your leg didn’t charge $8,000 for the stick you bit down on. Yeah, now instead of antibiotics, they just pour hot coffee in the wound and call it ‘cowboy penicillin.’ My insurance is so bad, it only covers prayer, a bucket of leeches, and a pamphlet titled, "Have you tried not dying?"

Remember Luigi Mangione? This bullshit is probably what drove him over the edge. He wanted to shoot Lincoln, someone beat him to it, so he killed Brigadier General Brian Thompson, head of leeches and denials instead. So yeah, bite down on a stick, chug the whiskey, and hope Brian Thompson’s ghost approves your claim. Anyone know how to load a musket?