Kitten

- work work work. it distracts me, often entertains me, and $$$. i worked pretty much the entire weekend and when i’m at work, my mind isn’t in overdrive thinking about my ex and all the shitty things i went through this year like it often is when i’m at home. and when i work that much, by the time i get home i’m so tired that i just sleep instead of sitting around thinking too much and driving myself crazy.

- stayed up all night one night reading all of cat marnell’s old xojane articles and making a list of makeup and skin care products to buy.

- music! i didn’t get to listen to music apart from like top 40 radio in the car for pretty much the past year. albums i’ve been playing a lot: The Con, So Jealous and Sainthood - Tegan and Sara, Fantasies - Metric, In Utero - Nirvana, Deja Entendu - Brand New, Live Through This - Hole, America’s Sweetheart - Courtney Love, and anything by The Weeknd when I’m getting ready to go out.

- kept myself so busy that there were almost entire days that went by when i didn’t think about my ex and all the rest of it. where i almost felt like my old self again.

- xanax is a lifesaver for those times where i’m exhausted from thinking thinking thinking but can’t get my mind to be quiet so i can get some sleep.

- drinking at least four 600ml bottles of water every day.

- going through drawers of old mascaras and makeup products i haven’t used in forever and throwing away so much crap that i don’t even know why i still had.

There was one night where he threatened to jump off a hotel balcony and I wished that he would do it. There was another night where I climbed onto the rail of a hotel balcony and was furious and heartbroken when he grabbed me and dragged me inside before I could jump off. I was heartbroken because I just wanted to be dead and gone so that I could be free, I was heartbroken to still be alive and to have to keep going through all the shit he was putting me through.

Like, why couldn’t I just have that? Why was that the exact moment that I had to meet this guy who would come in and just completely destroy everything and take everything that I had and fuck with my head so much that it’s like, I don’t even feel like I’m back at square one. With all the shit he put me through and all the stuff I’m still trying to understand and work out I feel like I’m at square -3000. 

So about a year ago he and I had bought this bottle of vodka, one of those little plastic Smirnoff ones, and neither of us are big drinkers so we probably had like two drinks each and this almost full bottle had been sitting around in my room ever since. At some point I was tidying up and I put it on top of the fridge, and at some other point it fell off the fridge and was lying on the ground near the fridge for ages because I was just lazy and left it there. Eventually I was tidying up and I picked up the bottle and saw that it was empty. When it fell off the fridge the plastic lid had broken and I guess the vodka had leaked out under the fridge and evaporated. This is quite literally the most boring story ever and I can’t actually believe I am recounting it or that I have ever had any sort of conversation about it. Anyway, I threw the empty bottle away and yeah, that was that.

A few weeks later my ex was looking around the room and asked me what happened to that bottle of vodka which was weird in itself, like who even notices/cares about something like that? So I told him the above story of what had happened to that incredibly important bottle of vodka. And he didn’t believe me, he kept saying stop lying, just tell me the truth and I kept saying I’ve already told you the truth, what else can I say?! I mean, if I was hiding something and lying, wouldn’t I have been able to think up a better story than that? Anyway, he was convinced that I secretly drank it with somebody (who? I didn’t talk to anyone at that point, there was nobody to be secretly drinking vodka with. And when would I have even had time to do that, he was basically with me 24/7) and just kept accusing me of lying and telling me to tell the truth. This all somehow comes to a point where he is screaming at me, ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU CHEATED ON ME!’ and I’m just like, what the fuck is even happening here, I threw away an empty bottle, how did it escalate to this complete insanity?

And about a week later I asked him to leave for the hundredth time (he had moved into my house, not because I wanted him to or had invited him to but he got kicked out of his house and just ended up moving in and even though it was the last thing I wanted, it was what he wanted to do so that’s what happened), he left for about three hours and then came back and spent nine hours (yes, nine hours) knocking on my door asking me to let him in before I finally called the cops and blah blah blah and then here we are now. I just realised at some point that you cannot have a conversation with somebody who is acting like that, you can’t reason with irrationality, the more irrational he became the more I realised how unsafe I was and how I couldn’t keep waiting for a better time to end it, I had to put myself and my safety first and do everything I could to get away from him.

I think with every argument I ever had with him I was looking at it from the idea of a normal, healthy relationship. Tom and I were together for seven years, we obviously had plenty of arguments and disagreements but we loved each other and the common goal was always to just understand where the other person was coming from, to compromise and find a solution where we were both happy. But with my ex it was never about compromising or understanding the other point of view, it was baseless accusations and horrible name calling and him bringing up every single thing I had supposedly ever done wrong and the argument couldn’t end until I had admitted that I was a monster and I was 100% wrong and he was 100% right. Even when I did just agree with him, it still wouldn’t be over, he would want to just keep on and on about how awful I was and how wrong I was and how I had done all these horrible, unforgivable things (but if I ever dared to bring up anything he had done in the past, like oh I don’t know him threatening me with a knife for example, it was ‘that was so long ago, it’s in the past, you have to get over it’ etc). 

There were just these little things that would happen or he would do where I would be shocked and tell him that what he had done or said wasn’t ok but somehow I would let them go. And eventually there were bigger things, like the first time he called me a bitch and slut and all these horrible names in an argument. I was shaking and just listening in complete shock, nobody had ever spoken to me like that in my entire life, I couldn’t even believe that anybody would talk to somebody like that. But somehow he apologised and acted as though he understood how wrong it was and understood that he could not speak to me like that, until the next time he did it. It just went on and on with him apologising and convincing me that he understood what I was saying and me giving him another chance and me letting all these things go until it got to a point where I couldn’t believe I was in this relationship with this awful person who did and said such horrible things to me but by that point I was stuck. I had left him before and my friends and my sister had been there for me and had taken care of me and I had told them some of the things he had done so when he ended up convincing me to get back together with him, I avoided seeing them. What could I say if I had lunch with my sister, oh yeah well forget about that time he tried to kill me because things with us are really great now! Or how could I tell my best friend the latest horrible thing he had done because she had been so amazing when I’d left him and now I’d let her down and gone back to him so, you know, told you so. I didn’t feel like I could burden anyone with how unhappy I was because I had gone back to him and I had let everyone down so I couldn’t drag them back into my mess, they didn’t deserve it.

So when I would say something and he would completely misconstrue what I had said and tell me I had meant something that I hadn’t meant at all, I would just think that he had misunderstood and would spend so much time trying to clarify what I meant and trying so hard to explain myself in a way that made sense and that he would understand. It didn’t even enter my head that somebody would be purposely misconstruing what I said or twisting it around into telling me that I meant something that I knew I didn’t mean. When he would tell me that I thought something I didn’t think or that I had acted in way that I knew I hadn’t, I would believe these were all genuine misunderstandings and I would spend so much time trying to explain myself, never thinking that it was anything other than a weird miscommunication. Then as time went on I started to realise that I was trying to rationally reason with somebody who was acting completely irrationally and no matter what I said, it didn’t make any difference.

I had never had a partner ask to look through my phone before. And the first times he did and I tried to talk about trust and privacy I was just attacked with so much ‘if you don’t have anything to hide then why can’t I look at it?’ That I eventually gave in just to prove that I didn’t have anything to hide. After that it just got so out of control, he would bring up screens on my phone that I had never even looked at myself and demand to know what things were. Apps that I had downloaded and deleted way before we had ever met, I had to explain and defend myself against these constant baseless, irrational accusations. There was a point where he was going through my phone and changing settings, turning on notifications for apps that I didn’t want notifications turned on for. Well why not, what are you hiding? I wasn’t hiding anything, I just wanted to have this tiny piece of control, to be able to choose the settings on my own goddamn phone. I lost it over that, just screaming, can’t I have anything that is just mine? Can’t I make my own decisions for just one tiny, insignificant thing?! No, of course I couldn’t. I had somehow gone from being a person who made every decision about everything, big and small, in my life to not even being able to choose the settings on my own phone. 

My whole life I’ve always been messy, I’ve always been a night owl, I’ve always listened to alternative-y music, I’ve always had male friends, I’ve always read lots of books, I’ve always had lots of internet friendships. Every other boyfriend or friend I’ve ever met just accepted this stuff as parts of who I am, things that make up the person I am, just as I have accepted things like that about my boyfriends and friends. I’ve never had to explain or justify the things I did or said or thought to a partner, I’d never been told that the things I did or liked or just generally the way I am is all somehow wrong. Even when I tried so hard and did things differently to try and make him happy, when I went from being messy to having everything always put away, everything always immaculately clean, he would just say ‘yeah, well so you should.’ It was always me who was wrong, me who had to change the way I did things in order to fit in with him. There was never any possibility that maybe the way I did things was ok, there was never even any possibility of just ‘agree to disagree’. I was wrong, he was right and I had to change.

Like seriously, reading books! What kind of shitty stuff does your horrible bitch girlfriend do to piss you off? Well, you’ll never believe this, but she sits quietly and reads!

Start preparing yourself emotionally for financial losses. It is very rare for anyone after being connected with a narcissist to come out of the fray better off than before they entered it.

Know this. If you are hanging on trying to receive some sort of financial improvement, your chances are very slim. When you are with an unaccountable narcissist who keeps creating disasters, and does not have your best interests or welfare in mind, you are on a sinking ship and the longer you hold out for the rowboat, the faster the ship is going down.

The sooner you get out the less you will lose.

http://blog.melanietoniaevans.com/how-to-leave-the-narcissist-with-your-emotions-intact/

Well this certainly spoke to me! There was a long time when part of why I stayed with my ex was well, he owes me several thousand dollars along with various possessions of mine that he pawned and lost. If I leave him there’s no chance of me ever getting back anything that he owes me.

Then about two months ago he totalled my car. Along with being angry and devastated (my dad bought me that car, I loved that car, it was just one more thing that my ex destroyed, it had been my freedom etc etc) there was this one clear thought in my head - he is never going to pay me back the money he owes me and he is never going to replace/pay me back for my car. If I stick around waiting for him to buy me a new car, I will be with him forever.

Even if you just have so little trust in her to suspect that she might be doing all this shit behind your back, if you think that she would be capable of that, if that’s the kind of person you think she is, again - why would you want to be in a relationship with her?!

Wouldn’t it just be so exhausting to be constantly checking up on where she is and what she’s doing and who she’s spoken to and then be worrying that maybe she’s lying about where she is and maybe she’s actually with some guy, like wouldn’t you just break up because why would you want to be so stressed and paranoid all the time?

Or is it all really just them trying to mindfuck you by accusing you of doing shit that they know you haven’t actually done? Are they genuinely paranoid and think you’re cheating or is it just another abusive controlling tactic? How is it that so many abusive men somehow all seem to know/use the same tactics to control women? Like some of the stuff is just kind of obvious and straightforward but I’ve read descriptions of very specific, almost subtle things that my ex used to do/say in other women’s comments online about their abusers and it’s just like wtf, how did all these dickheads think of doing that?