Happy Birthday to me!

Guilty Pleasure!

Genesis (Blasphemous! But I'm already going to Hell.)

To begin: A letter to my ex.

Dear Ex: 

 (I need to find an appropriate name to call you here, don’t I?  I don’t want to use  your real name, in case any of your family ever stumbles by here.  Although I doubt they would.  They don’t read, and even if they did, they’d have no idea where Arabella Donn is from or why I stole her character from Thomas Hardy to use as my online pseudonym, so them putting two and two together is about as feasible as me doing higher math.  But I digress.  The point is you need a name, and useless-rat-ass-bastard takes too long to type.  I shall call you Neanderthal.  It was the nickname I began calling you {in private, and to my few new friends} just before the separation.  It serves you well.) 

 OK, I need to start over, because as usual, my digression has taken on a life of its own and is threatening to take this entry over.   

Cleansing breath.

Dear Neanderthal:

I wish I could say that I don’t hate you anymore, because I really, really don’t want you, or any vestige of you, to have that much power over how I feel.   I thought I’d dealt with the hatred, yet recent events indicate to me that it’s just hidden, but still very much there. 

 Still, to this day, even though you are behind bars and therefore societally impotent, you attempt to reach out and exert control over my actions and emotions.  You don’t know where I live, you don’t know my home phone number, so you cannot write or call me collect from your (I hope) filthy, cramped prison cell.  Even so, you write letters to your family, asking them to contact me, trying to control me in your warped, twisted way.

 The worst part of it is that I know that your actions, to you, seem perfectly reasonable.  You have slipped so far outside of rationality, so far outside of reason that you believe that your behaviors are justified and reasonable, and cannot imagine that others might perceive such differently.  There’s a label for people who behave like this (along with all of your other “personality quirks”): sociopath. 

 Recently, the term sociopath has been changed to a much more societally palatable “Anti-Social Personality Disorder.”  You can wrap it up in a pretty package with a bow, but sociopath is still sociopath.  Psychopath fits as well, but that’s a later letter.

 So here’s the thing: for all of your self-aggrandizing behavior, for all of your smug, blaming-others for your problems façade, for all of your self-importance, for all of the twisted, warped coping mechanisms that you have developed that keep you feeling superior to everyone around you, at the end of the day, you are still a sociopath.  And at the end of the day, I still dream about ripping that smug grin off of your face with my bare hands.  Sometimes, I think the nightmares that I have about about rending you limb from limb are more frightening than anything you could ever do to me. 

 You are wrong.  Your behavior is wrong.   Your thoughts are wrong, your actions are wrong, your rationalizations are wrong.  You have always been wrong, even though you were charming and intelligent enough to convince me that you were right and reasonable.  And I hate you for convincing me that your “wrongness” was what was right, what was acceptable, and what was going to happen in our household.  You spent a lifetimes’ worth of breath convincing me that I was at fault, always, that all problems are rooted in me.  You used my very normal, human imperfections to deflect the attention away from yourself.  You accused me of horrible things so that I would become so wrapped up in defending myself that I wouldn’t see what YOU were really doing.  You expected from me perfection, but at the same time expected that I overlook all of your black spots. You took from me my pride, my self-esteem, my sense of self – everything within me that was good and pure, and you used it all against me, twisted it and broke it until I was empty and black inside. 
And I let you.

No more.

More to come...

The First Lie

So, in my last post, I said that I would begin at the beginning.  The more I thought about this, the more I’ve decided that I lied.  There are a couple of reasons for this.

 The first reason being that the beginning is boring.  Well, maybe not boring, but inconsequential.  I assume that at some point I may get around to explaining how it all began, but I keep thinking back to the first thing I learned about writing, both literary analysis and creative writing: you don’t necessarily have to begin at the beginning of the story.  Indeed, when dealing with literary analysis, one is strongly encouraged not to follow the chronology of the story, novel, poem, etc…  This has a tendency to lead to more narration than analysis, and thus a weak essay.  Creative writing is the same.  Sometimes an author has to take liberties with the timeline, in order to keep his or her audience interested.  As these two types of writing are what I am schooled in, I lean to them for support as I embark upon this writing journey.

 Thus, I will consider this project more a series of essays than a narration.  This brings me to the disclaimer portion of this post.  As I write these essays, these rememberances, these stories, whatever they end up being, I know that I will ask myself, again and again, why I stayed.  Why did I endure being treated the way that I was?  This is the question that will make this project difficult.   Because there is no answer.  Or, perhaps more accurately, the answer changed from time to time.  At some points I stayed because I thought I loved him, and thought that he loved me.  At other times, I stayed because I was afraid to leave.  Sometimes, I stayed because I felt that I had no other choice.  I suppose the best answer to the question of why I endured what I did is that I had no self-confidence and no self-esteem.  I lied to myself a lot about what was going on, it was my defense mechanism.  Why else would I have allowed myself to submit to such a sick situation?

 So, the disclaimer.  I know that I should have left sooner.  But for whatever reasons at whatever time, I did.  My plea is that I don’t receive criticism for what I’ve done in the past.  I write this and post it mainly for my own well-being.  I suppose that there must be some sense of voyeurism, I must be hoping that someone reads it, or I wouldn’t be posting it in a pubic forum.  I just ask that you think carefully before judging me for my past decisions.  You won’t tell me anything I haven’t already thought.  I am my own best (or worst, depending on how you look at it) critic