Gratitude for Being Duped...

I know this one may seem like a stretch, but it isn’t.  Let me explain...

My last relationship was born out of my own selfishness.  I wanted what I wanted, and saw the person before me as someone who could give that to me.  Looking back now, there was never a person before me that was capable of anything but lies, manipulations, gaslighting and cons.  But I refused to see that, believing, instead, all his pretty words of flattery and bullshit.  Why you ask?  Because I wanted to. Hell, I needed to.

The loss of the love of my life, left me searching for self love.  And, arrogantly I thought I found it.  And I did, but I used the newly found self love and the rejection experienced by the love of my life guy to cover over the deep, festering wound of not being enough.  I did not heal that, instead the loss of that love was a further injury to a wound I had had my whole life.  A father wound, a not enough wound, a pay attention to me, please kind of wound.  Even with all the years of therapy, program and work, it was still there smoldering.

And that next motherfucker saw it and exploited the fuck out it and me.  And me with all my arrogance and selfishness ate it up.  I jumped in, and then out, and then in and allowed this horrible person to move in, get closer and lie to me every single day of my life.  I would love to say I am over the pain but I am not.  I allowed him to erode the marginal safety I felt in intimate relationships to absolute zero.  To nothingness.  I allowed this to happen because I refused to address my long standing wounds that had nothing and everything to do with men like him.

I think I have always chosen men to abuse me in one way or another.  The ones who were sweet, present and loving, had to fucking go.  I couldn’t stand them being nice to me, showing up for me and loving me.  No I deserved something less than that.  And apparently, that all culminated with me choosing him.  Now, I believe I chose him as much as the victim of a crime choses to be chosen for the crime.   He stalked, he waited, he watched and then he moved in for the kill.  Weaving sweet lies that he knew I was just dying to hear.  And I signed up for all of it.  I cannot write that without rolling my eyes at myself.  It engenders in me a strong desire to go back in time and shake the motherfucking shit out of the me I was back then.

I was an easy mark.  Way too codependent, way too naive and gullible in ways that only a woman with a lot of childhood and sex stuff can be.  He encircled, he targeted and he moved in for the kill.  I was not the first, nor was I the last, sadly. And I thought the whole time I was being chosen for love and acceptance and partnership.  I was really just being duped into believing in a wholesale fiction.  And looking back now, I can see I needed to believe in it which is why it all worked so terribly well.

And in some ways, he was perfect for me:  intelligent, funny, tattooed, irreverent, handsome, well read, broken.  All the things I wanted in a man. I wanted them so desperately that I saw but refused to believe that this same man was also a con artist, a liar, an addict with no real intention of recovery, a master manipulator and a taker.

What I see now is that he was just another iteration of a long standing pattern of choosing men who would let me down.  I don’t know why I pick them like this, wait, that isn’t true.  I do know why and that is really important!  I pick them because they are familiar, and I, like everyone else on the planet, believed that if I could love just one man like my pattern and could make him NOT repeat the pattern I would be saved, redeemed, healed.

Total fucking bullshit.

But I didn’t know that then...

But I sure as shit do now.  Which is why I am not dating.  I do not know if I can do it differently.  I do not know if I can.  It is so hard wired in me, to bet on the long shot, the dark horse, the one in a million.  And after this last one, I never want to do that ever again.  So I sit out of the dating pool, watching, observing and reviewing myself and my own behavior...

So how the fuck could I be grateful for being lied to and manipulated and gaslit?  Well, because it was another bottom.  And rock bottom is where you stop digging.  And he was that for me.  He was a man rock bottom.  I woke up so disgusted with myself for letting someone like him into my life, my bed, my family.  Such a fucking waste of my time.  But I didn’t see it like that., no, I saw the abuse and then got mired in it.  The more awful he treated me, the more committed I was to him and us.  So fucking sick!  But it was who I was.  And I see that now.  And because I see it now, I can hopefully heal it.

I used men all my life to make me feel better.  They were evidence of my desirability, my worthiness, my value.  Right up until I saw the whole thing quite differently...one day I saw that they were really evidence, repeated and unremitting evidence, of my own disease and dysfunction.  And that was all they ever were.  The ones I “loved”, the ones I left, the wasteland that was my dating and loving life. The men were fodder and I was consuming and discarding just like he did to me.  I was not better than him, I was just as sick.

And at 29 years of recovery I did not want that to be true.  But it was and is.  And it has only been the last few months that I have been willing to really look at myself and my behavior.  How I found myself in a position to be so completely used and duped.  Ego.  Unhealing.  Arrogance.  Those fuckers will bring you down every single fucking time.  And, so it was with me.

But without him and all his horrific fuckery, I would not have hit that bottom and I would not have the recovery I am having at the moment.  The respite from compulsive dating.  The relief that I feel sitting alone on my couch writing or reading or just being.  Not with the wrong guy or any guy and finding contentment and peace in that.

Today, I do not want a date, I want friends.  Men that I respect and care about that are capable of loving without possession and demand.  For now.  And for me, I need to slow my roll and just work on myself.  There is a lot of work to do and I get distracted easily.  So I sit and I wait and I heal and I do the fucking work so that someone like him never darkens my door again, or if he does, I have enough sense to not open it.

It has been a hard three years.  And for a long time, I felt like I was the victim, but like every other time I have felt so victimized in my life, upon further reflection, I can see that I signed up for the abuse. And I got exactly what I bargained for...

Again, still...

So if I want something different, someone different, I have to be different and I am not sure I can.  I want to, but I am not sure, it is very complicated inside my head.  There are so many competing interests and narratives and I have to admit I get a little lost on myself, often.

But I am looking at it, and pausing and reflecting and owning that which is mine to own.  I got exactly what I wanted, which was easy “love” that was never really loving. I got bizarre insanity because that is what I picked, repeatedly for two years.  I kept accepting less and less until I had nothing left but a great deal of unanswered questions and a lot of blasphemous lies. And I got mired in attempting to sort out truth from fiction, until I realized that is was all fiction and I was the one writing it. Once I saw that, I stopped, blocked and began to slowly move forward, inventorying the fuck out of what just happened.

I felt shame.

I felt stupid.

I felt lost.

And sitting with all of that allowed me to change those feeling into

I feel compassion.

I feel relieved.

I feel found.

It has been a mother fucker of a process but I needed it and him to get me there.  And today, I am so grateful for all that stupid, ridiculous bullshit because it led me to a place inside me that will never allow someone like him anywhere close to me again.  How do I know? 

Because I began to heal the wound he saw and exploited, and only a women with a wound like that would ever sign up for a man like him. So I had to become a different kind of woman.  One who doesn’t need abuse for validation.  One that can instead opt out and for something less dramatic but much more real, a loving kindness within her own mind and heart.  That is capable of seeing her own defects and loving herself nevertheless.  And if I love me, then perhaps I won’t ever fall prey to someone like him again...

Well that is what I am going with today...I have to change the woman that fell for all of that, because if I don’t, I will fall for it again and again and again and keep forever wondering why I can’t get a better outcome.  I can see now that I was buying shit from China and then being pissed at the quality.  So disappointed with the toxic, cancer causing agents in my “purchase” but unable or unwilling to save up for a more quality product instead.  I got him because I needed what I wanted right fucking now.  And today, I realize that that will always lead me to men like him.  And if I really don’t want that, and I do not, then I have to heal the part of me that does want that.

Again, still...

I am grateful for

A lovely day at home with cats and fire

Cooking lesson from Nikitas

Long heartfelt in person conversations

New foods

Trust

Rain

Grace being ok and safe

Riley

Logan being ok and safe

Good rest

Books

Big Sur in one week!