Using...

Sigh...

I don’t want to write what I am about to write.  It is hard, but true.  As are most true things in this world.  Truth comes with a hefty price tag that most of us do not want to pay.  Which is why our world is spiraling into a morass of deceit and subterfuge.

Ok, here goes...

I use people.  I really wanted to write that in the past tense.  My fingers hovered above my keyboard.  Typed out “USED” as if this is something I did in the past, but have really gotten way far beyond now.  It isn’t.  I still use people.

And I suppose on some level, I have always known I do this.  I can remember being a child, maybe 9 or 10, and having an entire Saturday loom before me with anxiety and dread, calling everyone I could possibly think of, even people I didn’t like, all in the hopes that someone would be available to entertain me and stop me from being alone.  I just didn’t want to be alone.

There is trauma there for sure.  When alone, bad things happened to me.  Things that have taken my life time to heal from and with.  But I absolutely believed, without a doubt, that I was not ok alone.  I was deficient, maligned, less than.  And so I set about a course to never, ever be alone.  And it might have started earlier than that...but this is when I remember it best.  This maniacal calling of others to change the way I felt.  I gave them the responsibility of making me feel something other than what was naturally occurring inside me.  My internal condition was something to be solved or endured.  And I didn’t like either of those options.  And I can honesty say it NEVER occurred to me to accept that internal condition and make friends with it.  No, instead I began a full scale war within myself that could only be eased and alleviated by my use of others.

My ego is pretty pissed right now.  A flamingly ferocity of angry that I write these words.  This just might be the biggest secret I have ever revealed here, or to myself.  Something that I have danced around for decades, being able to walk right up to that magical fucking line between denial and truth, and then slowly backing away swearing that revelation was for another day.

Well, it is another day...and here we are.

Ok, now let me get to the part that I am most ashamed of...

My last relationship.  I so wanted to be the blameless, long suffering victim of a sociopath. And I suppose I was. I was the best person cast for that role. And I played that role very well.  And for quite some time.  I kind of loved all the pain, confusion and lack of satisfaction that was loving him.  I seemed to need the broken promises, the lies, the manipulations, the gaslighting, the sorrow, the loss, the absolute grinding of a bottom I did not see coming.  In short, I loved the pain that was him.

I have been stubborn and pigheaded.  I have demanded things impossible to attain in this life:  permanency and perfection.  I have insisted people and things deliver me to this island where everything lasts forever and everyone makes a sincere attempt to become my idea of perfection.  And if you refused, well, then you are quickly discarded onto my scrapheap of humanity that I have no use for anymore.  See I am this absolute deadly combination of dependent and avoidant.  So I will get all up in there until you let me down, hurt me, disappoint me and I will fight you until I am bloody and near death, and then with no warning or real concern, I will abandon you and act like you never existed.

And I have defended this dependency with all that I am for a very long time.  Always having an excuse which always, always began with you and your problems, issues and shortcomings.  Never mine.  I was over here living my best life, completely willing, available and very near perfection don’t you know.  But I see it now.  All the completely fucking misguided, delusional beliefs I have held about you and, even more importantly, I see the ones I have defended with my life about myself.

And here is the most shameful thing...I expected salvation from someone who could not even save himself.

I can remember being in my kitchen with him at the very start of that particular clusterfuck of a relationship.  Back when he was all loving and consistent and into me.  I was telling him all the reasons I didn’t think he and I were a good idea.  I was telling him all the things I knew but quite desperately did not want to be true.  I was seeing him and me for who we were and how very different our lives were at that time.  I was telling a truth that I did not want to be true.  And I fucking knew it was.  He was an absolutely horrific choice for me.  I fucking knew it.  But I wanted him to want me, please fucking for the love of GOD! I wanted him to want me.  And I wanted to save him, from himself and those other women that didn’t understand.  And I wanted him to save me, even though as he sat there, head in hands, I knew he was completely devoid of that fucking attribute. He told me (way too fucking early and with a heavy manipulative flair) that I was the love of his life, and because there was this exactly matching hole in my soul, I fell for it and rapidly began ignoring all the things that existed in him that did not fucking line up.

I did this. Not him.  Me.  I knew better, or at least, I could have know better if I was not just as willing to use him as he was to use me.  Of course, we wanted different thing from each other. He needed money, a car, a place to live, some street cred in recovery, a cheerleader and stability.   And I provided all of that and more.  Fancy vacations all paid by me.  I gave and gave and gave, buying his love and admiration one dollar at a time.  I fucking did this. Not him.  Me.

And the deal I was cutting, unspoken as it was, was that he was supposed to love me unconditionally, even though everything, absolutely everything about our relationship was conditional. Somehow he was supposed to arrive in this relationship with me in some sort of more healed version of himself so that he could be my fucking partner and I would be redeemed finally.

Of course, that didn’t happen.  Like at all.

And I can see it now.  What a taker I was.  How much I didn’t care about him or his salvation or what he was capable of. I was all too happy to buy into his delusions and denial so long as he was saying all the things I needed to hear.  And as long as I was hearing them, I didn’t seem to notice the ever widening gap between what he said and what he did.  Well, that is until I found myself standing on the edge of a great canyon, a rift if you will, that spanned the distance between my home in Ojai and his in Montana...

And here is the ugliest truth...I didn’t even fucking care that he could not take care of himself.  So long as he was willing to offer easy words and whispered promises of things that were yet to come, I was all too willing to give him everything I had.   The fact that he was not able to show up for his life, in even the most basic ways, was completely, totally lost on me.

And that even lets me off the hook a little too much.  It wasn’t lost on me.  That is the hardest thing to accept, the thing I have been running from the whole fucking time!  I wasn’t lost, I just didn’t care.  I myself a junkie needing a fix and I didn’t care that his supply was broken, damaged or completely lacking.  I just didn’t give a flying fuck.  I wanted what I wanted and he better give it to me God fucking dammit!

And thus ensued the worst relationship of my life.  But, but, one sufficient enough to make me hit a bottom I had been skimming for years.  And it is only here, now, that I can really see and own my part in this fabulously horrific dumpster fire of a relationship.  It wasn’t a mess because of him, it was a fucking disaster because of me.  I had recovery and I had tools, but I just fucking abandoned them wholesale and set myself, and him, on a course for absolute annihilation.

It has taken me this whole last year to heal from the devastation I felt.  Not because Ioved him so much but because he became my favorite thing to use.  I used him.  I cared not at all for his ultimate wellbeing...I only cared that he promised to fill that him shaped hole in my soul.  The fact that he couldn’t fill anything at all I just largely ignored because it fit my own dysfunctional and delusional needs.

So there it is.  I used him.  I didn’t care for his well being even as I made great speeches about how much I cared and why I couldn’t possibly leave him even though his treatment of me became worse and worse with each passing day.  And here is something that I didn’t know until just now...

At least in part, he resented me because he knew I was using him.  We didn’t speak of it because truth has a way of puncturing the magical bubble of complete flight from reality.  But his growing contempt for me was because I made this deal with a man that I should have never even let kiss me and then it was game on from there.  And while I think he saw it, I know he saw it, because he exploited it every single day from that day forward.  And I fucking let him.  I really didn’t have a choice because I could not, would not be honest about what I was doing.  And what I was doing was using him for my own selfish ends and then blaming the fuck out of him when he failed me miserably every single time.  He got to be the abuser and I got to be the victim.  And I didn’t know it then but I sure as shit do now, that is what I wanted out of a relationship.   That was the whole reason I was there in the first place.

Jesus fucking christ, I still quite desperately do not want that to be true...but it is.  And I can no longer hold it in, because it is searing me from the inside, this truth that I refused to own.  It is like shrapnel beneath my skin, ricocheting around and hemorrhaging my soul.

So I have had to do some field surgery on myself and work super fucking hard to remove that which I invited in to begin with. I held the gun, I the one who pulled that fucking trigger...it was my shrapnel, I just wrote his name all over those bullets.

I can see myself so clearly, making dinner for him in my kitchen while he sat at my table and recounted all the ways his life was fucked.  And I had to stand there and twist myself into a person that refused to see the impossibility of him and I.  I had to become the person I became because apparently that was my next lesson here in earth school.

I can say a lot of other things here to allow this truth to land more palatably in my psyche.  But that would all be bullshit and I am quite tired of that fucking smell.  I am tired of being mired in my own dysfunction.  I am so very fucking tired.

I used him. And he used me and then I got to blame him for everything even though I know now it was all really more my fault.  I could have known better and done better if I was not so very committed to using others to fill that aching, soul-less vacancy within myself.

But I wasn’t. And I got exactly what I should have given what was being offered and what was possible.  And I have to say now, that I deserved exactly what I got. And the most dysfunctional person in that relationship was, in fact, me.

I fucking see it now.  And it hurts so badly.  It is a cut that is so deep and permanent that it feels like I will never, ever heal.  But I know that isn’t true. I am a resilient fucker.  And I heal for the very simple and basic fact that I do not want to use.  Anything or anyone.  And in order for me to have prayer in this life of not doing that forever, I have to admit to first myself and then all of you that I have used people and then blamed them for my dependency...when, in fact, I was the one who set the whole thing up from the very beginning...

And if that isn't using, then I don't know what the fuck else to call it. So I rest in the catchphrase of my fucking life...

Again, still...