The Evulz Ex

Well since this will be the first really personal post here on The Year of the Phoenix it is appropriate that it be an explosive one!

This is about a previous relationship of mine. For privacy reasons, and because it cheers me to do so, his name will never be included and he will be known as Jafar. Now what this particular post is really about is the long torturous journey of healing I have been on to recover from him. All I will really say about him personally is that he has NPD, Narcissist Personality Disorder. Which I didn't know until after I had finally broke away from him. 

   Yesterday while reading the archives of one of my favorite blogs I came across something personally significant. I was reading about self image and self esteem and the ability to think and say, ‘There is Nothing Wrong with me!’. Today I was giving assvice to someone else about a crisis they were going through and mentioned that when dealing with someone who has NPD, the one thing you must be careful of, is their ability to subtly affect the way you think. Now, putting the two together, I realize that before Jafar I never thought there was anything wrong with me. Not that I didn’t have issues or self doubts before him, I did. That is one of the requirements for being in a relationship with Jafar (and possibly any other NPD). It’s how they hook you and eventually how they seek to destroy you, by playing on your self-doubt and issues and turning them into reality.

   All the things I liked about myself became, after 5+ years of dealing with Jafar, the things I no longer believed about myself. My intelligence, my compassion, my strength, my resilience, my ability to Love Big!, my beauty (inside and out), my courage, my artistic talents and my wanderlust (which is really just my curiosity and awe of the world) were all things I considered my best traits. These traits were things I gave freely to the world and anyone who came into it even fleetingly received them wholeheartedly without hesitation. If asked at the time what my faults were I’d have said, ‘My stubbornness, my shame, my ‘Mother Bear’ temper, my deep rage at injustice, my ability to hold a grudge, my secrets and my selfishness when it came to my mother’s problems.’  Looking back I can of course see that at least three of those were not faults at all merely my own issues concerning self actualization and people pleasing. 

    Fast forward to the now… After 12 years of knowing this person, I find myself in ashes. Everything I believed about myself and the world, every person I ever loved, every place I’ve been or dreamed of going, Everything is burned to the ground and is ashes.  I feel like a lesser person surrounded by despair/helplessness/and every ill of the modern world, cut off from every relationship I’ve ever had, and never venturing farther than my front door.  That is the ‘reality’ of my current situation. And while I know I have to change it until recently I had no idea how because while crashing and burning has a different meaning for me I had forgotten one essential fact. The phoenix reborn is still a Phoenix, is still the same phoenix – better, brighter, wiser. So standing in the ashes, I don’t feel a bit sad or angry about it. 

   That is the flame in my soul. I have made it to this place where I can look around at the ashes and see the former me and feel eager, excited, content, and amazed. Because I know that from these ashes will rise, the new me. For awhile now I’ve been stuck in fear. That fear has been of change and I consider it well deserved. The fear is that in order to start anew I must ‘die’ first. The fear was that I had to lose everything in order to begin anew. My life has been a horror show for some time now and many different times that is exactly what happened. I had to choose my entire world or my very being and soul. It’s what it took to leave Jafar and seemingly what it has taken every single time something horrific has happened since.  BUT! But! I am the same person. Jafar’s attempt to make me over into someone new and lesser (namely him) FAILED. I am still me, wiser and tempered by pain, and about to begin anew. And this life, reality, these ashes I stand in, is not something I want therefore I shouldn’t fear losing it all. 

    I’ve just realized that it was just a lingering shadow of Jafar telling me that it will never be as good (HA!), I will never be as happy (HAHA!), no one will ever love me as much (ggrrrr!), as it ‘was’ with him. The trick of a NPD is they will never ‘say’ these exact words. They will insinuate all of these and worse. They do it with little nasty biting comments over years and years. They do it with arguments about truth and twisted logic about reality (called gas-lighting) that soak into your mind. Until you literally can’t remember what you used to think, believe, understand before they came along. Standing here playing in ashes today, with it all coming flooding back, has released the floodgates of joy, release, peace, clarity of mind soul and purpose. And given me back my life, the one I was living before him, made wiser by the years and years of living despite him. I am the Phoenix and this is my Year.