After the darkness comes the dawn, always. Yesterday I wrote about feeling so disconnected from my emotions that I felt like I could slice someone’s head off without regret. This morning, I wrote a note to a friend that gave thanks for kissing my broken places and being the cherished and honored friend that the NF description said I’d get. In every way, this is the friendship I’ve waited for all my life and had to, because I could not have seen the pieces on the chessboard that needed to move for me to be capable of it.

My psychosexual dysfunction says that you don’t really know me if you aren’t having sex with me. Therefore, I could not and did not allow myself to really have friends outside of Dana because I was afraid of creating chaos. I did anyway, and as I watched those relationships burn, I realized that I’d made my choice. If opening up to someone triggered a sexual response in me, then I wouldn’t open up to anyone. I’d just compartmentalize friendship so that I wouldn’t allow myself to feel what was missing.

I came into a friendship in this broken place, and because Dana trusts me to know my own darkness, I didn’t feel bad about telling the friend that I didn’t know if I could be friends with a woman that excited me this much, that I couldn’t betray Dana, etc. etc. etc.

She didn’t even blink. Not once. She told me that she wanted to be everything for me that was good and right and pure about friendship, and I fucking lost it. That’s the tape. That’s it.

As a direct consequence of my abuser’s actions, friendship and sex are inextricably interrelated. How did I not have this epiphany before? My first real “my parents didn’t pick you” friendship was broken in exactly that way, so of course at some points in my life ALL OF my friendships were broken in the same way.

Once I was able to figure out where the tape was, I sliced through it. No more. Friendship stands on its own, and the testament to it is that when I offered up a broken place, she kissed it and made it better.

This is my personality without my abuser:

Your Keirsey Temperament Sorter Results indicates that your personality type is that of the Idealists (NF), as a temperament, are passionately concerned with personal growth and development. Idealists strive to discover who they are and how they can become their best possible self — always this quest for self-knowledge and self-improvement drives their imagination. And they want to help others make the journey. Idealists are naturally drawn to working with people, and whether in education or counseling, in social services or personnel work, in journalism or the ministry, they are gifted at helping others find their way in life, often inspiring them to grow as individuals and to fulfill their potentials.

Idealists are sure that friendly cooperation is the best way for people to achieve their goals. Conflict and confrontation upset them because they seem to put up angry barriers between people. Idealists dream of creating harmonious, even caring personal relations, and they have a unique talent for helping people get along with each other and work together for the good of all. Such interpersonal harmony might be a romantic ideal, but then Idealists are incurable romantics who prefer to focus on what might be, rather than what is. The real, practical world is only a starting place for Idealists; they believe that life is filled with possibilities waiting to be realized, rich with meanings calling out to be understood. This idea of a mystical or spiritual dimension to life, the “not visible” or the “not yet” that can only be known through intuition or by a leap of faith, is far more important to Idealists than the world of material things.

Highly ethical in their actions, Idealists hold themselves to a strict standard of personal integrity. They must be true to themselves and to others, and they can be quite hard on themselves when they are dishonest, or when they are false or insincere. More often, however, Idealists are the very soul of kindness. Particularly in their personal relationships, Idealists are without question filled with love and good will. They believe in giving of themselves to help others; they cherish a few warm, sensitive friendships; they strive for a special rapport with their children; and in marriage they wish to find a “soulmate,” someone with whom they can bond emotionally and spiritually, sharing their deepest feelings and their complex inner worlds.

Idealists are relatively rare, making up no more than 15 to 20 percent of the population. But their ability to inspire people with their enthusiasm and their idealism has given them influence far beyond their numbers.

——————————————————

And then the part of her that lives in me tells me that I could just as easily slit one of these precious people’s throats and walk away with no remorse, especially if it was justified and sanctioned by someone else. I love the idea of The Code. I love anything that feeds my dark side because I feel like no one can handle it. No one can go deeper and darker than I can in my group of friends. It is my illness and it is huge. There is not a monster inside me. In a lot of ways, there are pockets of me that are just black holes. No morality. No conscience. No fear. No joy. No anything. Just terrifying and cold silence. I don’t think I’m dangerous. I think it’s lucky that I’m NOT dangerous given everything I’ve been through. If I have an alter ego on television, it’s Quinn from Scandal, and I don’t even blink when I make that comparison. I spent the entirety of Dexter in my head. I went there and I liked what I saw. I am addict. I will do anything to get other people’s dopamine when I’m in that head space, and everything to find my way back to the sweet kid I was…

If you (plural) love me, you won’t read this and freak. You’ll say, “Leslie has an imaginative fantasy life.” That’s probably true, because my blog and my head are my most dangerous weapons. Actually, no, my mind is truly fascinating. I have the capacity to love you until I just can’t anymore. It’s so big that it will swallow you whole and you’ll adore the way I dote and flirt on my friends.

Just don’t stay around to watch my eyes flash, because you will see it and it will scare you into absolute and complete submission.

You know the really fucked up part? It should.

I have proven this weekend that if you try to hurt my family, I will respond in kind. My mother lion is so vicious that I emotionally cut someone to shreds because they DARE speak to Dana that way. I would have died rather than let them win. DIED. Do not come into my house and accept my hospitality and tell me that God didn’t create me and that my wife and I are mistakes. Seems like a reasonable request.

Apparently, I would be surprised.

Don’t ever test me and try to get me off my leash. The genie does not go back to the circle couch on this one.

“This aggression will not stand, man.”

I hit my limit and I exploded. I slayed all my dragons at once, including finally telling someone in an actual place to help me. The meeting was… productive.

She hasn’t done anything illegal, so there’s that. However, eyes are on her that will not go away. Not today, not tomorrow, or ANY of the days of her life. If she ever touches another 14-year-old, even if it’s only her brain, and anyone finds out about it, I am sure that the consequences will be ominously severe. And since I am not threatening her, just showing what will happen if this happens again, I will tell you that in her wildest nightmares she’s never figured out how powerful I am. I had the balls to tell someone that MATTERED- without excusing her behavior. When I tried to protect her, I was called on it and accepted it as fact. I told that I was not protecting her future, just her past, because those are the only memories precious to me.

She will never be able to get away with anything ever again. And watch the speeding, Mario.

Capiche?

I am thinking right now about how happy I am to have found friends, the kind of friends you keep for a lifetime because they know exactly who you are, warts and all, and don’t even blink. The people that can take your dark side because their dark side is either the same shade or similar. The places that we can go in our minds and not be threatened by each others’ thoughts is enormous. With one friend in particular, I have absolutely stood in front of her, or hope I have, and laid myself bare. It has been a hell of a day, and my story is that I slayed another dragon by letting go of the hope that they would change, and at the same time came clean about something I’d been holding in for a while. In both cases, my friend picked me up and hugged me and said it was okay. What is an even bigger miracle is that this happened to me three times today. THREE.

I am overwhelmed with gratitude. Overwhelmed. These past two days have been better than the past two years in terms of the heights and depths I could reach emotionally. I believe that it was my faith that carried me through, because it was faith in the God inside me. I lost my temper, but I did not lose my dignity or humanness. My faith in God allowed my humility to apologize for the things I’d done, and the things I’d left undone. Those words are written on my heart and I say them every week. They are not just words to me, they are a comprehensive response to life.

Grace to the God who strengthens me, because God sure as hell doesn’t need me for strength. I’m 5’4 and 125 lbs. I could bite someone at best.

Amen.

I was so proud of myself. I sang a movement of the Rutter Requiem, and it was extraordinarily well-received. I had a lot of people come up to me afterward and congratulate me on a job well done, and the best part was being able to take it in. To really hear the compliments given and not write them off as, “ohh, you’re just saying that.” It’s usually my normal mode of operation to reject a compliment, but that hasn’t worked my whole life so why not stop it? Why beat myself up while other people are trying to give me love? I think and pray on these things, and with each day, I feel a little bit stronger.

In fact, I would have made it the entire day without crying had it not been for one woman that gutted me like a fish, and thank God she said it as I was walking out so that I could go home and cry instead of what I did yesterday, which was sing at a funeral and cry all the way through it even though I had never met the guy. This woman was trying to give me something precious, and I am sorry that my first reaction was not to take it in the spirit in which it was given.

What she said was so loaded that the thing I’d been trying to ignore all day came screaming out. Tears came to my eyes and I shuddered with grief, because she said, “I really like your style.” I like my style, too, and I know exactly where I got it. Even while I was singing, I knew I sounded just like her. Not in tone, mind you, but in the little flourishes in our musical personalities are quite similar from having spent so many years together in choirs. At first, she was my handbell conductor and sat next to me in adult choir. Then, when we moved to Portland, she was my conductor for a lot of years at her partner’s church. I live and breathe her style because I have been in love with it for longer than I can really think back.

I heard her before I saw her, which totally made me think she was some sort of supergenius… weird only because after I got to know her, I hardly noticed her voice at all. I don’t mean that in a bad way AT ALL. It’s just that our emotional relationship was so tight that I was never really a drooling fangirl, you know? She may have seemed like an idol to me for a little bit, but within a few months we were laughing and joking so much that her status as The Best Singer in the World™ faded into the background. It is always lovely to hear her sing, and I have a couple of mp3s of her somewhere so that I don’t forget… and never want to… but at the same time, her voice wasn’t what drew me in. It was her stories.

One of OUR funniest stories is that when I was a little kid, she said, “Let me explain something to you. I can’t date you because I am on one side of the desk and you are on the other.” At the time she was a middle school teacher, but not one of mine. At another school in the suburbs while I lived close to downtown. We spent years and years being as equal as we could be given the circumstances, and then I got my moment. She told me that she’d met someone, and that this person was 15 years older than her. At the time, she was only like, 28 or something, so I said, “Let me explain something to you…” And the laughter starts. “Susan is on one side of the desk, and you are on the other.” She was snorting she was laughing so hard and she said, “fuck you Leslie Lanagan!” I had scored a point and it was DELCIOUS. PRICELESS. ALl THAT SHIT. It made my cocky teenager’s brain sing. 🙂

After church I went to my friend Aaron’s and helped him move the last of his stuff into his apartment from some storage units. On the way back, I got lost in thought and just kept taking wrong turns on purpose just to turn the day over in my head as I drove and listened to the Weezer station on Pandora. For a few minutes, I let myself feel fucked up that when I sang today, her style came out of my mouth. That she had influenced me to the point that there wasn’t ever a time when she wouldn’t be there with me. I have learned to talk to that part of myself and try to heal it, because especially listening to recordings I get overly emotional- because I don’t want to sound like the best imitation of her. I want to be the best genuine me.

I just have to get back to the elements.

Rutter’s The Lord is My Shepard is playing in the background on repeat since there’s this one phrase that I cannot seem to get right, because my brain doesn’t seem to keep the metronome going. I have a good enough accompanist that he’ll catch me no matter how many entrances I miss, but it is a career limiting move to show up to a solo without knowing how it goes. For the singers in the crowd, it’s the last one- “and thy…” There are several of you nodding. It’s ok. I’ll get it. Eventually. It’s on the and of wtf somewhere.

It’s a movement in the Rutter requiem. No, I didn’t pick it. I really didn’t. Joseph did. He said, “you can sing Pie Jesu if you want since you’ve done it before.” Yeah. I had to go with no on that one. Maybe later. Too soon. And it was ten years ago, capiche? For those of you just joining us, my abuser had me sing Pie Jesu with a community orchestra, and while I was singing, she just stared. Then, she got up in front of the choir and said that it was like watching her little girl grow up. Then, a few years later, her partner said that I read too much into it and it never really meant anything to her… and she could get away with saying it because my abuser wasn’t in the room. My suspicion is that the only reason she said it was to injure me. I certainly left that conversation with my tail between my legs from having my nose pushed in shit.

I have to keep remembering that these scenes in my head are in the past, and I can let go of them now. At the same time, it is the panic of losing those memories that stops me from moving on. In a way, though my blog has taken care of some of that, because they’re on the Internet, saved for posterity. I can go back and read them when I want, and if my computer crashes, I haven’t lost my stories, the things that make me, well, me.

It’s the pictures I’ll lose. It’s the feel of her hand on my freshly buzzed hair. It’s the way the air electrifies for me when she’s in a room. It’s watching her navigate every situation with unfailingly smartass humor. A part of me truly feels like it’s dying… and should. I don’t regret a moment of it, because I’ll never get that time back. To look back in anger is counterproductive.

And yet, sometimes I have to, because if I don’t, the big ball of rage will swallow every good feeling I’ve ever had, including the ones not about her. It clouds everything. Rage and anxiety rule the easiest when I need them the least. I would like to believe that writing it out, piece by piece, allows the ball of rage to live online instead of in my personality.

Leslie,

I’m confused — how is it that you didn’t know there was attraction on her part? Nobody behaves like she did without a romantic element involved…….

You are on the right path. I’m glad you recognize your own value…….

——————————————-

Tony,

I was naive. She told me it wasn’t like that, so I believed her. In fact, she would emotionally shut down every time the subject came up. I never wanted her to be displeased, because then she wouldn’t open up to me. I learned to play the game early, so if she said it wasn’t like that, IT WASN’T.

I am only now picking up the pieces.

Love,
Leslie

I have a really, really rich client that lives in Indiana. By the time I got finished with him, I had reset his password for our web site, walked him through how to use said web site, and sold him on buying season tickets to the Performing Arts Center 20 minutes from his house.

Fuck this has got to stop.

Occasionally I ask people for writing prompts to get my brain working, and Dana gave me this one.

How do you un-write the trauma? What is the first step?

Dear Dana,

If only I could step out of the pictures on our walls and tell you. If only the movies in my mind would play on our TV. I’d give you access to all of it. All the tears, all the screams, all the terror, all the love. Oh, the love.

“Love.”

I can’t say whether she was in love with me. She claims she wasn’t. I can only speak to my own experience, and what that experience tells me is that she was. However, there’s a whole lot that goes into it (as with every story). Love is in quotation marks because I’m not sure it ever really was. There were genuine moments, clearly, but never consistently enough to believe that she wasn’t going to turn around and give me the silent treatment as soon as I wanted to spend time with her. I spent a lot of time playing the game. “How do I have to act to get her to respond to me?” The pattern I learned is that at first, it would be really intense. Everything I needed and everything I wanted emotionally. Then, when she’d had enough togetherness, I dropped off her radar completely. Getting her attention didn’t work. Ignoring her did, though. As I have said many times, the cat wouldn’t move unless the mouse thought he was about to break free. The more I ignored her, the more I could ratchet up her fear that I would walk, and all of the sudden, we were aces again… until the next time she was sufficiently satisfied that I was sufficiently roped in and no more effort was necessary.

I told my therapist today that it was kind of like losing my mother and my child, because for so many years we mothered each other until she took the upper hand permanently and wouldn’t let me reach for it anymore. When I say that I had the upper hand, I meant that I was “free therapy for one older and often not wiser.” I have quoted that before. I’ll quote it again. I feel smart… and used.

When I was a teenager, I felt like I was helping her because she couldn’t help herself. I realize it sounds impossible. If you Google her name and see her title, you will not believe one word of this story… and believe me, there have been plenty that haven’t, especially because of her name and title. Houston was all caterpillar, and Portland was all butterfly.

And here I sit, all these many years later, holding the empty chrysalis knowing that the butterfly just. won’t. fit.

The first step, my darling dangerous Dana, is to be ok with dropping it.

Every writer should have an essay called “The Comfy Chair” when they’re talking about therapy. I started on the couch when I entered the office, and realized that my personality is definitely more of a wingback with pillow to put in my lap in case I need to do something with my hands. I always need to do something with my hands. In fact, it’s probably why I’m a writer. What better way to get past the teachers for not paying attention than to be so quiet I had them completely faked out? Now that the statute of limitations has run out, I will tell you that I never went to a single class in high school. Not one. I had the woman I was in love with in middle school and early high school, and then I had that PLUS a girlfriend my own age. I could sit in the back and write ALL DAY. Knowing what a gerund is? Osmosis.

I’m sitting in the chair turning the pillow over in my hands nervously when she asks me where I want to start. I told her that I wanted to start from the very beginning eventually, but that right now because of this other blogger that is literally psychotic (said that my abuser’s wife set up my abuser and this woman to be raped and killed, for instance), I was in a near-crisis situation because I can’t eat. (I would absolutely link this blog to hers if I did not fear that I would become implicated as well. I’ve met her a few times, and I do not want to dance.) I am not intentionally starving myself, it’s that taking the time out to eat is taking a luxury. I am so scared that I am down to fight or flight and there are no luxuries here. And this is my base self. My inner teenager. I can’t rest until I know that no one is hurting her, or I will go into absolute and complete shock and browbeat myself that I haven’t done enough to save her.

People tell me that it’s wrong, that I shouldn’t do it, etc. I tell them that if I’d figured out how to stop, I would’ve. And as a Christian, there is a large part of me flip-flopping between disowning her and forgiving her seventy times seven. This is the impossible choice. She has already made hers. I have not. Because my reaction is not dependent on hers. I’m not looking at this from the standpoint of what she decides. I’m looking at it from the standpoint of the kind of human being I want to be. My earthly self says to protect everything I have left in complete fight or flight mode because now I have figured it out and she is the enemy. She is the one that got inside my head, not the other way around. My heavenly self says that I am doing what I need to do to be a good person. That despite the level of damage, she’s the mothermentorsisterfriend I got, you know? I should never count her out because I’ll never get another one.

She is not the one I loved to the point of passion. It was much more than that. She was the one I loved to the point that redefined unconditional for me, and I can be proud of that. I didn’t lose the game. I resigned. That thought keeps me remarkably even-keeled until you catch me on a day without myelin. I’ve had a few of those lately, and they usually end up with me sobbing because I just can’t get it right- or can’t feel like I can, anyway, which is probably more universally accurate.

Maybe that is the legacy of abuse… cutting you off from the places in your heart that are capable of receiving love, while entrenching you in the places that give.

My therapy appointment was a mixed bag. On one hand, I absolutely think that she is a wonderful therapist and that I got genuine validation from a professional that my emotions are valid and there is a very good reason I’m feeling as fucked up as I am.

You wanna know just *how* much she understands? She’s in her 60s and wants to refer me to someone younger because she thinks that my trauma is so bad that she will have to retire before I’m well.

So, that was my fucking morning.

I can’t even say anything else than that. I was right, and knowing I’m right alternately breaks my heart and sets me free.

Sometimes I hate the chord that runs between my abuser and me, because it turns me into exactly the kind of person I don’t want to be. There is someone on the Internet so crazy that she’s actually throwing around word salad regarding my abuser and several of her “cohorts.” I don’t know what crazy people call them. I haven’t taken 401.

Anywho, this woman who is a total lunatic is hitting that nerve. The nerve that whispers “it’s your job to protect her, and you’re not doing it.” So what did I do? Like an ASSHOLE I emailed all her friend and asked them to check on her for me. I used to call it “loving her by sneak attack” and then I realized that the information obtained was not actually keeping her safer, it was just driving me bananas.

I didn’t do anything to protect her. I just did something to implicate myself, as if I’m part of this whole thing instead of trying to be the solution. Perception is reality, and I will not come off looking good. I will just come off looking even sadder than I did before.

Once again, SOMETHING THAT COULD HAVE BEEN BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION YESTERDAY.

I get into the hero mode of “if I could only Y, she would X.” The Y comes before the X because it would never occur to me that she would be the actor. I’m always the actor. I’m always the one who does stuff wrong. By saving herself and only reacting, the game is that she has never done anything wrong. She just reacted, and I took it wrong for 25 years.

My appointment for PTSD is at 9:00 AM. I have no idea what I want to say. Where do I even begin?

Like every lesbian’s story, I suppose.

There was this girl……………………

In my grief therapy group that I attended after my divorce from Kathleen, one of the exercises we did was to list all our losses- those things we knew we’d never get from that person again. For my inner 37-year-old, I have to deal with loss itself. In an abusive relationship, if you are the enabler, you have to admit you lost. You were never going to change them in the first place.

It hurts, all those moments you spent wishing that something would change. That something would finally click, and the face you loved would love you in return, the way you needed it to. It doesn’t have to be a romantic relationship. It could be your father or mother. If you were in this type relationship with your mother or your father, you probably spent a lot of time wondering if you’d ever win.

Did you?

For me, it was not necessarily that I wanted her to be my girlfriend. I was already confused as to whether that was an intention or not. But beyond eros, there were a thousand other types of love wrapped in the chord that runs between us. It was so intense that even I don’t understand it. The closest parallel I can draw is in Twilight (I know, right?) when Jacob, in his love for Bella, imprints on her child. He has been in love with her for so long, and yet so much of it is beyond eros. I imprinted on my abuser, and it is so entrenched that it will never go away, because I would have to destroy the wheat and the weeds.

I imprinted on her, and she says to this day that it never happened for her. I believe her, and I don’t all at the same time. I believe that there is a leaking velvet box inside her soul, as well. I believe that if she doesn’t see the chord that runs between us, it may not be that it isn’t there. It may be that she can’t acknowledge it because it’s so fucked up and so true at the same time. But that’s conjecture on my part, just what I use to pass the time.

People ask the abused all the time why they stay. I think I’ve figured it out. It’s that the chord between two people in a relationship carries all sorts of things, positive and negative. What you pick up depends on what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for positive aspects, they will leap out at you when you start to weigh pros and cons.

The negative that leapt out at me was that I never should have had to spend my entire life pining over one woman because she woke up my sex life before it was ready and treated me like I was her best friend. I never should have had a tape that ingrained that said she was The One when I was 13 years old. No matter what she thinks this is still undeniably true. Boom. It stands on its own without any emotion behind it- she did something wrong.

Why did I stay? I justified that wrong for a long time. It wasn’t until I tried to have a relationship that was more important than ours that this problem hurt in just the right way so I could see it clearly and when I did, I went into shock.

The shock has only sort of started wearing off, because the longer I sit with this problem, the shadier I feel.

I felt like I couldn’t save her, and the whole time she was playing me. Before I could drive. Before I could type. Before I could vote. Before I could responsibly be trusted with anything.

In the still of the night, I know it’s not that she hasn’t done this to others. I was just the youngest.

It’s been an interesting week, that’s for damn sure- especially physically. When I get stressed out, I tend to get psychosomatic illnesses like headaches and stomachaches. Not bad enough to stay home and check out of life, but bad enough to be a constant annoyance. My allergies are kicking up terribly, too, which adds a layer of frustration because when I get up to that level of snot, my singing suffers and my stomach hurts from even more post-nasal drip. Between those two things, I’m in relatively good shape… it’s just that hell hath no fury than when I’m inconvenienced in any way. I saw that on Facebook. You can steal it.

This week I have really been looking at my heart, or trying to. As I said earlier, the balance looks different between my abuser and me, and I am slowly determining what that means as I let go and remember. As I laugh and cry and look at old pictures and read old letters in her beautiful and consistently unreadable handwriting that slants to the left. I spent HOURS trying to reproduce it, and the only ones I ever got right were the D’s. I will tell you that it’s because my middle name starts with D; if you believe that, you haven’t been paying attention.

I remember what it was like to touch her… not in a romantic way, but in the way that you’d hug family. Even if this doesn’t ring true on her side, in my humble opinion the chord that runs between us is bigger and stronger than anything else in our lives. This is not that there aren’t people who are more important day-to-day, but I truly believe that if she *could* love someone the way she wanted to, I’d be it… and again, not romantically. I’m just talking about a relationship without constant hiccups and push/pull as we just stuff and deny, lying to those who try to get close.

She has told me with both faces that these things are true. Sometimes, I am the most important person in the world for her, and then the sun turns, and I am left to wonder what happened to the face I loved.

From what I hear, this is typical of this type relationship, and either I can hang with that or I can hang separately. I chose to hang separately, because I couldn’t take the swings. It was like playing Texas Holdem, knowing you’ve got the straight, and not realizing until after you’ve gone all in that she’s holding Kings full over Aces. You know the scene in “Rounders” where all the of the blood drains from Matt Damon’s face after he loses his roll?

Yeah, like that.

I find myself thinking a lot about that face… the duality of loving someone so much that it’s like having my heart beating outside my chest, and has been for so long that I don’t know where it started… and at the same time, realizing that it’s not impossible for someone with round cheeks and a great smile to be capable of abuse.

…but the Mississippi’s mighty,
and it starts in Minnesota,
at a place where you could walk across
with five steps down.

And I guess that’s how you started,
like a pinprick to my heart…
But at this point you rush right through me
and I start to drown….

Emily Saliers, Ghost

If we had a song, this would be it. She gave me a copy of the album and Ghost starts out, “there’s a letter on the desktop that I dug out of a drawer, the last truce we ever came to in our adolescent war.”

Letter? Adolescent war? Emily Saliers put an arrow through my chest.

I also think about the innocent people who aren’t me, and to that, I say this. It was going on under your noses the entire time we lived in the same city. You didn’t notice, because I didn’t call attention to it. I am every bit as responsible for all the lies as you are from that standpoint, because even though I had good reasons for it, I still covered it up right up until I couldn’t.

The gaslighting was everything- I covered for her, and she painted me as mentally unstable. But that’s not the person you know. That’s the person I do.

When you met her, she wasn’t 23. When I met her, she wasn’t a fully cooked adult yet. When you met her, you got to see her realized dreams, and not the poor college kid that made my heart beat faster. You weren’t there for her graduate school going away concert. You weren’t there to see the ways people abused her to even make her capable of connecting with me on that level.

So in short, I think about you and wonder if you’re talking about me in the same way. My peace comes from knowing that you are only reacting in fear, and haven’t made the connection that there are layers upon layers upon levels upon levels upon years and years of things you don’t know. Be mindful that not only is it terrifying going through all this, it’s even worse realizing that our friendship was abusive and I am taking a torchlight to the most fundamental impact on my development from the time I hit tweenage on.

You cannot imagine how much I value this writing space, because right now I’m talking to keep myself from shutting down entirely. I am grateful when you listen.

I’m not going to hell. I’m going through it.
———-

Friend: Do you really think that you are the only one? And I ask that both honestly AND rhetorically, and not to hurt you or diminish the feelings you had for her.

Me: The thought frightens my inner child so badly that I almost threw up on my keyboard.

Friend: She’s lived on the earth a long time. And not always within your sight line.

Me: I know. And I acknowledge. But I haven’t been able to look at that blast radius yet. My ego is too tied up right now. It turns my childhood from an accidental love story to To Catch a Predator

Friend: I think it was a combination, to be honest. And I mean that sincerely. Based on what you’ve said, and what I’ve read in your posts.

Me: I really, really hope so. To think there are others really taps into my worthlessness loop. I wasn’t special. I was just a hole.

Friend: Even if she “couldn’t help it”, it was still wrong.

Me: I am only saying that “I couldn’t help it” feels better than “I fucked half of teenage Amarillo before I got to you.”

Friend: Ya, I get it. For what it’s worth, she didn’t.

Me: ROFLMAO. It’s worth a lot. Thank you.