he tried to beat the she out of me and his wordy hands struck only white hot rock and spines he nursed blooded knuckles and spat
what are you?
i said
i am an animal that looks like a woman
*
this was a poem i wrote after having escaped into the snow one late january. the first evening there had been ok. on the second evening, we’d gone for dinner – something we’d never done before – and we got back to the accommodation and i could see he was ruminating. i could feel it coming. it’s something he does: sucks his teeth, the parenthesis around his mouth deepens. eyes grow dark.
and then it just began, the usual well-worn track. “i must have had so many dinners like that with so many guys.”
i bit my tongue but he didn’t stop. i was the usual [insert disgusting woman from a disgusting culture slander here] and he was going to go hook up with a woman he knew in vienna.
i began to put my clothes in my pack, to leave, and he took up a pair of jeans and whipped me with them, spat on me, and it just continued on until i screamed at him that i’d call the police. he left for 20 minutes and locked the door so i couldn’t leave (a common tactic of his) and i couldn’t finish packing for shaking, then he returned, took all my cash (i had my card tucked into my boots, thankfully, and my phone was in the bottom of the pack), he took my scarf, hat and gloves, but my jacket was in the entrance hall way, i waited till took off his boots, grabbed my jacket and fled so he wouldn’t follow, running 10km to find safety in a motel outside the city it was -14C.
i was set to head back to to my residencial country, but i knew he’d try to find me at the airport. and then one of his damned female groupies started in again – the flying monkey service – relaying a message that his mother had been taken to hospital, could we meet “one last time”.
that’s the only thing that stopped me in my tracks. he’s since had half a dozen dead or dying relatives, kidney stones, marauding gangs attacking him (his modus operandi guilt-manipulation tactic he’s used on all of his exes to hoover them back in), and i don’t believe him. i don’t fall for that now.
but not before i relented and saw him and his poor me face.
that fucking mask.
but the damage was done, i was the horse whipped shy and i began to stoke the first sparks to plan my way out of a situation i knew could be deadly when i left.
as for the flying monkey service (always women), i made good use of them for myself. i’d call them to diffuse situations, because he had to keep his mask on straight for them, and for a narc that takes a great deal of effort. it bought me time to work out how to leave, and what that would look like being isolated and physically helicoptered, and so physically and mentally fatigued.
i began therapy, started a course where i met a classmate who miraculously was my across-the-road-neighbour and an english speaker. i suddenly had time and space, and people who were not friends with the great manipulator. alongside therapy, it just took that one solid person to turn my head toward the open window.
narcissists come in a range of disguises, from overt to covert, to aspects of their personalites that become apparent when they drink, or are blamed on illness. they can be male and female, parents, siblings, bosses, co-workers, friends, extended family members, etc.
now i have educated myself on what narcissism is and the signs and reg flags to look out for, as well as the self-work to understand why i attract these types into my life, i can spot these fuckers a mile off.
no, i’m not at the radical empathy stage yet, and i’m really quite ok with that.
a couple of years ago i met the kind of person who everyone else was sure might be good for me to know: she was creative with a profession in the arts, an animal lover, and english-speaking.
we became virtual friends first on social media, a few likes on posts and brief messages before ‘bonding’ over our love of animals and the injustices of ludicrous actions in a faraway land.
half a year later we decided to meet in person in my town. she machine-gunned questions at me, which, after the initial excitement of meeting and subsequent lunch, i realised she’d asked me half a dozen things at once only to speak straight over the top of my answer. i shrugged it off, but it wiggled in my gut.
that wiggle, i know now, was my intuition telling me something was way off: an enormous red flag that she was not what she seemed, that there was something that didn’t sit well, and was something she would later deflect right back at me during a very real time of need. after a year and a half of therapy and selfwork i would come to realise that her behaviour was on par with that of the other narcissist [incidentally he came into my life a handful of months after meeting my friend].
after our initial meeting we started chatting via whatsapp and she introduced me to the vocal messaging function, which i’d never used before as i was loathe to hear my own voice played back at me. also…why not just make the phone call? however, this meant that i now had a platform from which i could tell my story – the answers to all those questions she’d asked – uninterrupted – without her getting noticeably increasingly frustrated at me for my slowness at an actual thoughtful response in the timely manner she expected it.
for a while i enjoyed our back and forward vocal messaging; i genuinely loved hearing her stories from just over the other side of the mountain. her beloved old cat. her eclectic, creative and extended international family, and the characters of her town, her flings and loves. i was mesmerised by how she could flow and segue, story to story with a rolling jolliness that i later realised only just kept the lid on a spiteful tongue.
our vocal monologues were often each 15 and 20 minutes long, and while listening we’d each do our thing. I’d take notes so that I could respond to her questions and certain points in the narrative.
this method brought us up to date with one another’s lives quickly and to such a point that actual conversations seemed temporarily balanced. i thought i saw glimpses of a friendship [read: i was projecting my hopes] till the red flags popped up again.
her cat needed to go to the vet and she had asked me a rather loaded request for advice: what did I think would happen?
from my experience as a veterinary nurse, i knew diagnosing any animal over the phone was out of the question, let alone give a prognosis for a cat I’d never met.
this conversation took a strange turn and bafflingly went round and round, and she raised her voice at me until i stated that i didn’t know precisely what it was she wanted me to tell her. i could hear the panic in my own voice that i was not getting this right, and she growled something at me and hung up the phone.
after throwing that to and fro in my head for the rest of the evening, again i pushed it back, underlining it as concern over her cat.
later she apologised via a message…sort of. no. actually, she blame-shifted: it was the heat, an endocrine problem, her stress.
i brushed it off and then it happened again a few days later when she rang me in a panic about some fledglings she’d found that would soon be a meal for a street cat if she didn’t rescue them.
no matter what animal care advice I gave her (advice she had clearly asked me for) it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, and that jolliness peeled back again to something quite nasty.
again i almost shook that off as her passion for the wellbeing of animals, but by now my trust to confide in her had receded.
i realised that any conversation with her would always be off-kiltre and while she clearly invited an opinion or interjection, if they didn’t fit with hers or she didn’t want to hear what i was saying she would bring down thinly disguised ridicule and deflection. i was there to listen to her (something she would later deflect at me, that she’d being doing all the listening, when i called asking for the kind of help that wasn’t long distance veterinary diagnostic or fledgling related).
as we hurtled towards the oncoming rupture of the friendship, i stopped voicing any of my deeper opinions to her.
the end arrived irrefutably during the first month of my relationship with the grand manipulator. i was hiding out in the bathroom. he hated my friend for “stealing my time” and, as he had hacked my whatsapp and other messaging platforms – and installed spyware – i had to delete any messages i’d written or received from her, and any calls had to conducted “in code”.
on that particular day, in the year of the narc, weeks had passed since my friend and i had spoken.
i wrote a message: i need an ear.
to paraphrase what she replied, it was basically this:
you made your bed and you lie in it. he’s unstable and he’s making you unstable. i’m sorry but friendship and support goes both ways.
my response was passive aggressive, stating bluntly that it had been that way for me, too, that it had always been about her.
last i’d looked, she wasn’t requiring any support from within an abusive relationship. i could not even be a proper friend to myself – how the hell was I supposed to “support” her?
this was never a friendship, i realised, and it made me sad to think my narc had been right about her. what i didn’t need, particulary when he’d succeeded in isolating me, was to believe my in-house manipulator.
much later, once i was long out of the narc’s grip, and with the headspace and perspective that comes with being free of enmeshment, i had immersed myself in therapy and i learned that what she had done mirrored what the great manipulator had done to me.
and i was the common denominator.
my codependence and people-pleasing were attracting these kinds of people into my life.
i have to laugh at least a little at that. it’s ironic to think that while they’d never met each other, how much those two hated each other, arguing each was usurping my time. they’d be loathe to know just how ucannily similar they were in terms of their barely-contained rage and behavioural traits.
departure point 