Looking back over the last 15 months since the last series of posts, I remember the utter hurt and restraint in each selected written word, I see the growth between then and now, and the application of the lessons, to see parallel dynamics played out again, and to step off before the undertow got me this time.
Between the words and the silence after them I see the orbits of season and cycle in myself and others, and I see gain more than loss, even though there has been a lot of sloughing. Nothing like a good old slough!
After a couple of breakups, one with a friend and the other with a lover who had been a friend, i began seeing, regularly, a psychologist in person. In a second language it’s a challenge, but you can’t beat real actual human connection. I’d seen English-speaking therapists online but I’m zoom-called out, frankly. Therapy has helped me step out of the anxiety enough to begin to write from a slightly cooler perspective. To not only see light through the fog, but to form and implement plans. In trauma I’d had that simple capacity stripped from me. I know I’m healing because not only am I beginning to forget certain things that happened, or at least beginning to not feel a visceral reaction to particular memories – which is the brain healing from the trauma of abuse – I am also able to plan ahead.
But sloughing itches. Trauma stays longer in the body. Oddly enough, it also bothers me that I might forget because the case is still before the magistrate and it can take years for it to be heard. For the sake of justice I don’t want to forget.
I’m glad that I filmed and recorded what I could, and that I took notes and wrote poetry, sent emails and sneaked messages during the height of horror. Reading that is like reading about another life, a whole different human being.
In any case, the exterior ever haggles for a place in which to ignite triggers. In 2019 I removed myself from the studio I’d set up (with the help and support of my ex husband, in the Italian village I’ve lived since 2012). Part of the stalker’s bag of charming manipulations when he wanted me to go with him, was to show me photos of a sizeable, light-filled space that would become my studio, coupled with commissions already in the pipelines ready to go, backed up by video calls with his friends wishing me well and doing the commissioning. All better, apparently, than what I had here. All of this in Switzerland, which in theory would equal a new language, new friends, a new life, actual income, ease of being. Everything I craved. Too good to be true.
Skip forward, it’s 2023, and a lifetime that reads like apocalyptic fan fic has passed: physical and sexual abuse, coercion, escape, pandemic, return, abuse, escape, divorce (from my non-abusive and very supportive ex husband), my beloved cat’s terminal cancer and death, loss of friends who just did not get it, cyber stalking, stalking in person, death threats, photos and videos of me distributed to my clients, friends and anyone else the stalker thought might have connections to me. (NB: the term “revenge porn” is problematic as it suggests that I willingly partook in this at some point before it became “revenge”. I did not know that he had taken film and photos of me. He took them without my knowledge and therefore it has been twice a non-consensual act. Rape, again, in other words).
Almost four years on and notwithstanding the fact we could have all been wiped out in a pandemic, fiddly minutiae from tic-tac-brained twats in the form of gossip and passive aggression and vitriol still rattles my way, spilling from those who once called themselves friends. It’s one thing to not understand narcissistic abuse and to lack empathy (cognitive or otherwise) but it’s another to be, frankly, a cunt about it.
However, drama, spite and gossip are the oil for the gears of this kind of mentality.
I’d made a decision that of course I regret in hindsight, of course there were red flags right there at the very beginning (given I didn’t even know what a red flag was, nor the term malignant narcissist till I was smack bang in it and googling behaviour traits).
At the time, before the physical abuse began in earnest, I felt like the risk to begin a life again somewhere like Switzerland was a risk that could have saved my life. I look back at the weighing up of those risks and know that I really was not in a good way here in Italy. I felt my life unravelling and had no genuine support around me. I wasn’t being heard, I was being judged. Every time I opened my mouth I was being talked over, and talked about. A friend/colleague had been badmouthing me for years all while enjoying the benefits of the generosity of my time and zero rent, and, trying to avoid her tantrums the few times I did confront her about things that were off (like copyright infringement, for example) meant at the end I didn’t have the bandwidth to call her out on it and boot her arse out of there like I should have at the time. I was spent. She had never been in my corner, she was simply a user, and I’d known for a long time. I simply didn’t have the energy to challenge it further.
I had anxiety and at the precipice of depression, vulnerable and raw still after my separation with my ex husband the year before. I was deep in the grief that comes from the annihilation of a once-promised future with someone i loved deeply, the only person i ever wanted children with – and the resistance to accepting that loss as fact – and what the experience was then as a foreign divorced woman in a tiny Italian mountain village, where even the prime local legend is about the medieval townsfolk bullying the daughter of the local woodwitch because she was different and lived in a different way that made her “other”. The provincial pack mentality of that epoch is still alive and kicking. And what does the wood witch do in revenge? She smites her own castle in outrage, blighting the horizon, which outwardly seems like a weirdly reactive, passive aggressive and self destructive and “other” thing to do.
In any case, it’s the “other” that draws me in. Being the “other” and knowing the “other” has always intrigued me, in people, in stories, places, and in life. And sensing all of that in me, in waltzed the malignant saviour. He was definitely other. He was charismatic; narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths always are, in the beginning.
Yet it wasn’t physical attraction – people always presume that. No. There was something I didn’t like about his eyes, his too-big teeth, and the way he spoke. His laugh was high pitched, and frankly awful. It was all a mask (I know that now). There was nothing physical I was attracted to in the very beginning. As a kid I was drawn to reptiles, in particular snakes, perhaps that can explain it in part? I recognised the reptile behind those eyes? Where he burrowed in was when he love-bombed me about Mesopotamia, Kurdish women warriors, Rumi and other poets, philosophy, theatre, photography and art. He was a feminist (so he said). He was all Free Rojava and he had purpose, it appeared, and was cultured, well-travelled. And he just poured that culture and intelligence over a woman thirsty who, not into motor clubs or brindisino for the millionth time, had been desiccating in a cultural and emotional desert for way too long, without really paying the proper attention to it, because, hey, I had a studio in a small Tuscan town? I should be so lucky, right?
Through him I became dangerously attracted to my own rebelliously possible way out in order not to die an isolated soul-death in Parochial Town. And he was cunning in his use of heart-strings manipulation.
So, no, I wasn’t physically attracted to the reptile man, yet I still hear anything from the naff suggested reasons of a sexual nature to attacks on my character, emotional stability and intelligence. I’ve heard these things from the very same people who make sure they’re seen holding up placards in anti-bullying and anti-violence rallies, who pat themselves on the back for having posted the latest lip service publicity shouting into the old white man void they still play coyly into, to end violence against women. Maybe, instead, do the bare minimum and actually listen to those women?
I don’t expect folk like that to understand. If they haven’t by now, it’s likely they never will, and they’ll continue their hypocrisy and “blame the victim”. Or worse, in the case of an old white man client, shortly before I ceased working with him, who thought he’d make light of the fact that the stalker had filmed me having sex without my knowledge, and then sent it around to the whole village, my family, my clients, and jokingly said: “you should have at least asked for payment”.
It’s not my job to educate people on my experience, but there’s a part of me that feels I have to. Some have even called it attention seeking. No, folks. I happen to like a quiet life. Genuine human beings with actual real wide-open brains and a decent amount of empathy have proved that they don’t judge or presume but rather they ask me what it was about him that I was so taken in by. They don’t just ask: they let me answer. Unfortunately it’s a question posed usually by those who’ve been through similar situations themselves, so by default they understand.
In any case, for those who want to learn, if you have to ask: it’s that “what” that is better than the “why” or “how”.
The whys and hows don’t fit into the infinite and murky width, depth or breadth of narcissism. The “what” as in, “What made you smite your own castle?” can at least be usually (somewhat) answered at surface level.
departure point 