Dearly beloved are you listening?

It’s 5 in the morning. I’m not up early, I’m up late. Once again, I can’t sleep. Some nights I sleep like a rock. Some nights I wake up every hour or two. Some nights I don’t sleep at all. This is one of the latter kind. My mind just won’t shut the fuck up. It just won’t.

Chances are you found your way to the post because drumroll you’ve recently been in an emotionally abusive relationship with a narcissist (why is that word so fucking hard to spell?). I’m so smart, see how I guessed that? Surprise, I have too. That’s why (surprise!) I’m writing this post.

You may have noticed something oddly different about this post than other posts, links, books, YouTube videos, etc. etc. that you may have run across in your search for emotional validation: the words FOR MEN. Odds are, you’re not. In my journey that’s the first thing I discovered, almost all victims of emotional abuse by narcissists are women. This can be a little problematic if, say, you’re not a woman. I’ve already become fairly frustrated with my search for self-actualization. The first audiobook I purchased on the subject was late last night. I downloaded it and set it to play on my tablet. Being aware of the skewed gender distribution of narcissists and their victims, I tried to find one that was at least somewhat gender neutral. That’s not all that easy. So many have taglines along the lines of “is he a narcissist?” “thousands of women have found hope in this book” etc. etc. I thought I found one so I dropped some much needed cash on my recovery and started listening with the intention of drifting off to sleep after finding some comfort. I quickly became frustrated as the book talked about narcissists and their victims in VERY gender specific terms. Rather than finding healing I’m finding my self-doubt growing. I’m a man. Am I really the narcissist? Was she right all along? I’m I really to blame for everything?

So finding my anxiety heightened rather than assuaged I went back to searching for books that were, perhaps, gender specific but in the other direction: Empathetic men victimized by narcissistic women.

Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Bupkis.

Apparently society is simply under the impression that all men are the same and none of us have any kind of emotional vulnerability. I’m here to tell you that’s bullshit. Highly sensitive men might be a minority but we definitely exist. I know a few who just happen to not be me. So here I am, sleep deprived, anxiety plagued, depressed, and in desperate need of attention to hygiene to say “This shit happened to me too.” That is not to say that if you’re a woman you might not find some value in my writing, but I’m writing this for me. This blog has always been by me for me. I’ve never had a large following at any point. I think at one point I might have had twenty or so regular readers, but in checking my blog stats this morning on my blog that hasn’t seen a post since 2016, my blog had a grand total of two hits for 2019. I’m pretty sure they were both me. That said, if this helps you nobody will be more excited than me. Follow along. Maybe we’ll find some peace together. First, a little background on me, just in case anybody who isn’t me reads it.

The space that’s in between insane and insecure

First of all, I use profanity. A lot. If that makes you uncomfortable, you’re on the wrong blog.

My name is Dr. David Grey. No it isn’t, but that’s not important. It is to you. What am I a doctor of? I’m not. It’s a fake degree. I printed it off from an unaccredited diploma mill years ago to make a point about how worthless degrees from unaccredited institutions are. I know a few “experts” spreading around woo (a term that means bullshit) with “Dr.” prefixed on their name. A little digging shows that their degrees are worth about as much as mine. Hence, I’m a doctor. Strictly speaking my doctorate is intelligent design or some bullshit like that. If I find the PDF with my degree I’ll be happy to post it.

I’m a musician. That’s the label that describes me the most completely. Music is my love, my sanctuary, my therapy, and my life’s blood. I started playing the violin at age four. I was concertmaster for all of junior high and always in some kind of titled seat through high school. I won the solo competition with my high school orchestra, played in the the local youth symphony, and went to music camp every summer. I went to college on a double scholarship for violin and French horn (picked that one up in 6th grade or so).  My college professor destroyed my wrists and ended what was once a promising career. I washed out of college shortly after.

I got married in my early 20s. I fucked around and did a lot of nothing. I went to community college half assed and worked crap jobs. This went until around age 29 or so when my wife got involved in a religious cult. I was indoctrinated shortly after. After a bit more than a year of psychological abuse I left the cult. I went through that clusterfuck by myself. Nobody knew what I was going through, and my wife was still in the cult. I pulled myself through that crap alone, and I’m proud of that. It was fucking hell.

About a year later, as I was getting ready to divorce my wife because I had no intention of having children with her and having them be raised in a religious cult, my wife surprisingly left. Excited at what looked like the restoration of my marriage, we had our first child some nine months later. i cleaned my act up and got a computer science degree and began working as a software developer. Far from being the restoration of my marriage, it proved to be it’s undoing.

My first wife apparently succumbed to some form of mental illness. It was difficult to spot at first, but ten years later it was undeniable. I’m not a psychiatrist so I can’t say what it is with any certainty, but from what I’ve learned it bears a lot of resemblance to schizophrenia. Who knows. The short version is ugly divorce, custody battle, lots of mental trauma for all involved, financial ruin, foreclosure, therapy, and eventually me and my boys were more or less ok. She ran off to Texas or something. Nobody knows where she is now.

Somewhere along the line, circa 2008 or so, I realized I was an atheist. Religion had done so much damage to me that not only that but I had a really long angry period where I was a full on anti-theist. A lot of that is chronicled on this blog. Then, blogwise, I disappeared around 2016 or so. The parts you missed were, after a few more bad relationships, I thought I found the one™. There’s no explaining this. For some reason I became enamored of a highly religious Republican voting abortion protesting blonde bombshell. We married last June, she left me about a week ago. And now we’re all caught up.

Nobody’s perfect and I stand accused

I’m not going to tell my story in chronological order. I don’t need to, I lived it. I’m going to go over the parts that matter in the order my stream of consciousness puts them on this page. Like most people I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to put the pieces together to figure out what happened. So little of it made sense. No conflict is entirely one sided. I know I fucked a lot of things up. The narcissist always tries to put the blame on you, and that’s what she’s been doing. It’s a form of gaslighting, and it’s painfully effective if you’re highly sensitive. This is where a lot of the pain and confusion for me comes from: the inclination I already had to blame myself for everything. When the other side is also blaming you for everything, it spirals out of control.

Since things really went to shit about a month ago, a lot of people who have known her a lot longer than I have have reached out to me and given me a lot of info I didn’t have before; things that really would have been helpful to know before saying “I do”. But last night a good friend said a word to me that really kind of hit everything home for me: Narcissist.

It hadn’t really occurred to me that she was a narcissist, but with that word locked in place so much of it begins to make sense now. The thought had crossed my mind, and I even looked up the symptoms of narcissism previously, but she didn’t seem to match enough of the signs to convince me. A total lack of empathy sure, but not all the signs matched in my mind. So I kept that to myself and filed away. I never said the N-word to anybody, but unsolicited they said it to me last night. Once I knew that other people saw her a narcissistic, I knew I wasn’t crazy for thinking that. The unbearable pain, the out of control crying, the binge drinking, the chain smoking, all signs of the emotional abuse I’ve gone through. I hesitate at that word, abuse. It makes it sound so intentional. I don’t think it was. I don’t think she knows why she behaves the way she does. Certainly if you approach her with concerns about her behavior it immediately sets her into a rage. It’s like there’s some kind of demon deep inside her head that hits the panic button as soon as anybody tries to help her.

I think I’m going to wrap this post up at this point. It’s obviously going to be a multi-parter. I have no idea how many parts there will be. This is a journey. This is about me trying to find my way back to normalcy, to learn to love myself again, to recover and function from the complete and total devastation I feel. Only in the last few days have I even been able to function at all. Every day I’m a little more productive. I’m getting there.