[Nas]

Depending on the level of interaction with her, I might decide to document this but maybe should do it on a different thread so as not to take up the entire vanisher thread.

I’m just sitting here having my coffee before I start yet another long stressful day and a few thoughts come to mind. First, I really want to make sure it never comes across as though I’m demonizing her for leaving her marriage. The ending of a relationship is always painful, but there are ways to end things with respect and kindness. I never understand how a person can be in an intimate relationship with someone for so many years, a lifetime really, and walk away from it without so much as a conversation.

Treating relationships with other people as transactional is a deep trigger for me for reasons I could write an entire book about.

In some ways, her reconnecting with me is also transactional. She needs something from me, whether it’s an emotional Thelma to her Louise (I’ve actually never seen the movie so someone can tell me whether I would rather be Thelma or Louise 😂), someone to enable her trip back in time… whatever it is, there’s a reason and it’s more than just “I value your friendship.” Otherwise, she would’ve valued my friendship over the past years when so many things were happening to me at once. There was a quick “hope you’re okay” once or twice, but certainly no flurry of texts from her on days where I was struggling for a reason to continue on the endless uphill battle.

I am working on a couple of things that I strongly dislike, not the least of which being that I am at least right now struggling with why I worked just as hard or maybe even a lot harder in life but ended up with nothing…
and worse, and more shameful, dealing with a kind of jealousy, and I’m not sure if that’s the right word, of the way other people get to live their lives without the kind of struggles I face, even though I was so careful and responsible and blah blah blah (I know I sound like an MLCer). So I also want to be careful not to demonize her or the financial ease she has in anything she does going forward. I’ve documented here many times how I think jealousy is truly one of the ugliest traits. But I’m not going to lie to myself or anyone else and say that I don’t feel it. It’s really not fun to admit that. But I look at her situation and I feel a lot of things and to not admit that would be disingenuous of me. Again, could probably write a book about it.

So I want to make sure when writing about her, I’m not ever speaking through a green eyed psyche. That’s where my judgment comes in, and it’s wrapped up in my own trauma and experience and I have to step back and keep it all in check.

I will absolutely be there for her to talk to (with clear boundaries of course), not because I feel super close to her, but because I know how important it is for someone to be there when you need to talk. But like I said, I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to believe that I’ll continue to hear from her unless or until she finds someone equipped to enable her distractions and running.

[Treasur]

I must admit that I had assumed that, in her head, you are an object with a potential role to play in her fantasy and had wondered how active or validating her support had been as a friend through your own hard years.

It is ok to be honest with oneself about our more squirmy feelings. Tbh I think being honest with ourself about what we feel at a given time even when we don’t much like that we do is usually what helps us to avoid unleashing or acting out those feelings on other humans. I will confess too that, particularly at this time of year, I feel a kind of idk, not jealousy exactly, maybe a kind of yearning envious self pitying foot stamping thing about others who have family that they like, who feel loved and not alone. A sort of ‘why not me/why them’ feeling which is not a very attractive bit of my emotional toolbox. Or useful tbh. But it swooshes through anyway 

The only advice that occurs to me, Nas, if you choose to interact with this friend bc you know the value of feeling heard? Be appropriately realistic that she is probably not (at least right now based on the evidence you have) like you. The value she places on being heard may be rather different and her sense of self-centredness is unlikely to make her someone who behaves like a friend. And it’s important and reasonable to honour your own bandwidth without feeling responsible for being unable to offer what you cannot offer or scratch someone else’s itch. Emotional vampires can be a real thing 

[Nas]

That's so funny you said that, Treasur, I literally just made a joke last night to someone that I was being an energy vampire. Another fear wrapped up in layers, could be another chapter in my book.
Oh, and I guess envy is a better word than jealousy - jealousy's fraternal twin - and I could prattle on and on about my self-discovery there.

As for how this situation plays out, I've no intention of playing a predetermined role/filling a void/slotting into a blank space in her or anyone else's fantasy or real life ever again.

And as always, random song in my head:
https://youtu.be/s08jD3E6Mpg

"And this is why I hate you
And how I understand
That no-one ever knows or loves another..."

[Biscuit]

Nas.

Going to see the Cure live next week!

B

[titleholder]

Nas.

Going to see the Cure live next week!

B

I saw them last week, it was beautifull!

[nah]

Hey Clanishers.
It’s a bit slow at work so I figured I would catch up. 

Nas, that’s crazy about your old friend. I have little tolerance for abandoners, or whatever she is. My sister is an affair partner turned wife (they were both married), and everyone knows that I can barely stomach either one of them. He’s a Sargent in the police force and physically steps back every time he sees me coming. 

As for the person that abandoned me? Not only have I haven’t heard from him in years, I just realized as I started to type this, I don’t even know what year we last interacted. Guess that’s a good thing.

Haven’t heard from my daughter still. That date I do know. July 1st 2014.    I message her once in a while. If I message her too much, I’m a toxic stalker. If I don’t message her at all, I’m cold hearted and mean. I get it, Nas, you with finances, me with my daughter. We both did all the work but it didn’t work in our favor.
Sucks.

My son is doing good. He has had depression and anxiety issues, ongoing for most of his life. He’s very aware though (unlike his father), so he makes it a priority to meditate and exercise daily. He’s clean, no drugs or alcohol. Routine is very important to him, always has been. He has a job. Working has always been a struggle bc he stresses too much about people. He seems to like this one, though. Hopefully he will stick to it. Last month was a struggle. His former guitar teacher turned friend committed suicide. Ugh. My heart just broke when I heard the news. Since this guy used to teach at our house, we were all close to him. Even though they were ten years apart, the two of them clicked right away so he would stay extra hours all the time, I would make him dinner. After BD, I used to go to the club where his band played. So heartbreaking. By coincidence, he lived on the same street as the Exhusband. Weird.
So my son came over, we were talking about life and death, and my son said, “I feel like my real Dad died when he left, and the other person is just someone else that took over his body, you must feel that way too”.

I just slowly shook my head “yes.”
 

[forthetrees]

I´m sorry that you got yet another confirmation of how far the MLCer falls and how for the most part they don´t seem to find a way back to a semblance of a whole healthy person. We spend so much time thinking it was the "us" and over time the way they treat their own children brings a new perspective.

[Nas]

Nah, I’m so sorry for the loss of your son’s friend.
I’m not surprised that this heartbreaking loss caused your son to also reflect on the equally sudden loss of the father he always knew and how he changed into something else.

As for the friend I wrote about, it turned out I actually had to distance myself from both her and her husband. I wasn’t surprised to start hearing from her a lot after she had left him because I was serving some purpose for her and whatever internal process she had going. But then I suddenly started hearing from him daily.  I don’t know him well and it became very clear it was for toxic, manipulative purposes.

She ticks an awful lot of MLC boxes though. Relationships end, even long relationships, and the person who leaves isn’t always a bad person. When you break up with someone and they don’t want the relationship to end, they are understandably going to be devastated and it may take quite some time before they stop looking at you like you’re a person who hurt them. But if you end things with respect and honesty and as much kindness as possible, eventually, if they are emotionally stable and healthy, they come to realize that, even though it hurt, you didn’t set out to hurt them.

I’ve been on both sides of it more than once, and when the dust settles, you can look at the other person and see they are just human, they are someone you cared for (and still do, but maybe in a different way). They are still fundamentally the same person. You can still think of them fondly and care about them and have respect for them, and they you. Break ups are a difficult but normal part of life.

We unfortunately can recognize the way a disordered person ends a relationship: the sudden personality changes, the unilateral decision making about things that affect both people’s lives, the rewriting of history, the demonizing of the other person, the anger, the entitlement, the needlessly hurtful and deeply painful insults, the cheating, the crazy spending… All of the things that leave the LBS’s head spinning. She’s doing it all.

But at the same time, the way her husband is handling it is chaotic and toxic. And with me at least, really manipulative and selfish. Like I said, I don’t know him well enough to know if this is a reaction to being BDed or if this is how he responds to emotional pain. I just know I don’t have a role to play here, even though they both seem to want me to play a different role to serve their respective purposes. So I hope they both eventually choose inner peace and don’t destroy themselves or anyone else completely, but it’s not a situation I need to have any part of.

[beyondblessed]

Good call on bowing out of their relationship troubles.  No matter what a relationship looks like from the outside, a person can never really know what it is truly like to live it.  There are a lot of marriages out there that have some longevity, but that does mean they are happy, healthy, and balanced relationships.  Going through what we have as LBS may give us more insight if someone is acting truly mental, but even then, our own experience can skew the whole picture.  Personally, I'd stay far away from it, especially if those involved were never much a part of my life anyway.

[Nas]

A rare update on my own vanisher. I literally don’t know what I feel about this yet (I know how I feel on the surface, but I haven’t delved deeper yet and this one will be extra layered), but I had to share. There are things about my life that I’ve never told anyone at all, and there are things that I told my former husband that I’ve never told anyone else.  Long story short, I found out that my former H has been telling a version of his life story that includes some of the most deeply painful experiences from my life. He’s stolen them for his own purposes, whatever firetrucked up purposes those might be. Based on the way it’s come to light, I could speculate but what’s the point, that’s all it would be is useless speculation. I didn’t even know what to say and that feeling of being frozen in place with pins and needles crawling through my body is something I’ll never easily recover from. It’s not like I could dispute it, what was I going to say, “No, those deeply traumatic things (that I was never able to share with anyone but him)…didn’t happen to him, they happened to me”? Add it to a list of WTFs and “whys” that will never, ever be answered.

Ever since the discovery of OW, I’ve lived with the unacknowledged but just under the surface terror that he would tell her or others my story and paint a giant bull’s eye on my most vulnerable spots (a fear I'm sure some of you are familiar with). It never crossed my mind he would instead erase me completely but steal the deepest parts of me, parts that I opened up and shared with him, fool that I am. I wonder if I’ll ever forgive myself fully for trusting.