The Lost Letters: The Dark World of Narcissistic Abuse

Rise From The Carnage

I miss the birds. The beautiful, elegant murmurations of jackdaws sweeping across dusky Swedish skies. How they would move in synchronicity, tie those complex invisible knots and release them, only to slide into another, even more complicated loop. How did they know what to do? Hundreds of them seething as one entity, as if they possessed one mind. Who led? Who followed? Or were they all followers and leaders at once? Were they aware what they were doing was utterly magical to witness, an otherworldly, haunting emulation of a living fractal? Probably not. They just did it. It was a wonder.

Being in a relationship with a narcissist is similar, in a twisted, ugly-beautiful way. You become one in a complex, endless dance that morphs and changes, yet never completes a cycle. Are you leading? Are you following? You don't know. You become an extension of them. Of their reality. Of their needs, wants, unhappiness, of their rules of engagement that shift and slide. You tumble after them, as the skies spin and the ground turns sideways, and the world becomes a blur—your only constant, the one who lifted you up to the skies and pulled you after them, driven by your desire to make it to stop, for it to end, to at last come to rest—and the brutal belief in the lie you have to power to do so.

And then they discard you, vanish as abruptly as they came into your life, their toxic wing beat eclipsed by the glare of a sunbeam. Lost, disoriented, purposeless, you continue your erratic flight through the sky, waiting for them to return, enslaved to their control. Neither leader nor follower, you struggle to maintain continuity in your solitary dance, but there is none.

Alone, you push on, the pointless, lonely twists and turns of your flight embedded into your behaviour, a siren call for help none can hear or see. You cannot cease what you have been trained to do, and so, unwanted, unloved, you plummet, an exhausted shell, locked in the silence of your vanquished soul, of a heart broken beyond repair.

And this is how it ends. This is what happens to those who stay, who do not escape—who cannot escape.

It is day twenty-one of my solitary month-long stay in Poland. I lost some writing days traveling, dealing with the ongoing court case, and on one particularly terrifying night and day, in a battle facing the depth of the consequences of having spent a decade in a narcissist's reality, and accepting just how much damage had been done—of just how much of my future had been taken from me, and what it would take to change that.

It is perhaps similar to when you decide to improve something in your home. Paint a wall, or replace a bathroom suite, and you think: I will just fix that and everything will be wonderful. But as soon as you fix that one thing, suddenly in its changed appearance, all the other things that were also in need of attention you couldn't see before become visible. And you can't unsee them. They bother you. Prey on your mind.

As you continue, go deeper, you see more things to fix, to improve, or to throw away and replace. It's overwhelming. If you had just left that wall alone, or the bathroom suite, you would not have revealed to yourself all these other things, some of them much worse than problem. When you replace the bathroom suite, you learn the floorboards are infested with woodworm. When you lift up the floor, you discover mice. You keep going until your house is nothing more than a skeleton, a frame, and still, there are things wrong. The ground your house is built on is subsiding.

That is what is to come. I want to warn you. Eventually you will muster the strength to fix that one thing inside of you to make your life better, to reclaim your power, to begin to live again—and just like that house renovation, you will open the door to a cascade of buried trauma that will stun you. Trauma you will have forgotten. Trauma you thought you were over, and absolutely are not. And perhaps the most painful of all: the awareness of the depth of your brokenness. Because now, alone, without them there to cause stress and drama 24/7, the adrenaline stops and the pieces tumble into place. The dust settles. You find yourself alone, and surrounded by utter carnage.