I do not fear death. I no longer fear I am unlovable or unworthy. I have those irrefutable answers at last. I no longer fear the persecution of lies, ignorance, or huge misunderstandings. That’s all been decided, judged, and prosecuted already.
I fear failure. I fear I’ve not thought of something critical and I’ll cause more unnecessary and undue suffering on the people left in this world whom I’d rather die than ever hurt. Literally.
I no longer fear anger. I don’t have this chronic deep anxiety that deep down I’m going to be like my mother – ruling with rage, cutting sarcasm, and torrential tirades. I still feel immediate terror when I sense anger anywhere about my vicinity, but with all my habitual begging and pleading for forgiveness of crimes I didn’t commit and/or aren’t even crimes at all, combined with faults I am most certainly guilty of, I feel angry.
I think about people who have been wrongly convicted of violent crimes, like rape or murder, who spend years in prison – sometimes lifetimes even – and I imagine how they must feel sitting in their prison cell for all those years, knowing they aren’t guilty…knowing they’re not perfect either, but that they did not commit these heinous crimes against humanity, but there they sit. There they sit among hundreds of guilty voices who also cry out, “…but I’m not guilty!”, knowing their sincere pleas of innocence are useless, tiny ridiculous cries, begging for justice, screaming for truth, but drowning in a sea of guilt that continuously whispers, why bother crying out?
I’ve read over the years of cases where DNA evidence exonerates some poor innocent soul who’s served the time already; who wears that noisy scarlet G for guilty, in spite of their innocence. How angry they must feel! How invisible (other than for persecution purposes, of course), how hopeless, how senseless, and unjust. I once believed that anger was a useless waste of dangerous energy which serves no efficient purpose except transmitting unnecessary negativity out into the world. Yet, I can imagine these people feel quite righteously angry indeed! Yet, in great irony, if they expose their anger or noisily express the travesty of their wrongful conviction, most would just shake their heads and say, see? Look what an angry person he is! Look how “he doth protest too much“, only adding fuel to their guilty judgment with every righteous expression of anger, outrage, and shocking disbelief.
Trapped in their cell, wearing the blaring Scarlet “G”, do they even bother getting angry when it serves no purpose except to shine even more certainty on their misjudged guilt? Can you even imagine for a moment how horrifying that experience must be?
I’ve actually never allowed myself to really feel anger and be okay with that. I have to say though, uselessly senseless as it may be, I am angry. I am furiously angry. I feel angry that my voice is small and unsure, unsteady and without passion anymore. I feel angry that even when I get the words out, now they sound hysterical and imbalanced… rendering them uncountable. I feel angry that I tried so hard, suffered through so much, sacrificed without thought, and pushed myself past every hurdle life and narcissists threw at me.. just to end up defeated and hated in the end regardless.
A life full of consistent efforts to matter, and consistent efforts to help others and to use my struggles for good. A life of buying into the whole, everything happens for a reason, just use it all for good in the world and good will come around to you… No. No that is not true. I’ve lived a life believing in some non-existent karmic balance in the world, some ignorant notion that if I just keep doing the right thing no matter how hard that is sometimes, then everything will be ok; believing that deep in my heart, while drowning in a sea of evidence and experience which keeps slapping my face insisting otherwise.
Apparently, I’m a special kind of stubborn-stupid.
It’s wasted energy, I understand. It serves no purpose except to add fuel to the charges, but fuck that! I am angry. I am PISSED OFF. And I’m letting myself feel that for once in my fucking life.
I feel frustrated and angry that as invisible and non existent as I am and as senseless and futile as my words, life experiences, and feelings are, that I still exist. I still fucking exist!
I hate my body for functioning. I resent myself when I feel hunger. Why should I have to feel hunger? Why should I have to go grocery shopping or buy groceries? I don’t want to and I don’t even exist on any plane that matters….
I used to love to cook! Even after they first left, I confess, sometimes I’d still cook big dinners and send my kids pictures hoping to spark a memory of my cooking they loved, or maybe fondly recall the many dinners we had where we laughed. It seemed a safe topic to address when all topics and all my words are twisted into daggers and furiously flipped, taken out of context, and unleashed upon me backwards like boomerangs. My feather boomerangs I lovingly toss out there which return as daggers to stab and criticize.
Now, I feel pissed off when I’m hungry and when I can’t push past it anymore, I drag myself to the kitchen and eat a spoonful of peanut butter or anything readily handy that will shut up my hunger pains when they’re driving me crazy.
Maybe those food pictures were manipulative? Maybe I’m selfish to want them to remember being happy with me, loving me, being a family with me…? They’re admittedly gloriously happy, why would I want them to remember those things when they’ll either be twisted to hurt me or twisted inside them as painful reminders of the depth of lies they’ve told and the depth of senseless destruction they wreaked?
I once got an irrationally inordinate pleasure out of- of all things! – lip balm! I used to get so excited over a new chap stick or lip gloss… and I adored the feeling of applying lip balm on my chapped lips, that moment of quenching that annoying thirst of my lips and how soothing it felt.
Now, I deeply resent my lips when they’re dry. I don’t feel pleasure from buying a new chapstick and I feel just annoyed when my lips dare to be so dry. I get no pleasure whatsoever from the soothing sensation of quenching that. Why do I even have lips anyway? And how dare they have needs!
I’m angry that I’ve no one who will stand for me even up when I’m gone. I fear that all my abusers and those who’ve used, deceived, and demolished me for their own purpose and angrily threw me away only when I finally stood up for myself against their abuse, that every one of those people will just say “see? See what she did now? See how far she’ll go to manipulate? I told you so.”
As a child, I wished for death almost as much as I craved and begged for love. And I would play the scenario in my head, mother will be sad that I’m gone. She will see how much I loved her after I’m not around anymore. She might even miss me and realize that she did love me a little… I see now that I’m an adult, how childish and selfish those thoughts were. I loved my mother in spite of everything. Why would I have wanted her to suffer missing me? Suffer regrets she could never rectify? I didn’t yet know about NPD and that pathological narcissists are incapable of feeling regret, remorse, or love.
Regardless, as angry as I am, I still don’t wish any pain on anyone… not even my abusers or persecutors. I’ve never intentionally wished any of them pain and I still don’t. I don’t believe that their experiencing pain like they’ve inflicted on me would vindicate or bring me any satisfaction.
It wouldn’t.
I have far more anger at those who stood by watching it happen, knowing it was horribly wrong, and did nothing…said nothing… And will most likely even express sympathy (real or fake) with my murderers after I’m gone.
And my children… my children who are merely accessories and pawns in a bigger narcissist’s game than they could ever comprehend. And the more they scream that they’re NOT and throw cruelty at me like they have zero heart and less than zero compassion for anyone weak and unlucky enough to have been abused, the more I accept that what I know is true, even if I’m surrounded by naysayers. Truth is still truth whether or not anyone believes, respects it, or remembers it.
What’s kept me from ending my suffering these past 5 years was the very fear that my children MIGHT remember they loved me too late… that they might remember the truths and sort out the lies, that they might suffer even a moment’s doubt about their choices and their actions. I do not have any desire to “show them” what pain feels like nor any wish for them to EVER know even a fraction of a second of the level of pain they and my abusers have created inside me.
While I still ignorantly tried to believe that truth and goodness will prevail in the end, I could not end my own pain knowing that might someday cause them pain even if they can’t or won’t realize that today…
Most of all though, I’m angry that after everything, no one will stand up to say, “another fatality of narcissistic abuse” another senseless victim for parental alienation “. No one will call it murder by the fiercest and most damaging of bullying… adult bullying via children.
No one will scream, SHE DID NOT COMMIT SUICIDE! SHE WAS DESTROYED BY PARENTAL ALIENATION!
I’m confined to the prison my abusers specifically created for me.. a hell I can’t escape no matter what I do… for my heart will still love and long to be loved by my children.. until my last breath. They created my prison, and like a person on death row for a crime they didn’t commit.. my screams of innocence and demands for justice are just more proof I deserve this prison sentence.
Yes, I am pissed off.
And if my existence and all my lifetime of strenuous efforts to matter, to love like I wished for love, to believe in the goodness of people even when monsters were whacking at my head, to help others like I wished someone had helped me, to hold to faith when it was smaller than a mustard seed.. and hang on hope even when it was the prickly noose around my neck..
If none of that mattered and none of it made any difference in this world, then maybe I do deserve this prison of nonexistence, but if so, then I also deserve the death penalty… a death free from the burden and stigma of suicide, free from the heavy conscience of that tiny remote possibility that my death might hurt someone I love – someone I love who (unwittingly or otherwise) also tightened the noose others placed around my neck.
If I give in to these impossible persecutions, the years of agony, the desperate climb up and past so much abuse just to be kicked back down again… if what they say I am, I really am… then I also deserve to be free from further blame at accepting their truth even when it wasn’t mine to accept or bear.
I fear that my entire life was in vain and now, without a voice or a leg of worth or value to stand on… as a fragile shell of my former spirited, hopeful self…that my death will also be in vain.
These are the only fears I have left.
