Sep 27, 2021
Edi, it's a Good-Bye
I drove by Cafe Beano today. I remembered that often Edi criticized me for going there and spending money, my old local hang. That’s what they do, I was reading just the other day, they isolate you.
She even didn’t like me reading The New Yorker for my interest in the personal history essays, others revealing freely, openly and honestly. A type of intimacy.
She withheld intimacy/sex as a manipulation. She dumped me by volunteering full time and keeping a full-time job.
The love-bombing stage, when I was vulnerable in transition felt like an incredible experience, the sex especially, she would do anything with anybody. Not to exchange affections, as it turned out but to be liked. She had gone to the gym and tanning salon in order to look good naked. Like a car salesman needs to look good when he feigns empathy. We moved in together when I changed careers so I could afford art school on student loans. Essentially a business deal. Then the isolating and the undervaluing started then finally the dumping went on for years.
Her public persona was sweet and innocent and very convincing. It has taken me years to unravel her typical sordid squalid narcissist con. Even in family therapy, after I was shoved aside, it was pointed out and I refused to believe, it was not all my fault, so complete was the brainwashing my belief in the undervaluing. The Stockholm syndrome.
You don’t make enough money was the most common undervaluing. Well, nobody does and it changes all the time. But it doesn’t look good was the implication. Her father was a millionaire, her friends were well on the way. They paid when we went out for dinner. After I was kicked out of my house my income increased 5 fold landing photoshop contracts on the internet.
The bottom line, I am what Dr. Tara calls a typical victim of narcissism with character traits such as: “ They (narcissists) go after people who are kind, generous, trusting, eager to please, conscientious, competent, talented or “gifted” and, most importantly, people who have a desire to cooperate and find compromise. (Namie, 2003)”
But why me other than that. Edi had the gene for Huntington’s disease, brain death essentially. She was cultivating a caregiver/ hired hand/slave. Winter was coming. She was like my Mom.
She finally told me about the gene when she had me fully hooked, committed and in love. I’m a romantic, happily so, one true love and flowers. I like lesbian porn because affection turns me on. At that point and for the rest of the relationship, if I dumped her I was dumping someone with a horrible disease. What kind of person does that? What does that say about me? The hooks went deep into my self-esteem.
One thing about art school, is you learn to stand up for your art, for yourself, the marks your body and mind make, its art because I say it's art. As I began to assert my rights in relationship, I was undervalued, called abusive and dumped. It was decided that by asserting myself, asking for what I wanted, a relationship deepening exercise, I was abusive. My lack of paid work, while I studied full time to improve my career, was deadbeatism, so I should leave. Edi was coached in this by the creature Fred, of course, so he could move in.
I cried for six months. I was so anxious/terrorized I couldn’t do simple math. All consequences of the constant criticism.
I was told by the therapist to avoid her in future, and I took his advice seriously. I haven’t seen her since.
I miss how I made myself feel when I was with her.
