“I’m sorry.” “Don’t be. My life got radically better when Edi left.”
I used to carry my dead round with me.
Edi wasn’t one of those individuals you really mind losing. You know the type, the empress of illness who apparently give empathy and caring but it’s really only silence. And after I gave her some of the best weeks of my life, 70 of them. I was dedicated to relationship because I was led to believe that the silence was something other than manipulation. I was getting 20% satisfaction, (the Burn’s relationship satisfaction scale) trying to get 70% satisfaction, coping with frustration with self defeating behaviors: tobacco addiction, overeating, withdrawing, exercise avoidance, procrastination unassertiveness.
I was at art school for 6 of those 9 years, changing careers, changing my brain, scared shitless. Then 3 years taking upgrade teaching courses and building an art career: having shows, making paintings, contract teaching, learning computer art skills, doing art administration and curating.
I started initiating change with dumping tobacco, followed by asserting to get my needs met for mutual control of finances, sex, and information i.e intimacy, breaking down the wall of silence in our relationship, I was labeled as an abuser.
I didn’t know about covert narcissists how they are different personas with different people and they don’t let their worlds collide by friends knowing each other. It is isolation on steroids. And blindsiding when you get the news about their sexual proclivities, such as Edi was bi-sexual and for 9 years I never knew. Evenings and weekends with a girlfriend called something else. I was called intrusive if I inquired to closely about why I wasn’t invited to the cabin as well. ‘A girls weekend’, was the answer, or an evening out with a friend or ‘getting a massage therapy’, were the typical put offs. But you could smell the lie and it was easier to not push it, have a smoke and another piece of pie.
So when there was no more cigarettes or pie, frustration began to be expressed as cranky irritable responses to the put offs, I was labeled as abusive and told to get out. Fred was moved in as being more nurturing to the empress of illness with the gene for the impending doom disease. My studio was packed up and taken to the dump and I got an affordable squalid place and a transitional needs job in my old career dispatching logistics.
I stayed in the industry mostly driving for the freedom from the childish office politics until the injuries and finally a stroke got me an independent income and a vehicle, allowing a return to my art career, this time on the internet.