A Letter to the Empath – No. 5

Dear Jedi,

It’s 2020 for me: April; four years after you divorced the 2^nd husband.  I’m you, and I’m writing to warn you.

We are now doing really well.  We have our ranch, our life with the horses, and we are capable of more than we ever thought we would be.  We are about to learn to drive a tractor, and our horses are going to be in another movie.  Our job has done amazing things in response to the fake virus scare, and I am working at home where we have wanted to be all along.

Back in your time you are dating that loser Pat W.  Sorry, but great as his d*ck is, he is a loser who can’t do anything for you.  David, too.  You’re going to let them both go without even looking back.  In August, not knowing that you are just fine, but still pining for David and giving up on Pat, you are going to go dancing.  You are going to meet a young man whom you would normally never look twice at because he is so young.  It will take you three nights of dancing to notice him.  He’s then going to catch your eye in a big way, take you dancing in the rain, and it will be over for you.  You will ignore all of the red flags, and there are many.  He will mirror you, and you will mirror him, and the two of you will make magic together.  It’s something only the two of you could make together, and it is going to be wonderful.

But the whole time he will be manipulating you, using your abandonment triggers to control you, and sleeping with and romancing multiple others.  The whole time.  He is going to verbally abuse you.  He will physically abuse you too, but not regularly or badly, and you aren’t going to report him.  The worst is the emotional and verbal abuse.  He will also abuse you financially, gaslight you, and pretty much find any way he can to hurt you.  It will not matter what you do, because hurting you is the point.  You won’t understand that and will try to appease him, and you will see that he is wrong, and that his head is screwed up, and you will even try to tell him that, to help him, but it will be for nothing, and in appeasing him, your incredible abilities will become known to you.

You are going to start to become yourself as a result of this, instead of morphing into a different, made-up identity which has always been your response to trauma.  Every outlandish and unreasonable request he makes of you, you are going to meet.  You are going to overcome everything, you are going to accomplish everything, and most of it won’t even be a challenge.  Only you being you can do this, and this time you will not splinter into another facet of your personality.  It’s all going to be in and through you, and there will be no escape.  But you are going to learn things and do things you would never have done had he not caught your eye.  There is no demand he makes that you can’t accomplish.  He’s just a simple millennial, after all, and you have the universe inside you.  His world is small.  You will want to give him the larger world, but you can’t.  He can’t.  He can’t even want it.  But you will fulfil all of his demands, until finally he demands that you lose weight.  That you will not be able to do.

I haven’t yet.  The extra weight has always protected us from people like him.  So your body will resist returning to the pre-narcissist weight.  He will finally be gone because of it.  You will push him away during the hoovers because of it.  You will stay away from him because of it.  Embrace it.  It will not stop us from anything else, and without him constantly abusing us about our figure, we will be able to finally clear out that particular problem from our life.  It will take some time, though.  It’s just most important that he is gone.

I wouldn’t advise you not to go with him.  We like the changes we make.  We love his energy and the magic we make together when it is good.  We certainly loved the s*x.  We accomplish so much just trying to make his dreams come true.  He’s a mirror, though, remember?  So the dreams he is demanding are actually your dreams.  You are going to accomplish making your dreams come true.  We like knowing that we can do so much.  We miss him, and a year and a half after the divorce from him, that is still true for me.  A year and a half into the new relationship with the first good man we have ever loved, and I still miss the narcissist.  I still hurt over what he did.  Even after everything he did, I still love him.  That is our nature.  We forgive; we only love.  That and the horses are our constants.  We could have overcome everything he did and simply loved, if he would have just stopped.  He won’t stop.  He will never stop.  He will do this to everyone all of his life.  You won’t save him.  You will end him.  You were his last chance.

But look: you are the one who could have overcome every terrible abuse and still loved him.  You are the seer of souls.  You are the one who without even breaking a sweat could do everything he asked you to.  You—we– are incredibly powerful.

I can tell you that I am still suffering as I deal with the pain of it, and missing his energy and drive and the magic we made together.  You didn’t have a strong sense of self when he came along, and I don’t yet.  I’m confident that change is coming, as I continue to shed the residual effects of being harmed by the one I loved most.  If I could give you advice, I would advise you to do just what you did.  While I wish you hadn’t married him, it ended up not really mattering.  I would tell you not to change your name, but we deal with that, too.

When he was awful, you were still good and kind and loving and forgiving.  When he was leaving, you maintained your course.  Through the worst emotional hurt of your life, you kept your feet moving in a positive direction.  You even grew.  I hate that we had to be so harmed to get here.  I hate that what hurts most, even now, is that he is gone.  I hate that I still want to talk to him, and that I still think of him almost all the time, especially since I know he doesn’t think of me.  I am holding the line, though, and keeping him gone.  We are safe.  We are loved.  We are alone enough that we can deal with our emotional trauma, but not alone enough that we want to die.  We have someone wonderful and sane and steady to call our own.  We laugh with him, we dance with him, we drink with him, we cuddle with him, we go on adventures with him, and he says we are the best he has ever had.  Our healing is not complete, but it will be.  The narc will stay gone.  We will continue to grow.

So go with the narc when he shows up, because you are going to get to demonstrate to yourself who you are through dealing with his insanity.  You will try to change his course, but you won’t be able to.  You will change your own course and learn.  And when it is over, you will let it go.  As bad as it is, the pain and wounding will heal.  We get better every day.

Love.