I used to run up around the school and then down Rainier Street on the way back home. Someone I was supposed to meet lived there. I worked out like a bastard animal to get in shape for varsity football. I played for an incredibly intense, incredibly successful high school football coach. With my animal workouts, I got to be the fastest player on my team. They timed us semi-regularly. 40-yard dash. Admittedly, we didn't have a particularly fast football team; nevertheless, I was the fastest. I was also the third strongest guy on the team. The only two guys who could bench press more than me were huge linemen who outweighed my average build by about 50 pounds, so I would HOPE that they could out-bench-press me!

I had actually started the offseason conditioning program stronger than even those two guys, but once the regular after-school workouts started in earnest as a team, then pretty soon, when it came to the bench press, it felt like I had a four-cylinder-engined car that was competing against a couple cars with eight-cylinder engines: I may have had a head start on them, but it was inevitable that they would pass me.

The week before football season started was also the week before the high school year started. Someone I was supposed to meet later went to my same high school. This last week of practice before the football season started was traditionally called "Hell Week," because of the penultimate intensity of the full-pads, double-a-day football practices in the sweltering heat of late August. We practiced and panted like dogs, both morning and afternoon. Most guys had to drive or get dropped off to practice. But my parents lived three houses up from a park that led to the high school and the practice field. It was literally a five or six-minute walk for me. This was how I acquired my nickname among my teammates.

For the early-morning practices, the hot August sun was not yet tormenting and crippling, it was so damnably early that the first practice of the day started. The grass would actually be cool. There would be a low, fine mist above the landscaped, freshly sprinklered grass in that park.

Because I lived so close to the school and the field, I didn't have to put my football pads on in the locker room like the other guys. I would put my pads and everything on in my bedroom, even my cleats, and I'd then walk out my downstairs sliding-glass door and go clockety-clock-clackety down the sidewalk in full football pads, helmet dangling from one arm. And then I would have to cut through that freshly sprinklered, misty-manicured lawn in the park to get to the practice field. Did I mention it was damnably early? My teammates would be exiting the locker room or already stretching on the field. They would see me coming as a ghostly, mist-shrouded figure. I would emerge, apparition-like, through the misty morning fog, fully padded up to play.

Now, at the time, and for a long time, the central playground feature of this park, right in the middle of the sandbox I had to walk through to get to practice, was a rather unique, three-story, metal-encaged, playground rocket for climbing. Little kids could climb up its three segmented stories, and they could slide down the descending slide sticking out from the side of the middle, metal segment. Someone I was supposed to meet used to climb up there later on with a pencil wedged sideways in her full lips and a journal in her hand; all by herself she would write in her journal from the inevitable third story of the rocket, inevitable because its lofty isolation beckoned her. As it did for me, later, but my beckoning call from its alluring isolation was more for beer drinking and deep pondering, at the time.

But my mystified teammates would see me emerging from the fog next to this huge, yellow, metal rocket. And I became known as "Rocket Man." I wish it had something to do with my having been the fastest player on the team. But no, my team nickname had a much less heroic, and much weirder origin than that.

If I have learned something about myself, it’s that my adaptation to life events have been quicker and less depressing. Since I was diagnosed with mixed anxiety-depressive disorder, I have had a cushion to blame my outbursts of crying and being shut-out to the world. It wasn’t until I gave birth to my first daughter that I realized I needed a change. A change that had to originate from the pit of my soul. A change that would seep through my veins and settle in my heart and brain. This change, although not predicted with the “how”, began to take over my being. I had a sudden urge of tasting God. If your not familiar with this statement, it’s completely understandable. In The Bible, John 6 : 54-56, it is said “54 Whoever eats - my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” I wanted to know what God tasted like. I wanted to feel peace, the hope for eternal life. I wasn’t prepared for this journey but I was not completely unfamiliar with it. My parents tried to raise me as Catholic but because of the negative events that happened while attending church with mom, the attempt was over shadowed. Church and God were still a mystery and was not appreciated. When my baby girl was born, my urge to knowing what was supposed to be taught over powered me.

Anyway, thanks to this random desire to follow my faith journey, it has opened me up with more ways to “dealing.” I don’t think that there is such thing as being a waste of space anymore. I no longer believe that I am not wanted or needed. I no longer feel like I could ever be alone, partly because the husband and children don’t know or haven’t practice MOMMY’S PERSONAL SPACE. I do go through moments of sadness, and I still have anxiety attacks but the recover time is way quicker than I ever knew it to be. I am able to recognize when I am being unreasonable, and I’m able to switch perspectives more as needed. I haven’t gotten the praying-everyday-thing down, but I do pray. I just don’t do it as often as I wish I could. I’m working on that.

Currently, I am trying to be gentle. Gentle to myself, gentle with my family. I am trying this because this life is taking a turning point with our children. Schools are infested with sick children who do not know how to channel their anger. Children are fighting in schools and recording it for likes and shares. It’s crazy. I guess that I am not necessarily preparing myself, only, but also my children and the children who surround me.

I have a nephew that is just… hard to get. My moms and pops are raising him because his mother, my cousin, abandoned him. There’s two of them, they are brothers. But this one specific kid… man oh man. They have diagnosed him with ODD or Oppositional defiant disorder. Children with ODD are defiant and always are on the opposite scale of a conversation.

“Kiddo, wash your hands for dinner.”

“No, I like them dirty.”

“Ok, then sit down and eat with dirty hands.”

“How dare you make me eat with dirty hands?!”

“Ok, let’s go wash your hand together.”

“I’m not a baby, I can do it myself!”

“Ok, come eat.”

“I am so hungry I’m going to die!”

“No, you’re not, come on.”

*Starts rolling on the floor*

“It hurts! It hurts! I’m so hungry!”

*grabs stomach while rolling*

“Kid, come on, eat.”

*eats half of his meal*

“Oh my God, I’m so full. OK bye!”

This is an example from last night. I want to be gentle, I’m sure my mom wants to be gentle, I’m sure everyone wants to be gentle. But it is clear that everyday we have a new worry. All we want and pray for is for these kids to be… sane and sound. Not to get killed for how they respond or dress or act. We as a family, we know what we need to work with, but others? How will the world be o.k. with a defiant child who will grow to be a defiant grown-up? Or how will my low-spoken niece be able to conquer the cruel reality of the world? How will my daughter not be blinded by vanity if her beauty follow’s her to her adult-hood? How will my other nephews and nieces have a healthy relationship with others if the examples of their own parents abandoning them has caused so much trauma already? How can we be better for them?

All I truly want and all I think we have control over is to create a safe space for them. When they experience cruelty, I hope they know, what took me years of therapy to understand, that “Home” is where these efforts are taken.

Home is where love is.

All narcs like to keep their victims in the dark. Narcissists like to disappear without telling you where they went. They like to do this to their spouses. They like to do so regularly. Or irregularly. Depends how you look at it. They like to go completely radio silent on their spouses, too, also regularly.

What this means is, the spouses probably did something that made the narcissist jealous, or in some other inadvertent way caused the narcissist to experience a “narcissistic injury.” When that happens, the spouse will never know what they innocently did. The narcissist will never talk about it. Instead, the narcissist will just wait and wait and plot to get the spouse back. They may wait and plot for 10 weeks, 10 months, or 10 years, but rest assured, the narcissist WILL get you, the spouse, back. And oftentimes that revenge will take the form of going radio silent on the spouse, just when the spouse was beginning again to believe and trust in the narcissist. Or, the narcissist may be going radio silent on their spouse because he or she just might be out f-cking and lovebombing some new source of narcissistic supply. Or, in the case of my narcissistic ex, they (the demons inside) may be going radio silent because they are out “doing good deeds” and “volunteering to help in the community.”

Indeed, that was the main source of narcissistic supply for the kind of narcissist by which I had been parasitized.

Once again, regardless what type of NPD you are dealing with, if they are really a bonafide NPD (diagnosed or undiagnosed) then it really is all about SUPPLY and nothing else. Narcissistic supply. Whether it is getting attention and adoration and duper’s delight by f-cking strangers behind their spouse’s back and deceiving their spouse to his or her spouse’s face, or whether it is receiving public adoration and praise for publicly feeding and helping strangers, attention from STRANGERS is a POTENT source of narc supply to all narcs. It’s an addictive drug to these demon-possessed meatsuits. Adoration from strangers and hyper-controlling abuse of family members is truly the best of both worlds to a narc: a public saint, and a private, megalomaniacal tyrant.

Now that I know what I know about narcissism, I am not at all in denial, and I am not delusional enough to deny that my narcissistic ex probably f-cked around behind my back. She’s a NARC. OF COURSE she likely did so. But frankly, my ex didn’t have the looks to lasso a lot of guys. You had to be a seriously screwed-up codependent to go for that.

Like me, for example.

I married her for her PERSONALITY. Can you believe that shit? Well, imagine my conundrum when her personality turned out to be 100% fake. There was no such person. Never was. Just a cleverly abusive meatsuit playing 100% pretend. Who’d have thought that was possible? Not this idiot. AND I got STUCK with that clever demon and that overly fleshy meatsuit that housed that demon.

And why not? I had had a narcissistic mother, hadn’t I? I was good and programmed to do what I did. And I did. Boy, did I ever.

Anyway, the demon in the shell of flesh of that thing that I married, that I—gulp—reproduced with—that demon’s favorite way of obtaining narcissistic supply (again, probably only because its hull lacked the looks to f-ck around a lot) was to compulsively go gallivanting all over town as a community do-gooder: volunteering to feed the homeless, volunteering to cook food for this or that public charity event, volunteering for some charitable organization to help teach young girls how to do arts and crafts or how to cook, just gallivanting all over town, ceaselessly, relentlessly, nonstop and maniacally, desperately and constantly seeking out community charity events for which to PUBLICLY volunteer and PUBLICLY help out. And then of course to go to COMMUNITY BANQUETS and GET COMMUNITY AWARDS and MAYBE EVEN GET YOUR PICTURE IN THE LOCAL NEWSPAPER!

All of it, narcissistic supply.

Narcissistic abuse survivors and narcissistic abuse therapists call this particular kind of demonically possessed narcissist a “COMMUNAL narcissist,” because of this kind of narcissist’s rabid, never-ending compulsion to constantly be going out and doing do-gooder activities in the community.

—Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, Dear Reader—I know exactly what you’re thinking right now: Sounds great, right? I mean, these types of narcs sound like such great people, right? Like—if only every demon-possessed, personality-disordered person was so nice and helpful and giving!

AND THAT RIGHT THERE IS EXACTLY WHAT MAKES THE COMMUNAL NARCISSIST SO EXCEPTIONALLY HORRIFIC TO HIS OR HER VICTIMS, i.e., HIS OR HER OWN FAMILIES. For while the communal narc is frenetically out and about, treating everyone in the community with decorous charm (flattery) and publicly, showily “giving of themselves” and being so very decorously kind (more flattery) to one and all OUTSIDE his or her “home”—notwithstanding, inside the walls of their own “home” they are just as mean and cold and gaslighting and deceiving and vengeful and rotten as any other type of narcissist. Naturally, the narcissist’s own family takes the brunt of all that, as with every family of every narcissist.

But here—and pay attention now—the COMMUNAL narc can GREATLY magnify the intensity of another universal abusive weapon of all narcissists: TRIANGULATION.

Triangulation is when a narcissist enlists the help of others to basically team up with them, and then to all gang up on the narc’s chosen victim, which is of course the spouse of the narc, or some other family member of the narcissist that is not doing everything the narcissist says at any given time, and is not currently allowing the narcissist to abuse them. Naturally, this enlisting of such a gang of psych-abusive acolytes involves the lying and deceiving and flattering of all of these duped acolytes of the narc. The narcissist is always carefully cultivating such acolyte-ass-kissers-of-the-narc. They keep a stable of them on-hand at all times. They rotate them in and out, depending on their usefulness to the narc at any given moment. And when a narc decides that a family member of the narc’s has caused the narc any sort of imaginary “narcissistic injury,” or if a family member is daring to erect any kind of boundaries to keep at bay the narcissist’s abuse of them, then these gossiping, slandering, sycophantic acolytes are then summoned and sent forth to punish and slander and gaslight the family victim of the narc.

In the parlance of the narcissistic-abuse survivor community, these idiot-gossiping acolytes of the narc are known as “flying monkeys.” Of course, if you’ve ever seen THE WIZARD OF OZ, you know what that’s all about.

But imagine now a narcissist who has been spending the vast majority of his or her time and energy out and about in the community MAKING THEMSELVES LOOK LIKE A SAINT IN THE EYES OF OTHERS. Imagine how many FLYING MONKEYS a narcissist like THAT could enlist to go after a family member that tries at long last to stand up to the narc’s abuse! What suddenly appears around the victim, in his or her own town, are hordes and hordes of real-life, bipedal flying monkeys all coming over to “reprove” you and “see if you won’t repent for what YOU did” to the narc, or the flying monkeys the victim now encounters on the streets around town who either berate the victim or browbeat the victim, bringing up the narc’s bogus charges against you they’ve been told, through the many fake crocodile tears of the narc. These are flying-monkey people are in the victim’s own community. The victim goes to church with them (or used to), the victim played chess and other couples’ board games with them (used to), the victim would see them on holidays (used to), would see them in the grocery store (the victim drives out of town to shop now), these gossipy, puppetized idiots used to go to Bible study with the victim (the victim no longer goes there, but the narc still does: LOADS of narc supply there!), etc., etc. But they’re ALL giving the victim these cryptic looks of disdain around town whenever they see the victim outside. And the victim wonders, just exactly, what was the content of the slander campaign that the narc used against me with THAT person? Whatever it was, they sure believed it. Most all of them do. The puppetized flying monkeys can have NO idea what that creature is really like within the four walls of the “home” the victim shared or shares with the narc. And don’t bother trying to tell them: They’ll never believe the victim.

NEVER.

The demon(s) inside the narc is that diabolically good. They are always five steps ahead of any non-possessed, mere mortal.

In the narcissistic-abuse survivor community, is generally said that COVERT narcissists do greater damage to their codependent victims than the stereotypical OVERT narcs do, because the covert ones “fly under the radar” more, they’re more subtle, and therefore they can perpetrate their psychological domestic abuse for longer upon their families.

I’ll go one step further: Communal narcissists are probably the worst narcissists of all to ever let into your life; for the communal narcissist combines much of the sneakiness that lets the covert narcissist fly under the radar and do many more years of damage without getting caught, COMBINED with the overt narcissist’s ability to mobilize many more slanderous, gaslighting, psych-destabilizing flying monkeys against the narc’s chosen target of domestic abuse. Communal narcissists combine the worst of both narc worlds. They are truly diabolical creatures.

And if you ever want to meet one, just go down to your local homeless shelter or your local at-risk teen center or your local community thrift store that works with funding the cost of tuition at the local private schools on behalf of financially needy families. You go down and talk to some of the volunteers there, interact with them, and in so doing you are GREATLY increasing your chances of meeting a real, live communal narcissist in the flesh. Don’t worry: You won’t be abused by them unless you invite them into your life. Like vampires, you have to invite them in. If you don’t invite them in, they’ll just flatter you and treat you fakely, but WONDERFULLY fakely. You’re a stranger to them, and so they want your adoration as much as a vampire wants blood.

In the 1970s, they had these ant-farm toys for kids. It was like a series of small, rectangular, clear-plastic, mini-aquariums you could interconnect with flexible, clear tubing. It came with a coupon to send away for your free batch of ants to be sent to you in the mail. You can’t call it a colony, because they wouldn’t send you the queen ant, just the workers. Once the workers all died, that was it. No more ants.

I, however, preferred to collect my own ants. That way, I’d never run out. It just so happened that the same exact species of ant that the ant-farm people would send out were also native and plentiful where I grew up as a boy.

My favorite thing to do when I was about four, five, and six years old was to walk down the street with an empty metal coffee can and a stick and look for red ant hills. They weren’t hard to find, once you recognized the telltale giveaway signs all around their holes, plus all the red ants coming in and going out.

Despite the ant-farm people mailing them all over the world to little kids, these red ants bit and stung like bastards. That didn’t bother me, though. I was always too fascinated by their behavior to care too much about the stings around my ankles, once they crawled up my shoes and got past my socks. They were vicious little buggers. Although I did try smearing Vaseline on my shoes one time to make them slip off or else get stuck, but that didn’t work at all. They just crawled right over the Vaseline like it was nothing. If anything, the Vaseline gave the ants better gription.

One time I went to one of my favorite red-ant hills down the street where I knew there was a nest, and there were TONS of them crawling all over the ground. They had all come up on top and had left their underground tunnels. Many of them had wings and were bigger than the workers. These were crawling up whatever they could find and then spreading their wings and flying off, or else they were taking off right from the ground if they could. They were flying off in all directions, all around me. It was amazing! It was clearly a great big deal in their Kingdom of the Ants down there.

I was five. But I deduced what was going on. These were the queens. They were going off to start new red ant hills. I felt overjoyed, like I had happened upon something famous. It was a miracle. This was rare and a special event. And when it was happening, I’m sure my legs all stung up more than just the usual amount of times, but I don’t remember any of that. I only remember marveling how I had made a big discovery about the ant world.

And I looked down right then and I saw it. The yellow one. The one and only time I have ever seen a yellow red ant. It was different from all the rest. But none of the others were attacking it, so you knew it was still one of them. It’s the only way you could tell. It was so different, it stuck out like a sore thumb. And there was only one of them. I had stumbled onto my second big discovery about the Kingdom of the Ants all in one day, and all at the same ant hill: There was such a thing as a yellow red ant.

I was the only kid to ever see such a thing. There were lots of kids at my kindergarten, but none of them had a ant farm, and none of them even cared about ants. Just me. I was the only one.

My goal for the week was to publish a chapter a day on The Prose; an autobiography of two people. But with my blood boiling and grieving, I cannot simply sit here at work and try to be creative. I am fucking HOT. I am fuckin boiling.

My morning started off with this auto bio in mind and i was ready to conquer. I get a text that an aunt passed away. That is very much suckish. It sucks because i know people loved her, and still having grandchildren and a young daughter, her absence will affect them. It's sad but because i am faithful, i am sure, she will be ok.

That threw me off for a bit but right after lunch i was ready to get this page going.

BUT NO!

Fuck my LIFE. NO!

My niece, 15 years old, was jumped at school while she was sitting on a 5 ft tall planter.

She was thrown to the floor where she was socked multiple times in the back of the head by a fucking little fucker who is clearly sick in the fucking head.

THE GIRL WAS LAUGHING!

the last bit of the video was of my niece screaming "WHAT IS WRNG WITH YOU!"

I am so upset and i don't know towards who.

Myself? for not teaching her how to fight?

At my mom for not teaching her how to stand up for herself creating a defenseless-90 pound-depressed-anxious-bipolar child?

At the school for not protecting her enough?

The fucking security guard walked up to them like it was just another fight.

This is fucking insane.

This girl has been through so much.

Ironically, she is the inspiration for the everyday posts i want to commit too.

What is wrong with these fucking kids’ man?

How could we have failed so drastically where school fights are a must?

What if anything can schools do?

Why is it that we cannot protect our children?

Why is hate so heavy with these kids?

Who hurt them?

Why did they hurt these kids so bad that it has resulted into such rage towards others.?

Why is the devil seen more than God?

What happens now?

I need a fucking black n mild and a large sangria from Septembers Taproom.

But no.

I have a huge meeting with the president of one of the largest coating manufacturers in the united states.

Smiles on.

A narcissist will always get you back. Always. Guaranteed, 100%, rest assured, count on it, they WILL get you back. Whether you meant it or not, that doesn’t matter. Whether they acknowledged and accepted your apology (unlikely) or not, whether they’ve told you they forgive you (unlikely) or not, even if it was a complete and total accident on your part and you’re the most genuinely sorry person on the face of the earth and you offer to make it up to them, tell them you’re sorry and you’ll make it up to them and you tell them how much you love them—doesn’t matter. None of that matters. Pay no attention in the unlikely event that they say they’re over it; pay no attention to what they say or what they don’t say. There is only one thing that you must know:

The narcissist will get you back.

It may take days, weeks, months, or years, but if this person is a genuine NPD, whether diagnosed or not (most aren’t), then he or she—or it—WILL get you back.

How do you know when the narcissist has got you back? You won’t. Not for years. But there will come a point, IF you hit rock bottom and don’t commit suicide (thereby providing the narcissist with even THAT juicy source of supply on your way out [Secretly, in their lurking dark-helled heart, every narc will think: “Ooooo, he/she even KILLED themselves over me! I must really be that IMPORTANT!”]), then you will have your Twilight-Zoneian survivor’s epiphany, you will in that moment become Once-in-a-Lifetime David Byrne incarnate, suddenly mentally shouting to yourself, “My God! What have I done?!” and you will begin your long recovery process from the evil, paranormalish codependency to narcissistic abuse in which you played your part, and in ugly, rotting-onion layers over the course of the next year and the next, through the hazey paranormality of the complex post-traumatic stress syndrome that the narc put you into, that you let the narc put into you, then you will keep slowly peeling back these rotten, toxic-black-moldy layers of misplaced memories, and you’ll be having further, ugly, nasty, new epiphanies with each, and it will more and more begin to dawn on you, how each and every time that the narcissist ever did something screwy to you, something that didn’t make sense, something that you never figured they’d be stupid enough or accident-prone enough to do—but hey, they said it was an accident, and hey, accidents do happen.

When the narcissistic in-law backed over your mailbox, you thought it was an accident. An incredibly dumb, boneheaded accident. They even offered to pay for it. They were so incredibly sorry, and so you said, No, they didn’t have to. Nevermind. You’d fix it yourself. But you never made the connection to the time, four months earlier, when you called the narcissist out for gossiping about you with other family members.

Not until now.

When the narcissist burned you with that scalding hot water that time, those couple of times, you thought it was an accident. An incredibly dumb accident. How could they NOT understand how a faucet works?? It made no sense whatsoever. But it COULDN’T have been on purpose, they’d NEVER do that, because they’re such a GOOD PERSON. It MUST have been an accident. But you never made the connection to the time, six weeks earlier, when the narcissist mistakenly thought you were calling the narcissist fat.

Not until now.

When the narcissist didn’t get back on time like they promised, so you could go to your friend’s big event, the narc was just stuck in traffic. The reason they never called was because they’ve been having problems with their cellphone. They can’t call out on it for some reason. They have to get it fixed. So you had to stay with the kids and miss your friend’s big event. But you never made the connection to the time nine months ago when you were all playing SETTLERS OF CATAAN together, and your friend made that one joke, and you thought it was funny, but she secretly didn’t.

Not until now, you didn’t make the connection. But now you do. You start making lots of connections. Lots and lots of connections. All those oddly inexplicable absences or mistakes or oopsies that the narcissist did that inconvenienced you or frustrated you or hurt you, all of those inexplicable events,—HOLY SHIT, THOSE WERE NO ACCIDENTS! THEY WERE NOT ACCIDENTS!!

But they said they were sorry! And you said you were sorry! But wait,—she still got me back?! THAT’S what all those were about!?! Shit. Shit. Shit! What was I WITH all that time?!?

Mind you, that is only your reaction if you actually MARRIED one of these demonic meat-puppets; if you got burned so long and so egregiously that you finally awakened from your codependency and SAW the creature. But if you were only the in-law whose mailbox the narcissist ran over after you dared to erect a boundary to them, then you probably never do wake up. You’re still annoyed, of course, but the fact is, the narc got away with it. Got away with his or her revenge upon you. Just like the narc was counting on. Because after all—who in their right mind would do a thing like that on purpose?? It’s RIDICULOUS!

Key word: RIGHT.

As we entered DisneyWorld on the DisneyWorld shuttlebus, some sort of drawbridge opened, and we looked down into the moat surrounding DisneyWorld and saw an alligator floating in the murky waters below. It was a middling one, maybe four or five feet in length, including the tail. Minutes later we disembarked and checked into our hotel. The wife had taken care of it all. The wife always had to take care of it all. She had to be in charge of everything. But that’s not all. What she actually had to do, every single day of those 13 years of demonic matrimonial parasitization, was to NOT ONLY have control over everything, but also to constantly gaslight and criticize me about how I, “the HUSBAND, would never STEP UP and take control for a change!” Now, keep in mind, whenever I did “try to be a leader” for her, whenever I would try to “be a MAN for a change!” (her words), she would undermine, sabotage, and abuse me in a thousand tiny pin-prick ways to get me back. My gut could discern what she was doing, but my head and heart had long since overridden my gut, thanks to the strategic success of her diabolical initial lovebombing campaign against me. But the sum of her control freakery, combined with her gaslighting me, over “not being a man!—not being able to take charge!—not stepping up and taking control over ANYthing!” gave the narcissist layers upon layers of narcissistic supply from which to feed, which is how a narcissist always rolls: A) She got to be in control (narc powertrip form of supply); she got to gaslight me about “not taking control of anything” (narc-sadistic-powertrip form of supply); and when she’d always bemoan and lament to me how she just “HAD to take control, because NO ONE ELSE would do it,” she was also—in classic narc fashion—able to play the victim (narc-false-victimhood form of supply).

It was July in Florida, and whenever I’d shower and get dressed in the DisneyWorld hotel, two minutes after I stepped outside, I felt like I needed to shower again. I don’t remember much of the trip or the rides. That’s one thing about demonic narcissistic abuse, it has an amnesiatic effect on the victim’s brain. Over time, a victim of narc abuse begins to suffer from a kind of brainfog. They begin to holes in their mind, lapses in time when, uncharacteristically, they begin to forget things. Demons know how the human brain is wired. They live in narcissist’s bodies and thereby walk among us, and they desperately desire attention from us, such is their hysterical level of insecure self-love-and-loathing, and so what they do, they break certain of us and train certain of us to be obedient and domesticated slaves in a “relationship,” and they do so with the same higher-being facility that enables normal human beings to break and train horses, dogs, and milk cows. But the demons inside narcissists are abusive trainers, completely devoid of normal human empathy, and somehow, whether deliberately or incidentally, they leave scar tissue on the minds of their abused victims, sometimes leaving the victims with holes in their heads where there ought to be memories. But they can’t erase it all from the minds of their victims. I know that much. I remember that much.

Let’s see—well, the stunted entomologist in me remembers seeing a gigantic, dark-orange hornet on a tree inside the DisneyWorld park. The exoskeletons of giant bugs must surely benefit from the oppressive humidity of Florida in summer.

Then there was this one newish ride they had. We tried to go on it at night. The line was a mile long—at least. And then, as we proceeded forward in line, snails were racing past us in the hot, sticky Florida foliage off to the left of where we were cordoned off in line. This cordoning off of the line grew precipitously narrower, until my narcissistic wife, myself, and our baby girl in the stroller were sardine-canned inward with all these multitudes of hot, sweaty people all around us, in front of us, behind us, on all sides of us. Soon, all up and down this long, cramped, throng of standing, sweating, stationary human beings, the moaning started.

“What’s happening?”

“What’s going on?”

“Why is this happening?”

The confusion and compliance of the crowd amid that narrowing sardine-can crush from all sides was beginning to make me have somewhat realistic visions of cattle cars on their way to Auschwitz. I had to get out. Lucky for me, the narc got spooked by it, too, otherwise she never would have listened to me in getting us out of there. Picking up our daughter and using the borrowed DisneyWorld stroller as a wedge to get through the other prisoners, I got us out of line. It wasn’t easy. Everyone else around us stayed; like they were mesmerized. It must have been one helluva ride. Perhaps with ovens, barking dogs, and truncheons at the end of it.

The other thing I remember about DisneyWorld, the MAIN thing, was The Bridge Incident; an incident that baffled me, freaked me out, frustrated me to no end, and drove me in that moment to “take charge for a change!” and to “be a MAN, why don’t you?!” to the female narcissist that I had knocked up three hapless years previously. So the the narc got what she asked for that one time—I became the MAN she always bitched about me not being—and there was of course murderous contempt behind her eyes when I gave her what she always bitched about.

We were walking along the merry, meandering DisneyWorld pathway there between the rides, and there were of course the swampy canals and moats running all throughout the park, it being Florida, after all. And we had since seen another small alligator or two down there in those dark, brownish-green, brain-eating-amoeba-infested waters, and now there was another of those little walkway bridges over another part of the canal that’s down there.

The narc took a sudden liking to this particular little bridge, apparently, for she suddenly handed me the camera, pulled our daughter out of the stroller AND STOOD OUR THREE-YEAR OLD DAUGHTER ON TOP OF THE CONCRETE RAILING AT THE SIDE OF THIS BRIDGE. The top of this railing was a flat cement surface about a foot and a half across for our daughter’s little feet to stand upon. She was now going to be nearly as tall as Mommy in the photo, and THERE WAS NO PROTECTIVE RAILING BEHIND MY DAUGHTER’S BACK TO PROTECT HER FROM A POTENTIAL THIRTY-FOOT PLUNGE INTO THE CANAL BELOW. But my wife, the “mother” of our daughter, thought it cute that our daughter could now be in “the same picture as mommy,” now that she was “almost as tall.”

I went All Systems Alert.

The water below, yes, that swamp down there, 30 feet below us or so, was murky and shallow, probably only deep enough to make a splash as someone little and small, falling backwards, would break their neck on the bottom of the canal. And if I was wrong about its depth, if it was deeper than that, then there were of course the alligators. The ones we’d been seeing repeatedly. (This was a few years before the actual alligator ate the actual kid at the actual DisneyWorld pond in actual real life.)

I got instantaneously sick to my stomach; a vertigo of some kind, but strictly of the stomach. “GET HER DOWN,” I demanded. The look of annoyance on the narc’s face barely concealed that same, old narcky-murderous intent therein. If she didn’t need me around for supply once in awhile whenever all her other supply dried up, she would probably have poisoned me later, instead of merely getting me back in some other micro-abusive, plausibly deniable way which was so petty that I never even made the connection. But make no mistake: I was robbing her of this specially supply-laden moment: I was denying her the opportunity of this specially chosen photograph of herself and the little toy she’d created with her own special, unique womb, and that photograph would have been something she could shop around later amongst her flying monkeys, generating good, quality supply for herself. She initially did not comply with my demand. Of course she didn’t.

“TAKE HER DOWN NOW,” I repeated, even more demandingly. Had I not been petrified that any sudden move by me might result in my daughter falling backward, I would have already launched myself over there. Reluctantly, pissed-offedly, the narc took our daughter down off the precipice. By then I was over, grabbing our daughter from the other side, by her other arm and shoulder, easing her back down onto solid, non-precarious ground.

Then came the harangues. The everlasting mantra of snide harangues I was to hear that day that I was so used to by now—though you could never truly get used to them. I was “such a worry-wort”; I “worried too much”; I “always worry about everything”; and of course I got told how “Nobody ever wants to be around you because you’re SUCH a worrier—GAHD!”; how there was “something wrong with me” for being “so ridiculous” and “so protective over NOTHING!” Not only that, but I was “ruining the whole trip by being this way.”

In retrospect, I would have been better off having had a baby with one of those alligators down there. At least mother alligators have a protective instinct for their young.

This is just a small, innocent memory, but it stands out in mind, even to this day. The reason is that it was the exact moment I learned about unconditional love.

I must have been no older than 4, but the conversation I had with my mother synapsed together so many neurons, so firmly, that it rose above the mental ocean of my 4-year-old mind. At that age, thoughts ebb and flow; some stick, some don't. This one did, and no swells of churning whitecaps could wash it away. It was a castle made of--not sand--but blood, clotting harder than titanium. Those synapses raised a cortical island protruding to the limitless sky forever in my mind.

"Mother?" I asked. I was in the bathtub, probably old enough to be left alone in the water, but she didn't think so. As such, these tub-time conversations were common. All just part of the quotidian family life as we know it. Or at least, as I knew it.

"Yes?"

"Um, if someone said you had to cut off your arm or have someone cut off my arm, what would you say?" One of a thousand thousand what-if questions that tub-time evoked. I don't know what surprised me more--her answer or the immediacy of her answer.

"Mine, of course," she answered without even thinking. Like a spinal reflex.

I was stunned. Four years of age is a time when you're still navigating between the id and the ego, the self and the rest, the œdipal and the solipsistic, the one and the many. Therefore, her answer, "Of course," gave me pause. Little stupid, immature, pediatric pause.

"Really?" I asked, just to confirm. "Your arm...your whole arm?"

"Well, sure," she said, as if she were talking about water being wet or offering to dry my hair.

I mean...I know she was my Mom. I get that now. But an arm is a pretty big deal. It was a pretty good feeling to know that my arm was second in line for any arm chopping-off maniac that might be lurking. She didn't even have to think about it.

I would have thought about it. Maybe I'd say the right thing, but I'd definitely think about it first. An arm is worth thinking over.

Today I realize this was apples and oranges. It is a mother's inclination to--"of course"--sacrifice anything for her child. Give her life, even. (So, is an arm really that big a deal?) The reason this was oranges, too, is because I was not obligated to return the gesture, from an existential point of view. I was the child. I didn't have to give up an arm for her. It wasn't a two-way sentiment.

Or should I?

Which, of course, was the next question. From her: "What about you?"

"What about me, what?" I asked, but I knew. I knew.

"What if someone asked you whose arm to cut off?"

My answer was not so immediate. I started thinking about my arms, my hands, my fingers, my legs, feet, and toes, and on and on. I think my answer answered her question and she wasn't even upset. Even at that age I knew I was right-handed. That's what I was thinking about.

"Can I pick which arm?" I asked.

"No, she said, because it would be none of yours. Just mine. But that's silly." She held up a towel in both of her highly-valued hands. "You won't have to pick anything to lose while I'm around. Ever. Here, lemme dry your hair."

I had forgotten about this until after she had died at the age of 96. My brothers and I had to give a little talk at her funeral service, and I just went on about how much I loved her, how great a Mom she was, and the usual crap you'd expect.

And then I remembered the tub-time amputation conversation and realized that she was the one who taught me about unconditional love. That's what I should have spoken about. Besides its obvious truism, unconditional love, I remember now, is immediate and thoughtless. And so very real. And forever.

It's not the easiest thing trying to gauge your strength when the walls that raised you were paper thin. I knew my rage was different from most. I knew my anger would be a catalyst for how I'd approach those who thought they'd keep me from where I was supposed to go. My mind is a savage place to be which caused atrophy within me. I began sinking further into the place I didn't want to belong. I knew what it'd make me and turn me into. That was as low as it got for me as a child. I never considered giving up then, no matter how many times I couldn't escape the insanity around me. I dug my feet into the ground instead of digging a hole to die in. Each time I think about giving up now, I think about the child in me, the child still trying to get out and be happy for once in her fucking life. She sits there in awe of what she has accomplished since those days, remembering how no one was around to save her from it all. I catch myself in tears sometimes, recalling what I endured, what I fought through, and ultimately who I had to become to make it out of the house I will burn to the ground one of these days. My fight isn't with anyone alive anymore. It's simply about the ghosts who still play their tricks on me, keeping their distance in the shadows beyond what my eyes can see. This life has taken more from me than I could ever explain to someone who has never gone through the tens of hundreds of stages of grief that make you sit without being able to come away with a lighter shade of hope. It wasn't all bad, but those parts seem to stick with me more than the good ever did. I've had hands that touched me and pulled back without remorse. I've had certain family members judge me for who I was, what I wore, and how I looked. Everything I've been through has been needed, damn near warranted, if I were to become who you see in this mirror. My markings, my vulnerability, my accountability to be as fucking authentic as I can. It matters to me because I still remember not having anyone when I needed someone to not only love me but see me and let me know I mattered. I wanted someone to let me know I was needed. It's my job now to make sure I never forget it."

I was never fast enough to find out what it was in that secret place we used to sneak off to. Late spring. All during summer. Whenever it wasn’t snowing. What kind of critter was it? Must have been a frog or a turtle. But to this day, it bothers me that I was never fast enough to get a glimpse of it.

Northeastern Indiana wasn’t just full of frogs and turtles, it had a lot of railroad tracks, too. All through its podunk-tiny towns. I was ten. When you walked a couple blocks down the street and stood on the railroad tracks and looked straight down them, the tracks looked like noodley-warped licorice strings, but parallel to each other, just going all over the place together. How the heck could a train ever go on THAT? Fortunately, trains only went by maybe once or twice a year, and super slow even then. We lived in a stagnant backwater of the state. Podunk and stagnant.

But if you followed those screwy tracks way down to the weird side of town where most of the really hardcore hillbilly kids lived—the kids that would all sit in the back of the schoolbus and say “mother-effer” every other word in their sentence—then down there like a mile or so there was this tiny abandoned building about the size of two 1970s telephone booths. The windows were out and the door was gone. I don’t know what this little building was, something to do with the train tracks maybe like a century ago. The floor was missing, and there was a little pond there. A puddle. Like all bodies of water in Indiana, if it ain’t frozen, it’s wet. Never dries out.

Our friend Skeeter showed us this place. He said there was a ghost critter in here, and he wasn’t lying. Even he doesn’t know what it is. The thing is TOO FAST. Every time you poke your head in the little shack, the thing is ALREADY GONE. All you see is the splash in the puddle. What the hell was it?

And I wonder why I didn’t try harder. Because these days, I’m thinking now it’s going to haunt me till my dying day. What the hell was that? What the hell was wrong with me for not getting a NET and going right on straight down there? Even if I’m right and it was just a turtle or a frog—frog, probably—still, it bugs me bad now that I never got to see WHAT KIND. What kind of spots did it have, if it even had any? How exactly big was it? Was it green or brown, or greenish-brown or brownish-green? How big was its mouth? What did its eyes look like? How pointy was the mouth, or was it more round?

I didn’t appreciate Indiana. I had a psychotic mother bad-mouthing it all the time in the background. So there was that. And then we moved away. And I never got to see what kind of critter that was. And I was never diligent enough to bring a net with with me and dredge that sucker out. So uncharacteristic of me. Was I already gone by then?

Thanks, Mom.

That might be in my Top 10 All-Time Things That I Would Do if I Had a Time Machine: Go back there with a fishing net—even a tea strainer!—and find that little guy.