So Protective Over Nothing, She Said
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.