Nunca encontrarás um amor como o meu, e continuo a odiar isso para ti

High school sweethearts… that’s what everyone called us my whole life. We were perfect for each other, weren’t we? Destined to live happily ever after, because of course we would.

Back then, I felt like your high school sweetheart—except for when I felt like anything but. All these years, until now, Eu estava a viver num mundo de fantasia ingénua de negação that you were who you claimed to be, the guy everyone loved. But year after year, you were proving to me alone—behind closed doors of course—that wasn’t ever really who you were.

Oh, mas quando as coisas eram boas, éramos óptimos. O mais alto dos altos. Diversão, risos, viagens pelo nosso cantinho do mundo. Davas os presentes mais doces, dando sempre palmadinhas nas costas. Subiste a escada da empresa e mantiveste-me em segurança em casa a criar os filhos, onde nunca pude ver como a vida podia ser muito melhor fora das nossas quatro paredes.

Havia escolas privadas, até mesmo ensino doméstico, danças na sala de estar, frequentar e servir na igreja em conjunto, e cortar árvores de Natal frescas todos os anos. A fachada estava bem montada para quem estava a olhar de fora. Até eu acreditava nisso em metade do tempo.

Mas quando as coisas estavam más, Senti-me como se estivesse numa montanha-russae mal se mantinham nos carris. As discussões a altas horas da noite eram frequentes e surgiam sempre do nada. Tinha de ter tampões para os ouvidos por perto e usar a minha almofada para abafar a dor enquanto tu ficavas repetidamente em cima da minha cama, a gritar comigo por cada novo erro de perceção.

I knew our kids were upstairs covering their ears too, and my heart ached for them. I never wanted my children to have the fear and pain I’d endured as a child but I felt powerless to do anything more than just tell you what you wanted to hear to keep the peace.

I walked on eggshells my entire life trying not to piss off a man who refused to see how his anger and control affected his family—primeiro o meu próprio pai, then the man who’d sworn to love, cherish and protect me all the days of my life. I’ll never forget the bedtime tuck-in when my then 9-year-old daughter asked me why Daddy never gets in trouble for the same things she does.

I might have asked my mom the same question a few decades ago. Sadly, I don’t even recall what nonsense I must have spewed to placate her searching heart. I know I hugged her and told her how sorry I was that Daddy was just so sad and needed our prayers. I was always apologizing for your behavior to our kids, but you don’t remember that, do you?

You probably never knew, and if you did, you would have made it my fault somehow anyway. You were always so absorbed in yourself that how I felt, or how our kids felt, was like a foreign language you never cared to learn. It was up to me to make sure our kids knew that adults mess up too. I couldn’t bear the thought of them growing up without apologies from adults like I’d had.

Depois, houve alturas em que as coisas estavam mesmo más. Like the time I startled awake to the pounding on our front door at 2 a.m. to find you so drunk and disheveled that you couldn’t get the key to work in the door. We awoke the next morning to find you had totaled your car on a drunken drive home from a local bar after we had argued. I guess that would have been my fault somehow too. It was pretty damn sobering to have to watch the local news to see if there had been a hit-and-run. We never did find out what you had hit.

Depois, houve a altura em que insistiu que deixássemos uma igreja onde estávamos perfeitamente felizes, para frequentar o que era basicamente um culto liderado por um sociopata. Silenciaste todas as minhas objecções antes, durante e depois de lá irmos. Lembras-te do dia em que me encostaste a um canto da nossa casa de banho, ameaçando-me por me atrever a falar com o teu novo confidente de confiança na nossa nova igreja sobre o tumulto emocional na nossa casa?

That was definitely labeled wrong of me to ‘ruin your friendships’ by speaking up about my pain, wasn’t it? One of the final straws was the time when I sat like a spectator of my own life in our final attempt at couples counseling. I watched in shock as you spewed angry, paranoid delusions that shocked our therapist. It was nothing new to me.

I’d seen you overreact this way a thousand times before but thank you for finally letting someone else besides me see it, someone who could help me understand it and finally do something about it.

Our therapist would later confess that this was the day he lost hope for us. It’s hard for me to choose just one but this was definitely one of the days that made things much clearer for me. This was the day someone outside our four walls knew what I wished I could have seen long ago—that you would never really look at your behavior and take responsibility for how you affected me and our family.

Não podias ou não querias ver a realidade de quem eras na nossa relação. Pior ainda, não viu a realidade de quem eu me tinha tornado. Como Deus me libertou, na última década, da disfunção que me levou a esta relação. Eu estava a oferecer-te um amor que poucos homens alguma vez conhecerão, um amor que tu tomaste como garantido.

Recusou-se a ver-me como eu me tinha tornado, preferindo sempre ser o louco aos comandos da nossa montanha russa. Pelo menos agora tenho finalmente um nome para esse louco.

Reading Margalis Fjelstad’s book, Deixar de cuidar do borderline ou do narcisista, at the recommendation of our therapist, finally helped me understand it all. I didn’t waste my breath trying to get you to read it, although oh how I still ached to heal us! But I finally understood that you would never give yourself over to what would be required for that.

You don’t really want to change. Being a narcissist works for you. You are only interested in ‘faking good’ not being good to me. Your only desire for anyone who sees beyond your mask is to villainize them or deceive them back into believing and you could no longer do either one with me. Our relationship would never have changed for any length of time.

Provaste-o repetidamente através das muitas segundas, terceiras, quartas, quintas e vigésimas oportunidades que te dei. E eu mereço uma quantidade razoável de amor e paz, mas mesmo assim, não podia desistir de ti sem um último combate.

Eu tinha-me mudado do nosso quarto well over a year before, knowing it was over, but then you did that thing you always do, where you would tearfully relate some epiphany you’d had about what you were doing wrong, and you made all kinds of hopeful promises of change to lure me back in.

Por isso, como de todas as vezes, dei-nos esta última oportunidade, agarrando-me à esperança de que fosses realmente aquele homem bom que, no fundo, sempre acreditei que eras. Sempre fui otimista até ao limite no que te dizia respeito. Essa esperança lembra-me sempre a única coisa que aprendi com o nosso penúltimo conselheiro.

Ela disse-me que foi muito amável da minha parte dar uma explicação compassiva para os seus comportamentos ofensivos e estar disposta a percorrer esse caminho consigo, apesar da sua negação contínua. Ela disse que a maioria das mulheres não se importaria com a razão pela qual estavam a ser tratadas daquela maneira; simplesmente iriam embora. Eu não era a maioria das mulheres.

E, aparentemente, também ainda não estava preparado para aceitar a realidade. Precisava de saber se toda a sua raiva, irritabilidade e emotividade, juntamente com a sua recusa em ver o que há de bom em mim, eram resultado de todos os golpes repetidos na sua cabeça devido a acidentes de carro, quedas e lesões desportivas. Se assim fosse, pensei que talvez houvesse opções de tratamento que me pudessem devolver o homem por quem me apaixonei, o homem de quem sentia falta.

O homem que, ao que parece, foi sempre um produto da minha imaginação, apenas a projeção do teu falso eu, o homem que o resto do mundo pôde desfrutar, que apenas fez aparições pouco frequentes e imprevisíveis na minha vida. Ah, mas se eu pudesse ter tido esse gajo o tempo todo!

Aceitar o facto de que a primeira metade da minha vida foi em grande parte uma fantasia foi devastador. No início, não fazia ideia de como raciocinar tudo isto na minha cabeça. Apesar desta constatação e do subsequente fim da nossa relação, sei sem sombra de dúvida a minha vida não foi um desperdício total. Houve coisas boas.

Houve muitas recordações fantásticas misturadas com o tormento emocional. My love was real even if yours wasn’t, even if that’s the best kind of love you have to give. I would never want to imagine my life without the wonderful children you gave me. The reality of my life up until this point has served as the catalyst for the strength and healing I now enjoy, despite the difficult decisions this awareness has demanded of me—decisions like filing for divorce and no doubt being pegged as the homewrecker by those who only know your false self and believe your lies and distorted perceptions.

We were awfully good at faking being the perfect little family though, so I expect a few people were shocked. Anyone who really knew us was not. But here I am, facing the reality that you won’t take care of me, despite explicitly and repeatedly assuring me that even in divorce, you would keep your promises to take care of me.

More manipulation that finally didn’t work. You swore you would never do to me what some of my friends’ narcissist exes had done to them in divorce… like hiring slimy lawyers, being deceitful, making claims of abuse when I, the abused, chose the high road, and trying to avoid paying a dime more than the law requires. In case you didn’t know, I know this is who you have been all along.

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Mas eu nunca quis que isto acabasse. Queria acreditar nas suas mentiras, mas aqui estou eu no meio de uma batalha legal litigiosa just to get my reasonable needs met after devoting over twenty years of my life to taking care of you and our kids, sacrificing my own career and well-being. I left you as a shell of my former self. I didn’t know who I was anymore, if I ever did.

My life was all about you, and always had been. We had the fairy tale middle-class life, 2.5 children and the house in the suburbs—the very definition of the American dream, but I had never felt more alone in all my life.

I lived from counseling appointment to counseling appointment for years, begging to be told what I could do, how I could change to ease the anxiety and outbursts coursing through the veins of my home—and while yes, there were definite codependency and caretaking behaviors that I would have to stop to break the pattern—I was repeatedly told, year after year for over a decade, by more than one counselor, that I could not change the madman at the control of my roller coaster life. Eu só podia mudar-me a mim. Então. Finalmente. Eu fiz.

Nos últimos anos da nossa vida em comum, estabeleci limites saudáveis. Mudei todas as crenças, suposições e reacções possíveis. Perdoei. Escutei. Aguentei. Afirmei os meus próprios pensamentos, crenças e necessidades, como aprendi que é saudável e importante fazer. Por vezes, fiz asneiras e regressei a velhos padrões, mas aprendi. Fiquei mais forte.

Mostrei graça a ti e a mim próprio. Tentei ouvir qualquer coisa real e tangível a que me pudesse agarrar por detrás de toda a sua raiva e ansiedade. Fiz todos os esforços possíveis para me ligar emocionalmente, espiritualmente e fisicamente a si, o homem que me disse toda a vida que eu era o amor da sua vida.

Agarrava-me a ti durante e depois de fazer amor, tentava fisicamente virar a tua cabeça para olhares para os meus olhos e tu afastavas o pescoço, sempre com uma desculpa pronta, sempre com uma razão grandiosa para não conseguires olhar para os meus olhos e ligares-te a mim. Diziam-me todos os dias que eu era amada, então porque é que não me sentia amada? Era uma loucura. Eu perguntava isto vezes sem conta e, eventualmente, todos os conselheiros e mentores da minha vida me diziam, de um milhão de maneiras diferentes, que o que estava a acontecer contigo não era amor.

I was not crazy. I was codependent. I was a caretaker to someone who would never care for me, and the only thing I would ever be able to change would be myself. My head knew but my heart had stubbornly refused to acknowledge the reality since I had pegged you as my soulmate at just fourteen years old. Thirty years later, if this wasn’t love, what was? And could I ever know it?

Tive de vir para aceitar que tinha acabado. No blame. No shame. It is what it is. Life doesn’t always fit in pretty little boxes wrapped neatly with perfect bows. I had tried everything I had known for longer than anyone I’ve ever known, to fight… for you. I could honestly say we had tried. Though it will always be hard for me to fully grasp, I accept that you too did everything that was possible for you to do.

I could easily make a list of things I wish you had done, but I choose to give credit where it’s due—you did some counseling and you even allowed for an evaluation that clarified what we needed to know about the possibility of our future together. You were pleased with the results—no head injury issues.

For me, that just summed up what I had been saying all along; either there is a solid explanation for the hurtful behaviors or there’s not. Now we had it in writing, there was not. We had given it our all, and it just was apparently not meant to be. You could or would not be the man I needed, and I could never go back to the old ways.

Há uma mudança de paradigma que é irreversível: when we see a truth, we can never ‘un-see’ it. Nunca poderia desaprender tudo o que Deus iluminou e curou dentro de mim na última década, nem o quereria fazer. Houve dias, quando te deixei pela primeira vez, em que me deparei com tanta incerteza ao olhar para o caminho que tinha à minha frente e, por vezes, perguntava-me se podia voltar atrás, fingir que estava tudo bem, ser os namorados do liceu que todos queriam acreditar que éramos.

But I couldn’t. I can’t. And I never will be able to.

I won’t ever reduce myself to a former lesser version of myself. I have finally begun to define who I really am, and I like her. And everyone around me loves her. I am so deeply saddened that I cannot be the real me with you… the only man I have ever truly loved. And deep down I know that you will never find a love like mine, even if you find someone to mimic it for a time. You will know it’s not the same. And even as much pain as you have caused in my life in our many years together, I still hate that for you.

Mas não estou triste que estou finalmente acordada e viva de novo. Eu rio-me. Amo. Relaxo. Sonho. Sorrio. Ainda choro de vez em quando e sinto saudades do que gostaria que tivesse sido contigo, mas rapidamente me recomponho e procuro ajudar os outros e permitir que os outros me ajudem, pois muitas mulheres que conheço estão a fazer esta viagem não escolhida para uma nova vida. Tenho esperança.

Um dia, hei-de encontrar um amor como a que eu tenho para dar. Alguém desfrutará do amor que tu nunca aceitarias. Um amor que floresce com o meu tempo, o meu amor, a minha energia e todo o meu ser. Eu bato o pé ao ritmo de uma nova vida que está apenas a começar a ser descoberta.

(But, let me guess, this is all exactly what YOU were going to say…)