High school sweethearts\u2026 that\u2019s what everyone called us my whole life. We were perfect for each other, weren\u2019t we? Destined to live happily ever after, because of course we would.<\/p>\n
Back then, I felt like your high school sweetheart\u2014except for when I felt like anything but. All these years, until now, Eu estava a viver num mundo de fantasia ing\u00e9nua de nega\u00e7\u00e3o<\/strong> that you were who you claimed to be, the guy everyone loved. But year after year, you were proving to me alone\u2014behind closed doors of course\u2014that wasn\u2019t ever really who you were.<\/p>\n Oh, mas quando as coisas eram boas, \u00e9ramos \u00f3ptimos. O mais alto dos altos. Divers\u00e3o, 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 seguran\u00e7a em casa a criar os filhos, onde nunca pude ver como a vida podia ser muito melhor fora das nossas quatro paredes.<\/p>\n Havia escolas privadas, at\u00e9 mesmo ensino dom\u00e9stico, dan\u00e7as na sala de estar, frequentar e servir na igreja em conjunto, e cortar \u00e1rvores de Natal frescas todos os anos. A fachada estava bem montada para quem estava a olhar de fora. At\u00e9 eu acreditava nisso em metade do tempo.<\/p>\n Mas quando as coisas estavam m\u00e1s, Senti-me como se estivesse numa montanha-russa<\/strong>e mal se mantinham nos carris. As discuss\u00f5es a altas horas da noite eram frequentes e surgiam sempre do nada. Tinha de ter tamp\u00f5es 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 perce\u00e7\u00e3o.<\/p>\n 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2014primeiro o meu pr\u00f3prio pai<\/a>, then the man who\u2019d sworn to love, cherish and protect me all the days of my life. I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n I might have asked my mom the same question a few decades ago. Sadly, I don\u2019t 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\u2019t remember that, do you?<\/p>\n 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\u2019t bear the thought of them growing up without apologies from adults like I\u2019d had.<\/p>\n Depois, houve alturas em que as coisas estavam mesmo m\u00e1s.<\/strong> 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Depois, houve a altura em que insistiu que deix\u00e1ssemos uma igreja onde est\u00e1vamos perfeitamente felizes, para frequentar o que era basicamente um culto liderado por um sociopata. Silenciaste todas as minhas objec\u00e7\u00f5es antes, durante e depois de l\u00e1 irmos. Lembras-te do dia em que me encostaste a um canto da nossa casa de banho, amea\u00e7ando-me por me atrever a falar com o teu novo confidente de confian\u00e7a na nossa nova igreja sobre o tumulto emocional na nossa casa?<\/p>\n That was definitely labeled wrong of me to \u2018ruin your friendships\u2019 by speaking up about my pain, wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n Our therapist would later confess that this was the day he lost hope for us. It\u2019s 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\u2014that you would never really look at your behavior and take responsibility for how you affected me and our family.<\/p>\n N\u00e3o podias ou n\u00e3o querias ver a realidade de quem eras na nossa rela\u00e7\u00e3o. Pior ainda, n\u00e3o viu a realidade de quem eu me tinha tornado. Como Deus me libertou, na \u00faltima d\u00e9cada, da disfun\u00e7\u00e3o que me levou a esta rela\u00e7\u00e3o. Eu estava a oferecer-te um amor que poucos homens alguma vez conhecer\u00e3o, um amor que tu tomaste como garantido.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Reading Margalis Fjelstad\u2019s book, Deixar de cuidar do borderline ou do narcisista<\/strong><\/em>, at the recommendation of our therapist, finally helped me understand it all. I didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t really want to change. Being a narcissist works for you. You are only interested in \u2018faking good\u2019 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.<\/p>\n Provaste-o repetidamente atrav\u00e9s das muitas segundas, terceiras, quartas, quintas e vig\u00e9simas oportunidades que te dei. E eu mere\u00e7o uma quantidade razo\u00e1vel de amor e paz, mas mesmo assim, n\u00e3o podia desistir de ti sem um \u00faltimo combate<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n Eu tinha-me mudado do nosso quarto<\/strong> 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\u2019d had about what you were doing wrong, and you made all kinds of hopeful promises of change to lure me back in.<\/p>\n Por isso, como de todas as vezes, dei-nos esta \u00faltima oportunidade, agarrando-me \u00e0 esperan\u00e7a de que fosses realmente aquele homem bom que, no fundo, sempre acreditei que eras. Sempre fui otimista at\u00e9 ao limite no que te dizia respeito. Essa esperan\u00e7a lembra-me sempre a \u00fanica coisa que aprendi com o nosso pen\u00faltimo conselheiro.<\/p>\n Ela disse-me que foi muito am\u00e1vel da minha parte dar uma explica\u00e7\u00e3o compassiva para os seus comportamentos ofensivos e estar disposta a percorrer esse caminho consigo, apesar da sua nega\u00e7\u00e3o cont\u00ednua. Ela disse que a maioria das mulheres n\u00e3o se importaria com a raz\u00e3o pela qual estavam a ser tratadas daquela maneira; simplesmente iriam embora. Eu n\u00e3o era a maioria das mulheres.<\/p>\n E, aparentemente, tamb\u00e9m ainda n\u00e3o 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 h\u00e1 de bom em mim, eram resultado de todos os golpes repetidos na sua cabe\u00e7a devido a acidentes de carro, quedas e les\u00f5es desportivas. Se assim fosse, pensei que talvez houvesse op\u00e7\u00f5es de tratamento que me pudessem devolver o homem por quem me apaixonei, o homem de quem sentia falta.<\/p>\n O homem que, ao que parece, foi sempre um produto da minha imagina\u00e7\u00e3o, apenas a proje\u00e7\u00e3o do teu falso eu, o homem que o resto do mundo p\u00f4de desfrutar, que apenas fez apari\u00e7\u00f5es pouco frequentes e imprevis\u00edveis na minha vida. Ah, mas se eu pudesse ter tido esse gajo o tempo todo!<\/p>\n Aceitar o facto de que a primeira metade da minha vida foi em grande parte uma fantasia foi devastador. No in\u00edcio, n\u00e3o fazia ideia de como raciocinar tudo isto na minha cabe\u00e7a.<\/strong> Apesar desta constata\u00e7\u00e3o e do subsequente fim da nossa rela\u00e7\u00e3o, sei sem sombra de d\u00favida a minha vida n\u00e3o foi um desperd\u00edcio total.<\/strong> Houve coisas boas.<\/p>\n Houve muitas recorda\u00e7\u00f5es fant\u00e1sticas misturadas com o tormento emocional. My love was real even if yours wasn\u2019t<\/a>, even if that\u2019s 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\u2014decisions 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t take care of me, despite explicitly and repeatedly assuring me that even in divorce, you would keep your promises to take care of me.<\/p>\n More manipulation that finally didn\u2019t work. You swore you would never do to me what some of my friends\u2019 narcissist exes had done to them in divorce\u2026 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\u2019t know, I know this is who you have been all along.<\/p>\n ***********************************************************<\/p>\n Mas eu nunca quis que isto acabasse. Queria acreditar nas suas mentiras, mas aqui estou eu no meio de uma batalha legal litigiosa<\/strong> 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\u2019t know who I was anymore, if I ever did.<\/p>\n 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\u2014the very definition of the American dream, but I had never felt more alone in all my life.<\/p>\n 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\u2014and while yes, there were definite codependency and caretaking behaviors that I would have to stop to break the pattern\u2014I 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 s\u00f3 podia mudar-me a mim.<\/strong> Ent\u00e3o. Finalmente. Eu fiz.<\/p>\n Nos \u00faltimos anos da nossa vida em comum, estabeleci limites saud\u00e1veis. Mudei todas as cren\u00e7as, suposi\u00e7\u00f5es e reac\u00e7\u00f5es poss\u00edveis. Perdoei. Escutei. Aguentei. Afirmei os meus pr\u00f3prios pensamentos, cren\u00e7as e necessidades, como aprendi que \u00e9 saud\u00e1vel e importante fazer. Por vezes, fiz asneiras e regressei a velhos padr\u00f5es, mas aprendi. Fiquei mais forte.<\/p>\n Mostrei gra\u00e7a a ti e a mim pr\u00f3prio. Tentei ouvir qualquer coisa real e tang\u00edvel a que me pudesse agarrar por detr\u00e1s de toda a sua raiva e ansiedade. Fiz todos os esfor\u00e7os poss\u00edveis 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.<\/p>\n Agarrava-me a ti durante e depois de fazer amor, tentava fisicamente virar a tua cabe\u00e7a para olhares para os meus olhos e tu afastavas o pesco\u00e7o, sempre com uma desculpa pronta, sempre com uma raz\u00e3o grandiosa para n\u00e3o conseguires olhar para os meus olhos e ligares-te a mim. Diziam-me todos os dias que eu era amada, ent\u00e3o porque \u00e9 que n\u00e3o 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 milh\u00e3o de maneiras diferentes, que o que estava a acontecer contigo n\u00e3o era amor.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t love, what was? And could I ever know it?<\/p>\n