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Well, well, well. I’ve already come to my first hurdle. Before I sat to write my first entry, I had committed to sharing the true and yucky details of my current life. And I craftily avoided doing just that. It’s quite overwhelming for me to try to find a way to share enough details of where I am in order to paint a true picture.
(This is a follow-up to my first post and start of my journey which you can read HERE.)
My wake-up and healing journey began a year ago. That is when I finally understood that my husband is a narcissist. Holy cow. After twenty plus years of seeing myself through his eyes and believing I was the monster he painted me as, this was HUGE. Boundaries of all sorts started becoming part of how I interacted with him. After his initial fight of getting even uglier, things have calmed down so so so much. He knows now that I just don’t care. All the emotional blackmail lost its power. This has been evolving over the last year and I am finally at a place where I have some mental energy back to now heal and move forward.
For anyone who has dealt with a narcissist, it is the biggest mental drain will ever know. You spend so much time questioning your sanity, doubting your intuition, spinning in circles trying to figure out what is the truth, that you have no energy to come up with plans or ideas. I was constantly in my head, working to find the exact right words that would finally get him to hear me. This was constant. CONSTANT. (Spoiler alert: every time I thought I found those words and bravely spoke them, I would be so viciously attacked that the emotional pain still lives in me.)
So, my goodness, having this last year to discover boundaries and reclaim so much of my mental energy has finally put me in a place to start walking down the path to happiness. The not-so-funny thing is that I don’t see a picture of what happiness is for me.
I liken this part of my journey to the cynic who is on his death bed and, as a last hope, decides to have faith in God or some other spiritual being, not really even knowing what that means. I am taking a leap of faith that this thing that I can not touch, feel, smell, see or even imagine- happiness- exists. This for me is the starting point.
Here are some visuals of where I am. This first image is from a self-assessment from Feeling Good (affiliate link) by Dr. David Burns. It is a wonderful and very practical book about depression.
I remember the first time I took the assessment and was shocked to see my score at the extreme level. This was before my “awakening” and I had just gotten so used to how I felt that I did not see how dire it really was. My latest score was a 48 and fluctuates around there now.
This next snapshot is an evaluation I did just recently. Out of 12 core life areas, I am barely so-so with health and fitness, regular so-so with life vision, and how-low-can-you-go bad in every other area. The funny (my son would say here, “When you say funny, you mean not funny, right?”) thing is I look at this and think, “Wow! I’m not as bad as I thought!”
I’ve gone back and forth about sharing more personal details of my situation, but I come against that fine line of what is helpful and what is harmful. Let’s just say that I am completely broke, very isolated, have boatloads of anger, lose sleep because of not being able to take care of myself and kids with things like dentist visits, checkups, etc, and living in less than 600 square feet of crumbling cinder block battling every day to protect two little hearts from broken promises and outright gaslighing.
What I have is a whole hell of a lot of room to grow. I’ve got a growing toolbox of mental warrior tools and a chance to learn to see myself through my own eyes instead of through those of a sick f$%^.
What about you? Are you willing to take inventory of where you are at right now? Do you clearly see your end goal and know where you want to end up? Or, like me, do you have to just step forward blindly not even knowing what your happiness looks like?
