Celebrating the Divorce

or How I divorced a narcissist and lived to tell about it, barely.

I am celebrating the divorce the way others celebrate landmark events in their lives. Such as an anniversary, a promotion at work, and retirement. It is important to acknowledge this event which has shaped my life in a way I had never anticipated.

When I was going through my divorce, I did not blog much. At the time, I feared that mr horrible would remember my blog, find it, read it, and get wise to what I intended to do. An even bigger threat was the realization that I did not know who my husband was as a person.

Some of the reveals from discovering his affair were:

• He truly was manipulative and emotionally abusive (I wasn’t imagining this part of him)
• He knew far more about me than I did about him.
• He had grown more violent (I assume because the toll of keeping his affair a secret grew on him)

I really wish I had documented more from that specific time because I feel that I repressed too many of the memories. It has only been a year and already many of my recollections grow fuzzy as the process of just living takes over. I don’t mind that I have replaced them, but I feel I am losing the teachable moments and therefore will not be able to grow as a person from my experience.

On the plus side, mr horrible does go out of his way to give me a little nudge from afar to remind me of exactly why I left him in the first place.

Anytime he chooses to call me, text me, or send me an email, he does it with the least amount of respect and decorum possible to come across like a complete jackass. If he is unfortunate enough to catch me at a moment when I have the least amount of patience with his shenanigans, then I am going to retaliate in kind. Not the smartest move, I know, but it is what it is.

Other times, I am better at ignoring him and not rising to the bait with retaliations and either manage to not reply, or to respond in such a way that it can’t be construed as anything but polite conversation, making his communications that more rude in contrast.

Married to a narcissist

One of the hallmarks of a narcissist is that they are unable to accept their own personal faults, and any behavior that paints them in a bad light is never their own fault, and when pointed out, it never happened. I spent most of the time that I was married to mr horrible feeling like I was taking crazy pills.

Everyday things would happen that seemed as if I was the only one who either saw them that way…events that no one else seemed to notice had transpired and I came across like a lunatic most of the time. I screamed a lot in frustration.

I had to raise my voice just to be heard, and the rest of the time I just felt taken for granted and unappreciated… generally abused as a person and therefore filled with a lot of self-doubt. I realize now that I was just married to master in the art of gaslighting. 

Post-divorce with a narcissist

But as a survivor of living with a narcissist, gaslighting, and emotional abuse, I am just trying to make it to the next day. So I celebrate this anniversary of my liberation from oppression. I celebrate the journey to finding myself again.