Not Your Momma’s Fairy Tale

First off I would like to welcome my new readers. HI NEW READERS! Please stay. Also, tell your friends.

Further, thank you to the person who linked the hell out of my post on correctly identifying Rosie the Riveter in several places. You drove the hell out of my site traffic. much love to you.

I promise to get back to tell the truth about people to their digital faces later but today I am going to tell you a story.

Ahem…

Once upon a time there were two lovely ladies who were in love.

They looked like this:

You’re welcome for the eye candy. We are pretty bitches!

Sadly, like many other ladies who are in love they were not ready to admit it to themselves or other people. So, in the place of the pain of honesty they decided to try a poly relationship with someone they thought was a prince.

Poly can work and many people live happily ever after within it but not these ladies. And that’s mostly because the third leg of their triad was not so much a prince as a clinical narcissist who was incapable of being in a loving, healthy relationship.

So that was an issue.

For real. I’ve got stories but they all involve him so none of them are interesting. Also, this is not about him.

Instead this is about the two lovely ladies.

So the prince thing wasn’t working out.

Also, one of the ladies is gay. Which is also an issue.

But these ladies did love each other and they fought hard to be together. Even though there were times that they didn’t have anything to talk about or any real desire to interact, they kept loving and that brought them back to talking.

After much pain and trials and fights and tears, they got out.

After twelve years of emotional abuse against her and six against me, we, um, I mean the ladies, got out. In fact, three years ago yesterday, the lad…fuck it, we got out.

People often ask us how we knew it was time to go and the answer is, we started asking that question.

If you’ve started imagining how much better your life will be once you are no longer in your relationship, it’s probably time to no longer be in that relationship.

Don’t get it twisted, we had a lot of advantages. We had each other. So when he would gaslight us or rage or generally act like himself, we could each give the other a sanity check.

And yes, we were actually in a place where we sometimes had to look at each other and ask “Did that happen the way I remember or the way he said it happened?”

No really. Gaslighting is a fucking trip.

We also had family who helped us get to where we are now. We had friends who were smart enough to know that we weren’t ready to hear “You are being emotionally and mentally abused,” so they instead simply loved and supported us. We got extremely lucky.

So what is the point of this little anecdote? Why am I spending my very early morning typing about this and not ranting about some social injustice?

Because statistically someone reading this has never heard of gaslighting but is suffering from it right now.

Hey there hypothetical person. You are not crazy. This is an actual thing. This kind of abuse is hard to identify. People who do this do not change. They just get better at abusing you. This is not a situation that you can work through or overcome. They are made of poison and you don’t have to eat that anymore.

LEAVE!

Yes, it can be extremely difficult on a number of levels. I understand.

Leave anyway. Make a plan. Execute it and get the fuck out. No matter how hard it is or will be, just go.

Why?

Because you deserve better. If you take nothing else from this post take that.

You deserve better than that kind of life.

Trust.