I am sitting here frozen. Reminiscent of when James would rip my heart out and blame me for it. You know when your whole world seems to come crashing down around you and you just can’t cope, can’t think clearly enough to make sense of your thoughts.  I can’t drive right now, I can’t make myself move. I am shaking so bad I can barely type and I know I should be doing something.

What the hell am I babbling about? Please, if I tell you; no one tell me I told you so; no one get mad at me or tell me what I “should” have done or that I’ve let you down. Because I am feeling very fragile right now.

As you all know I lost my job. Colin, (the guy from work who I was seeing and found with another woman) has been extremely supportive and helpful throughout the whole time. When I found a truck I had him check it out, he thought it was a great find. He talked to management and got them to agree. They didn’t want to spend that much so he personally signed for $1500 of the debt.

He built a dog kennel for my house, he was just an all round nice guy. He kept making sure I knew he wasn’t seeing anyone else. And well, I started to relax and we become intimate. It took alot for me to get there and we talked alot about where I was coming from, his feelings. We didn’t say I love you but I felt there was a relationship growing.

Anyway, I got my truck on Friday and by the time I paid the sales tax on it I couldn’t afford to insure it so got a two day permit so I could work and make money for insurance.

Colin worked on it until late Friday night and came home with me. I drove him back to work Saturday morning and went to work myself. I made enough to get another permit and a few groceries.

Saturday I wanted him to take the afternoon off and come back to the lake with me but he worked on my truck until almost midnight and said I had to come back Sunday for hIm to finish.

My grandma’s memorial was Sunday up at Cultus Lake and when I went to leave my truck wouldn’t start. I did what I could but couldn’t get it started. My mom gave me her car to drive home. I had a key for Colin’s so seeing as it was early I thought maybe he would ride back to the lake with me; I knew he could get it going in 5 minutes.

I let myself in, yelling “Hello!?” as I walked through the door and saw the same woman he had there before standing there.

I called him a Fucking bastard and handed her the house key and left.

I know I am not in love with him, its the lying and the effort he put into breaking down my barriers that hurt.

I will get over it/him but now I have $15 to my name and my truck is broken down and I have no one to help me.

I have been trying to remain positive since I lost my job but you know? I am tired. I haven’t had any breaks from the stress.

I never should have dated him.  Its not that I need a man, its that it was nice to have a man to care and be helpful. I enjoy sex with the right man.

That’s all I have to say. I am just very sad today and I don’t know how I am going yo pull it all together.

I am sure I will find the strength somewhere

Hugs to you all.
not much of an inspiration now am I?
Carrie

This is my typical morning view, I am sitting in my little cabin listening to my wind chimes being whipped into a frenzy by the wind. The sun is shining but the wind is cold, yet I am warm curled up on my couch with Laila snuggled up beside me with her head on my feet.

Every morning I wake up and feel blessed to be alive, even this morning, jobless; how could I not feel blessed to be alive?

Mornings haven’t always been so idyllic, it wasn’t long ago I woke and cried every morning.

JC used to scream at me,”Every fucking day its like this, every fucking day you cry. I am so fucking sick of you crying. Can’t you ever be thankful. You ruin every day with your bitching. I wake up in a good mood and then you get up and ruin my day with your nagging and crying.”

Of course if I mentioned WHY I was crying he would go into another tirade about how my happiness shouldn’t be dependent on his moods.

See the contradiction here? My mood ruined his day but his moods weren’t supposed to affect me in any way.

I didn’t realize what I was dealing with and understand now that Narcissists hate intimacy and once they have their victim firmly hooked they will avoid closeness at any cost.

You see when I met JC he couldn’t get enough of me; he would drag me off to the bedroom the minute I walked through the door and at night we would go to bed together and make love again. He liked to fall asleep with me on top and him still inside me, often waking up 1/2 way through through the night and making love again. I say making love because that is what I felt it was, it was far to intimate and intense to just be sex. We would wake up in the morning in the same position and, you guessed it: make love again. Even on the very odd occasion that we didn’t have sex I would fall asleep with my head on his chest, his arm around me, my hand cradling his head (because he had broken his neck years ago and I would massage his neck as we fell asleep) and wake up in the same position in the morning. Neither one of us would roll over in the night. We discussed the fact that neither one of us had ever slept like that with anyone before; with anyone else one or the other had rolled over at some point in the night.

During our “getting to know you” stage I had asked him if he had ever screwed around on any of the women he’d been with. He admitted that he had, once. He told me he had been with the woman something like 10 years and she had always accused him of cheating. He told me he had always been faithful, even though he had been a trucker at the time and had the opportunity, he had always remained faithful , but when he got home she would accuse him of cheating. He said it was destroying the relationship and that they weren’t even sleeping together any more. He was on the road alot but when he was home they hadn’t slept together for about 6 months when on one of his trips the boss’s niece needed a ride in the direction he was going and rode with him. One thing led to another and they ended up having sex. He had always called his girlfriend every night but that night he felt so guilty he couldn’t call.

When he got home his girlfriend was waiting for him and found evidence if a woman in the truck and all hell broke loose. He said he felt horrible and tried to make it work and never screwed around again but she couldn’t get over it; had an affair with his best friend and eventually it broke them up.

I had thought, surely she knew it was over if they hadn’t slept together for 6 months, and he said he had felt so guilty. (you know the lies we tell ourselves in order to justify their actions and assure ourselves that it won’t happen with US because we are “special”.

It didn’t happen overnight; it started slowly, with him coming to bed with me and then getting up once I was asleep and then he started coming to bed later and later. I talked to him about how I loved to fall asleep in his arms and he blamed it on the fact that he wasn’t working so just wasn’t tired at night. (I of course WAS tired because I WAS working.) He always made it to bed at some point and when he did we would always make love and fall back to sleep with him inside me.

When he got a job nothing changed, and over the course of years he came to bed later and later. The love making turned to sex, where he came to bed, pulled me on top of him and got his rocks off without so much as giving me a kiss. By this time I had discovered his addiction to porn and personal ads. I often felt like I was nothing more than a physical release after watching hours of porn, I could have been a blow up doll for the amount of forplay he put into having sex. I ended up buying lube, a mistake because then forplay consisted of, “Where’d you put the lube?”

I never turned him down, I always wanted to make love to him but I missed our love making, the closeness we once shared. He would promise to “be there in 5 minutes” when I went to bed, then I would wake up to find the bed empty beside me; it was obvious he hadn’t been to bed at all that night.

I would get up and find him asleep at his computer, I even found him asleep on the toilet; one time he was so tired he fell asleep half way up the stairs Standing!! He avoided coming to bed at all costs.

You know what I was thinking right? Porn, personal ads, not coming to bed…….it was over and he just wasn’t telling me. Yet any time I talked to him about it he said I was being too sensitive,  he was working too much, not working, working on my truck all night, didn’t want to come to bed because I was nagging him, then he didn’t want to come to bed because I never asked him to come to bed. It tore me apart.

On top of it he was growing more critical every day, it was as if me breathing his air was pissing him off.

Finally I left him. Of course as soon as we split he was so sorry he hadn’t slept with me, he made love to me with even more intensity and we got back together. We did this dance many times. Until the last time when he came and begged me back and asked me to marry him etc.

This time, after we had been back together about a year he even stopped coming to bed at all and if he did he would keep his clothes on and sleep on top of the covers. If we did have sex he would undo his zipper, not even take his jeans off.

I am not proud of the fact that I never said no. I loved him so much, I kept hoping this time would be different.

So yes, that last year I woke up and cried most days. Occasionally he would come to bed and make love to me, but I couldn’t even enjoy those times because I knew that if he made love to me he wouldn’t come home from work the next night.

It took 10 years but he eventually destroyed my confidence sexually, eventually he turned me off of sex completely. And I knew exactly the hell his ex had gone through for 10 years and why she had made it her life purpose to inform every woman he got involved with what he was like. She became a severe alcoholic that drank herself to death, bitter, and alone, broken.

I vowed I would not let him break me like he broke her. I would not give him the satisfaction of thinking he destroyed me so deeply I could never be with another man.

Fyi to James, I don’t wake up crying any more. I don’t hate men, in fact you have made almost every other man on the planet look good!! You did. Not. Break. Me!! Your inability to be intimate and loving did not destroy my ability to be intimate and loving; if anything it has made me value that quality in others even more.

You are the anomaly, healthy people need closeness and enjoy intimacy and cherish it when they find someone they can be close with. You are the one lacking James, but you know that don’t you? Misery loves company and you tried to make me as miserable as you. You hated the fact that I could bare my soul to you, that I could be that vulnerable, you saw it as a weakness and punished me for allowing you to get that close. You felt I deserved the rejection, I was so stupid to love you that much. How sad for you James. You are not that powerful, I am so much stronger than you. It takes alot of strength to be that vulnerable.

So now I get up in the morning and I thank God for my life and the beautiful world around me, my puppies, the lake and the fact that I can feel, because life doesn’t have to feel bad, life can feel intensely good. But you will never know that James.

I haven’t shed a tear in his honor for longer than I can remember.