Dating a narcissist is never a good idea, especially if you’re treated as a rebound relationship, but this is how you woke me up from my existential crisis.
So, how did you get here? I’ve been asking myself that with a great deal of shame woven into the investigation. I also now understand why people have a midlife crisis at 40. This is because you began to see your youth fading away and all the moments, out of desperation, were wasted on trivial things.
Related: Why Narcissists Love Bomb You (And How To Recognize When It’s Happening)
I’ve spent most of my life oscillating between wanting to die and trying to find reasons to be here. So, over the course of a decade, I spent about $300,000 of inheritance money on research. I used some of it to get my master’s degree, some to travel, some to pay for living expenses, and some as recovery money.
Sorry? That I didn’t buy a house at 28 or create some form of stability in my life.
Instead, I ran from the pain. I kept “busy” moving from one place to another. The luggage code that was haunting me was a storage unit containing worthless items that I kept “just in case” and that was collecting annual payments of $1,000.
It is humbling to live in escapism from life while at the same time trying to truly live it.
It’s embarrassing to think of all the men I let sleep with me because I was “on this adventure” and equated adventure with prosperity. For three years in a row, I dated three different men who were all narcissists.
One of them was addicted to “doing ayahuasca” and was no longer sober for the process. Next was the complete scam where he was telling several women he was looking for a wife when he was really looking for a getaway and was also on the verge of bankruptcy. The latter…well, his brand of narcissism was the conduit to his “come to Jesus” moment.
One pattern I repeated with each of these people was that I tried to make them become something they were not. From the jump, each of them was a “no” for me, but they offered me the chance to “adventure” — and adventure was the only way I knew how to keep myself alive.
It was like a defibrillator for my broken heart and it worked most of the time.
But, this last time, I completely exhausted myself trying to build something with someone who was lying to me about the whole situation in a “let’s see where this goes” kind of way.
The truth is, I was just a rebound girl between his on-and-off relationship. As with most rebound relationships, it ended badly.
I insisted he was a narcissist. He responded by saying I was “psycho”. Then he came back with his light switch girlfriend.
I kept calling him because something wasn’t completed. I felt like I left a part of me behind and kept going back to get it. She felt like she won. Then the stone was rolled away and I realized that I had never fought for his presence in my life. I was fighting to exist.
You see, when his girlfriend came back into the picture to claim him, she said to me, “I just want you to go away.”
You struck a chord. But at the time I understood it to mean: “Leave us alone so we can be together again.”
It wasn’t until I got into a fight with her over following me on Instagram after I provoked her into doing so by messaging the guy (I take it) that I realized where my upset was coming from.
I was supposed to cease to exist and cease to be relevant. I was just a throw away girl. I created a throw-away life. I have spent all the inheritance money. I’ve dated boys who were thrown away. I lived in abandoned houses. My career was a complete “neglect.”
Mind you, I can see all of this with hindsight.
Related: 8 Ways To Deal With A Narcissistic Sociopath (Once You Realize You’re Married To One)
