Its time to set the record straight.
Dear strangers,
Whatever you’ve heard about me is not true.
From me.
Unfortunately, the straightening of said record will never reach its target audience. And I’ll have to live with that. My blogs have been nothing but honest. Nothing but my feelings and experiences. There are two sides to every story, and I believe its about time a bit more of mine was told.
Trust me. I don’t ask for drama. I just want to get on with a quiet, happy life!
I had four odd holiday days to use up and wanted to take two of them this side of Christmas, and the other two after. I randomly chose 15th and 16th September, and took Sunday 17th as a day off, giving myself a rare weekend off. This was a week where noone else had any holiday booked. As good a week as any.
I don’t think my choice was as random as I first thought it was. I think it was my subconscious telling me to take stock of what’s going on and to take back some control.
Saturday 16th September 2017 would’ve been my 17th wedding anniversary. Would’ve been, if the man I married in 2000 hadn’t told me in December 2014 that he no longer loved me, and hadn’t for two years.
Of course, I hadn’t forgotten this date. It was weird in 2015, it barely registered in 2016, so 2017 should’ve been almost insignificant, right?
Wrong.
I woke up Saturday morning thinking maybe I shouldn’t have booked off this weekend. Its fair to say a lot of emotions rushed through me. I felt a bit of a failure, what had I done wrong, why did he stop loving me? Of course I’ve since realised that the “love” stopped when my tolerance and naivety about his behaviour did. I then felt anger. Angry that I’d “wasted” the best part of 1997 through to 2014 with the wrong person. The anger soon dispersed when I heard my 14 year old son clattering around in his room. He is the reason it was all worth it. However, I did too feel stupid. Stupid for sticking with it for so long and not ending it myself. I wasn’t happy. I spent the last few years feeling unloved, lonely, unattractive and I’d started to become suspicious and lies were unfolding. That quickly turned to pride. I made marriage vows that I intended to keep. Good times and bad. I was also proud of how I had handled myself since the split. I didn’t talk about any of this for over a year after he left, despite a very active smear campaign against my character on his part. I only talk about it now because there are only so many straws a camels back can take. I didn’t need to resort to lies. I knew the truth, and at the time I had to trust that everyone else would see it soon enough too. The things I heard about myself were dramatic enough to make an EastEnders script. I stayed silent.
Perhaps the only emotion I didn’t feel on Saturday morning was sorrow. I wasn’t sad. I didn’t miss it. I didn’t want it back. The time off gave me time to think, and reflect upon exactly what I’ve put up with and how far I’ve come. To finally prove to myself that it really shouldn’t matter what strangers thought of me..
However, I’ve mentioned before how hard it is to not care what people, mostly those strangers, believe about you. They’ve been painted a picture of you from one persons twisted mind and that’s the only picture they’ll ever get to see. To try and get you to see how it feels, I have a task for you.
Go grab a gossip magazine. You know the type I mean.
Chat. Take a Break. Woman’s Own.
Now I want you to read all the “real life” stories. Also the readers letters. Perhaps even the Dear Deirdre page. Next, substitute the name of the main negative character/the villian-if you like, in these articles with your own name. Imagine that there are enough similarities and factual occourances in these articles that even you start to wonder if the stories are, in actual fact, about you.
Then, you realise that hundreds, thousands of people that you don’t know, are reading these articles that refer to you, and they are believing them. Even though they don’t know you, this will now be what they think of you, and you’ll never, ever have the opportunity to correct them, or change their mind.
Welcome to my life.
Its being written for me.
Believe it all and you’ll think I live my life like a soap opera. The only place where the ridiculous stories I hear about myself actually take place on a regular basis. I wonder if Adam Woodyatt forgets how to be Adam when someone else is writing a life for him as Ian Beale.
You know the saying “you couldn’t make it up”? Well, my script writer has been there, done that and proudly wears the T-shirt.
I’ve read so many stories centred round my life, that my reality seems mundane and boring!
The soap opera scripts don’t stop there. I also suffer hang ups over things people have said about me to me. When my relationship ended with alley cat, we tried to remain friends. In a previous blog I’ve mentioned how one sided it was and I made the choice to let it go. Along with finding out some truths about him stringing several women along and attempting to get money out of them, I sent him a message saying “I’ve been told what’s going on, that’s it, I want no part of it” and he promptly accused me as “being the same as all the others”. In fact I was branded a back stabber. It hurt. I hadn’t got involved with what was being said about him. I gave him chance after chance despite him taking me for granted and walking all over me. He had wronged me , yet I was being made out to be the bad one.
Why does it keep happening to me?
Am I guliable? Easy to manipulate? Still so unwilling to see anything but good in people? Stay quiet for too long when not happy that I end up just putting up with things so as not to rock the boat?
My friends tell me that those that matter know the truth. That karma will come around! Well, maybe I’m done waiting because, even though I know they’re right, I still worry about what complete strangers think is true about me. Its fucking hard.
So, back to that anniversary weekend.
Fresh from hearing a little story that told how I apparently have ” no ambition”, I was faced with a weekend off with nothing to do. My son had plans. My partner was working.
The same weekend, my home town was hosting a music festival. Live music at various venues across the city centre. My friend L was photographing the event, but she was having to cover as many bands as possible so if I bumped into her it would be more down to chance than planning. So, I decided to go on my own on the Saturday and Sunday.
Armed with just my compact digital camera and my best “I don’t give a shit” attitude, I decided where I was going to go and for the first time ever, I walked into a pub on my own where I had no intention of meeting someone for a drink, and stood and watched the whole set performed by one of the artists at the festival.
On my own.
Little, unambitious, lazy, unstable, thieving, selfish, bitch faced me*
*(if you believe the stories!)
Setting the record straight, I am none of those things.
I took a few photos, I went to a few more venues, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Noone around me knew me, noone had read or heard anything about me. And it felt good. I was just me. And that was OK.
I was back writing my own story.
But as always, it was short lived.
I started this blog wondering, what do they gain from spreading lies about me? They don’t even get to witness the impact of what they say as I very rarely retaliate unless my sons involved.
Nothing. They just can’t help it. Its a game to them. For them to feel good, feel big, they must bring down those around them.
My own life has enough natural ups and downs that I really don’t feel the need to embellish it to make it, or me, seem more exciting. I also don’t feel the need to lie about someone else to try and make their life harder for my own pleasure . I don’t imagine I have a lifestyle anyone would be envious of. I don’t need people to look up to me. The fact that someone, anyone, would need to make up lies about others and themselves screams to me that THEY are not happy. Someone has suggested that maybe they are jealous of my new life, because theirs is still based on lies. That someone also thought that maybe they’d never really gotten over me, and hated the fact I seemingly moved on so quickly. I’m not sure and I don’t want to know.
Trouble is, I’m not dealing with just a bitter, envious person.
I’m dealing with a narcissist.
Narcissists have a need to be centre of attention, and they need people to like them, to feed them and supply them. They’ll tailor their lies to specific audiences, partners, business associates, whatever, in order to get them on side so that ultimately they can control them. Some never see through the lies, and will happily go along with the narcissist and do their bidding. I’ve learnt because trust me, I’ve done the research, these are referred to as “flying monkies”. There are some, like me for several years, that start to get suspicious but put up with it because they don’t want to believe none of it was ever real. These are the ones that supply the narcissist with drama. By this stage, the narc will know exactly what buttons to press to get a reaction, and can cleverly manipulate the “victim” into thinking THEY are the ones in the wrong. They have spent years learning about you, promising you the best, subconsciously moulding you in order to eventually use all they know about you, against you. They’ll convince you that its all in your head and that you are going mad if you say anything. They’ll successfully reign in their true nature for long enough to make you think it was just a blip and it’ll all be fine. Anything you do is never good enough.
Then there are those who see the lies, can no longer take it and confront the narcissist about them. As soon as the narc thinks you’re onto them, they will drop you and start telling the world what they’d tried to convince you, that it is in fact YOU that’s the bad guy. You are mentally unstable. Even after the relationship ends with a narc, the abuse won’t. They’ll move on to their next “supply” but while things are rosy for a while with them as they build up their story, they’ll still be fishing for the drama from you. There’s no real reason for it. Dragging you down to make themselves look better is just a game. An ego boost. A power trip. They start the smear campaign to belittle you. Trying to show the flying monkies how it was you that made their life hell. They thrive on “oh how awful, poor you, you’re the better person because of it”.
The battle to keep my dignity and pride intact is ongoing. Strange really, as I have an awesome group of friends here that can see right through it all, so that should be all that matters. But there’s still a growing number of people in a different city, and honesty, probably across the country now,that think the worst of me. It doesn’t matter to them. They’ll never meet me.
It matters to me. I never know from one week to the next what I’ve apparently done now. Or what fictitious misdemeanor of mine has prompted a particular outburst. I guess yes, it plays a part in my paranoia, how could it not? I am so the opposite of what some strangers think I am. I’m not nasty or malicious, I don’t want to be centre of attention and I certainly don’t want everyone to know my personal business. Unfortunately, I can’t just throw away the script and start again. The script isn’t even in my own hands. What I do need to do, is being braver and writing my own spin off series. One which has a twist in the tale and exposes the truth in a clever way that leaves the viewers gasping and saying “oh I didn’t see that coming, now it all makes sense”. Because, you see, the trouble with lies is remembering what you’ve told to who and keeping up the continuity of the story. Things will start to not add up. Doubt about the story will start to creep in, to the point where the person being told the lies starts to take whatever the storyteller says, with a pinch of salt.
It may be a long, drawn out storyline, but I’m in for the long haul now, I have no choice. I don’t want revenge, as such, I just want to clear my name. Pick it up out of the mud its been dragged through and restore it to its former glory (albeit a little rusty, hey, I’m not saying I’m perfect here!)
I’m only 40, I’m hoping I have a good few years for the story to unfold. Hey, I’m even holding out for a documentary here.. You know those “truth exposed” ones you get on random Sky channels. You never know, anything can happen in my story. And it usually bloody does!
