Shove Off, Narcissist

Oh, look, my inbox contains an email from Mindfucking Psychopath, who still believes he’s entitled to have contact with me. Nope, still incorrect. I can see the beginning of the message in the subject line, and it looks like a pseudo-apology at best.

Actually, despite the above sardonic tone, my reaction to merely seeing that in my inbox put me in a murderous rage. No, I am not ready to read a message from that narcissist who used some of the same manipulation techniques as the narcissistic sociopath who gaslighted me for six years.

No, Fuckface is NOT entitled to project his majesty’s traits onto me. He is NOT entitled to gaslight me. His belief that those closest to him have to walk on eggshells or let him lash out at them–or walk around on eggshells AND let him shower them with verbal abuse anyway–is bogus and always has been bogus.

No, he has NO right to have ANY contact with me. His delusions of entitlement are bogus, always have been, and always will be.

While I do regret texting with that narcissist and thereby getting into a fight with the parasite, I do NOT regret blocking his majesty’s phone number and social media accounts. I do not regret going No Contact, as I did with other toxic relatives years ago.

I DO regret that it took me this long to finally stop having blind and stupid loyalty to that narcissist. It seems ridiculous that it lasted as long as it did.

Since a narcissistic sociopath gaslighted me for six years and I broke up with her in 2016 and have learned a great deal from that experience, it was inevitable that I would FINALLY stop having that blind and stupid loyalty to that self-entitled parasite. His delusions of entitlement are as bogus as those of the narcissistic sociopath.

He should be grateful that my blind and stupid loyalty lasted so long—but instead he’s outraged that it’s finally gone. He didn’t deserve that loyalty, had no gratitude for it, took it for granted, and destroyed it. It’s never returning. Good riddance.

So yeah, while I’ve certainly gone through afflictive emotions and have been depressed since he lashed out at me via texting, days before social distancing became official here…. I certainly learned from this experience. My days of letting him lure me back into a false sense of security–my days of assuming he has a right to be in my life–are permanently over.

I’m sure I’ll read and respond to Mindfucker’s email at some point, but not today. Not while I’m in a rage. I intend to meditate a lot this month and read at least one self-help book and hopefully get back to reading a Buddhist book by Sharon Salzberg. After all of the above, then I should… probably… maybe… be up to reading Mindfucker’s email. That could be a month of meditating and reading. At least.

And I need to actually do this meditating–formal sitting meditation, not just tell myself to do it. That’s not only my usual informal meditating first thing in the morning and last thing when I turn out the light at night. I used to be seriously into meditation the first few years that I got into Buddhism; it was normal for me to meditate at least an hour a day, occasionally as many as three hours. I got out of the habit when I moved many states away.

I’m creative and suck at time management, so it’s easy to procrastinate and prioritize writing and sewing over meditating. But if I’m going to read that email without going into a rage and without writing an enraged reply, I need to get back into intensive daily meditation.

This pandemic would have been stressful enough without verbal and psychological abuse. The fact that Fuckface pulled that shit right before I began social distancing means that this social distancing has not been easy for me–it has involved a great deal of rage and brooding in addition to emotional sponge general pandemic anxiety. That’s another thing he isn’t entitled to: creating so much trauma.

He has no right to have any contact with me. In fact, his majesty isn’t entitled to a reply email. I don’t owe him anything, especially not even more of my time, energy, and emotional labor.

Nightmares during a Pandemic

I dreamed that I lived in a large Victorian Queen Anne house in a fairly rural area. The house had a wrap-around porch and a stone foundation with a basement. Because the house was built on a slope, the basement had an exterior side door.

At some point I had a visitor who was a friend.

Toward the end of the dream, I heard people on the front porch. I was in the basement and didn’t want to talk to them. I wanted to hide. I slipped out of the basement side door without locking it and ended up… where? Under the front porch? On the porch? It seems like I ended up on the wrap-around porch, which doesn’t make sense if I was trying to avoid people whom I thought were at the front door.

Wherever I was, I witnessed a group of about six people slip in through the basement door I left open! They were breaking into my house.

Enraged, I went after them.

I went into the basement and grabbed a long piece of wood leaning against a wall and, yelling, “Get out of my house!” or something like that, charged at one man. A struggle ensued, with me pushing his throat and him against the wall while the others watched (or ran away?).

A male friend or acquaintance of mine came up behind me and tried to be the voice of reason, I guess. He said, “Don’t kill him! You’d end up in prison!” I just felt angrier.

 

I dreamed that my brother and I were in a car in a parking lot. We were having a conversation… and we may have been talking about the past, when we lived in Indiana.

He said something about Britney Spears. Confused, I knit my brow and said, “But… I don’t think Britney Spears was around in the 80s.”

Completely out of the blue, he yelled at me—how typical—I don’t remember what. His rage made no sense and creeped me out (what else is new?). He got out of the car.

I recovered from my shock enough—only after the asshole got out of the car—to become enraged and, giving him the finger with both hands and yelling repeatedly… well, something very vituperative that I won’t repeat hear. He ignored me

 

(Last night I was revising one of those autobiographical novels inspired by toxic people. That could well have triggered that dream, even though it was a different perpetual playground  bully. I am so sick of empathy-challenged perpetual playground bullies who harbor a bizarre delusion that they’re entitled to use me as their doormat/verbal and psychological punching bag and that it’s somehow magically my duty to be their doormat/punching bag. I was sick of them before the 1980s ended.

Black Lives Matter, But Thank You for Flaunting Your Racism

Ew. Ew. Ew. Next time a white male says to me, “All lives matter,” I’m not going to freeze up. I’m going to say, “Check your privileges.” If only I’d said it today. I could have done so much better.

I was at the post office to ship two boxes of gifts—one for a friend who lives in St. Louis. The white male behind the counter said he grew up in St. Louis. He should have stopped with that. That’s a normal thing to say if you see a St. Louis address on a package. But he didn’t stop.

He talked about living in different parts of St. Louis. He talked about moving to different neighborhoods and even mentioned a specific intersection that I tried to picture. He mentioned a family member moving out of the city and into a certain part of the county.

He proudly stated that four of his cousins work for the city of St. Louis. When he said that they work in law enforcement, I started getting uncomfortable. I lived in St. Louis for about a decade, so I know what it’s like to be harassed by St. Louis cops for being female and for having an Indiana license plate. I remember the stories that black and female friends recounted about their experiences being harassed by cops in St. Louis. I’m pretty sure every ticket I’ve gotten was in the St. Louis area, and that was a lot of tickets. A friend of mine called St. Louis “a fascist police state.”

He said that one of his relatives worked twelve hours a day in Ferguson—as in when the cops killed a black kid and there was a huge Black Lives Matter protest that made national news. I saw a powerful play about it. I said, “I’m glad I left St. Louis before that,” because I was thinking about how overtly racist and hostile St. Louis is.

It wasn’t until well after I left that I realized HE WAS BOASTING BECAUSE ONE OF HIS RELATIVES WAS ONE OF THOSE POWER-TRIPPING RACIST COPS IN FERGUSON. You know, the ones with a tank.

It wasn’t until he said, “All lives matter, I say,” that I finally froze up in shock and couldn’t make eye contact with him anymore. He’s lucky I’m so slow to process. I’m ashamed that I didn’t call him out.

I used to work in retail in St. Louis, and I have horrible memories of racist white people coming into my workplace. (Not to mention of course fundamentalist Xians jamming their religion down my throat, anti-vegetarians, ignorant hicks who claimed I have an accent and asked where I’m from and ridiculed me when I said that I was born in Indiana… and sexual harassers.) And that was before that sexual predator neo-Nazi narcissistic sociopath started squatting in the White House and emboldening white surpremacists. But I don’t live there anymore, and today I was on the other side of the counter.

So, yeah: the post office needs to tell their employee to read So You want to Talk about Race by Ijeoma Olua … and he and I both need to read the book How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi.

The last thing he said was, “Merry Christmas.” Another assumption.

I should have replied, “I celebrate Hannukah. But thanks, I look forward to giving feedback.”

Last Night’s Dreams

I dreamed that I had some possessions on a stoop and people were coming and going. It may have been a University.

I wasn’t the only one who had some possessions there. There was a desk with stuff on it, and I had placed a few things there. I knew the desk belonged to a guy I disliked; he was self-entitled and accustomed to getting his own way, and I was fed up with him.

At some point, I was close by and saw him run up to his desk and go through stuff, looking for something he urgently needed, and I was under the impression he needed it for a class project or presentation. I had no remorse for putting stuff on his desk, but neither did I feel angry at him in that moment.

Later, a guy who was a friend of mine but who could get annoying came along, and I was holding onto something, maybe a floor lamp, and he was demanding that I help him out with something, but I didn’t want to. He was trying to physically drag me away, and he got me off the stoop and onto the grass before I yelled at him. “No!”

He was shocked and stopped and stared at me. He wasn’t accustomed to me saying no, to me not being an extreme people-pleaser. I was surprised at myself.

Next, I was moving out and my male ex-roommate passed by without even acknowledging me. I think we were both ex-roommates and ex-friends.

#

I dreamed I was in kind of a large and cluttered space, maybe a basement, with a few other people who were busy with their projects.

I was in contact with a guy who sold cannabis. I think I was on the phone with him… but it was weird, because soon I was holding in my hand one of his cannabis products. I thought it was delightful, because it was sculpted out of cannabis and resembled a witch flying a broom.

#

I don’t know if that was the same dream, but I walked into my mother’s kitchen–she had a female friend (probably one of her siblings) with her. I noticed next to the stove a package of 3 treacle tarts just like the ones I used to get at a British import store. I exclaimed, “Treacle tarts!”

My mother snapped, “Don’t eat those up! That’s all I have!”

There were only two left, and the middle one was cut in half. I considered eating only half of the middle one, but they were so small. I asked her where she got them, so I could go there and buy my own treacle tarts.

Anti-Feminist Bullshit Day

Oh. My. Goddess. When the bar is only 1/8 of an inch above the floor, you should be able to get right over it. It’s not asking too much.

In a writers’ group this morning, one member, a white cisgender male in his sixties or seventies, shared a piece he’d written that listed off bullshit stereotypical descriptions of feminists. No, feminism is about dismantling patriarchy, rape culture, and systemic oppression such as misogyny and racism and gender binary. It’s not about hating men and wanting to have “test tube” babies. Patriarchal males are so narcissistic that even their made-up version of feminism is about them. (Since the 2016 election, I’ve repeatedly noticed patriarchal/misogynistic males wave narcissist red flags.)

As for bra-burners?! That was a misnomer invented by patriarchal mainstream media. Atlanta had a city ordinance against burning trash. Therefore the feminist protestors in question tossed oppressive, sexist things such as girdles and Ladie’s Home Journal into a trash can without actually burning them. Stop repeating a lie that has been repeatedly disproved… and read feminist books and blogs.

Later, I logged onto Facebook and visited a group that I usually enjoy. It’s for participants in National Novel Writing Month. But a female posted, asking if she must have “strong female characters” in her novel (because of something someone, maybe a friend, said) and if this is some “feminist agenda” or a requirement. She said she has a male protagonist and no “strong female characters.” Really? Not one single character in your entire novel can be described as a “strong female character”? She seems to think that because it’s medieval historical fiction, that she shouldn’t have to include strong female characters. This presumably means that her novel will have no major, three-dimensional female characters.

I was utterly flabbergasted, twice in one day (and I don’t even work in customer service anymore–heck, I’m somewhat reclusive nowadays). And I’m not going to read anything by her. Even Joss Whedon has no trouble creating strong female characters. It’s such a low bar. No doubt if she learned about the Bechtel Test, she’d have a heart attack or piss her pants or post about this “feminist agenda.”

Both situations reminded me of what a friend recently said in a feminist discussion: that people really hate us feminists. She’d dropped out of an atheist organization for this very reason. I’ve repeatedly observed that the only people with whom I enjoy socializing are feminists.

Yeah, and I’ll keep writing unabashedly feminist fiction. The funny thing is, this was a NaNoWriMo group, and my NaNoWriMo novel for this year is Feed Misogynists to Dragons, a novel so feminist that the title indicates it. I mean, it’s in your face. I’m going to soooooo wallow in the feminism of this novel and my “feminist agenda.”

Nightmarish Dreams

I dreamed I was at a large, very plain and white library… or museum… with s female friend. For a library, it certainly didn’t have many visible books.

In a large white room, I was standing in front of something like a white podium, and it was my intention to be doing research. But I didn’t like how this library worked and complained aloud, in a moment of exasperation and impatience.

Suddenly a male voice over an intercom—the staffer whom I’d met in the front lobby—was verbally attacking me over an intercom or PA system. He was somehow able to hear me. I replied in kind, and he replied and proceeded to shower me with nonstop insults, accusations, and threats over the PA system for all to hear.

I needed to leave immediately. The friend and I were going to slip out a side door. She reminded me that he had my keys—you hand them over when you show up at this place—and according to her, I needed to go get them myself… although I wanted her to get them for me, so I wouldn’t have to see this verbally abusive asshole again.

And that’s how the dream ended.

 

I dreamed that I was supposed to meet up with a queer Latinx male friend, a petite guy, at a restaurant. So I was in a back room of this restaurant waiting for him… and he didn’t arrive. I felt abandoned.

Eventually, I went to the front of the restaurant… and to the front door… and he was out there waiting to meet me. I was so appalled that it didn’t occur to me to wait out front instead of in back. We talked for a bit, but the hour had passed, and he couldn’t stick around.

 

In another unpleasant dream, I was across the street from a low, glass, L-shaped 1960s building. I recognized it and associated it with the Buddhist book discussion group from which I recently dropped out, thanks to a bully. This gave me aversion. As I watched, I spotted both the organizers of the Buddhist book group approach the building’s door. I froze. They spotted me and kept looking at me. I felt dread and aversion, maybe even panic, although emotions are generally muffled in dreams compared to real life.

A Bad Taste in my Mouth

Oh, yeah, that’s the taste of psychic toxicity.

I have a podcast app called Castbox. It sent me a notification about a TED talk that Hannah Gatsby gave, so I clicked on it, opening the app.

The first thing I noticed was a couple of long-winded comments, and I skimmed through them… to discover that I can’t even use a podcast app without encountering trolls. I didn’t even know that Castbox had a comments section, let alone trolls.

This troll was accusing Hannah Gatsby of not being funny (even though I found her funny when it’s her intention to be funny), of just whining about her experience of abuse and trauma, and of being full of herself. In other words, this troll projected their own arrogance onto her and generally flaunted their narcissism in public.

The intention of trolls, of course, is to silence women. Misogynists have silenced–and attempted to silence–women for centuries. Time’s up. You can’t silence Hannah Gatsby, and you can’t silence me.

Joke’s on you, troll. Some of us have gone for decades being gaslighted and put down by misogynistic narcissists and narcissistic sociopaths. We’ve learned to see the signs for what they are.

Today’s Asshole Award Goes to: Mansplainer

Today’s Asshole Award goes to the arrogant white male directing traffic with confusing communication skills.

No, your delusions of entitlement don’t mean it’s okay to blame me for your bad communication skills. The way your arrogant white male ass held the stop sign combined with your confusing hand gestures meant I was having trouble figuring out when you wanted me to move forward.

When he seemed to be telling me to move forward, I began to do so–but then he abruptly directed me to stop. He not only stole my right of way, he also directed me to roll down my window, which I did, only for him to condescendingly say, “When I say move forward, you’ve got to move forward.”

I replied, “I DID move forward.”

The asshole talked over me and said basically the same thing. I was too shocked to yell, “YOUR BAD COMMUNICATION SKILLS ARE YOUR OWN FAULT!”

It wasn’t until I got home that it occurred to me that maybe he thought he was directing me to move forward before it was clear he was doing so. Wrapping your hand in a fist and holding the stop sign sideways in no way indicates that you want me to move forward. And of course I have no idea what he was saying until I rolled down the window.

Mansplaining, condescension, disrespect, and false accusations each push my buttons, and all simultaneously particularly infuriate me. Your shit communication skills are your own fault, fucking assfuckinghole.

After this asshole mansplained at me, a woman took his place, and I had no trouble understanding when she directed me to move forward. You can bet I fucking hit the gas pedal.

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This is what I emailed the city:

At approximately 1:20 PM on Wednesday, April 3, while I was waiting to turn right out of the parking lot on Tyinn St. off West 11th, an arrogant white male was directing traffic with confusing communication skills. I sat waiting and trying to interpret what he wanted me to do; folding up your hand in more or less a fist and holding the stop sign sideways doesn’t make any sense when directing traffic. His lips were moving, but directing traffic is nonverbal, and I couldn’t hear him.

When he seemed to be telling me to move forward, I began to do so–but then he abruptly directed me to stop. He not only stole my right of way, he also directed me to roll down my window, which I did, only for him to condescendingly say, “When I say move forward, you’ve got to move forward.”

I replied, “I DID move forward.”

He talked over me and smugly said basically the same thing and returned to his post. I was too shocked to yell, “YOUR BAD COMMUNICATION SKILLS ARE YOUR OWN FAULT!”

It wasn’t until I got home that it occurred to me that maybe he thought he was directing me to move forward before it was clear he was doing so. Wrapping your hand in a fist and holding the stop sign sideways in no way indicates that you want me to move forward. And of course I have no idea what he was saying until I rolled down the window.

After he mansplained at me, a woman took his place, and I had no trouble understanding when she directed me to move forward. His terrible communication skills are his own fault, not mine.