A Writer’s Truth
Blogging about my experiences is the scariest thing I have ever done.
I read about narcissism in the summer of 2019. I won’t remember how I stumble across the idea, but I recognize my husband, Atlas, in almost everything that I read. The way he is slowly warping my sense of reality until it is so twisted that I can’t trust any of my own perceptions. The way he has gradually worked up to calling me a cunt and telling me that there isn’t a man out there who would want me for anything other than that they could sleep with me.
I find myself, more and more, feeling the things that Snake used to say in ways that I never could before. “I am the scum of the earth,” he used to say. “I’m nothing but a freak.”
“You are a worthless bitch,” Atlas tells me, but only on the bad days. “You should act like your pussy is worth a million dollars,” he tells me on the not-so-bad days. I am a depository for his self-loathing. Scum. I am mentally fucked up, I am a freak.
I can feel the texture of Snake’s heavy black jacket, the weight of his body and the shape it took in my arms all those years ago. For a moment it is there; then with another breath I blow it away, and I feel so lonely in that brief memory’s absence.
I never say the word narcissist to Atlas. I don’t write it, either; I dance around the idea of it but I never utter it out loud. As long as I haven’t said the word, I can still have hope that it isn’t true.
The act of verbalizing the word makes it coalesce irreversibly into exactly what I perceive it to be.
“In all of the whole human race, there are two kinds of men and only two,” I type. “There’s the one staying put in his proper place and the one with his foot in the other one’s face.” I am quoting Sweeney Todd.
“Wow, that was dark. You’re usually so positive,” Snake texts back. I can suddenly, so briefly, feel his concern for me hollow out the middle of my abdomen. It disappears as quickly as it came.
He is like two different people in the last month of our marriage. He is so sweet and playful; he looks so damn cute when he smiles and calls me Bradley. As long as Bradley is there, we are Okay. But if Bradley slips, if Misty is all I can be.
I read about marital rape next. Then BDSM after abuse, then nihilism. I can relate to so many of the stories that I am finding; I almost get shivers reading a woman’s account of her abusive sex life, it so closely resembles mine. In two years I will read this article by Kara Summers on gaslighting and this one by Matilda Fairholm on coercive control; and I will, again, feel that eerie sense of recognizing my own experiences and internal struggles through someone else’s words.
And, more frequently than I wish, I find Snake in the stories I read as well. Intimate descriptions of depression, stories were written by people who had survived suicide attempts, what it’s like to hear voices in your head. Stories about ADHD help me understand a lot more of why Snake had acted the way he did when we were younger. So erratic.
It isn’t until a few months before October when I will finally leave Atlas, that I blog. I am blogging for myself, no one else; I have no audience at all. I write and post a little here and there over the summer. By the last time I text Snake, tears pouring from my eyes because I know this is the last time I will risk Atlas’ wrath, I have about twenty articles up on my blog and another twenty pages of short stories.
I send him the link to my blog, then I freak out and shut it all down. Unpublish everything.
Writing about yourself is so incredibly personal. That’s part of the reason I choose to write as Misty instead of my legal name; most of what I write is much more personal than I wish to get with the people who know me in actual life. But Misty has grown comfortable getting personal with readers who will never actually look her in the eye.
I write the last article of my six-month compulsive writing mania in February 2020. (Covid is almost here.) Then I discover Medium.
I am plunged into a world where people routinely describe their mental illnesses for me to bear witness to, where women talk about the ways they have been abused and parents straight-forwardly admit to things like regretting parenthood altogether. Yael Wolfe writes with a piercing eye about her body, her sexuality; and I know that I have been on the same journey of discovering myself, even though the processes look different. I read Shannon Ashley and I know exactly where she’s coming from when she talks about being an “exvangelical.” Glenna Gill has been where I am now, struggling to disentangle herself from the aftereffects of an abusive relationship that once defined her.
Although it will be exactly one year later before I actually show myself on the platform, I feel validated. I feel seen.
Some things I write seem a bit out there, I know. I have Daddy issues. I was damaged by the purity culture of the church. My ex-husband habitually coercively raped me. He was a narcissist who came way too close to killing himself. I smashed a bunch of furniture that he had made with an ax before running away. I hitchhiked down the road and showed a stranger my tits. I have some kind of mental issues; I am "delusionally obsessed," as Jester says, with someone I have still only seen once since I left Atlas. I am an empath. I am a highly sensitive person. I have both male and female energy. You might believe that I claim to have split personalities.
The fact is, the reality is relative to the observer. If Atlas wrote the same story, it would look completely different in some ways, but it would be equally true. Was Poe embellishing the truth because he put his experiences into lyrical verse? Is Jonathan Davis or Corey Taylor full of shit because you can’t relate to the emotion in their music? Is a painter only telling the truth when you can compare their painting to a photograph of the subject?
My interpretation of the events that have happened to and within me may be fluid, but the events and the emotions themselves are true. What good would writing a boring list of all the things I’ve experienced do me, anyway?
There was a point when I was too busy surviving to give a shit about things like “brand image.” I wrote then, gripped by the gravity of the Singularity, to pour out my heart to the one person I knew would care. To confess my sins to the only entity whose forgiveness I wanted. I wrote because it was mental torture not to.
I don’t even have the words to describe the intensity of that compulsion to write, the compulsion that paradoxically was the only evidence that, just maybe, I am in fact sane.
The only reader that blog ever had was Snake.
I am no longer merely surviving. I am for the first time in so many years. There are days when the panic rips at me, but they are now few. I can look back at everything that happened to me, the decade that I spent in the Singularity and especially that last summer, and I can see what I have learned from it.
I can write it out.
I can give it beautiful words, a haunting rhythm, formatting that makes it flow. I can use links to tie the different tiny pieces of my story together. And I can feel myself grow, allowing myself to relive both the best and the worst of those times, finding the gems encased in the trauma.
I can make order from the chaos that was in my head.
I don’t have an enormous fan base yet, but that is Okay. I am reaching people, my words are resonating with somebody how other writers’ words once resounded with me.
And yes, I appreciate my cheerleaders, those readers who leave comments telling me they understand what I have been through because they have been there too. When I saw the very first comment on the very first article I posted on Medium, I felt a validation I had never experienced. Amara Bryson told me that my piece was deep, that it had meaning. That I was not alone.
When I wrote that piece, I had never felt more alone in my life.
I had spent my entire life being told to be quiet. I distinctly remember my youth pastor telling me I was too opinionated. I learned a hard lesson in keeping my tongue when Atlas and I lived with the Wolf early in our relationship. I was never encouraged to tell my story.
I am telling it now. Thy Jester stands behind me, his arms around me when telling the story takes too much out of me, and reads almost everything I write without judgment — even when reading it hurts him. I am saying what I was too afraid to say for years, getting out the truth that I let myself be abused. I am putting myself out there, where outside observers can see me.
It is scary. But it is the only way to get out of the box I had been inside for so long.
Thanks to Denise Shelton for encouraging us to question everything, and to Joe Duncan for the article that started this conversation. And PS, I make bank spinning tales for everyone to read, earning a killer $29 this past month alone!