THE KILLER INSIDE ME

Oops I Did It Again

For someone who wants revenge as badly as I do, the fact that I never get any makes me practically a fuckin saint. But oh no, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” so I don’t do anything.

For months, all I wanted to do…and I was burning to do it, I wanted it carnally… was to paint a neon swastika on my dick uncle’s Tesla. I even had a fellow vandal willing to do it for me for a price. This was a terrible, terrible temptation. It would have made me orgasm for the first time in at least a year.

This last breakup was rough in that I am so incredibly mad at myself. I knew he was a narcissist, I knew it, I knew it, I could identify all the behaviors by name from the book, I knew it. I am perhaps one of the most well-read people in the WORLD about Narcissistic Personality Disorder. There were 19,000 red flags all over that dude like a Christo landscape. And yet I conned myself and made excuses for him in order to not know what I knew in my fucking spleen. What I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.

How the fuck can I keep doing that? How do I stop? I’m seriously asking, for this person who’s not my friend anymore.

This is what happens to kids like me who were raised by narcissists: this is the relationship trauma I have replayed over and over and over again, ad nauseum, my entire dating life, with few exceptions. Narcissism never looks like exactly what it is to me. I just love being in love I guess, and I have an unreal ability to lie to myself, and I just don’t fucking see the narcissist until I FINALLY DO, and then it hits me all at once like a sickening wrecking ball, and it hits me again, like waking up from the same nightmare over and over again, that I have poured my actual love all over a gross invertebrate creep with gigantic insecurity issues who is constitutionally incapable of returning my love as anything but manipulation, mental torture and abuse. Someone who literally wants to hurt me, and delights in it. Someone who does not in fact give a shit about me.

HANUMAN, oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2023

The worst part is never being able to see that person the same way again. It ruins all their good qualities for you. You can’t unsee the slimy reptile behind the shit-eating smile. That recognition goes down to the bone. It’s a toggle switch: GOOD/EVIL.

I once literally thought he was the best man I ever knew. He turned out to be a conniving, duplicitous love rat.

And what else can you do to save yourself from toxic people but lock the doors?

It’s not even their fault: they are what they are. It’s my fault for refusing to see it. It falls through a very deliberate hole in my head, carved there by my parents. I don’t know how I see it but instantly unsee it at the speed of thought. It’s like falling asleep behind the wheel. I don’t know how to stop. I get lulled into a state of frog-boiling by the familiarity of the behavior.

This time, I literally blamed it on autism, like autism was so benign as to cancel out the narcissism, and the lack of actual love. “He’s just got a really flat affect,” I told myself over and over as he did this amazing obstacle course of things to declare his narcissism to me, in classic, name-brand ways:

DARVO - (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) Every time we got in a fight, he would paint himself as the victim, when he was actually the offender. He blamed me 100% for everything, including his own behavior.

STONEWALLING - Instead of discussing anything difficult with me, he would stop talking to me altogether. He was too self-absorbed to have a single uncomfortable, relationship-maintenance conversation of any variety.

GASLIGHTING - He would rewrite the narrative on anything that happened between us to make himself look good, in an effort to destabilize my perceptions.

SCAPEGOATING - Again, he blamed me for literally everything.He once described my playfully pushing him off the sidewalk with my shoulder as “physical abuse.”

PROJECTION - He would accuse me of doing things to him that he was actually doing to me.

DEVALUING - He would go off on litanies of my faults, and downplay my accomplishments.

…to name very few.

He was also manipulative, dismissive, judgmental, sneeringly critical, derisive, unkind, and emotionally absent. Disinterested in anything but the sound of his own voice. And ultimately unfaithful.

What’s not to love, right?

Now this is not to say I am not also a mess.

I fight like a Puerto Rican, I was once told by a Puerto Rican.

The night I got my “Lord Protect Me from Narcissists” Vajra Chopper tattoo, the ex showed his true colors, to the point where I walked out of the dive bar and left him there “lookin’ stoopid,” as Sistuh Leslie said.

And I got back together with him later that weekend, because I can’t stay angry, so I guess I somehow monstrously forgot about it (See: Betrayal Trauma Theory, which describes a thing traumatized kids like me get wherein you forget offenses as soon as they happen. You just fucking forget.) But I saw his true nature in the bar. The mask fell, and there he was, like a bitter, jealous, competitive queen. Like my mother in a feather boa, he was sneering at me, literally mocking me, saying, “Ohhhh, loook at my tattoooooo,” because I was showing it to people in the bar who wanted to see it. I showed it off because I always want to see a tattoo, and I thought mine the best I’d ever seen. I felt magical and blessed, I was glowing, and he was angry about it because I was the one getting attention and not him. He did and said everything he could to shut my groove down, instead of throwing an arm around me and participating in it as the celebratory, special thing it was. It was a big ritual for me, and he flunked haaaard.

The tattoo was PROTECTING ME. It was DOING ITS MAGICAL JOB, and I IGNORED MY OWN TATTOO WHICH WAS TATTOOED THERE TO REMIND ME NOT TO DO THAT THING I IMMEDIATELY DID AGAIN.

Well, he’s not going to like this article one bell pepper, but I’m not doing it TO HIM

I’m doing this FOR ME. And anyone else with the misfortune to endure the mindfucky nightmare of narcissistic abuse. Don’t suffer in silence. That’s how they win.

Hurt people hurt people. Avoid the bitter and miserable! I would if I knew how!

Someday I will date someone who isn’t a shithead drone-bombing around without an empathy gene. Until then, I am your dutiful cuttlefish, spraying black ink when disturbed.

(And the occasional neon swastika.)

Yeah, you oughta. And then you should have me edit it so it makes sense. CintraW@gmail.com