Pandora’s Box
I’ve learned not to confide in people I haven’t known for fewer than two years. That is to say that I am not a closed book, or prude, or anything of a prim nature. I’m introverted, creative and downright bawdy. But my online presence is phantom-like and the deeper, human, private stuff, the dreams and goals, the Jungian shadows, the vulnerabilities I’ll let out with caution only after a person has proven their worth. Two years is about enough time to vet a mask that will slip, if the charm is false, if there are hidden edges that can cut me, an acid tongue and meanness if I don’t give up what another wants, or if there are serious financial or personality issues. If a person has the patience for two years of meeting each of the layers I open upon my terms, then they’re in.
The Great Manipulator wasn’t patient, and he could see from a long way off I hadn’t been taught boundaries, I was just so good mannered and polite, and he had just the excavating machine for that.
He was voracious, entertained a literal stalking fixation with my past. I spent my time and energy defending my good name. I had no privacy on my calls, my chats were being hawked, the length of time spent on the phone vetted. And I had no physical privacy — he was always there, whenever I went to town on foot he’d follow me, just appear out of nowhere. Surprise! I couldn’t even take a shit in peace, if I locked the toilet door, who was I talking to? When he installed a spyware app that cloned my chats I didn’t know straight away, but at least it gave me bathroom privacy. He broke into my phone and computer and took screenshots of emails, messages and chats and photos from months and even a decade before I’d even met him, digging up things I’d forgotten I’d had. At odd times, for drama’s sake, he’d send these screenshots to me.
He created a DIY version of my past:
Where did I go with this person? How many orgasms did I have with them?
How come I didn’t go/do/see this with him?
I give all the wrong people everything and him nothing…
Whatever I answered he would say I was telling him lies and, hating to be called a liar, I would have to dig through all that upended muck on a daily basis, for hours at a time to try to prove myself.
For what? Round and round we went.
Trying to understand this behaviour was maddening, frightening, and exhausting from the justifications alone, trying to understand the whys of it all (a subject of which I’ll post about in another article) and it was where I should have disconnected. Instead, I researched what I was doing wrong.
During the first few attempts of hasty searches I learnt about a condition I’d never heard of: retroactive jealousy. That eventually led me to narcissistic personality disorder. My stomach contracted when I read the list of traits. I did the online quiz, then another, and another. And this little people-pleaser learnt that telling someone about me had been my Pandora’s Box — something dreadful I only just managed to close the lid on in time. I’d glimpsed what this malignant narcissist really was, showing up in the reflection of the lid, overlooking with glee all the sharp-edged things in my vulnerability that he could use to flay me more than he already did. As it was, the little I did say became the Kafkaesque foundations of the shame and hell this monster created for me.
It wasn’t me: that was the one thing I grabbed for sanity. Once I knew, it dawned on me precisely how much danger I was in. I was in another country, he was from a seriously patriarchal culture and religious background, and that playing slow and compliant was the only resource foothold I had to get out of there in one piece.
