Photo by Fabrizio Verrecchia on Unsplash

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed with my thoughts.   So much crap spinning around in my head.  I get angry, sad, numb, and tons of other feelings on a regular basis.  How is one supposed to feel when their mother abandons them?  Yes, I went no contact with her.  But she's the one who actually abandoned me.  She's the one who chose her own made-up world over the truth.  She's the one who abandoned me a long time ago when she chose to allow terrible things to happen and then promptly ignored them (or flat out lied about them, even though they just happened).  She's the one who took sides of the people that hurt me, just so she could enjoy watching me hurt.

I am so angry sometimes.  I just want to scream or go to her house (which is a block away) and scream at her.  I want her to try to hit me, so I can put her ass in jail.  But after I come down off my anger high, I realize that it's all useless, futile thinking.  She is Borg.  She is assimilated.  And unlike Picard and 7 of 9 (if you don't watch Star Trek, you'll have NO idea what I am referencing--I apologize), there is no coming back from that.

My kids call what we see on shows TV Narcissism.  It shows that mom who always wants the spotlight (like the mom on Good Luck Charlie) or the mom who thinks nothing is good enough for her perfect child (Everyone Love's Raymond), but in the end, they have a good heart.  There's always making up or having a breakthrough where they admit "I am sorry I act this way.  It's just that....." and they all end up happy by the end of the show.  But true to life narcissism is MUCH more like the Borg on Star Trek.  Resistance is futile.  Even though they can't assimilate all of us, they do succeed in getting our family members and siblings.  And you can't talk to a Borg.  They will just say Borg things.  Just like a narc is always saying narc things, even though some of it sounds normal (trust me, it's not, it's always a manipulation).  They are unloving (though some narcs can pretend to show love, like my mother), unfeeling (though again, good at pretending to have feelings), and unkind.  You can't cure NPD, unlike Borg (curing a Borg of their Borgness is very, very hard, but ultimately doable), but other than that, it's probably the most accurate description of narcissists we have on TV.

And that's why wanting to scream at my mother or slapping her in the face is just futile.  It won't wake her up.  It won't change her mind.  It won't help anything.  You can slap a Borg until your hand breaks and that Borg will still be a Borg and there's nothing you can do to change that.  It's like trying to slap the cancer out of a person.

Imagine that....going around a cancer ward and slapping all the patients to cure them.  You'd be put in jail.  And all the patients would most definitely not be cured.  Though, unlike cancer, if you give meds to someone with NPD, that won't cure them either.  So no slapping, no meds, no yelling at them, nothing.  They are unchangeable.

And because of that, I feel my name still fits me quite well: Girl Lost.  Because I still feel very, very lost.  The girl I once was, growing up with 2 shitty parents, uncomfortable and drama-filled family gatherings, and pretend love.  It felt good to pretend to know who I was.  I was suffering, yes, but I had an identity.  A fake one, but it felt real.  Now?  I feel like I have no identity.  Like the Borg came and took my family away--my real family, the one I was supposed to get.  The one that actually loved me.  I have that with my kids, but I have no aunts, no uncles (besides the fact all my uncles are dead), no cousins, no parents.  I feel like I was left behind, abandoned in the woods, left to fend for myself for my entire life, and then, even the scary predators that lurked in the woods who wanted to hurt me left too.  And now I am left standing in the middle of the trees, with no sense of direction, wondering when I will find my way home?  I can create one, and I have, but it's not the same thing.  I can't give my children cousins to play with.  Or great-aunts or grandparents or anything.  Just me.  My hubby, too...he also went no contact with his own narcissistic family.  So here we are, the four of us (with our furrybabies), stranded on an island, together, yet alone.

I feel betrayed.

Abandoned.

Angry.

Alone.

We broke free from the Borg ship, but we are stuck in space with only us.  While we should be relieved and happy, and at first we really, really were, but now we are in that space of "Now what?  What comes next?".  It's eerie, all that silence.  Makes you paranoid.  The newness of the situation wears off and you're left with learning to accept your circumstances.  Sometimes I feel like I've got it.  Sometimes I feel like I have 100% accepted that this is our lives now.  But days crop up, here and there, that remind me that I fully haven't yet.  Days like today.

You get so used to dysfunction that when you don't have it anymore, your brain wonders what the fuck is going on.  These days are less and less, which is a good thing and shows me that I am healing, but at the same time, I just wish my new life would start.  That I could find my way out of those woods.  Even though the woods feel comfortable.  It's what I know.  The idea of walking out, into a different world, a different place?  Scares the shit out of me.  But it's so lonely here.  And I a ready for a change, because I know that I will eventually get used to it.

And I know it will be better.  Anything is better than this.