This is a tale of narcissistic abuse by someone I just met (who I happened to be blood related to) and how I should have listened to my gut before I let myself get involved with them.

And this is the tale of the fastest anyone has ever shown me their true colors that I've ever met.  Usually we humans have this setting that keeps us from being "real" with people we just meet, knowing that being on our best behavior is the best way to make an impression.  Not only that, we just don't feel comfortable "letting loose" all our issues on people we've just met.  Deep down we realize that new people do not deserve for us to be our assholiest selves.  We reserve those parts of ourselves for those we do not fear losing.  It's how human relationships work and why they work.  If we pull back the curtain the moment we meet, everyone would walk away from us immediately.

Unfortunately, for us, we had to stay involved with this person in real life for three weeks.  Not because we wanted to stay for three weeks, it was because we had nowhere else to go.  Had we felt we had a choice, we never would have went in the first place.

Let's start at the beginning.

I got a DNA test from Ancestry.com back in 2017.  I am adopted, so I thought this would be a great way to discover my heritage.  I was in no way looking for my birthfather (I already know my birthmother).  But as soon as I did the test, out pops all these family members who were not related to my birthmother.  And lo and behold, I found my half-sister (also adopted, also searching for her birthfather), my half-brother, some second cousins and the like.  So through all of these people's family trees and some sleuthing, I found his name.  So I searched his name online and found a list of other family members.  So I googled them, and found them on Facebook.  I contacted one, Yonne, found out she's my first cousin, who then put me in touch with another first cousin, Mindy.

So we all three were talking and I shit you not, within the first week of talking to both of them, I said "These two are both fucking narcissistic!!"  One more than the other, but I started to ignore them both because I could tell they weren't going do anything but bring misery into my life.

But then I wanted to talk to them about my birthfather's behavior.  He was erratic, paranoid, delusional, and constantly changed his stories.  I couldn't tell if it was dementia, narcissism, or some other mental illness.  So I started talking to one of them about him.  My half-sister was delusional herself, believing all of his tall tales and didn't want to hear me have issues about him.  My cousin was somewhat the same.  But then she started to see I was right (mostly because he was triangulating with me, my half-sister, and my cousin and always told us three different stories of the same things...it was awful!).

So eventually, I had to stop talking to my birthfather, as he was getting very possessive over my time and was very paranoid about what I was doing when I wasn't talking to him (accusing me of all sorts of things).  Our entire relationship lasted around two months.  But my cousin's and I's relationship went on.  It was fine as long as we were online (for the most part).  On the phone it was another thing.  I could never get a word in edgewise.  She rambled on the phone for 2-3 hours straight and never let me talk.  EVER.  Just like my birthfather (who's a paranoid delusional narcissist).  It's funny, she complained her uncle (my birthfather) did that, but she's just as bad, if not worse, and she has no idea she does it at all (so aggravating!).

She called herself an artist, which I was happy to see maybe it ran in that side of my family too.  But then I found out she was just saying that to relate to me and all she did was buy old lamps and hot glue fabric to the shades.  Not that that's not art, it was the way she presented herself as this HUGE artsty person, who loved to create things all the time.  She didn't.  She literally just did it a couple times and that was it.  I found that odd, but ignored it.  We even created an art group for the both of us to share our art in, but all her posts were of FB Marketplace items she wanted to buy.  That was it.  I would share art links to projects I'd want to try and pics of my own art, and she didn't understand any of it (or ignored it).  Or she'd make stupid comments about what I posted.  She even had all her family believing art was her thing, because they'd talk to me and say "Mindy loves art so much!  I see why her daughter is an amazing artist!"  Yet they never really saw any of her art.  Her five year old was an amazing artist, and Mindy loved to take credit for it.  She NEVER draws with her daughter, NEVER.  She just plays on her phone and ignores her kids all day long.  But she'll have everyone believing she's responsible for why her kid is so good at art (sound familiar?? total narc move!).

She also loves to hype you up about shit and then never speak of it again or if you do bring it up, she pretends to not know what you're talking about.  Or she changes her mind 50x a week.  "I want to run a single mother commune!"  "Now I want to be a daycare provider!"  "Now I want to illustrate a series of children's books and have you write them!"  I wrote a children's book, sent it to her illustrate, and she pretended to not know what I was talking about.  Now she's settled on being a travelling poker dealer.  This is her new scheme.  She always has a new scheme.  But once she decided on becoming a poker dealer, she ended any scheme that once involved me (and pretended like those ones never happened).

So then comes my birthday, she makes a huge promise to send me a big 'ol box of stuff.  She keeps saying she's making me stuff and putting it into the box.  I get excited.  I should not have gotten existed.  Because I get the box.  I open the box.  And LITERALLY it's full of stinky garbage.  For real, it smelled like she dumped her cigarettes in it, shut it, reopened it to put something that's molding into it, shut it again, and then filled it with broken garbage.  Like literal shit she should have thrown away but forgot the box was for my birthday and used it as a garbage can.  Then she sealed it.  She brought it to work (at UPS), and spent GOOD MONEY on sending it. 

Let me say this again: SHE SPENT HER HARD EARNED MONEY AS A SINGLE MOTHER (something she never lets you forget about her...she's a "single mom doing it all"--lies, as she has TONS of help, even more than I did as a married mother) TO SEND ME A BOX OF GARBAGE IN THE MAIL FOR MY BIRTHDAY.

What in the actual fuck? 

I had people telling me "Just give her a chance, maybe she didn't realize it?"  So I gave her benefit of the doubt, to a point...and let it go.  But why?  Why didn't I see it in that moment?  Because I ended up putting my family in the pit of hell by not doing so.  I ruined all of our lives.  Had I just listened to my instincts, had I realized that it was as bad I thought it was, none of this would have happened.

So she was always complaining about how her life sucked and she doesn't want to pay the bills she's paying anymore, and she doesn't want to work a stupid job for low pay and pay $700 in rent for a dinky apartment, blah blah blah.  

So she comes up with the mother of all ideas: 

She wants to move in with her dad in Willow Springs, Missouri, in the Ozarks, on 20 acres of land, and we should come with.  We live 500 miles away.  And we are supposed to quit our jobs, pack up our house and move in to the house next door to her father on his land.

The only issue is that the house next door to her dad is occupied.  She was in the middle of evicting the woman and she would be gone soon.  So as soon as they can get her out, we can all move down there: no rent to pay, just some water and electricity bills.

My husband had recently lost his job.  He had found a new one, at significantly less pay, and we were drowning in debt and could not afford where we lived anymore.  But we were getting by.  She saw our desperation and latched on, and decided to exploit our situation to her benefit.  At first, I didn't realize that's what she was doing.  At first I thought she wanted to live by us and we'd have all our family together (which is literally what she said tons of times...like "I can't wait for Thanksgiving!  I'll be able to spend it with family!" etc.).  But then, as time went on, she changed her mind about coming (first it was the winter, then next summer, etc.).  Then I found out that the place we were moving to needed a whole new water line put in for us to live there.  A total of $3,000 of money we didn't have.  I've always wondered if she didn't tell us about that to begin with so we could pay for it, then she'd kick us out.  And then she kept moving the time back for her to move in, until it became "never".  Then I found out she was telling her sisters that we were moving in to take care of her father.  Something I never agreed to nor was asked to do.  (I found this out after it was all over.)

While we were waiting to move, Mindy kept coming up with ideas about the "businesses we were going to start together" once we got there.  NONE of which were my ideas.  Any of my ideas were ignored.  All of her ideas were insane (her craziest one was a strip club called "Daddy Issues").  Most of her ideas would start out normal and fine, and then she'd add more and more and more until the idea became 100% undoable, and I'd be the one left telling her how insane the idea had become.  She'd never figure it out herself.  It became quite uncomfortable always having to say "That's just too much, Mindy".  She seemed to be the poster girl for self-sabotage.

Then came the one sentence that I should have heard loud and clear and stopped this whole process.  But were desperate, and she knew that, so we ignored it and kept moving forward.  She said:

"I KNEW if I were to have another me around, I'd be UNSTOPPABLE!"  

She meant me.  I said to my husband "She sees me as an extension of herself, not someone with her own ideas and dreams."  But, we were still desperate to get out of our wretched financial difficulties, so we continued with the plan.

Every single red light flashed in our faces.  Every single one.  But we played the denial game, desperate to just get there, and fix it from there.  We had hopes and dreams for living in the woods.  It was everything we'd ever wanted, for shit's sake!  We could deal with her once we got there!  Right?

Wrong.  So very, very wrong.

Finally, the woman on her dad's property was evicted.  We packed up our house.  Rented a uhaul.  And off we went.  After almost 10 hours, we get there after midnight.  And we pull up, get out of the car, get into the house, only to see that the house was completely destroyed.  And when I mean destroyed, I mean someone took a bat or a sledgehammer, and bashed everything in.   They broke the floors, the windows, the walls, the cabinets, and everything else.  There's garbage everywhere.  Cockroaches farther than the eye can see.  Every single electrical wire has been ripped out of the walls.  It wasn't salvageable, it needed to be demolished.

And the thing is, Mindy had just bragged about how it was "spic and span", and how the girl who lived there cleaned the shit out of it.  And how it looked "so perfect!".

Come to find out, Mindy hadn't set foot in there in a year.  And her father was the one who said it was so clean, and he was completely lying.  Actually, I doubt he was lying, I think he told Mindy the truth and Mindy lied about it, so we would still come.

It feels humiliating to be duped like this.  It feels like a huge betrayal.  A slap in the face.  A kick in the stomach.  A stab in the back.  That night was horrible, trying to make sense of the entire thing, not able to sleep a wink.  But that's not even the worst part.  We could have turned around and went back home and we'd all still have a place to live, a car, and so much more.  But when we finally got a hold of her the next day, she convinced us to come live with her.  Something she'd been bugging me about doing for months.  Something I kept telling her no to, because she has 2 kids, 2 pets, and live in a 2 bedroom apt.  How would she fit a family of four, with four dogs and four cats?

But she begged us and we listened.

Another very, very wrong move.

Now, I am not religious person, but I am convinced the devil is a woman and her name is Mindy (not her real name, but close enough).   We went from being homeless to living in the pit of hell.


I now look back at pictures of those times and feelings of panic arise in my stomach and head.  I shake a little and get a tad dizzy.  My stomach starts to get knots in it.  I've tried hard to remember that I am not going back there and I will never have to go back there again.  But just like with any trauma, when you first leave, you're always looking over your shoulder, feeling like one wrong move will send you back there.  I know logically there will never be a reason to go back, but still, the fear is there, creeping around the deep parts of my mind.

Living with my mother for so much of my life has put me in the position to know what it's like to not want to do anything on a daily basis.  To be a lump, in fear of making the wrong choice and to have her get on my case about it.  My mother loves to brag that I never did anything with my life (is that really bragging?  she acts like it is...), but she made it that way: I have a fear of succeeding and a fear of failure, because nothing I do is good enough for her, so I do nothing.  Easiest way to not get judged, picked on, tore down, or hurt if you don't do anything for people to talk about, right?  But then they talk about how you don't do anything.  But living with my mother is as easy as taking a nap in church compared to living with my cousin.  And that's why we're back here.  Because I'd rather live with the woman I went no contact with for over a year than live anywhere near that psychopath I'd like to forget that is my blood-related first cousin.

So we moved in with Mindy, and I again, became a lump.  Why?  Because every choice I made: from what I wore: "Oh, you're wearing that shirt? Okay...", to what kind of milk I bought or what kind of tortilla chips I bought to every other choice I made.  Imagine someone walking behind and you and making comments on every little thing you did, said, watched, or bought.  Imagine this person then would go to work, text you all day to get on your case about stuff, and then get home from work and go straight to her room, leaving you to walk her dog, feed her cat, and watch her kids until you went to bed many of those days (a nice break from the constant nagging---is nagging even the word for what she did? I feel that's much too nice of a word, it was more like nit-picking, hypercritical, griping, whining, belittling, disparaging, derogatory bullshit).  She never says thank you, never asks if it's okay, and never once says she's sorry about the entire situation, that SHE caused to have happen in the first place (well, minus our part in trusting her).

Then our car breaks down beyond repair.  And now we're stuck HAVING to put up with her nagging and her using us.  We had no way to get anywhere, and while we tried to apply for jobs along the bus lines, nobody was hiring.  And we were stuck having to use her car, in which she constantly bitched about that, too.

Living like that was hell.  And let's add in the fact that she gags.  Constantly.  Over everything (like brushing her teeth).  Like hardcore gagging.  I have a phobia of vomit, so this made me horribly sick the entire time I was there.  Not to mention we all got a severe adenovirus, which made us all actually sick for four entire weeks, three of which were with her).  We were also bleeding money living with her, as she paid for nothing.  I had to buy all the groceries and cook every single night (on top of being very sick) minus two nights she was manic and cooked all the food I bought, so I'd have to go shopping again.

I have horrible anxiety, due to narcissistic abuse, and I was right back in Satan's lair, dealing with a constant barrage of daily abuse, so every single moment I was stuck in this second guessing of every little thing I did or would say, until I did and said nothing.  I, once again, became a lump.  A neurotic, anxious lump.

Then we were evicted from her apartment, with her telling her landlord that we just showed up and took over everything.  So he yelled at us and evicted us.  We tried to set him straight, but he had a thing for my nasty cousin, so he wouldn't listen.  We had no car.  Nowhere to live.  I was happy to leave, but with no place to live, I was freaking the hell out.  She refused to stand up for us and move somewhere else with us (which is what she kept promising to do, which is what I would have done if the situation were reversed) and we were left on our own.  We found a way to rent a car, and went back to our hometown, having to break down and contact my mother's landlord to let us move in above her.  And luckily, he said yes.  We ONLY have a place to live due to the kindness of that man.  Otherwise we'd be stuck in Missouri, living in a box with our eight pets, and four humans.

I was distraught and completely freaking out.  The idea of losing all our beloved animals made me like I was going to literally lose my fucking mind.  We used to live a house that could fit us all.  It wasn't like we had too many pets.  And we were planning on moving to a place with 20 acres of land, which was more than enough space for them.  But now?  We didn't even have a car to live out of.  We had no way to protect them or house them.

So to have a place to live, while it's not idea living an apartment with four dogs, it's better than what we were faced with.  And our apartment is beautiful and the perfect size for us at the moment.

While everything is turning out better than we thought it was going to, we still aren't exactly where I'd like to be.  But then again, we are out of the grips of my cousin's control, so even though we still have no car, we aren't worse off.  And that's an amazing thing in my book.  And no matter how much we don't have right now, how the clothes we did bring with us have started falling apart, and how we still don't have the money for certain things, the one thing that brings me up again after feeling down about everything is "At least we do not live with Mindy anymore." 

And at least we don't have hear these wonderful little tidbits out of her mouth anymore, either:


I should haven known it would have ended this way.  I should have not believed her when she said the place we were moving to was habitable, or that it was nice and gorgeous, or anything good (the land looked like a bunch of meth heads lived there).  I should have seen the signs (we did, but we ignored them for promise of a better life).  I should have listened to that little voice that was screaming inside of me that yelled "NO!  DON'T DO IT!  SHE'S FULL OF SHIT!  THIS WON'T END WELL!"  I thought I was in control of my own destiny.  We all felt that way.  We thought we were finally taking a leap towards the life we wanted.  And instead, we became homeless, lost our car, and everything we owned (did I mention we had to rent a car to come back and leave everything we owned behind 500 miles away?  It's still there....).

We came back to our hometown with nothing but the clothes on our backs, a couple of items of clothes that fit into a bag, and our pets...minus two.  We had to leave two of our cats behind, because we had nowhere to put them in the teeny car we rented.  And renting the car was a clusterfuck of an experience, because our credit cards were maxed out, so we had to get my cousin to use her debit card (they wouldn't let us use ours since our licenses weren't from Missouri) and we had to put all the money in her bank and it wouldn't go through, blah blah blah.  Nervewracking was not the word for it...more like terrified of being stuck in a city that was trying desperately to strip of our entire lives.  And with a person who was trying to put me in the mental ward.

We came from a spacious four bedroom house with a fenced in yard, with a garage and a driveway and a screened in front porch, in which I had a HUGE art studio next to my bedroom.  We had space for our pets and ourselves with room to spare.  We gave that up for a supposed better life on a gorgeous 20-acre wooded lot in the Ozarks.  This is how it was described to us.  We walked away from everything we knew and didn't realize we loved.  All on one woman's promise that it was a habitable space with a gorgeous view.  All because we chose to trust a family member (which we all know doesn't mean jack shit).  All because we thought we were doing the right thing.

I am definitely learned a lesson after all of this.  I refuse to ever trust anyone ever again just on their word.  I need proof.  I need visual confirmation of whatever a person is telling me, or else I refuse to believe it.  There are too many lying narcissists in this world to believe anyone anymore.  It would had been different had she apologized, or taken some responsibility, but when I told her I was upset she hadn't done so yet, she called me names and said I was ungrateful.  She only housed us (and took advantage of us while she did) because she was cleaning up a mess she made.  She literally did the least amount possible any human being could do.  Fuck family.  I am done looking for family.  Let people search me out instead.  I am just so tired of this.  Being adopted and coming from a toxic abusive narcissistic adoptive family, I have searched for so long for blood relatives that would be like actual family.  And while I've found a few who are good people, I wouldn't say we are close.  But I am done with that.  I am done reaching out.  I am done searching.  I found what I needed.  It wasn't what I wanted to find, but I found it nonetheless.  And I am grateful for the experience I suppose.  It's always better to know than to not know.

What I learned from this whole ordeal is that all I need is what I already have.  And this goes for all of 2018, not just The Mindy Experience.  This is it.  And it's enough.  I am working to become whole without the desperate search for what I'll never get.  And I need to be okay with that. 

I think the worst part was that I let myself believe she had our best interests at heart.  That she really cared about me and my family.  That her and I did somewhat connect on some level, and that deep down inside she was just messy, not a narcissist.  That somehow I was overreacting.  It wasn't until I met her, that I realized she was one of the worst ones I've ever met.  It hurt lose someone, yet again, that you thought may have been real. 

It's funny, you think you're over something, that you've moved on and past certain needs or issues, and then people come along and BAM!  You're right in the thick of it again.  Well, enough lessons were learned this year that I think I'm good now.  I am ready for 2019 to be the year of wholeness instead of letting all these hungry wolves try and rip me apart.  My eye doctor once told me that the parts of our eye where a laser has fixed rips and tears are now the strongest parts.  Well, if we can apply that to the rest of our lives, once these wounds heal, I'm going to be stronger than I ever have been.  My whole family will be.

And as long as I never have to see that particular Devil again, I will be very, very happy 😊




(I will say, I also know what it's like to live with people who are scarier than her...I've lived with physical abuse and horrendous emotional abuse before, so I do know what it's like to have it worse.  So while what we went through isn't the worst abuse one can go through, what I am talking about here is the fact that the "pit of hell" for me, at this time, looked like this.  A pit of hell for you may be completely different.  Could it have been worse?  Oh hell yes.  But it was bad enough and I never want anything like that to happen to me or my family again.  It was horrifying and we were mere minutes away from living on a box on the street.  Something I never ever want to experience ever again.)