Can I really put it behind me now?

I have a meeting scheduled with Narc John later today. It's about winding up the money issues.  I have shown him in spreadsheets how I see his debt to my company, and he will respond with how he thinks I owe him.  Or something.

I'm nervous about meeting him today.  That blog of his has created such a complicated unsettledness inside me. On the one hand, it feels like it is the final straw for me - he has showed his hand, and it says that I never really existed as a person to him.  If, after all this time, he still is able to create that picture of me, then I may easily just have been a cardboard cutout or blow up doll.  An accessory that he carried around onto which he could project all manner of things.  But not real. Not me.

I think that after everything that has happened between us, The bad stuff, not the good,  that this one is just making it over for me.  Not with a bang or an explosion.  But with a sigh. Like "I can't anymore." Rather than an explosive "Fuck Him".

But on the other hand, I cannot bear to be misunderstood so much. And I know that just about anything I say now will tick a little box in his 'Covert Narcissist Expert' head, and will confirm for him how crazy I am and how he can now comfortably amble away, without responsibility for the wreckage that has become my life.  So I also want to be able to show how he's wrong. But ugh.  Do I really have the energy for that?

I know he has seen my crazy.  He has driven me in the past to such levels of derangement that I have: thrown a boardroom chair at him; punched his body until my hands and arms are bruised; hit myself in frustration; shouted and sworn and said the most horrific things to him; wept like a crazy woman on the floor, curled up in the foetal position; driven my car at suicidal speeds in a crazy rage; lain mute on my couch for hours, bewildered by his attack, and abandoned.  I have only seen that level of crazy in myself once before and that was more than 20 years ago, in the last weeks of my first marriage to my Borderline Personality Disordered ex husband.  It's not me. Or if it is me, then I have to be driven pretty far to find that part of me!

So if he looks close enough, and filters out all the life events that happened to me that brought out that in me at the time, he could find things to make some of his Covert Narc theory stick.  It makes me nervous until I read the internet again about the kind of crazy that Narcs can create in their partners, and then I slowly calm down again.  It's not me. It really is what he does to me.  People have been driven to this level of crazy before me.  Have a look at all the resources available: the pic I used as my header for this article is from a site called BreakingUpWithYourNacissist.com and there are many many more. Lisaescott.com. Tigress Love, the Breakup Guru.  But it's all there for us to access and process and find the approach that works best for us.  And reassure ourselves that we are not alone - this path has been walked by many before us.

His abuse of me over the past few years has taken a lot from me.  Weakened my body. Narrowed my emotional bandwidth. Cracked my soul. Made me soft in the head for a while.  But it is also my catalyst.  I still believe I needed to get to this point before I was systemically ready to make the changes I need in my life.  So I do need to be grateful for that lesson.  I have lived through hell.  But I don't' think I will ever need to walk a road like that again.  The lessons learned have been forged in deep pain and despair.  I will not waste that.

So today's meeting? Hmmmm. I will need to be gentle with myself and try to be just honest and clear with him.  I must protect my heart as much as I can, and try to avoid the conversation going to that emotional place.  It's not real: it's a roller coaster - piles of idyllic heights and terrifying drops, but lands up in the same place it started.  Time to stop that.  I've had enough.