#42.20 - Ghin is away

Klee - Three houses

My dearest darling Ghin is off to Florence. My wittle baby.

He is gone.

For a week. My heart is broken in two. Before he left today I made a massive fuss over him. He is just the best boy in the world. Sweet, and caring, and tough but also sensitive. Smart and funny and adorable. He is just the BEST. I am going to miss him soooooo much.

I managed to catch up with SOME laundry today. I will do the rest today. It will be so tough not getting Ghin at 3. But hey, I have had pretty good innings for being a mom and being with him all this time. So so hard.

I will miss him so much.

We had Japanese last night for dinner. Well... I had a weird dream last night and the upshot of that dream, the lesson of the dreaming was me waking up with the overwhelming knowledge of the following:-

That average is enough. I came to the stunning realisation regarding two things. Generally I get into the most trouble when I am in my 'try my best' mode. No, seriously. I do.

First, I hold myself to impossibly high standards and then secondly, I end up pissing other people off. For some reason people hate it when you are doing your best. Especially the people who see you as a rival. This is usually men who are incompetent. All my life I have been dogged by incompetent men. Competent men love me. Men who are at the top of their game and have nothing to fear often find me great company. The men who are a bit thick and a bit useless, they see me as an alpha female which is of course, emasculating. I have, only after 50 years begun to understand this.

Sadly I do not do stupid female. I simply can't. I can try shutting my mouth, that is the best I can do. But I cannot make myself lesser to make your ego happy. It doesn't happen. So, as a result, I have decided that I am going to simply be enough - sufficient.

Not be TRYING MY BEST.

I don't know if this is any good though. Just trying my best. It seems a bit stupid to be honest, like the thick people win... but this message came from the universe to be average. To be sufficient.

I will have to see.

Apart from doing the laundry and reading the Trojan War I didn't do an awful lot else. I felt very sleepy all the time. I did watch Good Omens which was meh and Lady Macbeth which was a bit mental.

I have been thinking about narcissists as well. How narcissists hate it when their partner is successful and when their partner does well. They have no interest in anything else but themselves. So interesting. One day I will write a memoir about my life... perhaps I shall start now. Perhaps I shall it will be excellent therapy and perhaps help other people to recognise a narcissist. They are completely irrational. Utterly irrational. They have no interest in having the other person succeed because this would mean that the spotlight would be off them.

Conversations are solely about themselves and all about how they are so wonderful and clever. Or the implication that they are. It is so fascinating. Of course the worst conversation they could possibly have is someone who really knows what they are like. Once the mask is gone for you, then they are left squirming. What was very strange for me was that that was the whole point of a relationship - to get under the hood. To experience everything with everyone. When you were told the truth about yourself, then you got to know yourself better. There was something sexy about that, that someone knew every single thing about you. HOWEVER, this was not the case. What happened was the denials began. And the more the denials began, the more the questions came from me. What happened then was a very strange thing. I would ask questions and because they couldn't be answered truthfully, the temper tantrums began. The blaming began. I watched the film about Bikram and there was a part when people would confront him to serve him his judgement and he would stand at his doorstep shouting at them - obscenities. He would yell at them, fuck you! How dare you! You... it was actually pure dejavu. The same anger, the same refusal to be accountable, the denial.

As I said, it is terrible when a narc is being nice to you. There is no where to go with that. I have decided that my policy is to just block it. Ignore it, the same way I ignore them being awful to me. It is worse when it is nice because you know that something is coming.

There is also another occupational hazard - you start to believe that everything is your fault. The gaslighting... then you change to try to please them. That is the worst part because it doesn't matter how much you change it will never be enough. Instead of seeing this as a loving attempt to make things work, they will regard you with contempt. They will sneer at your efforts because what they really want is for you to be gone. To vindicate them. My god, when I think of all those years.

But no more...

So, today, after school, I am going to plan for the rest of the next two weeks. To see what is possible and to get it done.