🏓 Grand Slam of Open Doors and Word Tennis
First Draft Created: 2024-03-18 18:45
Last Updated: 1 month, 3 weeks ago
Tennis.
That's how it always felt, conversations with her. She was supposed to be my support, but those two weeks of talking, while she was once again unblocked, she once again showed that she was my nemesis.
Still. Time to move on, I guess.
My thoughts had been preoccupied with much. Too much. It was like that movie, about dealing with everything, everywhere, all at once. Rather like those machines that fire a thousand tennis balls at you at once. Or was that even tennis?
Get temporary jobs. Find a permanent job. Find a purpose for still staying alive. Save, save money. But go out, because staying inside was a trap. Meet people, somehow. But everything costs money!
Right now was a manifestation of everything I had been through in my life.
Sometimes, often, lying awake in my bed whether at night or during the day - time zones and ADHD didn't care for regular sleep cycles - I would feel it.
The cold, approaching dread.
How long until I became homeless?
I had reached out, in a moment of desperation, to my mother over the phone. Unblocked her for two weeks, as had become the maximum period of time I was able to, every year to two years over the previous 6 year period since her rejection of me and incitation of the family fallout in response to my finally refusing to take the bait of her guilt-tripping and self-flagellation as an attempt to deflect from her crybullying attempt to steamroll my boundaries. I had reached out in desperation that I would become homeless - but couldn't bear to ask her for money, knowing how she would lord it over me. No, she would use it as bait, to force me to endure psychological abuse while refusing to actually help.
Which was funny, because I had convinced myself that my situation was desperate enough to open up, and yet, when I ultimately blocked her again she lorded it over me anyway, accused me of asking for money - which I had not, merely provided free therapy and emotional labour for her - and I told her to stop lying, to stop slandering me, told her truthfully that I would die before I asked her for money. It was and is the truth. I had thought it was pride, but the reality was, sometimes abuse and trauma will destroy you to the point where you can't take anymore, even for a vain hope that somehow things will change, even to save your own life. Sometimes things become unbearable, and I guess I realised it in this final unblocking.
This moment, the unblocking, had been me calling my own bluff on whether I could really endure the terror of homelessness and starvation ... followed by, plot twist, the bluff itself turning out not to be a bluff after all. Or rather, there was no option of support or safety with her, so bluff or no bluff didn't actually matter.
My declaration had been true all these years. It almost ceased to be true for a glimmer of a moment, it wavered like a flickering flame, then it became true again with harsh defensiveness, it burned with the purpose of need. I could not face this abuse again. I didn't know why my mind and body rebelled against this in the desperate fight for survival. Too, I'd realised, that nothing I could say would move her.
Even if I gave her her narcissistic supply, debased myself to let her play with me like a dog with a toy, shred every inch of my self esteem and dignity before others and take out her years of will to hurt onto me, she'd still discard me, as she'd always done, when I ceased to be useful. And I would still end up on the street. I was irredeemable, as the transgender "child" who had transitioned.
I was ruined and broken now, she would not know how to find me a good christian husband. I'd never been the most fun of her toys to play with, anyway.
I hadn't known in the moment why I couldn't let her pull me under, to below her level, why I couldn't suffer through it anymore, even to survive. Maybe it's because I knew even during those two weeks that it would make no difference.
So instead, instead of asking, I'd been her counsellor. Told her about her own trauma, something the cult had kept her from realising, despite the fact that she had a minor in psychology.
Somehow I was still connected to her, like a vein bringing health back to her heart in the form of oxygen, but it was time that I closed myself off. I was not a part of her anymore.
She tantrummed. She got angry, firing back shots like tennis balls. But there were times she decided to let down her defenses, to show vulnerability only because she knew I always had the option to throw down my metaphorical racquet and walk off the court.
No, it was a ploy. A vulnerable narcissist using all of the tactics of feigning vulnerability, just as she had always enlisted her flying monkeys to rage after anyone she had chosen to target next for her crybully antics. Still, she appeared to listen, afraid to be blocked again, and I got to tell her all the concerns I'd had for her. I, ironically, got closure. She, ironically, did not.
I spent the few days of our two weeks telling her what she needed to do to heal herself - go to a REAL therapist, a specialist. Reminded her of the childhood traumas she had never addressed or even recognised as traumas.
She'd listened, tried to fight me when I set boundaries, but ultimately backed down. And then, at the end, when I told her my ultimatums - that she must treat me with the bare minimum respect of a person, she grew angry and refused.
And that was the end. Block.
Six years it had been, perhaps even to the day, since this had started - her ultimate rejection of me, and then being relegated to being blocked 96% of the time, but she could never let me have power.
This was her way, and my father's as narcissists, ever intertwined in toxic codependence that kept them from growing: him grandiose and ridiculous, clueless, her circling like a shark, always, bestowing skillfully placed comfort and love bombing while sowing distrust in others, to foster codependence.
The vulnerable crybully, devious, with the power to destroy any person she chose, and she relished in throwing certain relatives under the bus in particular. As the queer relative who flew in the face of the conservative religion she'd raised me in and made their judgement of others with gay children look ridiculous in having their own trans child, I must now be a prime target of the ire and ridicule in my absence, I supposed.
I had already caught a glimpse of their dehumanisation of me, in how I had heard they misgendered me, and in a message accidentally sent to me by the intolerant one of my sisters, which combined my dead name with my chosen name into a singular new monstrosity.
The strangely complementary natures of my narcissistic parents meant there were no rivalries between them, though they had had countless fights before reaching this strange twisted harmony, likely brought about by my dad's insistence and my mom's deviously manipulative nature.
They both teamed up, delighting in spite as their unifier, and calling it a "shared sense of humour". I still remember how sickening it was when she bragged about the mind games she had played with the staff of their boutique hotel, forcing them to pay out of their own meagre wages for money that a guest alleged had been stolen and pitting the staff against each other, how she had boasted about it to a friend in my presence, how she had "annihilated" the devious plans she was sure they were formulating against her. "It's us versus them" she said. Given that all of the staff were black and we were white, it was clear what she meant. It sickened me now, that I had not spoken up more.
Present-day me would at least have the courage to speak to the staff about unionizing against her illegal actions, would have taken more of a stand today than to simply call her out in front of her friend, who had awkwardly brushed things off.
Back then, I was not good at acting in the moment. Since then, since coming out, I have dealt with more than enough hostility from my "family" and emergencies in general, to be prepared to give a more adequate response to inappropriate behaviour in the moment.
The unexpected is no longer so unexpected for me, and the bystander fallacy and its social pressure towards inaction, is no longer so strong. I guess that happens when you come out as trans and transition.
She was the type of person who always believed that other people were conspiring to one-up her, and it was with unbridled glee that she would take people down a peg or many and dash their hopes.
It wasn't the only situation which made her delighted. She also liked attention. But she was strange, nontraditional for a narcissist, in that she got her security from being perceived as nurturing, as a great mother, and so somehow people perceived her as an incredibly selfless and generous woman, the type to self-sacrifice and always be taken advantage of. She of course, made it very clear she was being taken advantage of in stories she told, riling people up to be upset on her behalf, expressing her hurt, and then, at the other's point of indignation, sighing like a martyr and saying "I'll just leave it. Try to be the better person." leaving the other person hurt, angry on her behalf and with nowhere to go with that frustration.
I had come to recognise the gleeful look on her face when she had reached that point of invoking the other person's readiness to act for her, and the pleasure she took in turning off the fawcett. That glint as she felt the pleasure of her own power and influence.
It was a remarkable shift, where she would urge the listener on, like a racehourse in their progression, and once they had finally arrived at the point she wanted, quickly slam the brakes on that conversation with a rapid thought-stopper. She really was an artist in the medium of spite, on the canvas of misdirection.
Still though, I had been naive, ignoring the evidence I'd seen before me, of course wanting to see the best in her. It was only when she turned against me that I saw it. She turned against me for calmly setting a boundary, and for stating that she had been inappropriate in what she had said in our family whatsapp chat. And her response was vicious.
Her floods of emotions invoked the knee-jerk response of others to fly to her aid as if I had exacted an act of cruelty in refusing to comfort her when she had fallen back onto her own self-flagelation of being an awful mother, bursting into floods of tears. My calmly re-stating the boundary and the inapropriteness had been met by greater and greater escalations by her and then lashing out with accusations of my immense cruelty, while simultaneously claiming that I was causing her immense pain in my transition.
I was actually rendered speechless at the realisation of just how masterfully she directed her orchestra, too shocked to even have the will to defend myself. Had she always been like this? Always the victim, the vulnerable one, but in reality always weilding this to silence anyone who stood up to her? Immensely powerful she was, like the shadow queen, the Morgana in so many Arthurian adaptations, she was pure poison.
She was not just the tennis player, not even the ball, she was not the tennis ball machine. No, she was the bullet and she was the gun. And now she was many types of gun, she was an onslaught.
She somehow managed to pierce, shatter, scatter-shot and ricochet and rebound all at once for maximum damage.
It's been six years and I still don't understand her. Not after she shattered my illusions of her, and has continued to show just how deep she can dig in, as if trying to break through the skin of my self esteem with words which are her relentlessly tearing fingernails.
This realisation was a latecomer, it's true. I should have realised this all before age 30.
But still, I had realised, just like I had finally identified the cult I had left.
I had even told her it was a cult.
But most importantly, it was over now.
And that realisation brings real relief, both when writing, and rereading those words.
It's over now.
This time, this occasion of unblocking and re-blocking her - something that had happened about four times over the past six years, always lasting about 2 weeks, something had changed.
This time I wasn't traumatised like before, despite no apparent end in sight to all of my other struggles.
Somehow I had not let her drag me down. Not this time. I had held my boundaries, maintained my fortress, not allowed my human rights to be up for debate, not engaged or accommodated, and actually used my time wisely to have my say. Hell, I'd been the one setting the boundaries and my rules of engagement, for once, not being dictated to and accommodating!
I had also gotten angry, been harsh and blunt (though unlike her not cruel), instead of the usual pressure to be perfect, to never slip up lest she have ammo to use against me.
I had been the child, been vulnerable in wanting connection and love from a parent, but been the adult as well with boundaries.
I had been imperfect, and that had been the winning "strategy", though it was no stragegy in truth, just a realisation, un upgrade on my thinking and mental health.
Because finally, I had realised, I did no longer have to defend myself against her shots, or justify myself to her, or the absent "family" she would misrepresent me to - as besides working to dominate all my efforts to assert myself, covering all family bases with propaganda was an essential part of her Grand Slam achievement. But this was finally a factor that no longer held even emotional sway over me.
I had my boundaries, my fortress, my do-not-cross lines, and had kept those in place. I had left when I had to leave, rather than allowing her to erase all of my progress.
But most importantly to me, I no longer felt the need to be perfect, a model victim or a model person.
I did not have to take the tennis shot, to gain a point in the game, or to deny her her point. Unlike back in the day when I was a teenager, I did not have to serve, return, or feel the need to assert or defend.
Over the years, our exchanges on the lengthy tennis court had shrunk to vicious games of squash, to rapidfire intensity and burnouts.
But now, finally, I no longer had anything left to prove to her, and that was why today, THIS break-up, everything was different.
Seeing the plexiglass, the smallness of the situation more clearly than ever, I stepped out of the court for the last time. I breathed a sigh of relief as, with my final block, I closed the door on her manipulation, her spite-filled rage - at long last, for good.
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