why does everything i do confound you?
Audrey and Dan left the heater off before their trip to Pennsylvania, so the past couple nights have been chilly affairs. Dan offered to reimburse us if we decided to go buy a space heater, but it hasn't reached that point, not yet at least. We rent from nice people.
The biggest obstacle to my personal growth and my journey to inner peace is my father, without question. Other bad aspects of my life have faded away once I left them behind, making it easier to heal the lingering wounds: I got out of the army with a medical discharge, and so never had to serve in any reserve component; after one or two attempts to win back my attention, my ex left me alone and I her; the arson of my grandmother's house was never a resolved issue but at least the arsonists never came trailing after me after that night. My father, on the other hand, has evidently made me the center of his skewed conspiratorial worldview (like my mother was before me - go family tradition!), and despite all my attempts at keeping him away, he just keeps trying to drag me back down into his cesspool of ignorance and insanity and abuse.
The bravest and best decision of my life was leaving him once and for all. But like all abusers, sane and otherwise, my father doesn't understand the concept of having ruined someone's life enough and leaving them alone to heal. He's frustrated and enraged by my refusal to submit to his control, and he has been trying every conceivable means to exert control over me in some way. When I had just left him, and was living with relatives who had generously taken me in, he got himself arrested when he returned to Ohio (having skipped bail numerous times before then) and the first thing he did was call me and rope me into some scheme to retrieve his handguns from a van he'd abandoned months before in Kentucky. I was still new at the whole living-apart-from-him business, so out of the kindness of my heart (and lingering habit) I did what he said, and brought the handguns to the home of another relative who generously offered to keep them, despite the danger. He continued to phone me and demand that I come visit him in jail, only to yell and hurl incoherent accusations and threats at me. That's what finally motivated me to disown him, to write him out of my life for good. But he never left well enough alone.
After I had joined the army, thinking that would help me repair the shambles he had left my life in, he still devoted time and energy to tracking me down, just to keep his thumb on me. In basic training he sent a series of bizarre postcards from Arizona, where he had skipped bail to once again. Once I reached my permanent duty station, he found out my unit and called them one memorable night, inquiring what company I was in, probably fishing for a mailing address. He even called the Red Cross and had my unit force me, under escort, to email him to "let him know I am alive," when he knew damn well I was. (Well, I give him too much credit; a sane man would've known I was alive, but he had invented all sorts of bizarre theories that I was either discharged or dead.) By this point he was already emailing me with unintelligible, disconnected rambles, leaping from one poorly spelled subject to the next without articulation or segue. And of course it wouldn't be long before he would pester my long-sufering friends list with more of the same.
A sane man would wonder what the point of it all was - had he even been emailing me about troubles that weren't imaginary, I couldn't have helped him, stuck a thousand miles away like I was, nor after what he'd done to me would I be willing to. But his goal through all this was to get some reaction from me, to get me dancing to his score again or kill me trying. Jen postulates that he may have been harassing my friends to get them to hate me, so I'd get lonely and go back to him. (Of course, my friends couldn't understand what he was saying, but they know reality from delusion in any case. It's like gaydar, in a way: sane people can always detect the words and motions of insane people. I had nothing to worry about from such decent and wonderful people as you.) I agree that my father seems to have this idea in his head that since I'm not jumping at the chance to live an indigent and pointless life of homelessness and peanut butter sandwiches with him, I must be the Grand High Llama of the conspirators, because any good and grateful son surely would jump at that chance. It seems he wants a return to me being an obedient little nine year old, believing his fantasies and reading conspiracy books about Freemasons. He doesn't fathom the fact that I am 21 years old now, more of a man than he has ever been or will ever be, married to a woman I love and don't abuse, living my own life free of his control, and perfectly happy without him.
The psychology of abusers is the same, whether they're at heart sane or not: they hate losing control. I know many people who can attest to this personally, let alone the actual literature on the subject. There's also an element of abuse psychology in which the abuser believes the abusee is hopelessly evil and must be punished to have any hope of redemption, often so dominating the abusee's personality that the victim believes it too. This facet expresses itself handily in my father, not only in his coronation of anyone who leaves him (first my mother, now me) as the Big Enchilada directing the conspiracies against him, but also in his myriad and elliptical fantasies about my behavior before I even left him.
For example, when I was 14, he actually believed that I was a "spy for the homosexual agenda," whatever the flaming hell that means. I mean, not only was I 14 years old, I had never had any contact with anyone outside of my immediate family! How could such a cultlike upbringing even allow me to make contact with anyone in the outside world? But that was never an issue with my father, evidently. Maybe I had radios in my teeth. What mattered to him was the "fact" that I was betraying him to his enemies, I guess by revealing his favorite flavor of Nutrasweet yogurt or something. (Black cherry, by the way.)
Another time, probably when I was 15, I lost a notebook that contained a juvenile and not at all noteworthy little dinosaur story, one I had lost interest in and never finished. It was an "appendix" to a larger dinosaur novel I had written in 1994-95, chronicling the adventures of two characters when they were away from the narrator of the novel. The two characters, Emily Cutter and Pete Johnson, flew up to an isolated camp on the "mainland" of Cretaceous North America, eventualy to be attacked by dinoaurs and be lost in the woods and rescued, blah blah blah. All I had written before abandoning the project was the character Johnson watching an Alamosaurus herd walking across a beach. Pretty deviant stuff, huh? But this notebook fell out of the car one night in either '96 or '97 (my father can't even get the year right; he's distorted it somehow to '94, before I had even written the original novel!). Almost within days, my father was obsessed with what was in this notebook. I explained what was in it to him, of course, but small surprise, he substituted his own reality. He obviously knew what I had written far better than yours truly. Even though he already had this fantasy that people were "harassing" him because of what "the internet" said about him, he reversed time somehow and made my poor inoffensive "Cutter and Johnson Appendix" the cause of this harassment! Pretty neat trick, considering he never specified why such a childish attempt at writing dinosaur adventure would incense a nation of computer-users used to bestiality porn and whatnot. I had even forgotten the Appendix had existed until he dredged it up in his journal yesterday. Still obsessed with it, and still making me out to be some diabolical, reprehensible teenage psycho over a dinosaur story no one on Earth has ever seen.
I know Eric reads this journal - in fact he's one of four or five people I can depend on to read it regularly, but I'm going into that in a moment - so once again I'm going to bend over backwards to help him out, just like I always did for my first 18 years of life, and expecting nothing less than the same spitting hatred and ingratitude in return. I'll clue him in to the fate of the infamous Johnson and Cutter. There is not, nor has there ever been, any trace of that story on the internet. Some laundromat attendant probably found the notebook and threw it away while sweeping the parking lot. Humble origins indeed for a conspiracy that spans decades, wouldn't you say?
Now, speaking of journal readership. Extending his "the internet is after me" schtick into the CretaceousRick age, he now believes that my online diary is somehow responsible for his imaginary harassment. Once again, he's convinced that horrible, unspeakable ol' me is to blame for ruining his life. Apparently he has this concept that simply because my journal exists, and that he can see it, means that everyone in the world reads my meaningless record of minor events in my personal life. He also has this idea that my journal exists to get support for my "complaints" about him, as if my private life was a friggin' popularity contest. Maybe he suspects "the internet" has vote-counters like American Idol, and that people are reading my updates and voting for either him or me. Conspiracy Idol, it could be called. To counter this, and to get his version of events circulating, he started his own journal way back on August 14, apparently thinking that just by being there he would attract millions of visitors. I'm sorry to say, livejournal doesn't work that way. After two and a half years of steadily expanding my friends list, I can expect roughly half a dozen consant readers - Jen, my father, and a small handful of friends who take the time to read my entires in full. And until he posted a harassing comment in my journal with his fancy username, a couple days ago, no one other than him knew his journal existed. Yet he prattled on as if he really believed everyone on "the internet" was secretly reading his side, and merely snubbing him for my sake. I'm touched, internet, thank you so much!
Jen has a degree in forensic psychology, the study of psychology as it relates to criminal behavior. She recognizes the classic symptoms of the abuser mentality in my father, and even after my limited reading on the subject I can as well. So I'm making a sincere effort to not let his continued harassment have any effect on me. He wants me to get into a tiff about him, to feel guilty or worthless or defensive. He has made me angry, yes, and I'll always feel some element of guilt for leaving him, even though I couldn't help him in the way he needed to be helped, and I needed to look after myself for once in my life, or die. Even such a clear-cut choice can be blurred by the mentality the abuser instills in the abusee. I owe Eric nothing. But I still love him enough to be hurt and angered by his relentless attacks on who I am, on his insistence on rubbing sand and salt and vitriol into the still-open wounds he left in my psyche. I still care about him, because I am a normal human being, and he is my father, no matter how abnormal he is. It's a difficult rope to walk, balancing between my own best interest and my misguided concern for him. I can't let the balancing act upset my own inner balance, the spiritual poise that has brought me so far and will take me so much farther. I can't let him attack the foundation of my Self.
And I won't. It's that simple.
The difference between sanity and insanity is that sane people can think rationally and behave reasonably. (By that defintion, most New York drivers are insane, but I already suspected that.) And I will never, under any of his provocations, be brought down to his level. I am taking the high-road to the best of my ability, and I'll leave hiding in the woods from a threat in one's own mind to him. Until he's ready to seek help for his illness, no one can help him - not the state of Ohio, and certainly not me. Let him remain a roadside bandit on the information superhighway. He's not going to get me under his control ever again, and that's my last word.
The biggest obstacle to my personal growth and my journey to inner peace is my father, without question. Other bad aspects of my life have faded away once I left them behind, making it easier to heal the lingering wounds: I got out of the army with a medical discharge, and so never had to serve in any reserve component; after one or two attempts to win back my attention, my ex left me alone and I her; the arson of my grandmother's house was never a resolved issue but at least the arsonists never came trailing after me after that night. My father, on the other hand, has evidently made me the center of his skewed conspiratorial worldview (like my mother was before me - go family tradition!), and despite all my attempts at keeping him away, he just keeps trying to drag me back down into his cesspool of ignorance and insanity and abuse.
The bravest and best decision of my life was leaving him once and for all. But like all abusers, sane and otherwise, my father doesn't understand the concept of having ruined someone's life enough and leaving them alone to heal. He's frustrated and enraged by my refusal to submit to his control, and he has been trying every conceivable means to exert control over me in some way. When I had just left him, and was living with relatives who had generously taken me in, he got himself arrested when he returned to Ohio (having skipped bail numerous times before then) and the first thing he did was call me and rope me into some scheme to retrieve his handguns from a van he'd abandoned months before in Kentucky. I was still new at the whole living-apart-from-him business, so out of the kindness of my heart (and lingering habit) I did what he said, and brought the handguns to the home of another relative who generously offered to keep them, despite the danger. He continued to phone me and demand that I come visit him in jail, only to yell and hurl incoherent accusations and threats at me. That's what finally motivated me to disown him, to write him out of my life for good. But he never left well enough alone.
After I had joined the army, thinking that would help me repair the shambles he had left my life in, he still devoted time and energy to tracking me down, just to keep his thumb on me. In basic training he sent a series of bizarre postcards from Arizona, where he had skipped bail to once again. Once I reached my permanent duty station, he found out my unit and called them one memorable night, inquiring what company I was in, probably fishing for a mailing address. He even called the Red Cross and had my unit force me, under escort, to email him to "let him know I am alive," when he knew damn well I was. (Well, I give him too much credit; a sane man would've known I was alive, but he had invented all sorts of bizarre theories that I was either discharged or dead.) By this point he was already emailing me with unintelligible, disconnected rambles, leaping from one poorly spelled subject to the next without articulation or segue. And of course it wouldn't be long before he would pester my long-sufering friends list with more of the same.
A sane man would wonder what the point of it all was - had he even been emailing me about troubles that weren't imaginary, I couldn't have helped him, stuck a thousand miles away like I was, nor after what he'd done to me would I be willing to. But his goal through all this was to get some reaction from me, to get me dancing to his score again or kill me trying. Jen postulates that he may have been harassing my friends to get them to hate me, so I'd get lonely and go back to him. (Of course, my friends couldn't understand what he was saying, but they know reality from delusion in any case. It's like gaydar, in a way: sane people can always detect the words and motions of insane people. I had nothing to worry about from such decent and wonderful people as you.) I agree that my father seems to have this idea in his head that since I'm not jumping at the chance to live an indigent and pointless life of homelessness and peanut butter sandwiches with him, I must be the Grand High Llama of the conspirators, because any good and grateful son surely would jump at that chance. It seems he wants a return to me being an obedient little nine year old, believing his fantasies and reading conspiracy books about Freemasons. He doesn't fathom the fact that I am 21 years old now, more of a man than he has ever been or will ever be, married to a woman I love and don't abuse, living my own life free of his control, and perfectly happy without him.
The psychology of abusers is the same, whether they're at heart sane or not: they hate losing control. I know many people who can attest to this personally, let alone the actual literature on the subject. There's also an element of abuse psychology in which the abuser believes the abusee is hopelessly evil and must be punished to have any hope of redemption, often so dominating the abusee's personality that the victim believes it too. This facet expresses itself handily in my father, not only in his coronation of anyone who leaves him (first my mother, now me) as the Big Enchilada directing the conspiracies against him, but also in his myriad and elliptical fantasies about my behavior before I even left him.
For example, when I was 14, he actually believed that I was a "spy for the homosexual agenda," whatever the flaming hell that means. I mean, not only was I 14 years old, I had never had any contact with anyone outside of my immediate family! How could such a cultlike upbringing even allow me to make contact with anyone in the outside world? But that was never an issue with my father, evidently. Maybe I had radios in my teeth. What mattered to him was the "fact" that I was betraying him to his enemies, I guess by revealing his favorite flavor of Nutrasweet yogurt or something. (Black cherry, by the way.)
Another time, probably when I was 15, I lost a notebook that contained a juvenile and not at all noteworthy little dinosaur story, one I had lost interest in and never finished. It was an "appendix" to a larger dinosaur novel I had written in 1994-95, chronicling the adventures of two characters when they were away from the narrator of the novel. The two characters, Emily Cutter and Pete Johnson, flew up to an isolated camp on the "mainland" of Cretaceous North America, eventualy to be attacked by dinoaurs and be lost in the woods and rescued, blah blah blah. All I had written before abandoning the project was the character Johnson watching an Alamosaurus herd walking across a beach. Pretty deviant stuff, huh? But this notebook fell out of the car one night in either '96 or '97 (my father can't even get the year right; he's distorted it somehow to '94, before I had even written the original novel!). Almost within days, my father was obsessed with what was in this notebook. I explained what was in it to him, of course, but small surprise, he substituted his own reality. He obviously knew what I had written far better than yours truly. Even though he already had this fantasy that people were "harassing" him because of what "the internet" said about him, he reversed time somehow and made my poor inoffensive "Cutter and Johnson Appendix" the cause of this harassment! Pretty neat trick, considering he never specified why such a childish attempt at writing dinosaur adventure would incense a nation of computer-users used to bestiality porn and whatnot. I had even forgotten the Appendix had existed until he dredged it up in his journal yesterday. Still obsessed with it, and still making me out to be some diabolical, reprehensible teenage psycho over a dinosaur story no one on Earth has ever seen.
I know Eric reads this journal - in fact he's one of four or five people I can depend on to read it regularly, but I'm going into that in a moment - so once again I'm going to bend over backwards to help him out, just like I always did for my first 18 years of life, and expecting nothing less than the same spitting hatred and ingratitude in return. I'll clue him in to the fate of the infamous Johnson and Cutter. There is not, nor has there ever been, any trace of that story on the internet. Some laundromat attendant probably found the notebook and threw it away while sweeping the parking lot. Humble origins indeed for a conspiracy that spans decades, wouldn't you say?
Now, speaking of journal readership. Extending his "the internet is after me" schtick into the CretaceousRick age, he now believes that my online diary is somehow responsible for his imaginary harassment. Once again, he's convinced that horrible, unspeakable ol' me is to blame for ruining his life. Apparently he has this concept that simply because my journal exists, and that he can see it, means that everyone in the world reads my meaningless record of minor events in my personal life. He also has this idea that my journal exists to get support for my "complaints" about him, as if my private life was a friggin' popularity contest. Maybe he suspects "the internet" has vote-counters like American Idol, and that people are reading my updates and voting for either him or me. Conspiracy Idol, it could be called. To counter this, and to get his version of events circulating, he started his own journal way back on August 14, apparently thinking that just by being there he would attract millions of visitors. I'm sorry to say, livejournal doesn't work that way. After two and a half years of steadily expanding my friends list, I can expect roughly half a dozen consant readers - Jen, my father, and a small handful of friends who take the time to read my entires in full. And until he posted a harassing comment in my journal with his fancy username, a couple days ago, no one other than him knew his journal existed. Yet he prattled on as if he really believed everyone on "the internet" was secretly reading his side, and merely snubbing him for my sake. I'm touched, internet, thank you so much!
Jen has a degree in forensic psychology, the study of psychology as it relates to criminal behavior. She recognizes the classic symptoms of the abuser mentality in my father, and even after my limited reading on the subject I can as well. So I'm making a sincere effort to not let his continued harassment have any effect on me. He wants me to get into a tiff about him, to feel guilty or worthless or defensive. He has made me angry, yes, and I'll always feel some element of guilt for leaving him, even though I couldn't help him in the way he needed to be helped, and I needed to look after myself for once in my life, or die. Even such a clear-cut choice can be blurred by the mentality the abuser instills in the abusee. I owe Eric nothing. But I still love him enough to be hurt and angered by his relentless attacks on who I am, on his insistence on rubbing sand and salt and vitriol into the still-open wounds he left in my psyche. I still care about him, because I am a normal human being, and he is my father, no matter how abnormal he is. It's a difficult rope to walk, balancing between my own best interest and my misguided concern for him. I can't let the balancing act upset my own inner balance, the spiritual poise that has brought me so far and will take me so much farther. I can't let him attack the foundation of my Self.
And I won't. It's that simple.
The difference between sanity and insanity is that sane people can think rationally and behave reasonably. (By that defintion, most New York drivers are insane, but I already suspected that.) And I will never, under any of his provocations, be brought down to his level. I am taking the high-road to the best of my ability, and I'll leave hiding in the woods from a threat in one's own mind to him. Until he's ready to seek help for his illness, no one can help him - not the state of Ohio, and certainly not me. Let him remain a roadside bandit on the information superhighway. He's not going to get me under his control ever again, and that's my last word.