Fairly certain I’ve used this song in a previous post but I’m okay with that. I love Dave Grohl, my longest unrequited love. I love the Foos and even went to see their objectively terrible “horror” movie last week. Loved every minute! Pat Smear was the absolute best part throughout. Anyway, this song is one that spirals through my mind often enough that I suppose it’s kind of like the soundtrack of my life in a lot of ways.
I recently got this sticker and put it on my laptop … to make it mine and try to erase the memory that the last person to type on these keys, for the better part of two years, was actually not me. It was a man I loved, wholly and without hesitation, a man I gave my laptop to without question, but also a man who isn’t at all the person I thought he was. I’m still having trouble accepting that the John I knew, the John I loved, was the same person who lied to me from the moment he met me. It’s easier for me to think of them as two different people. I want to keep the good memories and those only exist in the person who was never real.
I met with my therapist tonight for the fourth time and, while I guess I am still glad that I am making this investment in myself, I am also angry that I have to. It’s a hell of a lot of money and just so much mental and emotional work. I am angry that I have to pay to talk to someone every week about betrayal because I cannot figure out how to process it on my own — me, someone who has spent two decades working in mental health!
I’ve experienced a lot in this life. A lot of loss. A lot of emotional trauma. A lot of things that I’m only now realizing may have made me an easy target for a man like John.
My therapist told me tonight that John is a sociopath. This is a label that I am having trouble accepting right now. I don’t think it’s accurate; I think it’s actually inappropriate and unprofessional. But I also question what I know … about anything anymore. I feel like she’s making a diagnosis of someone that she only knows through four conversations with me, and this online journal. I have known a sociopath before, years ago, I dated him; he was evil and I struggle to assign the word “evil” to the John I knew the past three years.
The therapist though is trying to get me to accept that there are not two people, like I keep referring to during our sessions. There is just one person. One man who intentionally talked to me in a bar in July 2018 while he had another woman at home. He came home with me. He woke up with me. He asked for my number. He intentionally kept seeing me. He gained my trust, made me feel comfortable and understood and like I had finally found a someone that I did not want to imagine life without. He never told me about the other woman.
This therapist described my experience as catastrophic and emphasized that John did that to me; a good man could not have done that, to me or to his fiancé. She’s trying to get me to accept that although he tried to tell me he didn’t want anything serious in August 2018, that all of his actions prior to and in the three plus years after did not indicate that he was already in a serious relationship. He never told me he was sleeping with anyone else, let alone living with them and engaged to them.
She’s trying to help me see that I was too trusting, that what I thought was convenience (him always coming to me, or respect for my need for space, or admission of feeling sad in winter and needing to hibernate) — all of these things that I thought made us alike were really just easy ways for him to take advantage of my trust. I made it too easy for him to live two lives and to take advantage of the goodness in me.
While it is very easy to beat myself up about being too trusting, it isn’t very helpful. Because at the end of the day, I cannot help but think about all of the time we spent together, the conversations we had, the things we experienced, and I cannot make myself accept that a deceitful person was in those times, conversations, and experiences and continually & intentionally thinking of what to say to protect his double life. The reality is that half of the dystopian Trumpian nightmare, the fucking insurrection, the election, all of Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, all of COVID, so many tv shows and movies, the end of GoT, nearly all things sports, a particular SNL skit about Philly, so many dumb little inside jokes, all of my experience with my appalling excuse for a manager, all of my application and selection process for grad school, all of my experiences with every cohort of scholarship recipients — EVERY PIVOTAL AND TRIVIAL PART OF THE LAST THREE YEARS were experienced with this human. All of those experiences and memories cannot be divorced from my conversations with John about them. His thoughts and perspectives on those things are essentially mine; they always have been. I couldn’t have experienced them with anyone else and, even still, wouldn’t have wanted to. How fucked up is that though??
Why can’t I get my brain to accept that this person was LYING to me the entire time I knew him? There is no reason to believe that his compassion, empathy, earnestness, or curiosity about and toward the world and other humans was ever real. But how do I accept that?? It means I also have to accept that none of the good was ever real, and that all of the happiness I felt was based on bullshit. In theory, I understand that he likely just fed off of what I felt and expressed it back because he knew that was a way to make me feel seen and heard and a sense of solidarity and belonging. We were peas in a pod, in my experience. Not his though, I guess. Or, he just had two (or more) pods. I have no idea. Who does?
There is literally not one person who knows more about the situation with my boss, no one who knows how fulfilling and proud I am of the work I have been doing the past four plus years. I have never had a role that I felt fit me better, like it was handcrafted for me. And yet, the lack of leadership and toxic relationship I’ve experienced because of my completely inept and insecure manager the past two and a half years has been incredibly stressful. John has been around since the day this moron was hired. I work 50-60 hour weeks with no support, no understanding of the actual work or even education, generally, no acknowledgement of the immense effort it takes to do the work well – beyond glowing performance reviews but also a hostile working relationship. I applied to this management program with John’s encouragement, and he was as excited as I was in September when I finally got in after two years of trying. At least, he seemed to be.
When I finally reached my breaking point and applied for a new job tonight though, he was the first person I wanted to tell. I actually had the thought that he would be proud of me and, at my hesitation to leave a job I love, he would say “Fuck her.” He would be right and hearing him say it would fortify me and make me smile. But I didn’t have him to tell. And because he was really the only person I ever confided in about it, instead, I just didn’t tell anyone. Except this therapist — which I also only have because of him. Thanks, man?
Before our next chat, I’m supposed to send this therapist a list of the aspects about this whole nightmare that have had the most impact, the things that we’re going to systematically work through together. There are too many, she says, so we need to narrow it down. I am stuck. I know I need to start recognizing that the “good guy” and the “good memories” are figments. I know he’s a bad dude who intentionally deceived me, and his now wife, for more than three years, every single fucking day. That he continually and willfully made the choice to lie. Honestly, I never thought he was smart enough for that level of duplicity, but I am slowly starting to acknowledge that I was duped in more ways than I can process at any given time. Acceptance is another animal, altogether.
This therapist also says that it’s not my place to worry about her, about Crystal, his now wife. That I’m a good person and that’s why I worry almost every day, at some point, about whether she is doing okay and if she has support and what will happen when he does it to her again. And when she thinks back to five months ago, a month before she married him, to when I told her who I was and that I’d unknowingly been in a relationship with her fiancé since 2018… I can’t imagine the guilt and shame that will come with the realization that she made the wrong choice. Maybe it already has? The therapist says that she is still picking her own jaw up off the floor to know that Crystal married John. My friends and family are too, but I’m not. I know how charming he is, how much you want to believe in his version of his love for you. “Would she be worrying about you?,” she asked me. No. She probably hates me, even though I don’t deserve it. But, as someone who’s been cheated on before, I also don’t blame her. And I will not apologize for trying to make sure she knows what and who he really is. I wish someone had told me. There were people in the bar that night in July 2018 that had to have known that John was living with, not just roommates, but a woman he was sleeping with and had been for years, even though they weren’t engaged then. He was too fucking social. Someone knew.
But also, if John is really a “sociopath” or, even at the very most has some pathological penchant for lying, shouldn’t I worry about her? As the only other person who was victimized by him, at least in this situation, shouldn’t I try to make sure she’s okay, as a woman?
I’ve tried to play devil’s advocate — that maybe she still doesn’t know? That it’s possible she never got my email in October and he never told her. But when I’m in that absurd thought loop, the therapist reminds me that I shared this blog with people I found on social media that were on their wedding guest list (left on my laptop) after I found out the wedding actually happened. And I don’t know who they were, of course, but there were hundreds of views on this website in the following days so there are people in their lives who know. People who should care enough to tell her, and support her. The regular views here come from all the places they & their village live.
I tried to push back too by saying that he’d probably tell everyone I’m just some crazy bitch or that it wasn’t that significant. The John I knew would never say that about me — but she also reminded me that all the details are here. On these many pages, in these tens of thousands of words. There is just no way that anyone who reads them, especially anyone that knows one or both of them, could possibly think it was any less. Even if it seems impossible to believe.
It’s not my business whether they or she believe it. I’ve done my part to make people aware of the wolf in sheep’s clothing. That’s all I have control over.
So I want to live again. Sooner than later. I have to get it out so I can move on. That’s what all of this drivel amounts to. Four months of pouring onto the page. Living again is the goal. I’d love to love again but I’m not sure that’s possible. Sidenote: do you know how many “John”s there are on online dating? It is brutal, y’all. I swipe left on every single one.
I’m trying. That’s something I’m proud of. There are no days where I don’t think about it, about him, about why I have to go through this. Yet. But the amount of time it takes up in my day is getting less. The sadness still weighs a lot and comes in waves. The anger and thirst for vengeance comes less frequently. I’m hanging my hat on that for now. Little by little. After all, it’s times like these we learn to live again, right?
It’ll be a while before I’m ready to give again. This is the selfish season of my life. I hope it doesn’t last too long.
Music for the Mood: Times Like These – Foo Fighters
Tiger Lily Vegas 