“Why me?”  I can’t even begin to count the number of times I wondered this whilst involved with my narcissist, Julia.  Although, this why me isn’t to be confused with the self-victimizing how could this have happened to me?!  I recall a couple of times I asked Julia, “If it hadn’t been me who came along, if you’d met someone else before me, someone who showed you the same affection, attention, and understanding, would we have ever been?”  She just smiled and said, “You were exactly who I needed.”  At the time, I took solace in her answer, feeling that I mattered, that I was needed, that I was not just loved and cherished, but cherished by the person who was paramount to me.  But now, in retrospect?  What she said was spot on and probably one of the very few truths she ever told me in our 4-½ years together – an empath, a fresh source of narcissistic supply, was exactly what my narcissist needed.

When I first met Julia, as I (semi-)fondly recounted in my first article, it was the first week of February 2015.  (Un)Fortunately for me, she was like no one I had ever met before.  I say, “Unfortunately,” because, between that beautiful Russian accent, her petite feminine frame and beautiful face, I was hopelessly lost in her almost immediately.  And, conversely, I say, “Fortunately,” because one narcissistic relationship bloody near was my undoing.  I don’t believe I could have survived a second one.  About two years into our time together, I began to question if I truly meant anything to my narcissist.  I mean, after all, the way she could so easily walk away, cutting any and all ties with me, giving me the silent treatment for weeks or even months at a time, left me wondering if I truly meant anything at all to her.  I wrestled with wondering if she valued me, and us, and what we (supposedly) shared.  I found myself asking, if this bastardized, quasi-present construct of love was her idea of a healthy relationship, why had she become involved with me in the first place?  Was there something special that drew her to me?  I sure as hell didn’t feel special, let alone loved or cherished.  So why did she decide to pursue a relationship with me?  “Why me?”

I found myself hyperfocused, almost fixated, on that question.  It wasn’t like Julia had a shortage of men who were interested in her.  Even when we were together, she received lavish amounts of attention from droves of men, attention that she made little-to-no-effort to dissuade, nor did she feel compelled to share with them or anyone else that she was (supposedly) in a committed, monogamous relationship with me.  And, to be honest, I have genuinely come to believe that there was nothing particularly unique or special that set me apart from any of the other men who sought her affections and attention whether before, during, or even after we were together.  The truth of the matter is, when I first met Julia, I was simply in the right place at the right time.  Well, let me rephrase that.  If we’re being honest, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  But it was going to take me 4-½ years to figure that one out.

So what about you?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the lies our narcissist told us about how loved, amazing, irreplaceable, and cherished we were, were true?  What if we were, indeed, that amazing, special, undeniably wonderful person that they simply couldn’t live without?  I mean, let’s be honest, everyone wants to feel like they’re someone’s everything, right?  Especially when that someone is our everything.  I vividly recall one night when Julia and I began talking again after yet another in the multitude of discard phases that had been and were still yet to be.  She told me, “I’ve tried to live without you and I can’t.  I don’t want to.”  Doesn’t it sound absolutely splendiferous to entertain such a notion?  To believe that we are so vitally indispensable to someone?  To actually hold in our heart a purported reality that we are so absolutely cherished by someone that they feel they can’t live without us?  Well, beautiful, I sincerely regret to tell you but, we aren’t.  And we never were.  At least, not for our narcissist.  To be perfectly honest, we were just another face, in an ocean of faces, that was unwittingly crying out to our narcissist, screaming to be rescued, clamoring to be cherished for the ineffable beauty and purity that truly is within each of us as empaths.  But contrary to what we were promised, inverse to the multitude of lies we were led to believe, the person who threw us the lifeline and pulled us to safety would soon become the person who would drown us in a septic sea of duplicity, deception, manipulation, and infidelity.  They would liltingly label the gift which they gave love, but it would be abuse.

Now please don’t misunderstand.  I’m by no means saying that you are not amazing and beautiful, an irreplaceable soul that someone cannot live without.  I’m simply sharing the bitter truth that neither of us, you nor I, were ever that for our narcissist.  Yes, they were that to us.  But we were just a means to an end for them.  A series of succulent meals of emotional and physical placation on which our narcissist dined to their dark heart’s content.  Think about your relationship with your narcissist.  When did it truly start to go to hell in a handbasket?  Was it about the time that they started changing, growing distant, becoming less emotionally and physically involved?  Was it about the time that their “love” began waning and you trepidatiously asked them why?  And what was their response?  I’m willing to wager dollars to doughnuts they said it was you.  Something you had done or hadn’t done.  Something you had said or hadn’t said.  Or maybe it was a combination of all the aforementioned ingredients.  Regardless, did you notice that no amount of effort on your part was able to fix what you instinctively perceived was broken in the relationship with your narcissist?  That’s because the only truly broken facet of the relationship with your narcissist was your narcissist.  They were the only thing that was beyond repair.  Not you.  Not the relationship.  Them.  Period.

I beseech you, don’t do as I did.  Don’t sit in the dark, night after night, day after day, relentlessly wrestling with the ill-conceived notion that yours was the hand that brought an end to the relationship with your narcissist.  If anything, yours was the love that enabled your relationship with an unloveable person to last as long as it did.  If you hadn’t been the forgiving, loving, compassionate, committed person you are, your narcissist would have moved on much sooner.  After all, where are they now?  Moved on.  Right?  And most likely immediately on the heels of your relationship’s demise.  And you?  You’re still dealing with the wreckage of what was once, in your eyes, something so ineffably beautiful.  You’re now relegated to living your life navigating the fallout of a broken person’s broken love.  And that speaks volumes about you, your character, and the beauty that is you.

You’re taking the time to heal.  That’s a luxury a narcissist will never know – healing.  Don’t allow a reprehensibly vile person with a deformed concept of love, and a warped sense of how to love, to deface the beauty of your spirit.  Yes, we made a grave mistake in believing that our narcissist was the wonderful, loving, caring, compassionate person that they pretended they were.  But that’s what they do!  They are masters of deceit and deception.  That’s why they’re so bloody adept at seducing and deluding people with souls as beautiful as yours.  There is such great beauty within you.  Don’t allow someone else’s hideousness to extinguish that beauty.  Be the light in the darkness, not more darkness.