I changed my mind...

About carrying on with this blog. I will be discontinuing my writings here. 

Two reasons: 1.  Having taken many months to feel safe enough to let one or two new people into my life, and to rebuild my safety net, I have no urge to tell my abusive ex-partner, who has this url, about the details of my new relationships. 2.  I feel that the anonymous blog has achieved only a very small part of what I hoped for it, and that my energies are better focused elsewhere. My energy for extraneous activities is still very much limited since last year. 

If and when I decide to start journalling again, I will contact those of you I know personally and let you know where my new url is. 

To the one or two people I don't know, who have commented or emailed to thank me for writing, I send you my best wishes and hope you will continue following the adventures of other poly writers, and perhaps if I start writing again we will find each other in a different place.

In the meantime I leave this closing thought (and how I came to it): 

It is possible to be mentally ill *and* a bastard. 

When I was in my teens I went out bar-hopping with some friends of mine, and one of the guys in our group was sitting facing roughly into a walkway, although not by any means in the way. A guy using a wheelchair came in, and rather than carefully moving around us, casually ran over my friend's foot. My friend, in quite a lot of pain, gave him a mouthful of the choicest expletives he knew and pointed out in no uncertain terms that using a wheelchair does not give you the right to not look where you are going. 

The rest of us were mortified - it's somehow taboo in this society to speak ill of the physically or mentally disabled. We couldn't believe he had done that. 

The guy in the wheelchair stopped, stared, and said thankyou. He apologised for having been a careless arse, and thanked my friend for having treated him like a normal person, rather than a thing to be wrapped in cotton wool and pandered to. They didn't become firm friends or anything sappy like that - frankly the wheelchair guy, apart from his stopping to say thankyou, was a bit of an arse. A whole group of us learned that evening though, that being able-bodied doesn't mean that a person who is otherwise has the right to roll over you. 

So where am I going with this? 

Early-ish in our relationship, a certain person mentioned to me  that he had previously been diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, but had 'cured' himself of it. Thus setting himself up very handily, both as the 'person who needs to be wrapped in cotton wool and pandered to' but with an added flavour of 'but I'm saying I'm sane now, and you have to buy it or risk alienating me' - and so I bought it. Hook, line and sinker. Survivor Sympathy, and special status in one easy step. Frankly, whether what he told me was truth, lie or imagination didn't really matter, as it became slowly clear (unfortunately after I had left the country with him) that something was definitely up. 

Certain events took place that made me realise that Mountain was either still suffering from some sort of mental illness, or manipulative to the point of pathology anyway. He could act in very violent and agressive ways, and ten minutes later tell me with clear and innocent eyes that I had started acting weirdly towards him for no reason. - The morning it became unbearably clear to me was at Duchess's house, when I was packing up my clothes to leave for the day at her request, and he spent some time telling me loudly how selfish and worthless and pathetic I was, and how he never wanted to see me again. Yet not more than an hour later this had never happened - he described the event as himself 'asking me for cuddles and reassurance' and me turning cold and attacking him out of the blue.

There was definitely something wrong. The events of that morning only made it heart-breakingly clear. Trouble was, I was still in sympathy mode. I imagined what it must be like for a person who believes he has been verbally attacked at random by his partner (all too easily, as I'd been in that situation myself earlier - what a coincidence), and my heart bled. 

It took me one more serious physical attack*, and police advisement to remove myself, the unlawful confiscation of my property for several months, and the non-return of my life savings to realise what I probably should have earlier. That even if the things he was telling me I had done and was planning to do had been true. If I had plotted and schemed to 'break his heart', to 'damage his trust in people' and to 'line up my next shag' behind his back (a particularly odd accusation from someone supposedly polyamorous), and even if I had decided to 'willfully damage his property'  - i.e. that box of his CDs that I dropped whilst having my property illegally taken from me. Even if all that was true - Nothing, nothing at all justifies the level of violence he used on me. The attempt to cause me grievous bodily harm (yes, I mean this - a permanently damaged knee joint counts as GBH), the threats to break my fingers, arms and legs, and worse. And the calculated use of the rental vehicle as cover to avoid any of this being seen by actual eye-witnesses. Not a jot of that was the mental illness. That part was pure malevolence. 

I spent months making excuses for a man who was acting like a bastard, convinced that the mental illness 'making him' act in this way was all the more reason he needed me. I bent over backwards to pander to his paranoia, foolishly giving him access to my money, my property, my emotional well-being, and not expecting anything in return. I should, perhaps have heeded the maxim 'We do not see things as they are. We see them as We are' - and realised that his paranoia was based on the fact that his motives were, perhaps, not quite as pure as he pretended. 

Lesson learned, I feel. Though far, far too long in the coming. 

And I hope that some day my experience can prevent someone else going through the same pain. 

I may perhaps return as occasional therapy, to write about the things that I didn't mention at the time they happened, which I should really have paid attention to (for example how I came to forgive a certain person for attempting to throw me out of a moving vehicle, but couldn't do the same when he simply called me a 'selfish bitch'). While I was focusing on this as a blog about polyamory, these things weren't relevant: They were attributes of a physically and emotionally abusive relationship, not specifically a poly one, but I think there are still more lessons to be learned nonetheless, and perhaps revisiting them at some point might help someone else avoid going through the same experiences. 

For all intents and purposes though, please consider this online journal ended. It marks a three-year phase in the life of a person who I don't even really identify as me any more. I have changed a lot in a few months, and I realise that it's time to move on, not just from the horrors of my relationship with Mountain, but also the threads of internalised shame and monogamous-styled emotional blackmail unintentionally laced through my earlier relationships by well-meaning but ultimately destructive friends and lovers. I am going into the cocoon, and will emerge unrecognisable. 

It has been a long and tough crawl to get this far, but I look forward to flying. 

Love to you all,

Red. 

x

*I've not even talked about the violence before we left Canada, and I still struggle to, even with trusted friends - not so much because of what it was, but because I feel so bloody stupid for having gone back afterwards for more. One day, though.