Through the World Barefooted -- Gerda's LBS Guide

[Gerda]

Gerda - I ALWAYS thought your H was a real weird guy the way he wrote to you - I know you thought that was just his "beautiful" way of writing but to me it always smacked of strangeness and insufferable self-importance.

I guess I relate in that I really didn't see my ex's narcissism until it was pointed out to me after our divorce. It had always been there, I was just so accommodating that it didn't really register until later.

I never ever thought of his writing as beautiful, at least not anything I posted here. I am a writer and a writing teacher and spent many hours trying to edit his incomprehensible dissertation over many many years. Before MLC, he could at times write beautifully and he does write beautiful songs (he was a musician in the past). But there was always something in it to me that seemed overwrought, even before MLC, and once he went crazy, his writing was awful, painful, impossible to understand. It revealed his insanity.

I remember you told me many times in the early days that he had NPD or borderline or something and I brushed it off. I remember writing once that it seemed like my H did all the same things as everyone else's MLCer, and, in my early days, your two-by-fours were so painful that they sometimes chased me away. But as I wrote above, I am looking back now and wondering about all the things I explained away or chose to ignore, and his mental health seems to have been off from the earliest days. My mom had NPD, and my brother, and I think my father might have too, so I now think I was drawn to it because it was familiar. The truth is I saw you make similar statements to so many other posters that I thought it was just your shtik. Now I think you probably were seeing something I wasn't ready to see (though I still think you post that to a lot of people!).