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April 11, 2005

Once there was a thing called spring

It is finally, determinedly, actually, positively Spring. Birds start singing as soon as dawn touches the horizon and keep it up all day long until dusk. The pear trees are in full blossom and glow like lamps against the sky. Bees hover over every flowering bush and plant. et cetera. I am so happy to have made it to this point, to the thaw, to the warmth and sunlight and lots of it.

I have been doing some reading and have learned something about the husband and something about myself and something about the past and something about the future and something about what the almost-15 years of my marriage were for: maybe nothing. At least that's according to Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisted and self-described narcissist, whose book is "the documentation of a road of self-discovery. It was a painful process, which led to nowhere. I am no different - and no healthier - today than I was when I wrote this book. My disorder is here to stay, the prognosis is poor and alarming."

Great! And about the poor unfortunates who have the bad luck and ill timing to fall in love with, cohabit a house with, marry, and bear the children of a narcissist? "... to invest in a narcissist is a purposeless, futile and meaningless activity. ...Abandon him and go about reconstructing your own life. Very few people deserve the kind of investment that is an absolute prerequisite to life with a narcissist. To cope with a narcissist is a full time, energy and emotion-draining job, which reduces people around the narcissist to insecure nervous wrecks. Who deserves such a sacrifice?"

Who indeed. This is how Dr. Vaknin sees, and wants me to see, my life: ...humans are specks of dust in a totally indifferent universe, ...playthings... And ...finally their pain means nothing to anyone but themselves. Nothing whatsoever. It has all been in vain.

Yesterday in the late afternoon I stood on the deck in the sun with a glass of wine and watched the world turn green around me and listened to the birds and the kids and to a faint piano tune from somebody's house and to a muted conversation coming from two people fishing off one of the docks and to the voice inside me that said love doesn't die, ever, no matter what, and I didn't have to but I believed it, and believe it in spite of how futile my love might be. But I can forgive myself for that.

Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)