Guess Who’s Back!

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He’s Back

The way that the narcissist’s reappearance in my life occurred is so uncanny in that it is much like his reappearance into my life after a two-year hiatus we experienced during a breakup a little over 20 years ago. After our breakup, he reappeared into my life by first sending someone to scope out the seen with me, writing a note and attaching it to my car, calling me after experiencing a loss, and then finally showing up at my place. Fast forward to just two years ago, and his tactics to hoover me back are the same.

This time, the script was somewhat different, but more or less, the narcissist instituted the same tactics. I had visited my hometown because of the death of a family member. In all the years since the narcissist married, I have not ever seen him again. Although I do not visit my hometown very often, I have still never seen him even when I have visited with family. For me, that was always a pleasant gift to never have to run into him or any of his family members or associates. This time, however, I had to hear about him, and I found this highly suspect since no one ever mentioned him to me again after finding out that he was a married man.

It would be my brother who took the bait from the narcissist. The narcissist had visited the family wake prior to my arrival. He gave his condolences and then talked with my brother. My brother relayed the narcissist’s message to me. My brother told me that the narcissist said that he wished that things could have been different. He wished that he had not let me get away. He wished that he had tried harder to win me over … to get me back. He still loved me. He would always love me. I was the one who got away.

I found it odd that my brother was so passionate about letting me know this information. He spoke in a way that signified urgency. Without actually saying directly, my brother implied that I should talk to the narcissist before I left town. Although my reaction did not show anything, I could feel a liquid-y bubble of emotion well up within me. No, I was not feeling sick. I was feeling that agitation that turns to immediate anger when I know someone is attempting to manipulate me.

So, the narcissist had obviously appealed to my brother’s emotions in some way. Had this narcissist no consideration for my brother’s suffering? My brother had just lost his wife! By appealing to my brother during a difficult time of mourning, the narcissist’s manipulative tactic made it easy for my brother to overlook that this narcissist was trying to hoover me back into a narcissistic vortex. My brother was an emotional wreck. Narcissists will always prey upon the vulnerable.

The narcissist had even talked to my mother! Like my brother, she also chimed in on the compliments that the narcissist gave about me. She was also making underhanded implications that I should contact the narcissist. It was too much for me to bear. I felt such an overwhelming sense of emotions – a mixture of anxiety, anger, and embarrassment. Yet, outwardly, my responses to what they said were flat. “Cool”, “okay”, “uh uh”, and “hmm”. I did not really know what to say, but I am glad that I remained quiet.

The only thing that I could gather up to say around my family was that the next time they saw the narcissist to tell him “hello”. Face palm! Why did I even say that? That’s a license to start the ignition. That was an invitation to knock on the door. We were at a wake, and we were mourning loss. I figured that these were just words within a conversation that had very little meaning when thinking of the reason why we were gathering in the first place. After the wake, I was returning back to my life. I did not care what they told him. I wanted nothing to do with him.

And The Hoover Begins

After leaving the wake, I returned back to my life knowing that by living in another state, I was safe. Plus, I had long since relocated two additional times to other cities further away from the one that I had originally moved to over 20 years ago. I never considered that I would be found because no one, besides my family, knew that I had moved further away. No one knew where I even lived besides my family. However, all of what my brother and mother had told me gave me reason to ponder, and the more I pondered over what was said to me at the wake, the angrier I became. I fumed about it all for a few weeks.

First of all, I was bothered that the narcissist thought it a good idea to even voice his feelings at a wake. Second, he talked to my family! Why would he even do that? They did not even know about the drama that unfolded between the narcissist and me over 20 years ago. I lived a totally separate life apart from my narcissistic family even back then. So I not only fumed over this situation that the narcissist had reopened, I ruminated over it. How dare he take this to my family when he isolated me from them during the length of our relationship over 20 years ago?

My rumination soon ended when my life went back to my normal again … up until the pandemic changed lives all over. The narcissist was all but forgotten as I tried to make sense of a “new” normal while attempting to adjust and keep myself from becoming a possible casualty of the coronavirus. For whatever reason, the narcissist did not share in the same thoughts as I did during the heightened time of the virus. He was adamant about contacting me.

One evening while on social media, I opened one of my platforms to see that the narcissist had sent me a “friend” request. Normally, when receiving friend requests from people, I will click on their profile pictures to look at their page. I will look at pictures, posts, and whatever I need to see that shows that they are no longer the same people in terms of toxicity. I look for growth in as much as a “feed” can show, and then I make my decision. Sometimes, if I am not feeling the vibe to accept their friend requests, then I do not, and I leave the requests in a growing pile for people whose requests I may or may not eventually accept.

I know all of this about accepting friend requests sounds a bit much, but I have had entirely too many narcissistic experiences to not be careful. Plus, I grew up in a narcissistic family, and I have had a number of social media “friends” that I have had to ghost, block, or unfriend all because of their ties to my family, their feelings about my family, and their feelings about me. Most of my social media friends that grew up in my hometown do not even talk to me. Growing up in a narcissistic household made my life almost unbearable at times, but difficult nonetheless.

What is worse is that my town seemed to be a nesting ground for people displaying a plethora of toxic behaviors. Making friends for me was extremely hard enough with my extremely introverted personality that people did not seem to connect with nor understand, but add on being the scapegoat (the one always blamed and accused), and I can assure you that I only have the bulk of family and friends on social media from my hometown because they just want to know my business.

Clearly, if I am accustomed to this routine of accepting or denying requests, it should not have been a problem to accept the narcissist’s friend request. This is what I thought, but this was not the case. I waited to determine how I would feel about accepting the narcissist’s request. By now, I had learned about narcissistic personality disorder, and I could say for certain that this man is definitely a narcissist by clinical definition. He meets all of the criteria for the disorder. I wanted to wait for my discernment to kick in. I wanted to weigh the cost of opening the door to him again. In the end, though, I decided to leave the door closed because I felt nothing.

My Curiosity

The small amount of curiosity I had about accepting the narcissist’s friend request was not enough to tip me over the edge of acceptance. I went with my instinctive gut feelings. My gut said nothing. My gut had no emotions for this moment. I felt numb. I took my feeling of numbness as my cue to do nothing about the narcissist’s friend request until I knew to do something.

I know that to someone with logic, feeling your way through an answer does not make much sense. A person either accepts a friend request or does not accept a friend request. What is so hard about that? But, as for me, I discern by using all of my five senses, and my “feeling” sense of intuition is what I go with first. Even though I should know not to open the door to a narcissist because it really is just common sense, I am the one who has to know that I am not doing something out of a bad place within my heart. I know. It’s crazy.

Anyway, I had to know that the door with the narcissist was completely closed. I had to know that there was absolutely nothing left inside of my heart for him. I had to know that there was no narcissistic residue. I had to know that I had no words left to say. I had to know he no longer meant anything to me. I had to know that I was not hoping for something to happen. I had to know my heart to him was dead. That is just how it is with me.

In all the relationships that end in my life, I have to know that I am done with a person because when I am done with a person, I am truly done. There is no going back. There is no relationship because it is dead to me. I am the type that can see an ex-friend on the street but have no desire to reconnect with them. When this happens it is because I feel nothing for them. I feel absolutely nothing for them. I will look at them and know that this person was someone I once knew and loved dearly, but loving them dearly cost me. I exhausted all of my reserves with the person. The person took everything I gave them in an emotional sense. So once I see them, I have nothing for them because they completely drained me. They left me with nothing.

So this is how I know when I do not care anymore, and that I have truly moved on from the person. Even after more than 20 years of not being in this narcissist’s life, I was still unsure that there was closure for me. The only way I was going to know was to accept the friend request. I did not, however. Instead, I went about adjusting to life during the pandemic and left the situation alone.

I left the situation alone until I did not leave it alone.

Stay tuned for the continuation of this saga …