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The Letter In The Mailbox
One day after completing work virtually, I went to the mail box to find an unaddressed envelope. The only script written on the envelope was my name spelled incorrectly. I looked around wondering who might have placed the unaddressed envelope in my box. The only people that knew my first name were the neighbors who lived within close proximity of me. So I began making a process of elimination within my mind to figure out which neighbor might have given me a letter.
I consider myself to be a great neighbor because I mind my own business. I speak to my neighbors when I see them, but I have never visited with any of them because my schedule has never afforded me with leisure time. Plus, I do not wish to become involved in neighborhood drama. I am an introvert, and I have enough problems with narcissistic personalities to have them so close to home. So, I choose to keep my neighbors at a distance. Even with being home more during the pandemic, my neighbors are still at a safe and comfortable distance. The most anyone in the neighborhood does is wave from their own property. So having a letter in my box was quite a surprise.
Once I opened the letter, I read the letter without first knowing who the sender was at all. I just read the letter with a sense of wonder. Soon wonder turned to surprise. Surprise turned to amazement. Then amazement turned to anger. Then anger gave way to rage with a shout of various words and phrases. Just like that, I had been hoovered back to an emotional time that only the narcissist that I almost married could manage to fester within me. The narcissist that I almost married over 20 years ago had placed the letter inside my mailbox. It was a letter written to idealize and devalue me. This narcissist was on a mission to hoover me, and I had not physically seen this man in over 20 years!
The Contents of the Letter
The narcissist devalued me from start to finish in a letter that was designed to gaslight me into questioning entire events throughout our long relationship from over 20 years ago. I was stunned speechless. I had to reread the narcissist’s letter several times forward and backward to make it all make sense! This narcissist has not changed, has not seen the light, and has accepted accountability for his actions. He is a narcissist and will forever be a narcissist!
I do not know why I would hope for anything else except for what I should expect from the fact that he is a narcissist. I must admit that years ago when I had regrets that I should have given him a chance, there was a small glimmer of hope that he might see the error of his ways and realize I was a good woman even with my flaws. I hoped that he might work on changing himself so that he could see that I was a good woman. I hoped that maybe he would wake up and realize that he sincerely made a mistake.
Thankfully, years of inner work, therapy, prayer, and walking out what it means to understand narcissistic personality disorder showed me the truth about my hopes. My hopes were misplaced, unfortunately. Instead of hoping for him to change, I changed myself. I did the work (and am still working). I realized that I had a lot of issues, and I made myself accountable for them. I did not look back and place blame on him for my problems. I did not project.
Throughout the narcissist’s entire letter to me, he gaslighted me and projected onto to me situations from the past that he was responsible for creating. This narcissist had a lot of nerve. By the time I had read the letter several times, I was outraged at how this man had married, had children, and moved on with his life for more than 20 years and still had not changed at all. There was absolutely no change because his letter told me all that I needed to know regarding his narcissistic traits. His narcissistic traits are full blown.
Normally, I have to read between the lines to determine whether a person’s wording signals any red flags. Not this narcissist’s letter … oh no! Before I could even open the envelope to his letter, I was assaulted by a red flag when I saw my name! We were together for ten years as a couple. How does he not know how to spell my name? Just seeing my name misspelled sent me into a fit of annoyance. My face flushed with redness.
Then, when I opened the letter, I was saluted with the same misspelled name. I did not know if I wanted to laugh or cry. I frantically searched for the sender’s name to figure out why my name was misspelled, and when I saw that the narcissist was the sender, my entire being filled with dread and annoyance. I sat down with the letter and just stared in silence and shook my head. I realized that he had literally insulted me! He was repaying me for a narcissistic injury that he had suffered because I rejected him.
Before you go, “hey, give him a break. He has not seen you in over 20 years. He may have forgotten how to spell your name.” Let me just mention that he cheated on me years ago with a woman with the same first name and spelling, and he had written her name all over the place to spite me. So, nope … he has no excuse! I knew him well back then, and I know him now because his narcissistic behavior has not changed at all. He’s a full-fledged malignant narcissist!
Needless to say, he devalued me with my name so that before I could even start reading the letter, I would already feel some type of annoyance. Plus, I was already feeling as if I needed to prepare to defend myself. This is a tactic of narcissists – creating situations where victims feel the need to defend themselves. This narcissist was setting me up. After getting past the misspelling of my name, I was hit with love-bombing. He sprinkled his expression of “I love you” all throughout the letter while devaluing me in some of the same sentences.
Moreover, this narcissist gaslighted me by briefly discussing the “friend request” I supposedly sent him, and he explained it to where it would seem that I might cause him problems if he accepted it. I was like what? Unbelievable! What is this madness he’s talking about? As I read this piece of information, I actually explained the truth of what happened out loud to myself. I was literally defending myself against the lies he expressed in his letter. I literally stopped reading his letter just to go and prove that I never sent him a friend request by actually pressing the accept button to his friend request to prove that he literally sent me the friend request in the first place. After doing so, it dawned on me that this was the obvious purpose for his writing about the friend request and making such a big deal about it. I was furious! He had manipulated me through gaslighting me to defend myself.
The narcissist then further gaslighted me by talking about how much I never told him I loved him when we were together, but that is not true because it was always quite the opposite. He never told me he loved me until he proposed marriage to me, and we had been together 10 years! Then he went into what I believe the letter was really about. He focused heavily on my not accepting his marriage proposal. Here we are 20 years later, and he is still stuck on me not accepting his marriage proposal. I get it. I rejected him even though it was indirect. I muted myself from accepting his proposal because I literally felt frozen (as in flight, fight, or freeze reaction).
Yet, despite my non-acceptance, the narcissist still married someone. Did he forget that after proposing to me that he married someone else 10 months later? Did he forget that he proposed to me while he was actually cheating on me behind my back with the woman who is now his current wife? But of course not! He’s only going to mention what I did in his letter to me! Project, project, project!!! Twist, twist, twist!!! Deny, deny, deny!!! Lie, lie, lie!!! These are not exclamations of actual songs, but if they were, this narcissist would be the subject of them all.
Further into the letter, he continued to flip the script of our “love” story by projecting everything he did to me onto me as if I did those things to him. He even confused events to where particular time frames in our lives blended together as if these events happened within succession. I am going to assume that these events were profound within his mind because anything that matched up to how he felt about being rejected from the proposal, lined up with a similar event where I had remained silent [because of experiencing some form of his narcissistic abuse].
If anyone else had read this letter, I am certain that I would be viewed as the “bad guy”. That is how he painted me. He gaslighted me so much within the letter that I actually questioned my recollection of memories. I literally defended myself with every sentence. This is why I read the letter numerous times. The letter was not even a long letter. It was two pages with writing only one side of each page, and it was written on paper from a small memo pad!
This narcissist packed all that he could think to write to make himself look good and me look incredibly bad onto two pages from a small memo pad. Did I mention the letter was double-spaced? Yes! So, really, the letter was incredibly short in length, but it was completely packed with everything he needed to idealize and devalue me.
The narcissist’s letter was written with the direct slant that I should be apologizing to him! He blamed me for everything that ended our relationship. His mistreatment of me was never accounted for at all in the letter. The letter was more or less about how I had hurt him. After reading this letter, one would think I was the narcissist … that I am him and he is me. It is the perfect recipe of an identity switch … a projection. He simply projected everything that he did onto me! The audacity!
The Audacity
By the time I had decided no longer to read the letter over and over several more times, I paused to think about the brevity of it all. In a sense, the narcissist was attempting to win me over. Wasn’t he? Yet, basically everything that he said in the letter blamed me. If he was not blaming me, he was lying on me. He used a host of degradations from the devalue phase of narcissistic abuse. I marvel at the fact that he has been brooding for over 20 years and was finally able to release how he felt in a letter.
Then it suddenly dawned on me that he knew where I lived! He found where I lived! This man had been stalking me (in a sense) and decided upon the right time to deliver his letter. I was actually home when he delivered it, but I never saw him. Who knows how long he had been lurking around my neighborhood or in my area? Who knows if he had actually been watching me over a period of time before he decided to make his move? He had planned all of this! The audacity!
His last words to me in the letter left me open to pursue him. I believe this is what he wanted in the first place. He reached out to me to get me to reach out to him. I believe he knew me well enough to know that the wording of his letter would bring about strong emotions within me. He knew that I would want to explain myself (as I found myself constantly doing after reading his every sentence).
In fact, I believe the narcissist arranged and worded his letter in the way that he did because his previous attempts to ‘hoover’ me back to him – such as talking to my family at a wake, sending me a friend request on social media, and using a messenger to question me through DMs on social media – had not worked yet. He needed to incite strong emotions within me (especially my anger) because he knew that those emotions would cause me to react. So at the end of his letter, he left his phone number for me to call him if I wanted to further discuss the letter’s contents. Instead of calling, I accepted his friend request instead.
Stick around for what happens next. I do not know if it will blow your mind, but it certainly blew mine.
My Voice Unchained 