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When The Rainstorms Revealed The Mask
I did not realize that Rain wore a mask. Only small moments revealed times that the mask was slipping. The more I got to know Rain, however, the more I saw several times when I could not deny that she wore a mask to hide very deep insecurities. I never judged her though, but I was often taken aback by the hypocrisy she displayed, the rage she exhibited, and the hatred she so often projected when her mask was off.
In the beginning of our friendship, she showered on the love that I had not quite experienced from other friends. She was powerful at love bombing. That was surely her hook. Because I had not experienced such love bombing in the way that she displayed it, I often did not know how to take her expressions of love.
Rain was an amazing and thoughtful gift giver. It was always obvious to me that she really listened to me. Yet, I found it compelling that she only heard what she wanted to hear in an effort to keep me hanging on in her life. That is what made her gifts so unique to me. She really did not listen to me for me, however. She listened to me for her benefit. It was all a part of bonding me to her, and it worked.
Rain had a magnetic personality. She knew how to captivate her audience. I often wondered how she was able to meet and befriend so many people. She had a wealth of friends. It seemed that everyone knew her. I even thought that everyone loved her or at least even liked her, but upon closer inspection, I realized that everyone just worshiped her in her presence. Everyone who sat in her audience, including me, were a part of the flying monkey gang. We simply sat mesmerized by her tricks.
Little did everyone know that she triangulated us all according to her plans. She talked about each person behind their backs according to what each person would not or could not do for her. Because I was closest to her queenly chambers, I got an earful of how she really felt about others, and it was not pretty. People that I presumed were her friends were people she really hated. I thought I was lucky. Oh, how wrong I was about that!
Basically, Rain was a self-entitled brat in an adult body. If she could not get her way, she would literally pout and throw temper tantrums. She was huge on using the silent treatment as an effective means to get what she wanted from her victims. Her silence often felt lethal. No one wanted to be on the outs with her.
To be banished from her presence was to be cast outside of her engulfing castle. She may or may not have decided to grant her victims entrance. If she did grant entrance, victims would pay a dear price to appease her. Looking back, it was amazing to me how much power and control she wielded over others. It was not an outright power. She manipulated people under her control to obtain power. She was queen. Everyone else was a peasant.
Raining Down Honor Upon A Self-Entitled Queen
The reign of Rain’s magnitude was no where more on display than at a festivity given in her honor. Her favorite day was her birthday, of course. She was the second narcissist I had ever met who gave herself a birthday party and invited others to attend. She would invite as many people to gather to honor her as she could think to invite.
During parties in Rain’s honor, everyone attended, included any ex-friends and ex-significant others. I always found it uncanny how everyone – especially her exes – would put their differences aside to come together to celebrate her. These were usually people she had cast to the side as discarded trash even, but they would still show up to celebrate her birthday.
One of the last great birthday gatherings that I recall where others came together to celebrate her was a difficult time for me. This was during a time that I was on the bad end of her devaluing insults. At times, I was certain that the feelings she projected onto me were feelings of hatred for me.
I felt constantly torn down by her insinuations, gaslighting tactics, and passive aggressive behaviors. Because she viewed me as stubborn because I refused to follow her script for my life, she often triangulated me against the loud and annoying colleague. So at this particular birthday she held in her honor, I was on the outside of her affection and love, and the loud and annoying colleague was on the inside as Rain showered down her affection and love upon her so that I could see it.
When I arrived to the party, I was thirty minutes late because Rain had given me an incorrect time so that she could comment on my late entrance. When I walked in, I attempted to address the time that I was given, but she had already shared with others that I had a problem with time management. Attempting to explain myself regarding this was pointless. She did not care, and she had beguiled her guests into not caring either. I was already projected as the terrible friend.
Throughout the entire party, she passively aggressively mistreated me and hurled backhanded and sarcastic compliments in my direction. Outwardly, she came off as merely joking, but I knew the deal. I knew what she was doing, and she did too. When it came to her opening all of her gifts, she had failed to tell me that there was a theme to her gift-giving, so that when my gift was opened, it was clear that I had not followed the common theme.
In the end, I left the party feeling broken on the inside wondering how and why we were even friends. Instead of getting a clue, I looked for a way to make myself a better friend. I felt like I was the problem. I did not realize that this was the intent of the narcissist in the first place – to devalue and discard. Instead, I tried to find a solution to the madness.
When A Change Causes Undue Pressure On Friendship
Around the time that Rain was planning her move to a new city, we experienced a tumultuous time in our friendship. By this time, I was striving to maintain a friendship that was only an illusion, but I did not know this at the time. I was not readily aware that she was a narcissist either. I had only begun to study the topic sparingly, but it did not dawn on me that Rain was a narcissist. I blamed her behavior on so many other things.
I just knew that my friendship with her caused me great stress, distracted me from truly living, and deepened the effects of the depression I struggled from each day. No one knew of my silent battle except the other two narcissists I thought were my friends. Although they listened to me vent, they listened with a lack of concern and gleaming looks to their eyes and peaked interests within their voices. They actually sided with Rain while gaslighting me into thinking that I indeed had a problem that needed fixing even though I was already in therapy.
As a side note, I learned that telling my problems to narcissists only increased my problems since they did not care about me anyway. Their advice was to fix me because I was wrong. Even though their words did not necessarily sit right with me, I still reflected on what I could do to salvage my friendship with Rain while fixing myself.
Needless to say, Rain was stressed about moving as well as the demise of a love relationship with someone she did not want to leave behind but was willing to let her go. It never dawned on me then that her significant other wanted no more contact with her, but Rain was making it hard for her to let go.
I had no idea at the time that Rain’s major concern was really that she was worried about losing narcissistic supply. She was the one uprooting her life and moving away from her fans … her audience. She was leaving everyone behind for a new job and was going to need to start fresh with new supply. So, during this time, she was freaking out. I did not realize this then, but she was more focused on her problems too much to care about what was going on in anyone else’s life. When I found this out, I was devastated. This is when it became too apparent to ignore that she could care less about me.
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My Voice Unchained 