Pattern recognition

Jae was never a great writer. She was effective and understood and learned systems very well. This operability was also her fault. She lived inside a tiny fault factory. Error messages were taken as incitement to try again. It was the excellent education of “practicing for catastrophes” that her father was inclined to give his children. A system had faults and faults were the only teachers. She excelled because she began to understand this issue at a very young age and developed an intellect with impressive prowess based on these efforts. She was an emotionally stunted writer who was benevolent and possibly insightful, but rarely original. She always excelled because of her compassionate rhetoric but now I’m not entirely sure what the truth of that is. Manipulation was her game. She'd confess that all the time.

My father gave me abuse, range, insight and a constant terror of failure. Fear of failure is the system within which I was trained. Error messages shut down the system rather than incite it to greater adaptation to new patterns. I guess I have a crappy hard drive. But I have remarkable gifts. I am a great writer but my constant fear of failure has inhibited my ability to hone this craft. It languishes in a tiny closet inside of me. I take it out and polish it off for last minute academic papers and angry tirades but it's a pointless gift as it stands. Massive emotional pressure causes output rather than the emotions I would prefer trigger my ability: desire, organization, pleasure. It is the most painful experience of my life to have a gift that I can only use by some sort of emotional tyranny. But it is hardly something I can use dishonestly. It is not a systems understanding. Its most valued content comes from the least conscious point in my mind.

Jae’s first final emails to me were the product of her own emotional tyranny. In our time together, I tried so hard to keep her steady in this respect. In the early days, for her, all conflict was tyranny. Indiscernible, scary, and treacherous. She calmed quite a bit over the years. I tried to become a better communicator. I tried to avoid interactions that caused her system to shut down. It scared me that she reacted to me the way she did in the end. It scared me that she wrote several numb emails to launch her disavowal of our plan and connection. And well yes, it scared me what an unfeeling writer she was. Unfeeling may not be accurate. Jae’s writing is, in it’s most salient moments, smug and apathetic. My concern being that writing is the window to who we are. Our styles based on our truest selves.

Right after the argument I can’t remember, she launched her cold war. Her indifference was patterned and frightening. It was clear that her language was configured on protecting her financial resources. She acknowledged nothing and used only language that could avoid legal scrutiny. This acceleration to war happened very quickly and involved me less. Little had happened between us to create this vacuum and it broke me. I felt shame. I felt insignificance. I did not understand how her decision and language toward me could ever comply with the idea that our relationship had ever been a good thing. I still can't. It was like shitting in a well. She reneged on everyone of our verbal contracts. And she did it with the insight and rhetoric of an eight year old. And I couldn't do anything. I hadn't prepared for "revenge Jae" and she'd promised me that she could not ever behave that way toward me. It was all lies and I was worthless and easy to lie to. That's where I live.

Back in 1999, I think she had some emotional renegotiation with an old obsession. I say obsession because the woman was so terrified of homosexuality that nothing came of the connection. Jae wanted nothing and no one else. Laurie was her first love.

I don’t know what provoked the interaction but somehow Jae and Laurie were still occasionally speaking, and as is clearly the psychology of Jae, our relationship had lessened the power of the dynamic with Laurie. Initially Jae had greatly unburdened herself with a rebound with a very troubled woman named Michelle whom Jae basically used for sex. My appearance and the relationship that ensued was satisfying for both of us, I always thought, but predicated on Jae's attachment psychosis. I see that now. Even while supposedly in love with me, she chased a Cate Blanchett look alike around India (and there were others I believe).

In response to some part of their little “closure seminar” Laurie began to write these strange emotional form letters. The letters implied that Jae had been crossing unnecessary emotional boundaries to gain closure. Laurie kept making statements in these formulaic letters that indicated that Jae was dredging up long dead feelings and issues. The true issue at hand, for Jae I believe, was that it was hard to gain closure on a relationship that had failed because Laurie had never really acknowledged her feelings for Jae. I think Jae secretly wanted a tell. She was calling Laurie's bluff by demonstrating that she was in love.

It was a very strange scenario and I don’t remember Jae doing or saying anything that seemed overtly inappropriate. But Jae launched into a dialogue with her about her life and “finding me” for reasons unknown. So… looking to exact something, clearly.

Laurie expressed faux happiness for Jae finding a relationship in which she was supposedly happy in. But somewhere along the line it led to letter after letter arriving, with little response, stating that Jae was living in the past and that she was attached to something irrelevant (with Laurie). I have long supposed there were interactions that I wasn’t privy to. However, I imagine somehow, without doing much, Jae was eliciting the desired response from Laurie. Jae wanted Laurie to hurt as much as Jae hurt when Laurie got a boyfriend. And it worked, admirably. Jae played innocent, but these strange letters revealed that Laurie, far from being over Jae, was still living in some sort of personal hell for her decision and blaming Jae for it.

This is the nature of Jae’s smugness. Indirect and wounded looking for regret from those she feels wronged her. My best friend was instantly moved to laughter by news of her name hyphenation. I didn’t know why. She explained, “All these years she shows no interest in such things and suddenly, less than two years out of your marriage, she hyphenates her name. She wanted you to find out. She wanted you hurt. Wake up meg, she’s in a constant state of seeking revenge while pretending she isn’t.” It is weird to see her that way, but I believe she extracted real satisfaction from Laurie’s letter which pretended boundaries but expelled emotional doubt and hurt. And her response email last week, regarding me in the most one-sided way possible, says the same.

Laurie’s letters resembled Jae’s original disavowal emails to me. As if they were starting up in the middle of a story but you had no idea where that story began. Both Jae and Laurie pretended kindness, while avoiding the meat of their frustrations. Both sets were designed to hurt and do so by omitting the general context for the dynamic. Saccharine and vengeful, they both lacked the humanity of their authors while pretending at a lack of rage that both were clearly predicated on. I believed that Jae was hurt by Laurie’s letters. But maybe Jae fed on their true meaning. I didn’t see their true meaning but Laurie was not much of an issue for me other than compelling me to comfort Jae and stare in disgust at the letters she wrote.

Laurie’s motive was shame. Was that Jae’s motive? I always think that is the only real motivation for this type of human behavior. Even taken at face value we can find great shame at the base of our most confusing actions. But why might she be ashamed? I guess in my case it was because her declarations of eternal friendship, hand holding, and holidays together were immediately gone. Possibly because she had made financial promises she couldn’t honor and felt ashamed that now she would pretend that she hadn’t said the things she had. She was ashamed because she felt to protect herself she would be dishonorable now. Basically I doubt that. Maybe she was ashamed of who I was.

But I can’t judge her motivations clearly. I was receiving Laurie Mead’s letters from a woman I’d been married to for 15 years. And she was using calculated language to tell me I meant nothing while saying she’d had a breakdown because of our break up and could no longer honor any of her promises. “I broke,” is what she said. "It all hurts too much, we can't talk." It all hurts so much I'm going to start another serious relationship immediately and treat everyone who knows both of us like they're dead.

And then I broke and became the shameful tyrant that I am. Losing the literally only person who meant anything to me was terrifying and shame-inducing. I thought that we could be friends. I always thought that we would be friends. She told me we wouldn’t be speaking ever again. She never even said goodbye or another kind thing ever again. I tried to get her apologize for the "nickel and dime-ing" (her own description of her malicious time-consuming behavior) roller coaster she needlessly terrorized me with. When she didn't apologize I realized it was only for financial reasons and her father's advice that she backed off. This is who she was now. This is who I was to her. Just a liability she needed to completely wipe out. I wish one of us had died. I could have been the one. Honestly, she meant that much to me. I never wanted to live through to the day when she treated me like I was meaningless. And ever since it arrived I keep hoping I'll get up the guts to die. She is a terrible person in so many ways now and I don't want to live with this truth.

She started a relationship, likely that year and ignored everything about me forever after. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know how to live with how much it hurts that she rushed into a relationship immediately. Though much like her “break-up” with Laurie Mead, she appears to have rushed into yet another relationship with a Jewish girl immediately. With Michelle, she had used her for sex. Meeting me was likely the only thing that truly ended that back and forth. I hope that’s not the fate with this wife. I really do. Maybe at 40 years old an attachment to comfort is greater than that of love but it will all be the dumbest if she fails at it after rushing at it with a spear. The wife looks safe. She looks like a decent human being. She looks like a fellow cult member.

I toil away at the blast never knowing what I’ll extract. I'm seeing how, when I was breaking up with my ex, and thinking about her non-stop, she was chasing skirts and hedging her bets everywhere in a desperate effort not to be alone. I'm starting to see a compulsion I was delusional not to notice before.

Leaving the Fantasy

Willie Nelson, “Always on My Mind”

I want to be protected now. I want to be shielded from all of this. Ever since I found out about the speed at which your name changed from Jae Ehrich to Jae Ehrich-Meyer I feel like someone has been punching me in the heart. 12 days this has laid on me and I wonder at all of it. I wonder how it could hurt so bad even though I knew you had joined a cult in part due to the spiritual propaganda of a shared therapist. In large part due to the fact that you have toiled in life to suppress the endless rage your family seeded in you. You have long required a dollhouse to hide away from your humanity in a time of grief.

At some point I became aware that your intent had strictly come from a desire to humiliate and frighten me. I keep hoping you just morphed into a different person. A person wounded by their deceptive corrupt family. A person protected by me somehow, even though I always thought it was the reverse.

But it’s been how I hate myself that matters. And you knew that. You knew you would wound me by turning ALL your promises into lies and treating me like a stalker after 15 years of marriage. I did everything you asked and still you did this. The promises of friendship and shared holidays and a clear-minded negotiation of our separation. You said you didn’t lie, you just didn’t know what you could afford. As if that was the lie that mattered. I didn’t care. I knew you couldn’t afford it and I told you as much the last time we spoke. But you promised a kinder parting and served me with a summer sleeping on an air mattress on a floor next to a giant rat doorway. It was probably for the best that my surroundings reflected my feelings.

I lived in terror that entire summer and ignored your pretentious hateful emails trying to push me into a negotiation that absolved you of everything, including your humanity. “Nickel and diming” me you called it. You became so surreally Dickensian I was embarrassed to tell anyone because I believed I had deserved this on some level. I never included friends in our dialogue. I honestly couldn't believe I had been married to such a zombie for 15 years. It was too much to absorb. And I liked your memory much better than what you had revealed yourself to truly be. These days my friends look shocked when I even acknowledge your existence. I paint you as a mythical Hobbit I once loved and leave it at that. The fantasy alive in my mind, if dead in my heart.

That first year of our separation, all I could think about was meeting your family that first Thanksgiving and how reckless and cruel they were. My first instinct was to bolt. I knew then and there would be a price I would pay tying myself to someone from a family such is this. A family truly incapable of even the most basic etiquette towards your new partner. There would be something in you I couldn’t help. I knew it then and I relive it now. Was it all worth it to watch you revert into the needy addictive thing that your entire family is? Snorting religious and relationship drugs like a crazed zealot. I don't know yet. I keep hoping the fantasy will dovetail with the loss of it and give me some solace about the choice I made to give my reedy heart to a being from such a foul tree.

I was told an argument, that I was certainly not solely at fault for, about money, prompted an apparent breakdown. The email looked like your therapist and cult-friend had written it for you. That was the first step. Telling me there was no contact between us on my last spring break. And then I flew back to school and you crashed all our accounts. You said something hostile about credit card use which had been negligible other than the trip to Europe, that YOU insisted on, and a dinner out for a friend dying of cancer who had lost her home and everything she owned. Literally.

You enacted a malicious deception and you had no qualms at all about your actions. You waited until I left the state and told me that you were never speaking to me again in the "foreseeable future" and that you would give me nothing you had promised, materially or personally. That you had put my things in storage units, claiming you were careful, though I discovered many things were broken and missing pieces. That you were being the conscious citizen in our break-up. That you were faithful to reality and I was no more. And I knew it was right for us to stop talking. I had no contention about that. Though the total removal of any genuine civility or honesty mixed badly with your insinuative gas-lighting.  I discovered that you had in fact been paying close attention to your parents' unending battle tactics in a war never won.

Apparently, I had only earned deception and I had no right to expect any respect. Because of an argument you couldn't handle, I had no right to any sincerity after 15 years. You were them. You weren’t the victim in Great Expectations… you were the Ehrich-Cotter perpetrator you’d waited your whole life to become. Conjoined of a cynical self-hating patriarch and a mad abused matriarch. I did this. I must accept that my need to leave a marital prison did not mix well with the particular cocktail of social imprisonment that resides on Tory Lane.

The last I heard from Perez Ehrich, I expressed my shock at your sudden desire to eradicate me by shutting me out and throwing my things out of the house. In his "I'm being so sneaky" tone he accused me of cheating on you. He basically told me what all infidelity-laden Ehrich's must now believe, that I cheated. He honestly didn't believe that you would have behaved this way unless that was the cause. He also unintentionally revealed that you had been lying to him about the treatise we had made... You lied to your father to implicate me. He would have sided with you even if you had been truthful. Letting everybody think that I had done things I hadn't was a hard lesson about what a total and complete asshole you had resigned to becoming. That you are.

It was irrelevant but it hurt and terrified me that I had laid myself vulnerable to your faux honesty all those years. That you were just lying in wait beneath all that friendly goop you use to manipulate people. I knew it was possible but I thought love mattered. It turns out your abandonment narcissism ("I am the only one in pain") mattered more. So was it love? When the goop washed off I was treated with the identical apathy that was the ill-concealed hatred that you festered toward anyone you believed you'd earned the right to harm with impunity. I was your mother suddenly and utterly. Except you became more vain and made more of a pretense in your indifference toward me. You started a war trying to find the way to hurt me most and believed my angry response justified your actions. You wanted my anger so you could feel superior. Jae Ehrich, forever childish before understanding. That's how little our love breaking meant. You needed to exact a price and pull your prize and sob to your friends of what a monster I'd been. How was I fooled by you for so long? How could I be so damaged as to allow for this?

And now I have to accept that on many levels you didn’t love me or see me at all. And that’s what sits. I now know that’s what sits because when I saw the picture of your wife, I felt nothing at all. I haven’t seen a real picture of you in years, which was no doubt intentional and presently a relief. But when I saw her I felt nothing. I realized that even if I had ever really been in love with you (and it wasn’t part of some desperate lonely ehrich-gas-lighting) I wasn’t at all anymore. And I got stupid and sent you this:

“I am sorry for everything that led to this moment. Gerry was dead for 4 minutes. Brehan's mother was murdered. I am heartbroken at your diligent forgetfulness of everything and your abdication of the barest notion of our once eternal family ties.

I know you are not who i knew, but what transpired is still crippling... for both of us. You have remarried in barely the time i've had to begin grieving your loss. Your work-around for what is eternally true shocks and burns. Remember me honestly, if nothing else. It is hard to feel I meant this little.

Mazel tov on your new journey. I hope you will be happy. I wish you all the best.”

And when I said I was sorry in the beginning, I meant I was sorry. And when I said I was heartbroken, I meant I was heartbroken. And when I said I was grieving, I meant I was grieving. And when I said I felt shocked and burnt, I meant I was shocked and burnt. And when I said remember me honestly, I meant, do what you will but don’t make it false. And when I said Mazel Tov, I meant Mazel Tov.

And you wrote this:

“I am so sick of your anger. What claim do you imagine you still have on me, Meg? We broke up. I cannot help you. Unless there is something that you would like to discuss without attacking me, please stop contacting me.

Jae”

But I had written you about the family things. And they weren’t angry. And you ignored them totally. More lies from the desk of Jeannette VW Ehrich. Ahem, Ehrich-Meyer. What I said upset you because it was honest and not an attack. And I felt pain because you have worked so hard to teach me to loathe you by movements. You wanted me to hate you when I don’t. You wanted me to feel rejected because I rejected you. And I’ve wanted to forgive you but rejection is different than betrayal and it’s taking longer to see your betrayal as anything other than it was. And in March 2014 you initially denied your promises and then half-acknowledged them (after you'd ruled out a legal battle) and just said you "didn't know before" that you wouldn't be keeping any of them. And you discarded me with your things. You made the body of us into lies. And my favorite cats died and I never got to say goodbye. Is it any wonder I felt raw anger towards that which I believed I once loved?

I went to a favored card reader some time ago. I asked about you. She laid the cards and didn’t even ponder them curiously, as she typically did. She did something she had never done before. After laying the cards she immediately swept them off the table and snorted angrily, quipping in a disgusted tone, “She’ll get what she wants.” And she looked at me with pity and sorrow, like she knew what I would find out... that you’d barely let the corpse cool. That what you really wanted more than truth was to revert to false ideological safety measures to cope with the rest of your corporeal life. That these things would hurt me to know because even if you despise me, I will always care for you. That damn woman always seems know things she couldn’t possibly know.

I guess I am mostly indifferent to your anger now. It hurts but I’m learning I didn’t deserve what you did to me. And while my vitriolic response was unfair, the way you literally wanted to destroy me was more unfair. I'm not "in" love with you anymore and even though I hurt, that’s a relief. But your response to my grief, the first thing I’ve said to you of any substance in many years, is your true reveal. And your hasty marriage and reaction to my hurt about it, leaves you looking absurd and hung up on what we were more than I am. I guess I’d rather hurt for a moment now and live the rest of my life without your petty hatred. I’m contented for the moment to accept that while you never really saw me, I saw you.

You tried to take my belief away. I believed in you. I have to live with my poor choice and I will likely never fully recover from the deception. I think you chose me because you thought such a crippled sad person could never leave. That's what Liz basically saw. I think it shocked you when it became clear I would have to. I think your father's desperate solitude came knocking on the hollow log that all of this turned out to be. And now I must expect everyone to be as ruthless and inhumane as the only person I was sure I was in love with. I don't know where I'll be when I see the other side of this but I hope it's in this life.

When I sob for missing you, I know I miss the fantasy. I don't know what happened to you Jae, but it's not my fault. It never was. Thankfully my meditated heartbreak email made you show your hand and remind me what a unconstrained mess lies inside your pretend containment. This wasn't my fault. You told me I was to blame for everything in every way you could, and I wasn't. I kept trying to defend myself by attacking you back and I didn't need to. Everything you said after a certain point in our relationship was meditated falsehood. I know beneath it all it's because you always blame yourself for everything. Yet it's no excuse to vilify me. There never was a good excuse for that. This wasn't my fault. I don't need to feel guilty because of the things you told me I was. I'm not the things you told me I was. Not any of them. I just need to keep reminding myself of this when the fantasy of "our meaningful past" predates on my heart. You create your own hurt Jae. Your post-Meg choices illustrated how much this is true. I don't need to regret someone who now pretends they never wanted me at all.

I may be flawed and sad and crazy and dysfunctional and most of the horrible things you call me to the people in your world. But I still know I'm not hopelessly addicted to a lie about what happened. I tried kindness and I tried honesty and I wanted to say goodbye for the right reasons.  I may be lost because I'm confused. But I know I'm not vacant. I know I'm not a sad little wealthy kid sitting by the pool alone thinking hurting the people that loved me will get me out of the trap my family set for me.