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.
