I was reading through my first journal. It didn't take long - it was only about 1/4 full, like most of my journals. Throughout my marriage, I tried off and on to keep journals. Just getting my thoughts out on paper helped me deal with them, sort through them. There were no big revelations in them, no 'hey, I'm having an affair' type secrets recorded in them. They were just for me.
Except Joe couldn't handle that. Every time I would start another journal, as soon as Joe saw me with it, the pestering would begin. "If you really loved me, you'd let me read it." "Why can't I read it, if there's nothing in it?" And so on, ad nauseum. Looking back, I can see now that it was because of his need to control me. If he didn't know what was in the journal, he wasn't in control. And because there wasn't anything earth-shattering in them, I usually gave in. But I always felt violated. Why couldn't he just trust me? I stupidly thought then that if I showed him the journals, he would see there was nothing in them, and the next time, he would trust me and leave me alone with my thoughts. It never happened.
Part of it was that I felt sorry for him, I suppose. He had been the victim of incest as a child and I always assumed that he had trust issues because of it. Now I can see that it went way beyond trust issues. After 15 years of marriage and the subsequent horrendous divorce, I firmly believe that the childhood abuse he suffered caused him to grow up without the capability of empathy or compassion. Oh, he can talk a good game, and most people would say Joe is one of the nicest men they've ever met. But that's how people like Joe work. Appearances are EVERYTHING. It doesn't matter what's really going on behind closed doors, as long as it appears to everyone on the outside that everything is hunky-dory.
My last journal entry in the first journal is about a weird dream I had involving Joe. Joe wanted to have sex in a hotel room in front of a camera. I refused. (A definite vision of the future, but more about that later.) Then it switched to Joe, naked, demanding that I light his genitalia on fire. The dream continued with Joe running around in the front yard of our house, with his own personal torch, yelling for all the neighbors to come see, because it didn't hurt. Now, maybe I just ate some weird food combination before I went to bed that night. Maybe my own psyche was somehow trying to warn me about Joe. I don't know.
What I see now, looking back, is that the dream is classic Joe. Making demands of me that I couldn't or didn't want to meet, usually sexual, and Joe's compulsive need to put his 'spin' on everything that happened in his life. Joe could, and still can, convince himself that white is black. You can have a recording of him saying something, let him hear it, and he will deny that it is him. That's why people like Joe can so easily convince other people that what they say is true - because they have spent a lifetime lying to themselves. They come off as sincere, because they have convinced themselves of their own lies. They literally live in a dream world.
These days, I still occasionally dream about Joe. The dreams are always of Joe leaving.
No comments:
Post a Comment