Several readers have sent me notes of concern recently.
How I could forget Jacob so quickly, how I could move on? What am I doing to the kids? Why I can write so flippantly about fun moments after my husband died? And didn't we go through all this before and you're a fucking fake and Jesus Christ are you ever fucked up.
My therapists thank you. The bills for just one will cover the cost of a small villa on the French Riviera.
You know, if I had any idea my life would unfold like this when three years ago I was writing that Cole was working long hours and gee I hated shoveling snow but he came home and did it for me, I might never have started at all. Do you think it's easy having it all out there? I can't even walk away from it now because every last person who comes to read gets their update and if I don't write the assumption will be made that I finally did myself in.
Well, fuck you too, as long as things go well and I keep working so hard I think I can and will overcome that urge. I think I already have. How many of you are just waiting for that?
You're so smitten with Jacob that you forgot the central points involved in his takeover of my life. Encouraging poor opinions of Cole. He never let up the pressure on me. And then when I fell for him he took over everything. All of the sudden my friends were limited in their access to me. He encouraged me to drop several if not most of them. My car was sold. Cole was painted out to be a monster, when he was nothing more than a man with a violent streak a mile wide that was nothing I couldn't handle but he was dead so Jacob had free reign to paint him black.
I was stripped of my own opinions and reduced to a shivering, weakened doll while Jacob used his heavy handed charming approach to fix my life. He was going to take over and fix all of it. He would be a better man, a better father, a better husband and a better friend and God only help you if you disagreed with that. And then little by little it fell apart around him as I got worse with him instead of better.
He couldn't fix things, it just wasn't falling into place and his facade began to crumble. His self-esteem took a dive, he started making mistakes and he began to hate me for his obsession. His obsession with me, I don't even know how it began or what happened to it but it consumed him and then he decided he would drive me insane while still fixing everything and I would be fully dependent on him and it would hurt both of us and he could no longer make any sense of anything and he couldn't get rid of my friends and it got too hard and then he cracked and he stepped off a building and died and left me here alone, in amazingly poor mental condition and I've spent the last three months in therapy five times a week learning how to be human again.
He was my David Koresh, my very own Jim Jones, a live, in the flesh psychopath masquerading as the most amazing human being I've ever known. Of course he's still on a pedestal, I am mostly still under his spell even though it's been carefully dismantled piece by piece. I still love him. My God, had he not sent all these journals and the letters that he did I would still be in the dark. He knew what he was. He knew he hurt me. He knew he was a monster in his own right and he'll never be able to change that now just like Cole can't change the picture painted of him anymore. They won't get better, they're dead.
But I will get better. I want to.
I'm alive.
I want to be normal and I want to be in love and if that's with Ben, then it will be wonderful and if it isn't then that's okay too. If you can't handle reading or you don't understand how so much could go wrong in such a short while then trust me, you are not alone there, but please, for the love of God stop writing to me to tell me how awful you think I am.
Because I don't write for you.
I do it for me.
