When you live with a narcissist your sense of self is slowly eroded. You lose sight of who you were and who you are. It happens slowly without you even knowing. As the narcissist makes themselves centre stage in your life you move to the wings and start to forget yourself and your needs. You get so used to this that it becomes normal to you. You think that the person you have become due to the narcissists gaslighting is your real self. You become so bewildered that you become robot like and are pushed and pulled about like an automaton. The puppet master now holds the strings and it is their tune you now dance to.
Every now and then you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and the face of a stranger stares back. That stranger may even be wearing clothes that they would not have chosen before. The masked face they wear bears no semblance to the lovely creature who once inhabited that body.
But there is always a breaking point in the bewitchment of a narcissist. It often comes when you realise that an oath is broken. It may be an unspoken oath but it is one in which you had kept your side but you now see that the other did not. You gave and gave, tried harder and harder and in the end none of it worked. By this time the narcissist has grown tired of you. You start to show signs of waking up. Their game is sussed.
They had abandoned you long before this point anyway. Lined up another new model. You were just a toy to them, usefull. Now they throw you out of their pram, bored, wanting a new toy.
At this point you are at your lowest and in that you are also able to rise because it can not get any lower than this. So you raise up your head and see the truth. You are being abused. Even so at this crossroads you will still minimise and deny what has happened to you. The truth will not fully appear until well after you leave.
In those years after you have extricated yourself from them, when time and space have given you the ability to step back and see how bad it was, you see that it was actually much worse than you remembered. In this there is freedom as well as the pain of realisation.
You slowly start to recognise yourself again. You were a complete stranger looking in the mirror at yourself. Slowly you regain parts of you that you lost. It is a marvelous feeling to get in touch with yourself again. It is like meeting a long lost friend you have not seen for years. It takes time to even believe that you could once again remember who you were before you lost yourself in another.
The narcissist did not destroy you, though it often feels like it. What they did was hide you and replace you with a false self, just like them. Discovering who you are again allows you to regain talents that were hidden too. You may even find new things about yourself that you did not know. This is the moment when the importance of the narcissist fades and you come into focus. You take centre stage and leave the narcissist where they belong, back there in the wings.You see who you are now and you like who you are. You grow into yourself. Life begins again.
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