Vanilla

I like vanilla ice-cream, and I like vanilla as an ingredient in cooking, but when I read this prompt, the meaning of “vanilla” that came to mind was the one where “vanilla” is used to describe sex, and from there developed into a general insult meaning boring, unexciting, plain, safe.

Safe, now there’s a word that brings up Crap. Over the years I have had various encounters with narcissistic abuse. This can come not just from sexual or romantic partners, it can come from family, work colleagues, a boss, and from friends. The context of the relationship is irrelevant, although it is more common to read about narcissistic abuse in the realms of romantic partnerships, and termed domestic abuse.

It turns out that being an empath, like me, involves being a magnet for narcissists. This is obvious when I step back and think about it, but it is only in the last couple of years that I made that connection. I was well aware of all the other things linked to being an empath, or a highly sensitive person, but I hadn’t yet figured out that my problem with attracting narcissists was also part of the mix. I was tempted to write “affliction” there, because sometimes it does feel like an affliction, but it doesn’t have to be.

The central feature of a relationship involving narcissistic abuse is that the victim is constantly seeking the safe space, constantly seeking to be just the right flavour, to please the narcissist, when there is no place or flavour that will ever be enough. The victim cannot even be vanilla enough to keep the narcissist happy.

A couple of years ago I went through a really rough time. I refer to it here as Crap, or The Crap. I was in a situation that I desperately needed to get out of. I had tried everything to resolve it, and I had remained reasonable, but it came to a point where the reality was that the situation was not going to give, and if I didn’t move, it was me who would give. It was not a good time.

We got ourselves out of the situation, and we moved. At this point I was deeply vulnerable, broken, and had no idea who I was anymore. I had survived, but in pieces. I believed that nothing else could go wrong, that moving was going to give me the space to recover, and to adjust to something resembling normal. I was very taken with the idea of vanilla in terms of daily life. Precisely at this time, someone who had befriended me, decided to become a demon. It was subtle at first, because that is how these things work. It is only in retrospect that the full pattern of behaviour can be held up and identified. It took me six months to figure out that I had somehow walked out of a frying pan and into a fire.

Instead of moving, freeing myself from a toxic situation, and being able to start over, I found myself constantly being made to feel inadequate. Nothing that I did was good enough, and as I fell into a pattern of people-pleasing, I fell into a cycle of attempting to cope with constantly shifting goalposts. It was the most bizarre situation where the person seemed to have an “agenda to reform” me (a phrase I spotted on a social media meme recently which nails it), but whenever I met whatever reform presented to me, usually in passive aggressive crud, it wasn’t good enough either. I felt crazy. Which is what crazymakers do. I was so broken from the Crap I extricated myself from, I couldn’t see that I was now embroiled in more Crap. I was expected to immediately recover from the Crap, but when I did anything that involved recovering, that involved starting to let myself shine again, it was shut down. I found myself back in a place where I had to be vanilla to keep someone else happy.

After six months, the friendship (yes, I know…) dissolved. It was only when I had the space to process the whole thing that I began to see just what had happened. I had this idea that in moving away from the toxic Crap, I would have a chance to recover, and what happened was that I ended up with an extra dose of toxic Crap that affected me far more personally and deeply than the original Crap.

Once thing that I committed to, when I began to process all of this free from Crap, was that I was never going to be vanilla to pander to someone else’s expectations, or insecurities, again. Breaking out of that cycle doesn’t just involve going cold-turkey from the Crap. It involves working on my own patterns, my own Crap, to reclaim myself, or reinvent myself. I’m still working on that.

365 Days of blog prompts ~ 32 flavors Vanilla, chocolate, or something else entirely?