Realising the real narcissist in the family.
My mum is a narcissist. She had me at 17, blamed me for the fact she never had a relationship that worked. She invented new stories for my childhood because she couldn't have people know I was neglected. She let her partner's be mean to me, some of them did unspeakable things to me and one even tried to do that to my friends.
Because she was 17 when she had me, her parents offered to adopt me but she didn't take them up on it. I was so close to my grandparents growing up and I always wished they would have adopted me. I spent years in therapy unpicking the stuff my mum did and how it ended up choosing the partners I picked in my life. I'm now doing mental health research and bringing out books on the subject.
But now all of my uncles are divorcing their narcissistic wives. So my nan has been talking to me about how worried she is about them... I started talking to her about my mental health research and she started arguing every point, and I when I said "I think you misunderstood" she rolled her eyes and went "here we go again". I told her it was uncalled for, and she started asking what was uncalled for, I told her what she'd just done and she started shouting no she never and she'd never do that to me. I was floored. I kept calm and said "that's what I heard" and she said "that might be what you heard, but it's not what I did." And it was like my world shattered. My grandparents house is my safe place. It's where I cry, where I go for naps when life's too hard, where I go when I need to laugh, where I go when I'm too poor to feed myself. But this one event unlocked everything she's done to me and my family, every insult covered as a joke, every time she's triangulated us against eachother, every time she's convinced us our dreams are too risky and to get our head on straight.
I should have realised my mum wasn't the first. I thought it was her bad relationships that made her so unbearable, not her parents. I'm so heartbroken. And I feel like a fraud because my books are meant to be how to spot these people, and I wrote them while not spotting them. I'm scared of life again like everyone's going to turn out to be a villain, I've only just broken out of that mindset.