Pastures of peace

It's a little dull around my world lately.

Our personal finances are on track.  Once payday hits and I've done the exciting things like pay bills, play with the excel tracker, and put cash in our fun envelopes, it's boring until the next payday.

I'm back on the nothing-but-protien wagon after a summer of excess.  It's going well, already dropped a couple pounds (again, the same pounds over and over) but meat is boring.

I'm still not drinking.  21 days - 2 weeks!  But not doing something is sorta boring - wonderful. good, yes yes - but boring.

I've gotten 43 things listed on Ebay, 1 sold, 2 pending close of auction.  Boring.

Boring is hard to get used to.  And in fact, boredom can be easily confused with PEACE.

I remember feeling like this after I started reading all of these ACoN blogs, and dealing with the STORM of emotions that came up.  It was as if all the angst left inside me from my fucked up childhood and subsequent lifetime of bad decisions got squeezed out all at once and then my life and my world calmed WAY down.  My time living in Maryland was all about learning to live with no drama, learning to live in a life that was finally QUIET.

It's taken me about 4 years, really, all things considered, to learn to live a quiet drama-free life.  I still struggle with peace.  To learn that boundaries, MY BOUNDARIES, are actually very quiet things.  Inert.  Just like a wooden fence, actually - my boundaries of no narcs, no drama are the most calm and solid thing in my world.  The fences, as I think of them, are out in a big green field.  Far from me.  And every day that passes, they move (quietly, no fuss) a little further away from me.

My calm safety zone just gets bigger and wider - and more precious, more beautiful.  And the narcs may be talking about me.  They may be saying mean things about me, smearing my name all over creation.  In fact, I do believe in the case of Jeff's family, that's probably what is happening, since I did the unthinkable and walked away.  But you know what?  They can stand at that fence and jaw and talk all they want.  I can't see them, I can't hear it, and all that expanse of lovely quiet farmland grass is between us.  I love the buffer of it all.  The best part of it is that I forget about my mother, my childhood, all of it for lovely delicious chunks of time.  And those times that I completely don't think about any of them, where they don't enter my mind, get longer and longer.

That's the thing about going 'no contact' I think.  It's so very DECISIVE and causes SO MUCH DRAMA.  It's yelling and screaming, whether in person or via phone messages or even emails and texts.  It's flying monkeys and bullshit and PTSD attacks and guilt.  For a LONG time.  And then, slowly, it starts being QUIET more than it is noisy.  (altho, MY decision to go NC caused more angst inside my own head than it caused with my family.  I have the ignoring type of narc mother, not engulfing, so my journey was a little easier.  Still a lot of mental gymnastics, but not so much outside drama.  But I understand this is the case usually.)

The further you move into it, the better it gets.  Sure you're still beset with the mental agony of living a lifetime among the crap, and furious righteous anger at them and then guilt for leaving and second-guessing - but it's quiet and very still, now, so you can begin the work of peeling them off of you. (You can't possibly start peeling crap off of yourself while you're still sitting in crap.)  The loud screechy banshees are finally quiet and you can fucking THINK for whole thoughts at a time.  You write, you think, you dust your neglected house, you throw stuff away, you clean out your head and your surroundings and you just THINK.  And it's glorious.

And soon your boundaries start moving a little bit away from you.  You aren't fighting them at hand-to-hand combat anymore, it's 5 feet away from you.  Then a block away.  Then a mile.  And so it goes.

It's then - when the boundaries get far away, and the quiet spaces get so lovely and big, that people stop writing their blogs (I think).  Or go a different direction.  Because the narcs aren't taking up all the room anymore, and more wonderful amazing things can get in.  LIFE can just be there.

So many blogs told me what I now know to be true.  The only way to actual peace from the narc drama in your world is absolute unflinching no contact.  I know you don't want to.  You still want the round peg to fit into the square hole.  I know you want to keep trying.  Birthday parties and Christmas (oh my god christmas is coming *shudder*) and all the "reasons" to play at being a family that isn't poisonous.  But it will never fit.  And it IS poisonous.  And I'm telling you, the way others told me - it is so amazingly wonderful when you just walk away.

You CAN choose peace, you know.  You can choose it for yourself.  You get to pick.

The only way to win is to refuse to play.