Torturous as it was to have a parent to whom you seemed to be invisible most of the time, and having them use you only when it suited them to stoke their own ego, I got lucky.
I got lucky because unpacking the tangles mess of shit that is having a narcissistic parent, led me to shed a lot of the habits and conventions a lot of my contemporaries still struggle with today.
I never had a good relationship with my father and I spent years trying to figure out why.
We’ve been at odds since I can remember.
In our relationship, I was the one who was always left feeling confused and wondering what I did wrong, what I had done to cause such drama and upset, while he always seemed to walk away unscathed.
From everything. Always.
Often I would even end up apologising for something that I was sure I was right about.
What I thought I believed rarely held up to his scrutiny and I regularly did a complete 180 on my stance.
At some point, I started feeling neurotic and began to lose my sense of self.
I had a very strong sense of alienation and felt like I didn’t fit in anywhere.
I became unable to trust my own judgement and began to question the reality of everything in my life.
I started second-guessing myself; my feelings, my perceptions and my memories.
I became very insecure around my decision making — even with the smallest things.
A part of me was constantly wondering if I was going insane.
After many years of always managing to make decisions that made me unhappy, I finally convinced myself that the world was right and I was wrong.
I concluded that I was somehow fundamentally in the wrong because the world at large seemed to live life and make decisions just fine – so the problem had to be with me.
Those were symptoms of gaslighting.
His arguments were usually disguised as charming musings on the meaning of life.
These kinds of conversations were common since he profiled himself as a seeker of deeper meaning in all things.
“Essentially, a Gaslighter spins their negative, harmful or destructive words and actions in their favor, deflecting the blame for their abusive deeds and pointing the finger at you. This is often done by making you feel ‘overly sensitive’, ‘paranoid’, ‘mentally unstable’, ‘silly’, ‘unhinged’, and many other sensations which cause you to doubt yourself.”
— You’re not going crazy: 15 signs you’re a victim of gaslighting
I was the one who was “too sensitive” when I got upset for being the target of one of his outbursts.
I was being “silly” when, at age 7, I cried a river and begged to stay at home because I didn’t want to spend the weekend with my father.
Because it meant having to tiptoe around his temper all weekend.
When I got lost on my way to his wedding it was “malicious” of me to miss the ceremony.
A ceremony to which no one had offered 17-year-old me a ride, leaving me to figure out what overlapping network of buses I had to take to get out to their house in the country.
And he refused to send someone to pick me up or help me figure out where I was over the phone (this was before smartphones and all I had was a cellphone with Snake on it) when I was completely lost, standing at broken down bus stop in the middle of nowhere with the next bus due to come by in two hours.
He told me he didn’t want someone so “unhinged at the wedding anyway”, and that I didn’t deserve any help.
I ended up walking in the pouring rain for three hours on empty countryside roads (in wedding-appropriate attire) until I found a bus and asked for directions – all the while questioning my sanity for still doing my level best to get to the wedding.
Eventually, I made it to the reception about 5 hours late and looking like a soaking wet dog. He shoved me into the laundry room and told me to stay there and wait until someone would take me home. I waited for an additional 3 hours before that happened.
It had never even occurred to me that my father might be a narcissist.
I’m assuming this is very common among people who consistently get gaslighted.
As the situation gradually gets worse you normalise your experience and don’t see why it would be abusive.
I started trawling through online discussions where people talked about dating narcissists.
A common theme was that every one of the people who (in hindsight) recognised that they had been gaslighted, were astonished at the kind of lies that their narcissistic partners were able to get past them.
No one thought of themselves as stupid or unintelligent.
Many people had demanding jobs and successful careers and were astonished at how deeply they had allowed themselves to be manipulated.
They recognised that the narcissist in their life knew them well and knew how to push their buttons.
It took me until my early thirties to finally go no-contact with my father for good.
Because it just took me a long time to unpack all that shit to the root.
But as I did, and while I was struggling to survive while being raised by a mum that was a staunch feminist but who also worked three jobs, it gave me a lot of insight into myself.
I’ve started up several different paths in life, learned a lot along the way, and have abandoned more paths than I’ve traversed to the end.
To see the evidence of this, just look at the leaning stack of educational degrees and certificates gathering dust at the back of my bookshelf.
While I was the kid who had to run on autopilot and raise herself a lot of the time, my mum also set me up to be able to handle all the turbulence from a young age.
Her ideas of ❤️🔥smashing the patriarchy❤️🔥 and forging a path for yourself through life with very little help – she’s of our post-war/nation rebuilding generation (we don’t technically have Boomers as that’s an American thing) and the way she was raised trickled down to how my millennial self was reared as well.
So, she passed the burning torch of feminism into my hand and gave me a pat on the back as she wished me well in my travels.
And yes, this is one of the reasons why Spirited Away is one of my all-time favourite movies, because I identify with Chihiro’s journey on a personal level.
But I digress.
My point is, that being thrown into the figurative deep end of the pool from birth made for fertile ground in terms of self-exploration and personal growth.
And I’m lucky that the stars aligned in a way that made me grab that opportunity by the balls, again and again.
Is it painful? Yes, gods. Very. But it’s worth it.
And while I’ve struggled with feeling invisible in life not only because I had a narcissistic father, but because I was also autistic and genderqueer, the most important thing has been to learn to see myself clearly.
Want to get more out of reading books?
Grab this FREE guide on how to start a reading journal, complete with review templates, reading trackers and bingo sheets.
Understand yourself better as a reader, engage more with the books you read & make space for creative self-expression. Get it now!
“When Sasha Barrett gets bitten by a snake on a mission, her squad captain’s quick actions not only save her life, but also make her realise something she may have known all along…“
