You needed someone to blame for the horrible things that happened to us and you picked me.

I was getting so close to feeling pity. So close to thinking ‘she’s a bitch, but it’s justified’. So close to not lugging around this rage every day. And then you go and do it again.

(For context, this is part of The Louisa Series, see previous articles).

You uninvited our quiet, placid baby and my husband from your baby shower, months after the invites were sent and travel plans arranged. You then decided to charge me to attend said baby shower. And now, I find, other people’s babies are attending said baby shower.

You are officially vindictive and malicious. Spiteful and selfish. Manipulative and destructive. You “couldn’t care less about me” but care enough to do everything in your power to continue to hurt me.

My husband doesn’t get why it still shocks me that you can treat me this way. He doesn’t understand why I’m going when I know that it’s a trap. It’s a chance for you to ridicule me in front of your friends. A chance for you to tear me down with a public audience.

I am equally exhausted by you and fired up like a bull about to storm a town. I was SO close to seeing this teaching relationship to its end. To purging my rage through the pursuit of pity. To deeply acknowledging and empathising with your trauma, the way I have done with all of my abusers, it’s the only way I have been able to carry on and live a normal life.

But you? You are in active pursuit of me. You are no longer a part of my past that I can sit and process. You are ongoing. Wounding. Bitter. You stab for the fun of it because I wasn’t enough for you. And now we both pay. And soon your child will too.

You mask and you mask and you mask. The people think they know you. They think they understand you. They think they see the real you. But they don’t know the torture that swirls within your brain that you have to tightly bound down everyday. They don’t know what it made you do. They don’t know that underneath, you’re a little crazy, in the full dictionary definition sense of the word.

And I wish I could pity you Louisa, I really do. I was so close. I was reminiscing on who you were before, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of a life together without hatred. But it seems you’ve always hated me. Every Christmas card you wrote me ‘Hate you! Happy Xmas!’. Every birthday card ‘To the most selfish person I know, Happy Birthday!’. You said these things as a joke, repeatedly, and repeatedly, until I believed them. And for decades I absorbed them. Guilted myself into shame spirals and self-destruction because you convinced me I’d ruined your life. In fact, you convinced everyone I did.

But it was the other way round all along. You were Bluebeard, and I your innocent victim. You needed someone to blame for the horrible things that happened to us and you picked me.

And I shall suffer forever at the wrath of your projections.