Sometimes nothing you do helps

For a long, long time I held the belief that if something was broken or wrong, then it was your (that is, my) job to fix it. Even if it wasn’t totally broken, you fixed it so that it wouldn’t break further down the track.

This applied to mechanical, electrical and even professional or personal relationships. With regards to relationships, I felt doing something was often better than doing nothing.

Something happened this weekend that has forced me to conclude that perhaps things are just broken and that no amount of trying to fix things will put them back together. A run-in with a borderline sociopath and narcissist turned the light-bulb on in my head that the way I saw the world and the way this person saw the world was just so much at odds that no amount of work I did was ever going to fix the relationship.

In my head I traced this person’s behaviour back some 40 years and discovered to my horror that I had ignored his bizarre, emotionally crippling behaviour because I imagined he was getting better or that we simply had never managed to ‘connect’ properly. So I imagined that perhaps trying to connect with what he did and make him feel as though I was indebted to him might trigger some breakdown in his wall of self-delusion and start a dialogue going. That was not to be: he misconstrued that behaviour for something very different, something that projected the way he used people on to me instead as a way of self-reinforcing his pathology.

Indeed, he projected that all the way through to my nuclear family, although he never took the time to ever really meet or engage with them in 30-or-so years. So much is the pity that I am actually glad that never occurred because he might have warped their sense of what relationships such as these should be. Sad. His caricature of relationships and friendships would have served as a poor role model and possibly could have endangered my children’s emotional well-being.

I once used to proudly say to people in his industry that I knew such-and such, believing he probably left the last firm on good terms or his reputation was such that he was held in high esteem. It never occurred to me that he might not be regarded as highly as I thought. After a few times his former workmates gave me cold stares or nervously shifted the conversation to something else, I twigged that perhaps the person I’d known and the person they worked with displayed the same hair-trigger rage, callous indifference and cavalier attitude to the truth and people. It looks like he did not discriminate between work and friend — he was an equal opportunity hater.

For ages I thought that perhaps I could fix it if I could build some sort of bridge to him. He’s not bad after all, just misunderstood, I thought. A lost sheep.

This weekend I was disabused of that sorry belief. I am sad for him because I know what he could have been and what he could have done. However, I am glad for me because suddenly I no longer feel any responsibility to fix anything and neither do I care what he thinks or doesn’t think about me and my family in his little cocooned world of self-loathing and delusion.

I no longer feel as though I have to fix anything. I am free.