Up until this very moment I have been writing a fictitious story loosely based on my life experiences with one of the most charismatic and intriguing people I had ever met up to that point in my life. Bull Gunville was both a master of deception and possibly one of the best male friends I had ever had in my life. He was both somebody I loved deeply, and feared ferociously. I have taken a break in writing the 'story as I have seen it', to bring to light one of the most miraculous things that happened to me during my time with Bull and our crew of dentally deficient deviants, cutters, whores, thieves, and southern Illinois white-trash. This miracle took place in the form of my loving, supportive, and ever vigilant wife... Erica.
By October of 2011, I had deteriorated to about 130 pounds of black nail polish, dark makeup, and dyed-black shoulder length stringy hair. I had been high on meth for about a year and half at this point, and had suffered through the loss of our restaurant, and the loss of mine and my wife's best friend in a tragic motorcycle accident. Our friend had given me everything he could, within his power, to see me succeed or make me feel some sense of self-worth. We were building a fire department training facility together at one point. Alas, I had become so caught up in the world of Methamphetamine that he had all but resigned himself of me, and was contemplating coming to the farm and dragging me home by my hair. I loved this friend and so did Erica. The sense of loss and grief I felt when I carried his coffin that day can never, ever be erased from my soul. The drug amplified my narcissism, and I began focusing all of my resentment of our lost business, and my deceased friend solely on Erica's resistance to allow me to 'go to hell in my own way...' The following are scathing and fiery emails that I sent to Erica while I was fueled up on Meth. Erica, God Bless Her Heart, saw fit to see through my spitfire and venom and prayed constantly for me to come home and come back to her... where I rest easily these days.
The following are the emails in their rawest form. The following is an attempted justification of my horrible behavior at home, and my attempts at pushing Erica further away so I could spend more time cranked up on meth. All of my accusations of my wife are an extreme example of where I was at in my narcissistic paranoia. This is the monster I had become to the woman who loved me through all of this. Erica has never wanted anything more than to see me happy and healthy. Erica never did anything during this time in my life to inflict pain on me directly. Erica took steps to protect herself and our daughter from what I was becoming, while trying to leave enough wiggle room to allow me to come back home if I lived through it. Erica never lost faith that this would happen, despite the demon manifesting inside of me during this time.
Email #1: (I was still getting very high, despite all of the claims otherwise)
I am so sick of your shit. I refrain from telling you all of the things that I know are going on in your miserable head because I am afraid of the threats you have made, and your insatiable desire to see me just as hateful and miserable as you. I have never been so scared and unhappy in all my life as I have been the last couple of years. It never had anything to do with alcohol or drugs, they were just the last cry for help in a situation I never thought would lead to the manipulation and destruction of my desire to better myself in any way. I had done so much and worked myself to the brink of insanity, only to decieve and betray my own family for the sake of your hopeless, control-freak, content-to-be-miserable family. You can't stand the fact that even after a devastating brush with a life-threatening addiction, the friends who survived it with me, and relied on me to help them regain control of their lives are still interested in being my friends, even without illicit drugs or criminal activity. We still love each others company and laugh until our bellies ache. We laugh about the lives we were living and the stupid, life-threatening things we did, the danger we put ourselves in and the fact that at the end of the train crash we still walked away with the ability to laugh about it with each other. Every family of each of these people you loathe and never fail to proclaim your distaste for still stands behind them and loves them, regardless of their actions while they were being controlled by something bigger than them. Every family supports them, and visits them, calls them, and never passes judgement on who they were or continue to be friends with. Every family, spouse, or ex-spouse... except for mine. For the first time in my life I am the odd man out because the woman I believed I wanted to spend my life with for so long refuses to even acknowledge anything other than the fact that her perception of the events which transpired lead her only to memories of how she was hurt. You have no regard for what it is that I was going and continue to go through because I suffer daily through an addiction I will never be able to stay ahead of without the support of people who know what I went through, understand it, lived it, or loved somebody who had. The only persons feeling's you concern yourself with on this matter is you. How did it make Erica feel? How many times did Jerry hurt my fragile little self-esteem and make me feel less than the horrible person Erica sees herself as? Have you ever taken into consideration what horrors I was going through, or continue to go through daily. These compounded with the constant umbrella of suspicion, anger, and what seems to me like perfectly timed threats of orders of protection, or divorce which you keep me under make me grateful that I never gave up the faith I have always placed in the people outside of my family who appreciate me for what I am, and more importantly what I am not, and hope I will never become. Someone like you. What kind of relationship are you hoping for where you try to control my decisions with threats of having the law demand that I stay out of my home for fifteen days, before I can go before a judge and have my friends... witnesses to your threats, caretakers of my emotional well-being, testify against you and prove once and for all that you are exactly what I have been warned about by people who have known you and your family for years. A vindictive, selfish, hopeless, sad example of a daughter, sister, mother and twice forgotten wife. I refuse to bargain my sanity and potential to appease your desire for undivided attention and your need to see my soul placed on some sort of sick, sacraficial altar so that I will only know what life looks like through your clouded, constricted views of how the world should be treating you. You need to work on fixing yourself because I have never appeared to you in this life in any condition to lend a hand to that cause. I think of you constantly throughout my days. What was once anticipation of your arrival home morphed into anxiety over whether or not I was going to be hassled by the local authorities over some false accusations requiring you to be protected from my coming and going from a house that I want nothing more to do with, and now it has changed into thoughts of what your future will hold when I am no longer a part of it. Ever. I don't need you, Erica. I never have needed you to make me feel significant to this world. It would have been nice to see this journey to its completion with you at my side, but I now believe that my happiness and sanity, and maybe my eternal soul will be forever altered for the worse if you reamain in my life as anything more than a regreattable memory. One that I will never be able to reminisce about and smile, or share a laugh about something we did with the friends who want to see me become better, and stronger and fulfill my potential, regardless of whether my decisions include them, or make them feel happy. What you should be concerned about is if I am happy with my life. Not if what I choose to do that makes me happy affects the fragile, little, eggshell ego that you barely maintain. I am not resposnible for your happiness. Only you can be responsible for that. A great truth that I realized long ago about my life is that if I am not truly happy in everything I do then I can never hope to bring any joy to anybody who relies on me for anything. Maybe if you had concentrated more on what makes you happy, and realized how happy I was for you in your decisions and had not been so concerned about how my struggle for happiness, and my desire to find your place in my world affected you poorly, and made you feel angry, jealous, betrayed, or second-rate. You will never be first in my life, Erica. If I only concerned myself with your feelings, how could I possibly ever better myself, or hope to for that matter. You still have so much to learn about people. I'm afraid that you never will. That when you wake up one day and realize that you have grown old and lonely seemingly overnight, while everybody you know has left you behind to seek out their happiness, yet miss you and whatever small way you affected their lives. You will wake up and realize that because you wasted your time and only concentrated on how you could derive happiness from how others made you feel, you have either completely lost memory of or epically failed to learn how to make yourself happy. I wanted you to be a part of my journey for so long that I have failed to remind you that this journey is mine, and your journey is yours. We should have relished in each others triumphs and shared tears when we failed. We should never have tried to manipulate the paths either of us were on with empty threats, schemes to catch one another in a lie, blind accusations, or held each other in suspicion of anything more than perfect love for each other. Love of each other for our staggering successes or tragic flaws. Love of each other for our ability to make our own decisions about which directions our lives went and joyful celebration when our respective paths allowed us to revel in our ability to combine our different experiences in life to overcome obstacles together. What we have been doing is damaging and dangerous to everybody around us, and I want out. I love you, and hope you reread this and save it and share it with anybody you have left who cares enough to suffer through your pity party bullshit.
Email #2
no... it wasn't just you yelling. It was your irrational anger and you telling me that I did nothing for this family. It was you dropping me off at home so you could run off to your sisters by yourself to get (daughter) instead of taking me with you, probably so you could bitch about how much money I've STOLEN from you and how the gas your dad brought for the lawn mower wasn't needed quite yet, so instead of asking my wife, who along with restraining orders and threats of divorce, arrest, and homelessness, uses money try and control my comings and goings. It was how you wouldn't take me along with you to get (daughter) and then maybe on the way home swing by my friends house to drop off his starter and pick up the fucking sewing machine we needed to finish (daughters) costume that i had been working on all day. It was my irrational fear that if I walked too close to the road while cresting a hill on our road that you might in your anger swerve and try to hit me with your car. It was the fact that in order to remove myself from a situation that looked like it was heading towards more useless fighting and hurt feelings, and very likely a physical conflict that I absolutely refuse to allow myself to get into with you ever again, I felt that my best bet was to not wait for a ride or your fucking permission to leave... it was just to get the fuck out of there while you were gone for however long it would take you to break the speed limit there and back to tell me how useless and horrible I am for wanting to do everything I can for anybody who seems to need me including my family, as long as they don't make me feel like my family isn't important... which my friends never do. Doing things for people isn't buying their friendship... Its helping people you care about. As foreign a concept as this is, being that you leave me scared to ask for the littlest things, or gas to get away from the house where depression lives for a little bit... and I'm your husband... I won't even bother asking you for cigarettes anymore. I don't leave the lights and the tvs on around the house. I clean the dishes and cook dinner, and pick up (daughter) if she's sick, or your too busy fucking with your phone to inconvenience yourself long enough to show her the personal attention of a ride home alone with mom. Don't worry, though... I tell her how much I love her, and I make her laugh, and I hold her hand and tell her that I think she is beautiful just like her mom... I try every time I get the opportunity to let her know how great my life is because she has gotten to be a part of it. So don't you tell me about how I'm hurting her. Your insecurity and low self-esteem are leading you to a place where you allow yourself to make me appear as though I'm the only fucking problem you fucking have, when in actuality I have always been your biggest fucking cheerleader. I will not defend myself against baseless allegations of neglect, abuse or dishonesty. You have designed an idea about who it is that you need me to be, and you will never allow me to live comfortably outside of that idea you hold so dearly in your head. That idea is a fucking lie, Erica... and if you sit the fuck down and shut your fucking mouth for just a couple of minutes and think about the fact that I worship the ground you walk on every day you let me, but you're twisted ideas of what you believe would be an ideal life if Jerry would just do everything that pleases you, and put the things that truly make him feel like he is contributing to something in the trash where they belong... these ideas have left me leading what some people would call the life of a person with a serious personality disorder. I can't help it that I have people who want to be around me because I make them smile, or they can count on me to help them nail some boards into their house and share a conversation with to ease their minds. I do all of these things for you too. And that shit about me ignoring your "exciting' news about a promotion you hated the thought of taking because your daughter might have to learn to be without her mommy for a couple of hours in the evening. How the fuck do you think it makes me feel to know that you were just baiting me to fuck up and waiting for an opportunity to jump my ass about a mistake I made so you could tell your dad and mom and sister and daughter that you didn't take the promotion and make more money for yourself and move ahead in the world because you couldn't trust your husband to be at home with your daughter, who is perfectly capable of handling most things on her own these days, and that is perfectly natural for the record. Your sociopathic lying is so ingrained that you don't even know your doing it, and I refuse to sit back and enable your mental illnesses and worthless self-esteem any longer. You need to apologize to me for all of the rotten things you have done to me over the course of our marriage that have driven me to feel like a dual personality. You need to apologize for every time you make me feel like shit because I want to do something nice for someone, and it might mean that I won't ask for cigarettes for a couple of days.... but I would never tell you thats how I justify it. I just let you be a complete bitch and put all of the worlds weighty problems that you create for yourself on my broken and miserably weak shoulders. I truly hope you think about sucking it up and considering this, because I've been waiting for a long time for you to realize just how good you have it with me around, and how much of your bullshit I tolerate without calling it to your attention and making you feel like the batshit psycho control freak that you are. You need to apologize for expecting me to be someone you want me to be instead of someone I am happy with and can love you honestly with. You need to apologize for making me feel responsible for your moms addictions and suicide attempts. You need to apologize for letting your sister talk to me like I'm a worthless piece of shit, when in all honesty she is only projecting her worst fears of herself onto me when she hates me so openly and talks to me with distaste on her tongue. I have done everything to protect from those poisonous aspects of my family. You seem to revel in the fact that you know if you ever need to bitch about me, you know that your mom and sister will agree with you wholeheartedly and probably point out a couple of things that you would have never realized because your so fucking selfishly stuck on the world you want, that the world you could have had is rapidly slipping through your fingers.
You need to apologize to me for badgering me until I couldn't rest because if I were ever going to be able to love myself or anybody close to me ever again, I needed to tell you how much I resent you for never apologizing to me for anything more than forgetting to pick me up a pack of cigarettes. You need to apologize to yourself, because I do resent you, and resentment lasts a long, long time.
~~~END~~~
