Engaged to Mayhem

My relationships with men have been riddled with chaos. It’s taken me years to unravel this disheveled mess.

Where was my value? What would I continue to allow in my life? Was I worth being treated with kindness, gentleness, and integrity? Would loyalty ever be shown to me?

From the The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III, On disagreeable, nasty people; and on avoiding obsessing about their bullying:

10 March 1954

I am sorry things are not better. I am very puzzled by people like your Committee Secretary, people who are just nasty.

. . .

I have found it more among boys than anyone else. That makes me think it really comes from inner insecurity—a dim sense that one is Nobody, a strong determination to be Somebody, and a belief that this can be achieved by arrogance. Probably you, who can’t hit back, come in for a good deal of resentful arrogance aroused by others on whom she doesn’t vent it, because they can. (A bully in an Elizabethan play, having been sat on by a man he dare not fight, says ‘I’ll go home and beat all my servants’).

But I mustn’t encourage you to go on thinking about her: that, after all, is almost the greatest evil nasty people can do us—to become an obsession, to haunt our minds. A brief prayer for them, and then away to other subjects, is the thing, if one can only stick to it.

What great words of wisdom!

I don’t obsess over these men with whom I had terrible relationships with. I also don’t try to change it into being something better than it actually was. There were a lot of wasted years here.

I simply try to walk on by.

I’ve learned the lessons I’ve needed to learn. My upbringing erected a very destructive pattern that I had to redesign, tear down and rebuild.

Inner insecurity, the true colors of arrogance. It’s with their own twisted sense of self that they bully and abuse others. Their destruction is born out of their utter lack of caring for themselves and accepting who they are. They don’t have loyalty to themselves, so they have no loyalty to give to anyone else.

Unfortunately, these were exactly the lessons I learned from my parents. By using the gift and ability to tell my story with full truth it began breaking these ugly patterns.

Now, with all the nasty people I encounter in life, God grant me the ability to just walk on by!