Looking back for the first signs of trouble is a very natural behavior after the end of any relationship. You don't want to repeat your mistakes, after all. Even I, as unhealthy as I am at the moment, as distasteful as ever dating again feels to me, as much as I feel that I'd take her back if she ceased the silent treatment some day and reached out to me, know on an intellectual level (if on no other) that I'd better learn to identify PD women a mile away in a nanosecond. I imagine it becomes an obsession with all survivors.
In the case of Zoe, many of the red flags were concealed until it was too late. But there was one that was always obvious, a red thread woven into the fabric of her life. She couldn't conceal it if she tried and in fact, she didn't even want to; displaying this aspect of her history and personality openly was part of her plan all along. She must have guessed, and guessed correctly, that she could get away with almost anything if she presented herself to me as a victim.
A personal detail: Zoe works as a flight attendant. I wrestled for some time about whether or not to reveal that fact. Indeed, since the beginning of my recovery I've been navigating the line of how much I should openly publish, as it feels like a betrayal even though I've been betrayed by her about as completely as one can be already. But no one will ever make the connection to her anyway, and it's an important part of the complete story that I mean to tell.
At first her chosen career was an interesting, even glamorous feature of her life. I had a million questions. There is something undeniably fascinating about the world of aviation, and I was able to re-live that every time I introduced her to someone new—invariably all the same questions would be asked again. Everyone's flown before, everyone can relate. And then, of course, there's the promise of free travel, which I even enjoyed here and there during our time together.
But I learned very quickly: being a flight attendant is a terrible job. It's stressful. They're constantly falling ill. The schedules are inconsistent and exhausting. The flight benefits are a lot less beneficial than you might expect. And in the first years, at least, before one climbs the seniority ladder, the pay is abysmal. She was scraping out a living not far from the federal poverty line, in fact.
It might make sense for people in their twenties, people that want to travel a bit and have fun before becoming fully adult. Some of those might even stick it out until the lifestyle becomes sustainable, subsidized in the meantime by parents and partners, no doubt.
Zoe was thirty-four and had been in the job two months when I met her.
I've seen her academic CV. Becoming a professor isn't easy, no doubt, but she had the background; I believe she would have made it. Her degrees and her doctoral work were done at one of the best universities in the United States in her field. She was smart enough. But she had thrown all of that away, and for reasons that were never really explained. Her early attempts included:
- "I had to leave my home town, it was killing my soul". Killing my soul. She would come to use this sort of apocalyptic language frequently throughout our relationship. Eventually, and very hurtfully, she would apply it to me as well.
- References to a lot of interpersonal conflict in her university department, all of it created, of course, by others.
At the time I chalked it up to the usual despair experienced by the graduate student. I can understand that. She still had one foot in the university too: it was possible for her to return if she registered soon, in the next semester, to keep her already-earned credits alive.
When I met Zoe she lived somewhat near the airport, in a "crashpad" condo with four other girls, all of them in their mid-twenties, sharing bedrooms, some sleeping on air mattresses. Very quickly quite a lot of interpersonal conflict made living there almost unbearable for Zoe. Once again, all of it was created, of course, by others.
But this was relatively easy to explain away too; after all I already believed that nothing but chaos and drama could come from living in close quarters with four somewhat-transient and mostly not-really-educated women in their mid-twenties. It was easy to see Zoe as the victim of all that, as the one sane adult trying to keep the extended-adolescence lunatic asylum together and running smoothly.
She began to tell me stories about the other girls, about how they had turned against her and were busy spreading malicious rumors. Once again that was all easy to accept at the time; Zoe is an adorable, shy, introverted, petite woman that knows very well how to present herself as a "nice girl" that's fallen into some trouble. If she's suffering because of conflict with others (and one way or another she is always suffering because of conflict with others), the most natural thing is to believe her story, one-hundred-percent, and accept her anger into yourself—why is it happening to this poor girl, again?
There was something that stuck to my mind even then, however: Zoe signed a year-long lease committing herself to that situation, a lease that already looked like a serious mistake less than a month into it.
I've since realized that when someone comes into your life appearing to be perpetually the victim of circumstances, the kindest rational explanation is that they make bad decisions that cause these situations to occur. A less-kind explanation is that the victim pose is how they get away with abusing others.
If one of those "condo girls", as they came to be known, approached me then and told me any of what they were saying about Zoe, I wouldn't have believed it, not for a second. I'm still inclined to believe that she made a naive error and fell in with bad folk, but I'd be stupid to believe that completely. After everything I've seen, I can't be sure anymore.
But at the time I was sure; my protective instincts were roaring inside my brain and all I wanted was to take my beloved away from that place, wrap her up warm in some of my stability and prosperity, help her to thrive in this new life of hers, and rescue her from a mistake, even if she had clearly made that mistake herself.
And that was my mistake, the first of many.
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