Struggling to process what the F**K just happened

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on September 10, 2010December 16, 2022

Warning: The following contains venting of anger, to get it out of my heart and onto the page, to make the story authentic, and to show other victims of abuse that I feel your rage.

On July 22, I sent this e-mail to Jeff:

Actually, near the end of [watching] “The Burning Bed,” I was suddenly inspired to go into the e-mails and find out just what Richard wrote you on Facebook on about 6/28, when we were arguing about NLD and such.
I saw 3 messages he wrote to you that night, including the one about hitting you with a brick and not having been that mad in years and being easily provoked to physical violence. It was…scary.
It was hard to say if he was actually threatening you, but it was scary that he would even think that–and that there were at least two earlier drafts which could’ve been even worse.
I mean, WHY? What about what you wrote, or what I wrote, could’ve provoked him so much?
It reminds me, also, of how Tracy blew up a few days later, and that when she was living at our house, there was a time when she got so mad at me that she, according to Richard, almost killed, or could’ve killed me…I forget the exact wording. I don’t know if he meant it literally or verbally.
I remember Tracy’s e-mail to you included something about “self-diagnosed learning disorder.” Which I thought Richard said should never be brought up to her.
I remember this sense that it could make her mad, that it might be dangerous to mention it to her. And I wonder when/why Richard mentioned it to her.
These are violent people. And something seems to have been stirring them up, because I don’t know what we could’ve done to inspire the verbal tirades we were getting those few days.
Or what I could’ve said in my e-mail to him, near the end of May?, about [the Creeps who sexually harassed me], because that also provoked him to write a rather nasty e-mail (the final draft of many).
All I know is that for the past year, I’ve really struggled with getting friendly with Tracy because on some night that I can’t identify, she could’ve attacked me in my own house–for something that seemed to me perfectly innocent.
The thought of her possibly taking her fists to me has haunted me many times. I imagine you coming into the room, whether from the basement or your bed, screaming at her and throwing her out of the house. Me going to the hospital.
This has gone through my mind many times for the past year, since it was a year ago that Richard told me about this. And yet, somehow, *I* am painted as the one who has just been too stubborn or mean to treat Tracy right.
Right now, rather than wishing to have my friend back, I just feel this weird sense of having escaped but still dealing with the traumatic fallout…..

Jeff and I both feel that the e-mail that sparked the “incident” did not deserve the reaction it got. Yes, he saw the e-mail, and when he told a group of our friends about it, they all agreed that it’s something that friends will tease you over and embarrass you over, but that would be that and everyone would move on.

But a woman who is so full of jealousy that she feels she has to approve her husband’s friends, who is so full of jealousy that saying “I’ll miss you dearly, but have fun” sparks a rage episode from her—

–She’s not rational, and anything she says in such an irrational, raging state should be taken as just a bunch of BS that should never be taken to heart.

She must have been reading this Wikihow-to on how to isolate your man from his friends. (Check the comments, too: the later ones sound very familiar. Here I link to a blog post about the Wikihow-to, but the original is here.)

More than one person has commented that Tracy is never satisfied; I saw this for myself because she was never satisfied with me.

My mistake has been going over the things she said again and again in my head as if they should be taken even slightly seriously, as if maybe there were something to my actions that was shameful.

But I know what was in the e-mail, what it was for, what it was about–and that it was all perfectly innocent. My husband, too, has read that e-mail and the ones after it, and to him also it’s all perfectly innocent.

I did not deserve Tracy’s response.

And Richard was Judas because he allowed her to do this, when he knew dang well that there was nothing about what I said that was in any way shameful or that in any way deserved her response.

There was nothing sexual in my e-mail, though it was treated like some sort of proposition. Heck, I did not even want to see Richard naked, so why on earth would I proposition him? My e-mail was that of one close friend to another.

Richard should be the one ashamed.

Tracy should be ashamed of herself.

I was sick of all the accusations coming from left and right when I had done nothing wrong.

But because I believed Richard, because I trusted Richard, Tracy treated me this way.

This made me feel set up by Richard, that he wasn’t telling her his part in the whole thing, but throwing me to the wolves for something that he did.

I thought Richard had eradicated the violence that had once been in his heart and actions, only to find it still there.

It makes me want to seek out the ones who love, and who want to stamp out all forms of violence, hate and suspicion, since I know they’re out there, finding traces of them on the Internet and in music by the Beloved, Shamen, and the like.

Even if they are some other religion than my own, they express the love for mankind that my own religion is supposed to be about,

instead of the hate I found here in two members of my own religion.

After all the loving things we had done for Richard and Tracy, to help them, to be there for them, things which I had been the one to initiate, Jeff the one to carry out–I was being treated like sh**. I was told to f*** off. I was treated like some hoebag slut.

After we had given them what they needed again and again and again, I was treated like some skanky tramp who steals husbands.

All because I reminisced over an innocent hug. A hug! A hug which had no groping, no kissing, no hands in the wrong places, no gazing into the eyes, nothing loverly, but was an expression of platonic love and caring for a dear friend who had helped Richard’s family!

I was full of rage, of fury. Yet unlike Tracy, I did not throw f– bombs around, did not start cussing and screaming at her, kept myself in check, kept my tongue in check, though I was rapidly losing my temper and part of it was spewing into my messages. I wrote, for example, “WHY AM I BEING TREATED LIKE A WHORE????!!!!!”

You’d think this would be a big huge flag that I did NOT see anything about my behavior that was whorish, that she should calm down and find out the true meaning of my message instead of reading all sorts of crap into it that wasn’t even there.

But no. She’s always right about everything. What she says your motives are, are indeed your motives. If she sees your Facebook post of “I’ll miss you dearly, but have fun!” as moving in on her husband, then that’s indeed what it is.

Truth be d**ned. The only truth is HER truth. Whatever she dreams up in her pathetic imagination, is Truth.

–And don’t forget how cool Richard had become to me because I didn’t agree with his TEA Party politics, because I didn’t agree that Democrats and liberals were Antichrist, because I thought that Universal Health Care would be a good thing if Congress could get it to work.

My husband became furious with Tracy and Richard both for treating me like sh** over the e-mail.

He was so furious with Richard and Tracy that he said to me that Tracy needs to go sit in a corner like a naughty child,

that there was no call for her to throw f-bombs at me,

that no she does NOT get her way this time,

and that he wouldn’t allow me to try to patch things up with them until Tracy got down on her knees and apologized to me.

When I was still in shock over everything and mourning what had happened, wishing the friendship would be restored, my pastor friend Mike asked WHY–saying that even if we did reconcile, this would always be between us, and that whatever friendship had been there in the past, “these people are TOXIC!”

Catherine, when I told her Tracy took my quiet nature as a personal attack, laughed and said, “How long has she known you?” She also said that it sounds like Richard talked a lot but didn’t really listen to me.

Jeff even got upset with me during the week or two after the “incident” for even considering making apologies and reconciling, for thinking this is what the Orthodox Church says I should do:

Though he missed the children, as far as he was concerned, it was good riddance to Richard and Tracy after the way they’d treated me (and him for sticking up for me).

He felt that if anyone was to apologize, it was her to me.

He wouldn’t let me anywhere near her.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. We share a house

3. Tracy’s abuse turns on me