These are the stories and chronicles of my struggle to get free from narcissistic abuse. Sometimes they’re funny. Sometimes they aren’t.
Always, always, they are Lived Experience, the most radical soap opera style there is.
This one isn’t so funny.
It’s six o’clock in the morning in New York City. Friday. People will be getting up for work soon. Check that; when I got up to refill my coffee, I heard them starting up and getting it going, down below me in the streets of the Bronx. GAWD I love New York. I, on the other hand, still don’t have any work to go to and yet I’ve been up since around 4, awake since 3:30.
We had the mediation by Zoom today. I had thought maybe this would happen last year after I served him, but this divorce process has been a wealth of surprises. Unless you examine it through the lens of narcissistic abuse, and suddenly it all tracks. And today I was beaten to death by a system that does not protect women. It took hours. It was brutal. And although an agreement was achieved, I have absolutely zero confidence that I will ever see a dollar.
Oh my darlings. This is so bad.
First of all, there’s a buttload of credit card debt, which should come as a surprise to no one. I fled without funds, it was a matter of survival. So I have to immediately declare bankruptcy. I literally have to, it’s in the agreement. I’m 68, and I’m declaring bankruptcy for the third time, and I feel like an absolute failure at Life. But I have to. Like, Monday.
I still have to pay my attorney’s final bill, too. Oh goody.
But here’s where it gets just even uglier than I ever anticipated. His part of the deal is to sell our old townhome and give me a certain sum – not enough to live on for one year in New York, barely enough to re-start my life – by a certain date, Sounds easy, right?
In 30 days, he has to put the house on the market. In 90 days after that, he has to give me a little money. Here is what is going to happen instead. In the roughly four months until I am supposed to allegedly get paid, he is going to approach this legal obligation in the same manner as he approached the zoom the other day, and Discovery last fall. He will drag his feet. He will not prepare properly. He will lie (he lied a lot during the meeting and my attorney called him out more than once).
He will funnel money to his son, who is in bankruptcy himself, to do repairs. The repairs will take forever. The real estate agent (chosen by my spouse, unknown to me, but likely a family friend of the son’s) will insist on more repairs. He will retire from his fulltime job and claim hardship. That sale could take months to go through. The date will pass when he’s supposed to pay me my share, and he won’t be able to make payment. He will undersell the house by tens of thousands and claim that proceeds were eaten up by repairs. He will then claim hardship AGAIN and will be "unable" to meet the terms of the agreement.
I will be condemned to eternal poverty because I will have no startup money to build my business upon, unless something comes through pretty soon.
So, I've been up since JFC in the morning because we successfully reached an agreement, but I lost everything today. Mark my words.
There’s more, but that’s the upshot. I’ve been looking for a “day job” for months. I even submitted another online voice interview in consideration for yet another position at the Macy’s in Westchester just last week, just to keep in practice. Haven’t heard doodley.
So it’s even more crap to slog through as I get myself disentangled by my abuser, and it’s all on my skills as an actor and voice actor to seek work from here on in. I don’t have TIME to declare bankruptcy, it’s a Political year and I have marketing I’d like to do. But I have to. I have to do both, apparently, as the fascism and the billionaires continue to eat us alive..
Anyway. The booth stands. I don’t have Source Connect and there’s not a lot of room in there for accessories, not to mention one can only run so much electricity safely in these sweet old pre-war apartment houses. Our apartment is not heavily laden with three-prongers! 🤣 But it’s there, the studio I left behind me is a new magickal shoebox to record in. I can find my way back to the audio at last, both recreationally and professionally.
In the meantime, anybody want to buy a cheap white gold 10 carat wedding set with diamond chips from JC Penney 2008?
I took this at random a few months ago, so the rings aren't cleaned up or staged. But there it is, my marital jewelry collection. 10 carat white gold wedding set with chips; cheap silver ring with garnets a friend gave me; and one he found in the parking lot at the grocery and gave me for Christmas.
That’s right. He never even bought me decent jewelry to hock.
BUT, he did take a moment to post this:
Oh, girls!! He's single at last! And he's WAY OLDER than he is in that photo!!
That’s right. We’re not even officially divorced yet. But he changed that shit to “single” asap. Because of all the chicks he’s gonna get now! 🤣 He changed it to "separated" when I was crying in the next room, he changed it to married when I left him, separated when I served him; and today he completely skipped over the divorce that ain't final yet and went straight to single & ready to mingle. Oy. Good luck with all that.
As soon as I get some of this stuff started, I’ll make you some cool content and a shiny new podcast episode and really earn my keep as a creator. My two steps forward, three steps back, experience of recent months has not thrown me off the track entirely. And the enormous blessings of not experiencing human rage for nearly ten months has been liberating AF. It's really nice here where people don't verbally abuse each other. The struggle all along has been to get free from a toxic marriage, and towards that end I have been overly occupied with paperwork and digging up bits from my past like it’s a fulltime job right there. So this goal is nearly accomplished. The freedom is tangible.
But healing cannot be hastened by logic. The impact of realizing that, but for your support and the welcoming love of the couple who are apparently keeping me as a pet now, I really would be sleeping in my car on the Gulf Coast beaches, is going to take a long time to work through. Twenty years of my life gone, and not a dollar to show for it, in a collapsing economy as a dictator mows down our nation.
But my S2BX declares that I am capable of self support.
Well, maybe baby, but my businesses are expensive to run and you’re sure making it harder for MamaCat to function.
Wait, wasn’t it starting my business and spending more time on that than on housework that started all the fuss in the first place?
You can see how it’s been an exhausting time.
I’m putting video auditions in the can on the regular and submitting for some grandma or village witch role almost every day. The sooner it gets around town that there’s a fresh new weird old lady, the better I like it. We must never forget the One Hundred Auditions Rule: If you haven’t done one hundred auditions yet in a major market, you haven’t started; if you haven’t had a callback or request for further info after one hundred, you need a tune-up somewhere.
So, yeah, it appears that while some of y’all are at VO Atlanta 2026, I’ll be crashing at a friend’s place in Minneapolis while I retrieve whatever of my personal belongings I can access under the eyes of the law and under the Order for Protection I got in December. If you think to take up a collection while you’re there, I promise to continue to use it for niceness and not evil. I’m probably only partially kidding.
In the meantime, any time you give my YouTube or my podcast ratings, it tweaks the algorithm for free, and contributes to the illusion that I exist. (these are the jokes, folks!😸). That’s genuine help, and I appreciate it so much. Thanks again for being there.
LMK about the rings, too. Next on the chopping block is my KROK Rokit5 monitor speakers, and they’re far more dear to me.
Meanwhile, He Who Shall Be Divorced plays music in MAGA bars.
Alrighty then, off to another day of doing Everything Humanly Possible, fueled by coffee, built on determination and belief in myself.
Meow, darlings.
F*** ICE.