Scuppers

The puppy that saved my sanity.

The motorcycle was a shock.

It reiterated this unsettling feeling of… I don’t know my husband anymore. And I need to stress this — he had never mentioned wanting a motorcycle. Boats? Yes. Trucks? Yes. Random gadgets and oversized toys? Absolutely. But a motorcycle? Not once. Ever.

And like every other decision he made, I felt like I had zero control. No say. Any concern I raised was dismissed, minimized, or turned back on me until I started questioning my own reactions. I came home from the concert with the emotional range of someone who’d just ridden a roller coaster in the dark — excited about the new puppy, terrified by what I immediately clocked as a death-wish purchase, and carrying a heavy dread when I noticed a butane lighter** sitting out on the counter.

What I didn’t have language for then was that this wasn’t just about the motorcycle — it was about the emotional whiplash that comes from being constantly destabilized. The gaslighting wasn’t loud or obvious; it was subtle, cumulative. Decisions would appear fully formed, and when I reacted with fear or confusion, I was made to feel dramatic, controlling, or “no fun.”

Narcissists do this almost reflexively — they rewrite reality in real time, positioning your concern as the problem and their impulsivity as confidence.

And women, especially women conditioned to keep the peace, tend to respond the same way: we internalize the chaos. We doubt our instincts. We try to be cooler, quieter, more agreeable — telling ourselves that if we could just explain it better, react softer, love harder, the ground would stop shifting beneath our feet.

**If you’re not familiar, a butane lighter is a small refillable torch lighter — hotter, stronger, and more… purposeful than the Bic you buy at the grocery store. They’re used for camping, soldering, cigars, crème brûlée, “crafts,” and—let’s be honest here—the kind of drugs you definitely don’t make in a double boiler. And I was pretty sure which category we were dealing with.

But I didn’t have the time or emotional capacity to dwell on something that would be denied, deflected, or excused away. Not again.

That was the pattern, after all — see the thing, feel the thing, swallow the thing. Survival had taught me efficiency. I had learned that noticing too much only created more work for me.