My Monster in the Closet

I used to be one of those people that believed, truly believed in the inherent goodness in all human beings. That everyone, given the right circumstances, is good at the core. It is only the fault of confusion brought on by abuse, culture, society, poverty, etc that causes that good to get covered up. 

Roi has changed my mind. It saddens me, but I can't go back. For some, I now believe, are bad at the core. 

I have been with Roi for nearly 5 years now, and he is much more sober now than he was when we met, but he retains a frightening level of disconnect about his own actions. This disconnect was the last mind-bending thing I couldn't really get my head around. It didn't make sense that someone so intelligent could be so thick-headed about fundamental concepts that I'd seen many others in Recovery get.  

Not a day goes by that he doesn't say something that just smacks me in the face with its utter absurd hypocrisy. He'll refuse to watch a scene on television where violence against a woman is being portrayed, even if only the day before he had engaged in pornography that depicted women as victims. 

If I should point out this apparent disconnect he will reply that the porn is "just fantasy". 

Forgetting the obvious -- that television is its own form of fantasy in that it isn't real, I could instead point out that all of his fantasies seem to involve crossing a woman's boundaries without her permission, and though fantasies are only thoughts, our thoughts are also large clues into who we are as people. How we think is part of our core. But he only shrugs it off to my being overreactive, not understanding, crazy, or some-such. 

His default is that I can't possibly understand what he understands, and oddly enough, he refuses to even try to explain it to me. The cop-out is stunningly obvious, yet he has a ready defense for that too.

Only six months ago I believed that he was simply bold-faced lying to me during such conversations, but I am slowly gleaning that he believes himself, though he must defy all logic to do so. 

Roi considers himself to be a highly rational person, capable of higher logic than anyone around him. He refuses to question himself, to wonder if he is being irrational. His mind is so cleanly divided that he is able to believe his delusions. So when he says to one of his best friends who has been sober for years that he can't remember what alcohol is like, even though I'm sitting right there -- the same me who found his alcohol stash not two weeks before -- he doesn't even blink an eye. In his mind, what he just said to his friend is true. 

And because he can't see the disconnect, his sanity is ironically intact, while I have to make sure that I reach out to others to retain mine because it just makes my brain crack.