How I Survived Being the World’s Most Neurotic and Naïve Black Sheep

Goody Two-Shoes Becomes Hester Prynne and Gets a Bewildering Scarlet Letter

Panorama of a black sheep on top of a dike in Friesland, Netherlands. Credit: venemama via Adobe Stock

Being the Black Sheep of the family gifted me low self-esteem and low self-esteem gifted me perfectionism. The reason I was labeled Black Sheep was complicated and not my fault.

I ended up marrying a sociopathic narcissist.

My first husband was a guy from my church. He was also mentally, verbally and sexually abusive. We lived away from the family while he was in the Navy, and when he deployed I went back home and moved back in with my parents.

At home, with the mother and father who gifted me the low self-esteem, I realized I couldn't stay married to him. No one in my family had ever been divorced. Big family on both sides. Zero divorces. Ever.

When I made the decision to leave my abusive husband, my mother gave me a big long lecture about how terrible my father was and how she never left him. (He's a narcissist too.) And then I got called into church to be berated by a favorite uncle and aunt, and told that they knew people who had stayed married through infidelity and that I could too, if I would just try.

There were various other confrontations. His mother. My cousins. My sister. Even after I clearly had grounds for divorce (infidelity) that wasn't good enough for anyone.

Anyone but me.

As I processed my horrific marriage and got stalked by my estranged husband, I also lost most of my family. Not everyone. But a huge chunk. It's not easy to be the first person in your churchy family to ever get divorced.

Through all that I was forced to let people go. End relationships. Stand up for myself. It was hard. I wore all black and stopped eating and thought about not living.

It was a traumatic way to do it, but I learned to trust my gut. I learned to do whatever I needed to do to survive. Not unapologetically, but moving forward. A single friend went to my divorce hearing with me.

There was no one else to go. And that was okay. Because I knew I was doing the one thing that I needed most -- getting away from my abuser.

There was a lot of fallout. Years and years and years. I would DO IT ALL AGAIN. The guilt-inducing lectures and the months of crying and my mother screaming at me and my dad not caring and my sister condemning me to hell and my cousin (also my pastor) counseling me to go back.

Because I was worth it. And so are you.

Knowing your truth and living it out in front of everyone lets you know exactly where you stand. And then you begin to rebuild a new family of people who love and accept you. Because you deserve that and you have nurtured self-confidence, enough to do it.

All the love to you.