Made it through his first hoovering attempt this weekend

[TiredOfNarcs]

Unfortunately, my narcissistic ex whom I've been NC with for a month ended up being at the same event as me Friday night. I knew there was a risk of this happening since the event was co-hosted by both our organizations, even though he's never attended past events before, so I told my friends to please stay by my side so he can't try to get me alone if he shows up.
Sure enough, he showed up this time.
He left me alone during the event, but then the afterparty rolled around and things got more difficult. Once alcohol became involved it was a lot more difficult to keep my group together, people tended to wander off and mingle elsewhere. I thought everything was going well - either my ex had decided not to stick around for the afterparty or he was actually going to do the decent thing for once and leave me alone - and I got invited by a friend to play some games of pong with him. I hadn't even thought anything of it when my friend walked off to try and grab the ball that had rolled away from us...next thing you know, there's a hand being stuck in my face expecting to be shaken, and attached to it is exactly the man I'd been avoiding all night. He'd put on a friendly expression, trying to engage me in casual conversation, and I stuck to bland, one-word replies, nothing that would betray any emotion, negative or positive. I was hoping to just bore him into losing interest and moving on.
But of course, he had a couple more tricks up his sleeve before he was going to let that happen.
He "casually" mentioned knowing specific things I did and places I went to over spring break last week. For context, this man has been blocked on everything for just over a month and should only know about one of the things I did over spring break because he still follows a friend of mine who posted a picture of it. If I expressed surprise, it would open up a conversation about my blocking him, so I went along with it and plainly said yeah I did those things, without questioning how he knew about them. He didn't like that I still wasn't giving him a reaction, so his next strategy was to walk a few paces away and bring over the new supply to make out with right next to the table where I was playing my game of pong. Not only did I not even look in their direction - I actually scored the winning shot right at that table as they were doing their clownery.
So after that didn't work, he tried to triangulate. He'd go up to my friends and tell them that I didn't want to talk to him, trying to get them to tell him more. None of them folded or acknowledged his comments. So he took things up a notch again, following me around the large venue with his new supply without making it super obvious he was following me. Any time I stopped to converse with people or do anything, he'd be a few paces away canoodling with the new supply. God knows why she'd want to spend her night helping a man follow his ex around, but he's so manipulative that I'm sure she didn't even realize that's what they were doing.

The great thing about all of this was that it enabled me to realize his antics made me feel nothing anymore. He had no power over me anymore. Every time he upped the ante, he was losing more and more control whilst I managed to have an overall enjoyable night. I'm still going to be committed as ever to NC with him, but it felt amazing to know I could be so apathetic to his emotional warfare.

It felt like a major milestone in my healing process.

[escapingman]

Well done! That is impressive! Wow, just wow.

[Boat Babe]

That is a masteclass in Grey Rocking. Bravo