narcan but for narcissism
sporklift certified
i refuse to learn who the girthmaster is
“one person’s NPC is another’s DLC”
what are the 6 hater languages
sporklift certified
a lot of “i don’t talk to cops” niggas out here in snitchuationships, stay safe
“give it to me straight. thank you, now give it to me gay. fabulous.”
out: “zionist.” in: “they have…a certain genocide quoi”
some of y’all fave critical thinkers are critical stinkers
some of y’all need to be in a polycule with some books and some solitude, my god
if mental health is mental wealth, that really explains why everyone's broke rn
“we better depart, my dear, lest we join the dearly departed”
those holding you back from learning your history have every intention of repeating it
series is feeling cathartic so far, lemme know your thoughts 💕
last two were about therapy speak feeling meaningless and the oversharing economy online (LINK). let’s dig deeper—
pulling yaself up by your mental bootstraps (and also someone else’s as a treat)
let’s keep it a buck, we all know someone who be a little too self-glazing, on their own dick, crab scratching they clit – okay that last one was a little bugged out ( i need an editor).
self-love. focus on yourself. self-help. selfies. self-improvement. it’s easier now more than ever to ride high on being you and…great! some of this is to offset the negativity of the world, poor treatment by others across the board, to center ourselves in a sea of chaotic relationships, or to take time to understand our place on earth and the cosmos.
all that being valid, we are also living in unprecedented times of unearned confidence and overstated abilities/knowledge. people fake it til they make it, lie on resumés, queerbait, blackfish, walk through the world with the confidence of a mediocre white man/woman, call themselves kings and queens, etc. the internet has made it so easy to jack someone’s whole flow like in ingrid goes west (second reference in two posts, love this flick). literally, some people’s whole personality can feel like a fortnite skin they picked up from tiktok.
but does that make them a narcissist? do they have npd? oh my god – should we kill them?
well no, but still – these days it’s hard to tell, honestly, who a narcissist is and who isn’t.
i find it interesting that in a world of people with “main character syndrome” who are the center of their digital universe, where we are programmed to make channels/accounts/pages all about the curated version of us, or streaming their lives 24 hours a day for clicks (and making good bread doing it), that this descriptor of “narcissist” is still as violent sounding as it is. maybe it’s because it’s swung around as the most extreme version of the word and not every other definition of it, who knows.
i believe all of those diagnoses should be done professionally and not in the court of public opinion. yeah, there are signs, yes, there are concerning behaviors, but the clinical work gotta be done by clinicians.
i guess what i’m asking is what does that spectrum look like when we account for increased individuality?
do re 🎶meeeeeeeee🎶
i work in an industry of “narcissists.”
artists, writers, performers, etc: the whole job is to manipulate words and stories (or their publicist’s job if they g off and get rich enough). the confidence to be like “look at me, i’m funny/talented/dramatic/naked, comes from a little bit of well-placed ego, the right connections, and just a scoch of mental illness/pain to mine for perspective (some of those scochs a little more heavy-handed than others).
i mean, look at this list and think about some of the more annoying people in an artistic community. according to the cleveland clinic, people with narcissistic personality disorder:
are self-centered and boastful (um)
seek constant attention and admiration (umm)
consider themselves better than others (ummm?)
exaggerate their talents and achievements (ummmm??)
believe that they are entitled to special treatment (uhhhhh?
are easily hurt but might not show it (lmao)
might take advantage of others to achieve their goals (hmmmm?)
exaggerates their own importance (go on…)
is preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, intelligence or ideal romance (on. they. own. DICK.)
have you ever had a conversation with someone who felt “slept on?” it’s just this list of traits and a blunt tbh. i used to tell my friends who wanted to date comedians “why would you suck the dick of a dude who sucks his own for 8-15 minutes a night, 7 nights a week?” and “why add yourself to the recurring guest star list in shorty’s routine where she only talks about how hard it is to be straight these days but can’t see she’s the center of that story?”
mad easy to look at this list and be like “oh no not my favorite darling silly little guy!” but that’s overly simplistic and also NOT OUR MINISTRY TO DIAGNOSE. t
his is just a starting place.
narc tank on npd | 8/7c
factarooni: we’re all a bit narcissistic it’s when that normal dose of it.
it becomes malignant or it’s used to build a career/persona/power off of the backs people they’ve abused/harmed that we gotta interrogate and dig deep. plenty of more malignant narcissists hiding in plain sight, pulling the levers of the lives of people they’ve manipulated from the shadows (many such stories).
keep it a bean: being a wild narcissist is normalized in our culture, cushioned desperate upward social mobility. it’s further accentuated by living in a country that champions rugged individualism but preaches hollow community. pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps is par for the course in america and if you’re successful enough, you can pull yourself up by someone else’s bootstraps (if you’re a dick, you’ll hang those people by those same bootstraps).
so all americans are narcissists? feels overly simplistic imo. not exactly but in a historical, political, and media environment where america is centered in every global decision and pulls the levers of exploited, subjugated, and oppressed people all around the world, it’s hard not to look at america on the micro and the macro as a violent narcissistic country with a violent tendency to lash out when its insatiable and often immoral needs aren’t met.
i mean, look at this list of NPD symptoms from the DSM-5* and tell me that this isn’t america:
grandiose sense of self-importance (ummmmm???)
a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love (america be on it’s own shmeat crazy)
a belief that he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions (even if everyone wants to go to ceasefire’s for dinner (great tapas, highly recommend), all america has to say is no, I wanna eat endless dronestrikes at olive garden and no one ends up happy)
A need for excessive admiration (constantly needs to be seen as a beacon of peace and democracy)
a sense of entitlement (to literally everything)
interpersonally exploitive behavior (america don’t even be fucking with americans — it be beefing with teenage climate activists, college students, and tiktok)
a lack of empathy (do i have to recreate the lists of people domestically and abroad who need aid?)
envy of others or a belief that others are envious of him or her (“that bitch is tired — she wishes she had 120 guns per 100 people”)
a demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes (ask anyone in any country their opinions of american tourists or if you can’t afford it, ask anyone who works in service)
* the DSM isn’t perfect and everything should be taken on a case-by-case basis and diagnosed by a professional (but “america…america has a problem”)
so, what’s the difference between a narcissist and being programmed with american/western individualism? to me? levels of entitlement and the means by which people operate to get what they feel they’re entitled to. america (and other places, i know, i know) are steeped in this entitlement to time, energy, and preferential treatment.
this can be easily or lazily transcribed onto men or white folks or rich people who have a penchant for arriving in a situation and being like “hmmmm this needs a little more…me…” but this spreads to people of color and immigrants too. immigrant gang — how many times you had an uncle or auntie get citizenship somewhere else and they switch up crazy on some “you gotta get it out the mud like me, playboy” energy?”
american assimilation necessitates a certain level of individualism that feels unnatural and antithetical to the “community” conversations we’ve been starting to have and the cultural traditions many BIPOC people were raised with.
you always on that damn spectrum
because not everything is binary!!!! what separates regular degular individualists and the internet’s definition of narcissists? ethics.
individualists have been drinking the hustle kulture and konstant kompetition koolaid and just wanna grind. sure, they act in their self-interest but generally don’t want to harm, maim, or step on anyone consciously. to me, individualism feels more like industrial western indoctrination — it needs to be deprogrammed in service of more liberatory politic, this individualism’s a symptom of the american dream™️ and should be examined as such.
online, a narcissist seems to be defined as
an almost disney villainesque predisposition to single-minded emotional and social terrorism, manipulating every single minute detail of their existence with one goal and one goal only – getting theirs and making sure no one else gets their own. a danger to themselves and others and should be shot out of a cannon into the sun every day until god smites us with another asteroid.
okay, a little valid.
malignant narcissists will demolish everything in their path to get what they want, ethics and codes be damned. friends, families, perceived opponents, imagined (sigh) opps, it’s scorched mf earth until they’re felled (by their own actions or external sustained intervention). a solo venture through and through, they will die if they aren’t the center of the moment and you will die if you ever call one out (again, many such cases, especially in my industry). in this day and age, that type of violent narcissist can be a wolf in sheep’s clothing more easily because of the space between who they can project themselves to be online and who they can be irl.
to me? there is a spectrum from selflessness to selfishness and a parallel measure from self-love to plain jane normalized individualism all the way to cold unfeeling NPDemon status and again, that definition needs a professional intervention to diagnose and community care to heal (if it is truly a problem). it’s what the right does with anything that encapsulates the LGBTQIA+ community to just being “gay” — the labels matter, the specificity matters, the vagueness robs people of their humanity.
how do we stop it? well, not how we been moving! the name, blame, and shame game we’ve normalized online causes more harm than good, no matter how well-meaning it is and any transformational work requires all parties at the table to want healthy relationships for all involved (kinda hard to do when we’re coded to be more individually minded…). it also requires us not to move in fear of professional, social, or romantic retribution and abuse and to be able to recognize the signs.
folding it all together, collapsing a spectrum, and weaponizing an unchecked/unprofessional diagnosis isn’t conducive to anything outside of bullying and shaming.
wait, so what is about me? (triple entendre)
literally nothing is about you, about me, about your friend larry, nothing.
not to get too existentialist but we are specks on the timeline of all of recorded history trying to prove ourselves unique, to show that we’re different, to be remembered, to be better than some imagined, self-prescribed obstacle and while that feels like an individual endeavor, i rest easy knowing that i’m not alone in pondering these universal goals.
for me, only one place has been for me me me— therapy. therapy is all about you. the world isn’t. therapy is the 45-60 minute space to unpack and repack things and yes, apply lessons to move forward through difficult things. example? inhale—
you can ask my therapist: it took me a long time to open up and make therapy about me — close to 2 years of regular sessions. so much of my life before that was dedicated to making sure everyone was okay but me. i would blame myself for others’ discomfort, their harmful treatments, for doing my best to communicate in difficult times and not feeling heard.
i don’t confess this for pity but for clarity. the ins and outs of everything we do occur in relationship to others, their idiosyncracies, their tendencies, etc all inform our behavior in conscious and subconscious ways keep things contained to a personal ecosystem minimizes our relationship to things happening around us.
even attempting to center myself in the chaos of everything going on at the time (family, friends, work, societal climate, etc) felt too much about me — i asked her if i was a narcissist for needing space and time to focus on myself. she laughed and told me straight up no; in fact i barely made anything about me and she worked with real narcissists. i still didn’t believe her — how could i be there for anyone if i was being there for myself? math ain’t mathin
over a few more sessions, we unpacked some harmful (and generally trifling) relationships that i had been in and started to find that the internal voice that was telling me to take up less space was coming from those same relationships (including but not limited to ones that hurdled my boundaries, ones that invaded my privacy, ones where i minimized my feelings to keep the peace, etc) — projections and reflections of their own upbringings wreaking havoc on my own ability to navigate my own. shame shame shame kept me from admitting this and kept me jumping from unfulfilling experience to experience.
the next step? it wasn’t sending an emotional drone strike, it wasn’t slinging mud, it was learning to never let it happen again and to make sure i had the tools and wherewithal to a) take responsibility in my part of things and allocate the rest to other people, b) stand firmer in my feelings, and finally c) see how all of these interactions were related so i could better see where we (not just me) all fit into the mess of everything.
for me, only one place has been for me — therapy. the world can’t be twisted to fit my needs, but through the work i could find places i fit into, build appropriate boundaries, and build spaces that feel safe.
an addendum: it was a place to try and integrate myself back into my story and not be a secondary character. in order to understand ourselves, we gotta understand how we fit, reflect off of, and project onto each other in the world. that relational understanding is what defeats this individualism and while that journey can be difficult, it’s more rewarding as well.
everything that needs to change societally requires collective movements, collective education, spaces and places for all of us, and for individuals to find commonality in order enact change. deciding the truth, how to move forward, how to support people, how to dole out resources, happens in community.
while community got “u” in it, it’s also got a “u n i “— don’t forget we’re all in this together (copyright Disney).
how do we combat the me me me economy? how do we stop narcissists? i genuinely don’t know. recognizing the real and not hyperbolic sensationalized signs of unchecked selfishness and learning appropriate interventions for narcs is a start.
the whole goal of community is to rise together. when we say “community care” it doesn't just mean that we need to do our parts to be part of that community. that means that we cannot outsource healing to an individual. community has to look at each other as people and not ladder rungs — something hard for artistic communities where money, access, resources, and visibility are at stake — ripe for narcs with their singular allegiances to sink their teeth in.
there is a cult of personality/celebrity worship that i personally don’t ascribe to. i don’t know if it’s being raised muslim and rejecting idolatry or the discomfort i have with projecting my own issues with my life onto someone else. but, we have a penchant for blowing smoke up a person’s ass with likes, retweets, reposts, thinkpieces, etc and just as quickly curbstomping them from the comfort of our own homes without a second thought.
people’s lives aren’t games. if we subscribe to that, how does that make us any better than the boogeyman narcissist? puppeteering strangers for intangible clout, motion, mobility — that’s their whole playbook. approach with humanity.
we used to see celebs under this public microscope crash out and be like “why are they acting like that?” and the definition of “celebrity” has expanded from hollywood to people with many followers — famous but without the safety net of lawyers, publicists, etc. that panopticon life ain't it and while some of us opt into that public lifestyle, it doesn’t mean we opted into the abuse that comes with it.
i guess see people’s humanity and stop putting celebrity on such a pedestal. a cult of personality is still a cult (i deadass see the word “cult”) so put down the koolaid.
a widespread increase in suicidality, loneliness, narcissism (1, 2, 3), debilitating depression, crippling anxieties, and substance abuse is more likely to be a social malady than an individual one – while we should seek individual help, yes, it doesn’t mean that it’s all about you or that you gotta be out here doing anything more than your part.
look narcissistic abuse is very real, i’m not here to minimize that.
i aim to make things safer by creating a stratification of the definition so people who need help can get it and people who are just up their own ass can fuck off.
reactionary words can dead a conversation, spin-off into a tangent, and because of the sensitive nature of these conversations, sometimes people tap out early — it’s not easy or cute to sit with discomfort but it’s necessary and doesn’t need to be a solitary endeavor.
so here’s some lit and resources i highly suggest. i’ve navigated several real-deal narcissists (professionally and personally), they were helpful and set me on a path to learning how to open up about this and knowing i’m not alone.
lit:
have smartphones destroyed a generation? - dr. jean twenge for the atlantic
the narcissism epidemic: living in the age of entitlement - dr. jean twenge
7 major myths about narcissistic personality disorder | psychology today
resources:
jennie, kristen, jibran, mia, jordan, lucas, justin, grace, vivian, maria, pauly, nova, layla — thanks for being yappaholics with me this week given everything going on in the world 🌱