Though it did not make me happy and sometimes made me feel downright guilty, I had to cut
out a lot of dead wood this year that was becoming oppressive. Denial
suffocates me, and of course, deniers deny the denial and turn it around and
make it YOUR fault.
There is a lot on the internet now about
narcissism, which used to be called, “Oh, isn’t he good-looking!” The perpetrator would slide by on his good looks like a used car saleman rolling back the odometer. Everyone
would ooh and ahh and clasp their hands in approval, then wonder where all their
money went, or even where their spouse went. But all this still goes on, vastly amped up by the
internet.
Yesterday on the news, I saw yet another story
about an attractive, accomplished, well-off woman falling “head over heels”
with someone she “met” on a dating site. She had never actually MET him, of
course, but that didn’t matter. He sent her photos on Instagram, didn't he? Actually meeting someone in the flesh isn’t a priority these days, because
everyone carefully constructs their own image, which seems to be enough to convince people. By some magic of fiscal seduction he wangled
away a quarter of a million dollars she had salted away to look after herself and
her ageing mother. He sucked it away and disappeared and went on to the next attractive, accomplished, well-off victim.
My psychiatrist (yes, I see one! Zip-a-dee-doo-dah!)
once talked for an hour about narcissism, and my eyes were hanging out of their
sockets like those trick eyeballs on springs. It was a perfect description of
my older sister, for one thing, who always left you with the unpleasant feeling
that you had somehow shortchanged her or let her down, while garnering enormous
admiration for herself (she thought) by inflating herself like a grotesque balloon. I am
still sorting out, or trying to, how toxic that was for me and how much damage it did.
But back to the main
story. There was a movie called Catfish - I just looked it up and reeled at the fact that it came out FIFTEEN years ago! - all about the phenomenon of the phony, narcissistic lure which has grown
like a malignancy, affecting women in ways that make me scratch my head. Are
people THAT desperate for companionship that they fall “head over heels” for
someone who doesn’t really exist except as some sort of heartless parasite?
Evidently. Personality disorders thrive in the strange world of the internet,
because you can always manage and foster the impression you are giving, hold
the mask up, and if that one gets you in trouble, hold ANOTHER mask up to dupe
yet another lonely person.
I constantly wonder how this can be. Once Caitlin and I played a hilarious game based on a news story we had seen. A heartless, manipulative man somehow found out about an elderly woman who had not seen her son in a very long time. He phoned her up and said, "Hi, Mom! It's Johnny!" Mom was over the moon, even though she said at one point, "But you sound so different." She ended up wiring him thousands of dollars before someone intervened. Caitlin and I took turns over the phone being the elderly woman and the son, our scams getting more and more outlandish until we were literally rolling on the floor laughing. By the way, at the time, Caitlin was TEN YEARS OLD.
But there’s another side to all this, the narcissist who seems humble or even downtrodden. This is an exquisite form of parasitic behaviour with many evil twists and turns. It's the person
who used to exist and has been so eroded by the unfairness of life that just being in the same
room with her is completely exhausting and depressing. I call this the “how
could you?” model, the one who acts so downtrodden that you dare not say
anything to criticize her. This is
usually someone who has buried her ambitions like a corpse, then spends the
rest of her life fuming, fuming, fuming over people she hates (but is usually poisonously polite to) who are morally corrupt and doing everything wrong.
Of course she has a gigantic hole at the core, as every narcissist does, which needs constant filling and refilling from others to keep her from feeling dead. Which means that part of the friendship contract (which is never spelled out and which never changes) is that you must constantly build her up to shore up that rotten or non-existent self-esteem. Her traumatic background seals the deal: how could you not be sympathetic to her after the kind of childhood she suffered? (I have come to be wary of any statement or thought that contains the words "how could you?").
She is a misunderstood, "good" person, of course, no one appreciates her, and your job is to keep pouring it in and pouring it in like booze into an alcoholic, while it all steadily pours out the bottom. Whatever narcissists have that keeps them manipulating like that, it's never genuine self-esteem, or they wouldn't need to suck so hard. As Bob Dylan once sardonically wrote, no doubt describing the malignant trappings of fame, "Show me someone who's not a parasite/And I'll go out and say a prayer for him."
The things everyone is doing wrong are the same things SHE does, of
course, and far worse, but rather than take responsibility, she turns it
around and fumes and fumes. And fumes. And fumes. It never bursts into honest flames
but smolders like a shit fire underground. The smoke goes up your nostrils and
kills you with its reeking toxicity, but you dare not complain or you are being a
traitor and inexplicably disloyal. What has SHE ever done? Nothing! But that’s just the trouble.
Too many people shove away their real dreams and ambitions, letting them rot while they insist they never wanted them in the first place, and complain about everyone
else's worthless success. The downtrodden have the most hyperinflated egos of anyone I know.
It’s getting harder and harder to find someone
who WILL burst into honest flames and be straight with me. I don’t expect them
to be any more perfect at it than I am. But please, PLEASE do not try to con me, swindle me with a cry for pity, apologize in a way that feels about as authentic as the proverbial $3 bill, and ask me to pour gallons of my own precious energy down a bottomless hole that you will never acknowledge because you are too busy soliciting even more sympathy and complaining about everyone else. No thanks, that’s over now. Am I lonely? Who cares. It’s a cleaner loneliness,
because in spite of having to pay a price I never anticipated, I am no longer buried up to the chin in shit.
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