• Humpty Dumpty Elegy 4 | five books on 👑NARCISSISM👄 •
Been Dumpty-free for over a month now. Wednesday and I had our long-awaited shroom trip. And we've been seeing more of our old friends coming around.
The worries about violence have left me. He hasn't been seen lurking around anyone, nor their families or partners. His closer peers were probably right, he's not a combative person, despite all similarities to Elliot Rogers.
I didn't intend to give each entry a specific theme, but they do all seem to have their own threads running through them. HDE 1 was introspection, HDE 2 was autism and self-control, HDE 3 was death.
This time, I have narcissism on my mind. Talking about the fear of death has an absolving effect. Terror is a sin each of us are guilty of. It spooks us all into the same rash convulsions and mischief. Meditating on it is kinda nice, it's humanizing.
But talking about narcissism has the exact opposite effect. Here is where Frick Nitzels's quote, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” hits you right in the bones.
Narcissism is a vast and loaded concept: From an ancient myth, to a clinical diagnosis; A unique and personal euphemism that everyone has their own definition of; A pejorative; An infinite platonic form; And quite often a narcissist projecting their narcissism onto someone else, as if to say "stop being selfish and only think about meeee."
I thought death was a massive undertaking in one month, but death didn't get my hands nearly as dirty. Even after I realized I'm a worm, that eats, and will be eaten, by worms. I'm gonna have to re-read books that mostly informed me that I'm a poorly-behaved piece of shit, or a pretentious loser. I was happy to just silently take that advice, and work it into my life in private. But now, I gotta tell you about the sea of narcissism I swam through growing up, and the stains they left on my character.
I'm going to struggle to separate myself from one of my least favorite people on the planet, the two of us from my parents, Wednesday, and you the reader. In our secular world, if there's one vice still seen as unacceptable, it's narcissism. When we startle ourselves awake at night, thinking about the ways we trespassed against our peers, and soiled our reputations, most of the time we're reflecting on moments where narcissism got the better of us.
• #1 I Hate You Don't Leave Me by Jerold Kreisman and Hal Straus •
Wednesday was the origin of the Humpty Dumpty analogy. Years before meeting Hump, Wednesday took a sure-win, and dashed it off a rock like Smeagol with a juicy sweet fish.
It was a no-brainer, he had a good thing coming, all he had to do was not cancel it, then he could finally see a reward for all his hope. But he sabotaged it, and went back to wishing it worked out. Like there was nothing he could have done better. Just an unsurprised shrug out of him.
But I had no sympathy, I was pissed. For the first time I deeply pondered the idea that my friend was exaggerating his difficulties with his life, for people's attention. Which he's gotten a sizeable chunk of. I was brimming with contempt.
First, I decided to dig into info about Munchausen syndrome, and learn how that works before slinging it at Wens. Also known as, "factitious disorder imposed on self" (FDIS), it describes someone who fakes or exaggerates symptoms of an illness to achieve the role of a patient, indefinitely. There's an unfortunate stigma around it, which I myself held before learning more.
The causes of FDIS are largely unknown, but in many cases the person is trying to recreate events and arrangements from their childhood. In both stories, Wednesday's and Humpty's, each one started off life on this planet as patients. The overall point though, is that it's not like pathological lying, it's more like sleepwalking.
Got no god damn time for liars.
Wednesday was born with strabismus, and underwent atrociously painful eye surgery as a very young boy, which still didn't work. According to his parents, he was sad from day one. Although I believe he saw his mother's shadow early on, and knew she was mad, years before she officially lost her mind. He was serially raped by an older male relative from infancy. In elementary school, a girl falsely accused him of hiding a bomb in his locker. He was cuffed, searched, exonerated, but still held the reputation of a bomb-smuggling anarchist villain till highschool. He had a full beard like five years before his peers, adding to his eldritch lore. He was in a head-on bus crash where two busses sheered in half, exposing him to a small stadium bleacher of carnage, decapitated and dismembered people, alive, dying, and dead. His mom tried slashing his throat with a kitchen knife, and if his dad ran away with him and his sister, his mom could have used the family court system to jail their dad, and leave them alone with their mother. And that's not everything. Tricks and kicks, over treats and kisses for ya boy Wendy.
Wednesday, for the first half of his life, played the legit role of one being healed. His future was never a question of being great, but simply getting better, and becoming whole. But from whole, he had no intuitions on how to keep improving. Life was about putting fires out, not building a structured and ambitious life. All that is new to him. It's hard to look up, after you decide hope is a trap. Things must be unlearned first.
So, feeling more sympathetic, and knowing he's not just a pesky little scheming bitch, the next thing I dove into was something I overlooked. Something his shrink said he showed symptoms of: Borderline Personality Disorder. Narcissism's b-side.
Now, with BPD and NPD, the D, "disorder," is what matters most. This is a spectrum, where the closer to the middle you are, the better. Most people dominate one side more than another, but until it fucks with your life, and you get too far from the middle, it's just what we call your style. Like with autism. For example, someone towards the borderline side will probably express more imposter feelings, than notions of greatness. There's plenty of beautiful art from both perspectives.
Last I checked I was close to the middle, slightly on the borderline side. This whole series is sort of me granting myself a little bit of narcissism in my life. As opposed to being like "Eh, who needs to read this shit? Nobody asked for your opinion, Garble. Fuckin, IMPOSTERCOX. Booo!" Which is more typical of me, inside my head.
People who are extremely off-center often make it there from trauma, genetics, and a lack of empathy. In Wednesday's case, he actually scores very high on empathy and compassion towards others, but next to zero on self-compassion. Hence his capacity for self-sabotage.
I said I got no time for liars, but Wednesday lies all the time. Only he never lies to other people, just himself. Part of the game in being Wednesday's friend is catching him lying to himself in full earnest, and being like, "Hey Wednesday! Quit lying to my fucking friend Wednesday, YOU PUNK ASS JIVE ASS BITCH!" But externally, he doesn't have a deceptive bone in his body. Unlike Humpty.
Funny thing is that this book describes exactly how my relationship ended with Humpty. (And almost the same with Wednesday.) We were the angry therapists who felt played with, and gave up. Like wrestling with his issues was bringing out the worst in all of us. Borderlines occupy a shrink's office more often than bipolar and OCD combined. And they're the most likely to be forsaken by their therapist.
For a long time, psychologists thought borderlines were hopeless, and many strictly refused to treat them. But that's misguided. We're simply in the early years of understanding it as a disorder. Recent research and technology has painted a much clearer image of what BPD looks like.
If you have this disorder, you can expect it to go away eventually. Age seems to be the most reliable cure. But why wait till you're fifty, passively letting time and fatigue do all the work? Meanwhile, wasting a life of potential being a bored, insecure, psychotic punk.
Humpty Dumpty wants to believe he's unique. It would absolve him of all responsibility, and make the truth of his troubles opaque to every observer, except for him. However, he's not. We took him in because he sounded familiar; He seemed like us.
Knowing ain't half the battle, that's a bullshit quip written by some asshole. -- Aesop Rock, Get Out Of The Car
Get out the car, Egg.
This book is not an answer, it's a road ahead. Diagnosing yourself with BPD does exactly jack shit on its own. If you try to exploit it for sympathy and moral license, you're committing an atrocity. But knowing gives you choices. This tells you which choices help a borderline grow the fuck up with a bit more haste. Plus, it teaches one how to communicate with an angry borderline, whether or not the borderline is you.
• #2 Against Empathy by Paul Bloom •
I said Humpty had little or no empathy, was that harsh? No. In fact, it could be one of his assets, if he wasn't more focused on using that as an excuse to be a malignant shitball.
In his lazy research, Humpty learned that empathy is against his autistic nature, and thus treating people with love and compassion isn't an option for him. Even when he manages to, it was just a societal ambush of pressure and coercion. He's just pretending to be a human, because otherwise we'd smell is autism, figure him out, chop his head off, and ram it onto a pike. According to him.
But lacking it doesn't make you cruel, useless, or immoral. Like Simon Baron-Cohen (yeah, that's Borat's cousin, relax) said in The Science Of Evil, autists have no particular tendency towards any of those things, despite their deficit in both cognitive and emotional empathy.
Emotional empathy is when you directly mirror someone's physiological and emotional state within yourself. Cognitive empathy is when you mentally intuit how someone will feel or act, without mirroring them. Both are fast and intuitive, as opposed to a slow rationalizing process.
Humpty is perfectly good at cognitive empathy, whenever he needs it. Granted, the other portion of the time he's just fantasizing and projecting onto people. But when he's working inside the margins of reality he's as quick as anyone, and accurate.
Sweep empathy off the table. Say he's full-on Cluster A like he says, with Autism and OCD, or Cluster B like I do, with narcissism and psychopathy. It doesn't matter. He's not exempt from being a good person, or growing up.
Good deeds are best done slowly. Intuition is too quick to take time into consideration. It's myopic, tribal, and innumerate. Picture a child, crying and begging for a whole tub of ice cream before bed. The most empathetic response is to mirror the child's desperate desire, and give in to their request. But a compassionate response considers tomorrow, and the night-long indigestion marathon the kid'll be in for. It also weighs the habits that it could form, the other people that wanted to share the ice cream, and your overall responsibility to help a child make wise decisions.
Psychologists and doctors couldn't help anyone if they mirrored people with things like depression or mononucleosis. So they don't. It's not like psychopathy is something all helpers share, they're not just well-socialized daredevils. Lacking or limiting empathy is just a must when you're trying to help people in pain.
Most surprisingly, Buddhists agree. Brain scans have shown that meditation actually dims the empathetic activity inside your head. It helps you by turning it down. Buddhists believe there's two ways to empathize with humans, a good way and a bad way. The bad way to do it, is one human at a time, like a spotlight. The good way, is to aim that empathy broadly, at the whole of humanity.
I won't try making Bloom's whole argument. It's a controversial one, and he does the best job. But the thing I want to address is this school of thought, that empathy is the nucleus of all morality. That if only humans exhibited more of it, the more humanity would flourish. That people with empathy deficiencies are excluded from building utopia alongside the rest of us.
It's all untrue. And it's a lie that encourages moral decay. Frankly never thought I'd be someone railing against moral decay. But I've never seen a more effective way to do it. If levels of autism and personality disorders are on the rise, and empathy is going down, we have to avoid creating a massive slice of the pie that feels inherently excused from being morally responsible. That's too much nihilism for anyone's good.
• #3 Antifragile by Nassim Taleb •
Humpty Dumpty is a motherfucking egg. And I ate a piece of chewed bubblegum off the underside of an old moldy wooden bannister, on the ramp in front of a community shed at my housing co-op. It was soft, with a chalky greyish-blue patina. I made like three different visits to pick off more from the same piece. I didn't even realize it was gum till the second time. I don't know what I thought I was eating. I don't know what my motivation was, or what I seemed to like about it. It literally didn't taste like anything. Paper at most, probably from the moldy wood. And it just dissolved, it wasn't chewy at all. How disgusting.
That's my grossest story. I was like 4 or 5 years old. And I'm proud of it. Because that's some A++ immunity building. My mom always encouraged the consumption of germs. Literally told us to eat dirt. Would probably throw up if I told her, but she'd be very proud. Real high-five material. She may be reading this now. Sup, Q!
I also, around the same age, just hurled a brick up in the air, didn't watch it, and it landed square on my melon. I don't think that made me any stronger, but who knows. Does mithridatism work on stone? There's a real dent in my skull. So it did improve my ability to stack books on my head.
I don't have a fraction as much horror to speak of, from my upbringing. But I think I beat all of my friends in how chaotic and disorderly it was. A friend once said it sounds like I lived three or four simultaneous lives.
Starting in 2001, I moved to a new home every three years, till 2016. That year, nothing changed, until I felt an overwhelming desire to try psychedelics. That's when I realized the three year pattern. Then in 2019 I moved with my mom again, to where I am now. This cycle, It's my house; I'm in control of whether I move. I don't know how I'll feel in 2022.
On top of my home, my dad's home moved nearly as often (from rural motels, to a frat house for cabbies. I'll get to it eventually), and I wound up changing schools six times. I've made, and lost, and made, and lost, hundreds of real friends. I don't believe in stability. I think certainty is a childish indulgence. And I learned young that you can't measure risk, but you can measure your own fragility, and work on that.
Humpty, like all narcissists, is as fragile as they come. Cripplingly sensitive and inhibited. Knows twenty steps in advance how some normie will slight him, and sweats as he imagines how his shell's gonna craze.
"You mean, well, lemme understand this. Because aah, maybe it's me, I'm a little fucked up maybe. But, I'm funny how? I mean, 'funny' like an autist? I annoy you? I make you mad? I'm here to fucking annoy you? What do you mean, 'funny'? How, how am I funny?!" -- Humpty, screaming into his pillow while he goes over the day's staircase wit
Humpty needs a lot more slap, less tickle. More bannister gum, less Final Fantasy speed-run letsplays. And most importantly, more mortifying interactions with humans. He always scoffed at my people-advice like I was just naturally born this charismatic. Bitch, I had to embarrass my way up to this point. At his rate, he'll catch up to me in 600 years. This motherfucker thinks he knows the discomfort of human interaction. Pfffft, I say.
If you're gonna make a mistake, make it fast, and make it extravagant. You're doing it for everyone watching as well. Humpty is absolutely not a victim of trying and failing, he's a victim of being afraid to try. In part, because the school system, and a rising number of factors in our society are fragility-making nightmares.
He's like one of the monkeys in Harry Harlow's famous "hairy mamma monkey bonding (HMMB)" experiments, that got raised with a cold chickenwire mother to hug and nurse from. He came out too timid to explore or do free play with other monkeys. The system we grew up in is mostly staffed with wire mothers. And if you're a kid whose parents would rather let the government raise and indoctrinate you on their behalf, you gotta guard against the fragility this creates.
Most of my friends need to read this book. They tend to believe happiness comes from comfort and stability. When I describe pain and distress as productive, they often get flummoxed, and a little disgusted. As if I said sunlight makes things cold, or that bannister gum is delicious. Many of them see their youth as a constant struggle out of discomfort. To willingly re-expose oneself to it is completely retrograde and absurd to them. It's like I'm advocating for masochism.
In a way, they're making themselves allergic to pain, by trying to extirpate it from their life. Most of their suffering is fear of suffering, and a sort of emotional anaphylactic shock. Our anxiety is often just the dizziness of freedom, coupled with the impossibility of reading the future. We all do this here and there, myself included. But it's hard to fix it if you don't acknowledge that it can happen.
Antifragile is one book in Taleb's "Incerto" series. "Incerto" meaning "uncertain" in Latin, Nassim made one huge book, but then chopped it into five pieces. And they're all extremely worth reading. They're about how to make wise, confident choices in the face of life's inevitable uncertainties. If you want to become a smart-felling party-smants, these are the books to read.
Humpty despises uncertainty, like he does all grey areas. I wonder if this contributes to the way he vacillates between believing he's either the dumbest or smartest person on the planet. Smartest, when he's whipping up a corkboard in his head, with polaroids, red yarn, and thumb tacks. Then the dumbest, when he has to tear the whole thing down, and admit not a single bit of it paralleled reality. Later, to anesthetize himself from feeling stupid and helpless, he blames fate, or the malice of others.
He's got a fairly big brain. He's just wasting all his brainpower on making prophecies, rather than cultivating antifragility. "Antifragile" may be a neologism, but it's a quality humans have cherished for as long as we know.
Just a sidenote, I believe psychedelics and entheogens are an extremely powerful tool for teaching antifragility on an intuitive level. It's one of those things you can't articulate when you sober up, but you have a real sense of gnosis. Things like "creative destruction" get this seductive ring. Chaos earns its place in nature. You might start to ask yourself, "What would Dionysus do?"
• #4 War Of Art by Steven Presfeild •
If not for this book, I wouldn't be writing this.
When I was fourteen, a friend in Minecraft recommended this. Gazah was a thirty-year-old, kind, stoned, devout Joe Rogan fan. He said he got this absolutely amazing book on procrastination, and that I should get it. But also that he got it, read about a dozen pages, put it down, and never picked it back up.
I laughed like "Oh Gazah, you goofball." Got the book. Read about a dozen pages, and didn't finish the last 95% for another six years.
So, for best results, read further than 12 pages.
It's been six years since I finished it. I couldn't tell back then how much it changed me, but after re-reading it, it's arguably the most important book on the list. If you only read one book from this series, get this one. In fact if you read this first, my whole series will seem redundant. Though you'd lose all the fun cursing and psychobabble.
This book is what got me wondering about people's tendency to self-sabotage. Pressfield seems to see it as an ethereal force he calls "resistance."
The chapters look like a machine gun drum mag, with two main special ammunitions: RESISTANCE and PROFEESIONAL.
"RESISTANCE IS INVISIBLE, RESISTANCE IS INTERNAL, RESISTANCE IS INSIDIOUS, RESISTANCE IS IMPLACABLE, RESISTANCE IS IMPERONAL ..."
BAP BAP BAP BAP BAP 30-60 seconds a pop. It's something to re-read every year. Sweep that mental chimney.
"A PROFESSIONAL IS PATIENT, A PROFESSIONAL DEMYSTIFIES, A PROFESSIONAL ACTS IN THE FACE OF FEAR ..."
It may sound like some hyper-manic, Gary-V-style dogma. But it's actually distilled classical wisdom. Laconic mantras.
The big thing that influenced my decision in writing this series, was his idea that an amateur hides from analysis, while a professional embraces peer review. It's not enough to spend an ungodly number of hours, thinking about a guy I believe is a run-of-the-mill gigantic cunt. What does it matter if nobody has the opportunity to check your bullshit as you extrude it into the face of the universe?
My journals are perfectly sufficient for my prophecies, and venting about my less microcosmic peers. I write so that when I die, my loved ones still have my voice. In fact, I'd encourage all forms of amateur creativity. We all need something "autotelic" in our lives. Like drawing, dancing, exercising, asking people questions about themselves, etc.
But it's not sufficient to do this Humpty Dumpty shit in private. The muses have bound me to him. And if the muses call, you know where I'll be.
Now, Humpty didn't have a ton of creative passion, save for two things: Sadistic pornographic fantasies, involving people transforming into conscious pairs of pissed pants, invisibility, wizards, and the whole fucking nine. The other thing was photography. He bought a $4000 camera so he could take pictures of women out and about; They'd find it weird if he used his cellphone, but with a telescopic lens & DSLR, shit, he might work for National Geographic, so judge not! More pornographic fuckery.
Whatever your passions or goals, this book tells you when you're working towards them, and when you're being a time-wasting fuckboi. It told me when Humpty was being a bullshiter.
Regardless, it's a less-than three hour audiobook; It's one episode of the JRE. It's painless. And at the risk of sounding overly sensational, it's a life-changing book.
Why is this book in a clump of books, loosely bound together under the topic of narcissism? Because if you live by all of Steven's advice, it's impossible to remain as anything close to a pathological narcissist. Forget what psychologists say about you, wonder what this guy would say about you.
• #5 The Culture Of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch •
I said on The Body Keeps The Score that I've never had a panic attack. Well, I nearly had one while reading this. Had to pause it and get my breathing under control. Bravo!
This, I read after starting the Humpty Dumpty Elegy. Figured if I'm gonna accuse an alleged autist of being a sneaky narcissist, I had better read more about narcissism.
So I got this, and the abyss looked back at me like blue steel. When it didn't describe my foes, it described my heroes, it described my parents, Wednesday, Humpty, and myself.
I was reminded of the idea in Denial Of Death that all character is psychosis. Then, I tried to comfort myself by repeating it over and over in my head. "Narcissist" kept sticking to me like trying to pull a glue trap off my right hand, only to get it stuck to my left hand, then my foot, then I hopped around and fell in more traps.
When learning about any of the "Dark Triad" disorders: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, someone experienced will usually warn you about the confirmation bias it forms in your head. Like when you decide you want to buy, say, a silver Honda Civic, and suddenly for the next couple weeks it feels like every third car on the road is the car on your mind. Or when you learn a new word, and it goes from meaningless noise, to everyone's new favorite adjective.
It happened to me long ago with Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test. Where I started scanning everyone for psychopathy, and had a wildly high false-positive rate. Just like with that book, and despite expert warnings, this one had me seeing ghouls everywhere. Only this time I was one of them. At least with psychopathy the adage goes, "If you're deeply worried that you might be a psychopath, you're not a psychopath."
During the second readthrough, I couldn't recall which part made me almost faint, but I can think of a few candidates. No panic this time, but plenty of lip-chewing and knee-bouncing.
The part about us all going from "spiritual-man," to, "psychological-man," definitely got my nerves going. I denigrate Humpty's warped upbringing in the psychotherapy system. Especially the way psychology gets used as a cudgel to punish unruly youths. Meanwhile my cure is to slap him around with books on psychology, sanctioned and approved of by the same system. But that wasn't the panic button; That part's too early in the book, as I recall. Plus, he gave a shoutout to self-help over constant expert supervision, which has been my ideal.
Throughout the book, there was plenty of relief, whenever Lasch joined me in whipping Dumpty: For his constant pleasure seeking, His non-belief in the future or the past, the emptiness of someone who sees humanity as empty, his longing for an apocalypse or millenarian upheaval, his vague indefinable complaints, his lack of play instincts or willingness to suspend disbelief, the way he's defined by others not himself, his disgust towards his own passions, and much, much, more.
But chopped up and sprinkled between every major lift, I'd fall right alongside Humpty. The way we both scoff at hierarchical structure and competition; our disdain for nostalgia and how pretentiously we dismiss tradition, sport, and ritual; our fascination with evolutionary psychology, like zoo animals fantasizing about the wild; our sense of uniqueness and desire to hang out with a worthy few; our pointless use of humor and vulgarity when discussing serious topics; the way we fancy ourselves a couple of rebels, yet we're the picture of competence and submission at work.
Plus, there were some things the imposter in me can't just dismiss off-hand, as I'm writing a series like this. Pseudo-insight into my own condition, and the condition of others? False confession? How much of my mind have I numbed through the infinite regress of ironic detachment? Shells on shells on shells... All the way down. Nothing more typical of a narcissist, than pointing fingers at others.
This is starting to feel like Fight Club, where we're one guy all along. Did always say we were similar.
Narcissism is not a vague concept, clinically. It's not self-love, it's self-hate. There's primary and secondary narcissism. Primary is like a baby, just screaming for baby stuff; No awareness of others, voracious consumer, nourishment is all external. Secondary is a revolt against one's internal baby, where all nourishment is sought internally, hyperindividualism and isolation develops, and instead of helpless, one becomes grandiose. Borderline personality is essentially secondary narcissism.
But it doesn't really matter whether one's A or B, because fundamentally they're two sides of the same coin. One that flips regularly within people. Think about how bullies and victims so easily swap positions. Primaries often think self-help involves just becoming a secondary, and vice-versa. It doesn't matter if you turn the knob left or right, if the deadbolt is still engaged.
It shouldn't be surprising to hear oneself described in this book, though. For a couple reasons. Like I said earlier with I Hate You Don't Leave Me, it's a spectrum. And until all this becomes pathological and destructive, it's just your style. The other reason is, narcissism is just becoming more rewarding in our society. Not only is it a style, it's one of the coolest. Lasch wrote this in 1979, and his words have only gotten more true.
Yeah Dump, you could have just been a cool normie all along.
In the early days of narcissism research, with Freud, society mostly produced primary narcissists. Secondaries being rare. Since then, it has almost entirely flipped, to everyone being a nebulous cloud of anxiety and dissonance. Identity crises are through the roof. To many of us, "unique" is the highest compliment. We're all more isolated and militantly individualistic.
We're all told to seek the top of every hierarchy we're in, or we're being subjugated and exploited. As if the world was made of only bosses and suckers.
In the 18th century, a well-lived life was simply one where you died without having to apologize to anyone for how you lived. You only had to be a helpful and buoyant person, whose company people cherish. And read a book from time to time.
In the 19th century, philistinism took over. The only virtues became resume virtues. And personal growth was measured by how much more money you started making. Personalities became works of art, and most importantly, self-advertisements. Even I have promoted books that make people better employees.
As a result, society has bureaucratized itself into a coma. The most lucrative state of mind is an institutional one. The kind you develop in school, the military, or prison. Our virtues are all industrial. We're performers, not producers. With bullshit jobs, or dehumanizing peonage.
I could go on forever about this book, but this whole series is already committed to elaborating on its points. And this is tumblr, so my post is 3000% too long as is.
The key point, at the end of the day, is that Mr. Dumpty, you are a narcissist my man. You know that whipping I talked about, the one I took half of with you. From constant pleasure-seeking, to shells on shells, you KNOW that's more accurate than your autism diagnosis.
Which is just: occasional stutter, OCD, threw tantrums as a wee boy, and you struggle to make friends.
Humpty, come read this mirror.
• End Bit •
I keep telling myself to stop writing this and delete everything. Writing this, and re-reading these books has been nothing but fun. But a voice persists, saying this is wrong, and that I'll regret it. But oh well, I got at least 40 more books left. Fuck you, voice! This is for a future prison inmate.
I know I said I was done with The Culture Of Narcissism, but I gotta address one thing. This isn't false confession, fiction, or pseudo-insight. I really do see Humpty Dumpty as a microcosm of something pervasive. I've grown up with people like him, including myself at one point, and a major part of my fascination with psychology comes from the mystery of his kind.
I forget if I mentioned yet, but I was threatened with special-ed, endlessly, till the 6th grade. That year, my mom was like "Test him. Get an expert, and if he says my kid's a dumb bitch, he's a dumb bitch." The test said, objectively: "Garblegox is not stupid, he's just a fucking asshole." So finally, the teachers eased up, and learned how to stop getting punked by cool little boys like me. I was a bully in school; I bullied my teachers.
But from then on, I continued through school, wherever I went, with some hardcore sped cred. 'Bout 60-80% of my friends were special ed, medicated, or just fucking top-shelf weirdos. My passion is, and always will be, misfits.
The best way to approach the problem of narcissism is to not approach it as a problem of narcissism. Approach it as a lack of compassion and empathy, as fragility, as resistance. Approach it with sympathy and awareness of your own narcissistic or borderline habits.
"Narcissist" is the other N-word you best be careful with. It's like calling somebody stupid, they just won't cooperate with you; the firewalls engage.
You may have picked up that I'm a sucker for a patient. It's not considered healthy to choose friends with the goal of healing them. As Nassim Taleb points out, chronic healers can be as toxic and spooky as sick folk. Humpty shouldn't be transferring the role of patient onto himself, and doctor onto his friends. And I shouldn't be accepting those roles from him, or any other friend. It's a codependent transference relationship that hurts and debases both parties.
Bet you thought eating that gum was the most embarrassing thing about me.
Here's how I invoke the muses:
I have been completely unable to maintain any semblance of relationship on any level I have been a bastard to the people who have actively attempted to deliver me from peril I have been acutely undeserving of the ear that listen up and lip that kissed me on the temple I have been accustomed to a stubborn disposition that admits it wish its history disassembled I have been a hypocrite in sermonizing tolerance while skimming for a ministry to pretzel I have been unfairly resentful of those I wish had acted different when the bidding was essential I have been a terrible communicator prone to isolation over sympathy for devils I have been my own worst enemy since the very genesis of rebels -- Aesop Rock, Gopher Guts
SHOUT OUT TO MELPOMEEENE AAAAH uOOAAAAAHHHH!!!
NEXT MONTH IDK IF I'LL BE ABLE TO COBBLE TOGETHER A WHOLE TOPIC! WE'LL SEE! THE IMPORTANT THING IS JUST THAT I WRITE IT IN THE FIRST PLACEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!
