Narcissism, or the month in which I feverishly read six books in response to my existential crisis.

Reading time: 6 minutes

Until recently, I believed that a narcissist’s checklist entailed near sociopathic behavior and highly unregulated and erratic emotional manipulation, aka Donald Trump. But, in a revelatory conversation with a good friend about how narcissistic behavior in our environment leads us down paths of toxicity within ourselves, I had to do a literal two-month deconstruction of the self, including cocooning away in my room for a week, reading a slew of literature about healthy vs unhealthy narcissism, a major blow out with my S/O due to my inability to relay the sheer amount of turmoil I was processing and then, an epiphanic understanding of all the relationships in my life.

In which, I tell you how boundaries get rotten, and sometimes the rot does get into the core, and maybe, in those situations, amputation is best.

I resisted this line of thought for a while. I most certainly did not want to amputate my relationships, neither did I want to cauterize away entire limbs just because they hurt every once in a while. In my own history and experience, so much of what anyone would technically label as narcissism was self-preservation trauma response that I could not imagine my existence in which I was not behaving in self-preservation. 

“So how come you haven’t bought a house yet?” my father asks,

I don’t know, it’s not so easy,” I say, unwilling to engage.

“You’re already… how old are you now?”

“Thirty six,” I say in exasperation.

You’re thirty six?!he manages to get the insult in his voice just right, “Really? What year were you born?”

“1986 Dad! I tell you this every year!” This is not an exaggeration. I literally tell him this every year.

“When were you born? October? No wait — [Your brother] was born in October. October 19th. And your Mother’s birthday is October 26th. When was yours?”

“…I was born in September. 30th. Like I’ve told you, every year for over thirty years.”

The long and the short of this meandering spiel was in understanding that people themselves, aren’t toxic as much as dynamics and behaviors are. I was unwilling to play the blame game, and looking for answers became confusing and difficult and near impossible to fumigate away the infestation in my emotional spaces because I couldn’t quite imagine what it meant ‘to cut away’ a person from one’s life. Surely, in regulating my own emotions and expectations, I could steer my relationships into the land of unicorns and unlimited ice cream.

My parents were functioning, capable humans espousing varying degrees of human relationships, which was why their ambivalence and cruelty towards me and my siblings felt like bullets of betrayal. Betrayal that eventually transformed into acknowledgment of the frayed edges of our boundaries, when I finally realized that the problem was the belief that I was them and they were me.

I didn’t have to cut away my own limb, I had to unstitch the ham-fisted job my parents did of sewing us together into one big entity. Which, in the process, had caused the Frankensteinian mess of our boundaries to contract sepsis and exposed each of us to toxic behavior and gangrenous expectations.

Above all, it was the knowledge that I wasn’t making arbitrary cuts, I was reclaiming whatever I could salvage of my Self, that slapped me into my senses.

not all Asian parents exhibited manipulative, violent tendencies nor physically punished their children. So if it was cultural, then many certainly opted not to partake in it.

Much of what we, as children of immigrants and traditions that have historically been patriarchal and oppressive, are taught, is that such kind of boundary-rot is a one-of-a-kind cultural experience that must be treasured. It was only in college when a group of friends and I, all from diverse walks of life sat together and bonded over stories of how our parents gave us the beats, it came to me that this must be how evil thrives within trans-generational boundaries. 

I had intimate knowledge of the fact that not all Asian parents exhibited manipulative, violent tendencies nor physically punished their children. So if it was cultural, then many certainly opted not to partake in it. Perhaps healthier choices were obscured and not easily available, but it was a practice our parents chose to engage in and we were just as unknowingly choosing to normalize it. It was a space that only we and our parents occupied with each other and our only benchmark for normalcy was in normalizing what we already had.

The shedding of my cocoon chrysalis revealed to me that my love for somebody had no bearing on whether they had the capacity to love me. Understanding Amputation of Self™allowed me to see each of us as individual beings and the horrifying entity that we had become.

I could sit in acceptance of the fact that my father could, indeed, be good to others yet vile towards me. That he could remember the results of a disastrous birthday of a neighbor’s kid, or my brother’s birthday, exactly nineteen days after mine, yet have no idea of the year, month, or date when I was born. It was not about me because I was barely even a complete person.

I understood with deep empathy how my Self had transfused with my father because of years of external pressures and internal rot. He needed me, not because I was his daughter, but because I was not unlike his foot. Necessary and unheeded, but disfiguring and tragically inconvenient when it was gone.

By coming to this understanding, I had to let go of the villainous grip that I had kept my identity, my familial relationships, and my friendship expectations under without feeling like I had to set a live grenade to our bridges.

Maybe, perhaps, I could just put a gate on one end instead.

Unhealthy and healthy narcissism

I can only assume what healthy narcissism entails. A treacherous balancing act between ego and dissolution, rigidity and formlessness. I can assume these are skills we learn with acts of love and scaffolding of encouragement and respect.

Shame is the most unbearable of all human feelings’. — an author who wrote a book that started out well and ended up judgemental and kind of racist.

The particular author I read (I won’t share because the entire narrative and thought experiment veers off into unsavory territory) remarks that ‘Shame is the most unbearable of all human feelings’.

Shame management and regulation are critical to keeping that balance. She talks about building autonomy and a fully formed sense of Self that only comes from having a healthy understanding of narcissism, enough to buoy you into courage but not so much that it infects you from the inside out. The author might have fallen into disrepute by the end of the 200-page journey, but the main takeaways I got out of it were undeniably important.

Most of us in this day and age have not been equipped with the tools nor skill set to deal with this kind of boundary management, but as each generation comes into itself, I have hope that the work we put into ourselves now will yield bounteous fruit later.


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