Ticking Boxes!

If it is true that I have this narcissistic personality structure/disorder, then a first step toward dealing with it, would be to assume that the psychiatrist and psychologist know better than I what they are talking about.

Below are a list of symptoms associated with this condition (a human one after all), and some brief comments about how I feel I fit with them. Although I will be as honest as I can, it is an obvious point that my view of the thing will probably not coincide entirely with that of someone who has known me well and dealt with me at close quarters. In the same vein, two different people may not see me in the same way. Maybe a little more on that later.

• Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

I sometimes tell people that I have a Master's degree: in truth I failed it, although in my defence I was writing it in the middle of an episode, the worst I had had to date, panic and depression and the common story of a relationship I could find no peace with, neither by staying nor leaving. Later, I would receive ECT. As far as excuses go, it is at least documentable through medical files and prescriptions. Never the less, I do not have a Masters but have felt the need to prove something by saying I did.

Often, I joke about being a genius, but I am not so sure it is a joke; on some level I think I believe it. Despite the fact that I have read only a moderate amount, and generally on an array of differing topics, I believe this moderate investment gives me the authority to make conclusive statements on those topics that ought to be taken as gospel by my audience. Around those I suspect to have read more, I tend to be a little more understated, if not altogether mute.

Truth is I have achieved very little, been lazy, and yes, a part of me expects deference. To those that do defer, I can be nice but am often outright offensive and patronizing and condescending. From those who do not, I try to keep my distance, from which safe distance I will make scathing remarks at their expense. 

So, at the very least, this is to some extent true about me.

• Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

These two are clearly connected. Yes, I imagine myself doing some great deed, which deed itself tends to vary from day to day, depending on the flavour of the moment. I imagine myself as an adonis, seething wooer of women, as leader of some radical organisation, revolutionary....etc etc. This fits. Do I really believe these imaginings? I seem to believe that I have the potential to be any of these things, but for the most part stick to Dylan Moran's dictum, that potential is something best left alone, untapped, for fear of a head on collision with reality.

• Believes 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)

Must be true, based on what has gone before.

• Requires excessive admiration

Do I value admiration above love? I think so. The latter I find it difficult to understand; in fact I understand love as a purely selfish thing, self sustaining and parasitic, since the person in love seeks above all to sustain their feeling of love, and only tends to the other as a basis for sustaining that feeling, so that once that feeling starts to wane, so to does concern with the other. Those, I realise, are very cynical and bitter words, so I reiterate, I don't really understand love. Am I alone in that?

• Has a very strong sense of entitlement, e.g., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations

This one stumps me. I think of myself as reasonably compromising, and I do things for other, people. I don't expect people to do things just because I want them to. I often do things just to please others. I guess not everything I do need necessarily be contained under the rubric of Narcissism. There are bound to be aspects of my personality that do not fit. 

• Is exploitative of others, e.g., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends

This one too stumps me. I really don't think so, but maybe you should ask a third party. At least I don't think I do this more than the average person, but then theory tells me that I have a very skewed idea of the average person.

• Lacks empathy, e.g., is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

At times this is true, at other times not. I don't know. I feel I am generally empathic and score low here.

• Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her

Probably true to some extent, but not to a pathological extent, perhaps within the parameters of general human behaviour, in so far as I can be trusted to have a balanced sense of what that is.

• Regularly shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

True true True.

Hard to swallow!

She seemed like a kind woman, slouched in her chair, a tin and pointy woman, a cubist portrait come to life. She had just told me I had a narcissistic personality structure, structure in this case being a euphemism for disorder.

Backing up a little. I had that year been fortunate enough to find a woman, which in the beginning went well, but after a brief two month stint together, a growing sense of vulnerability erupted in outright panic and a rapid decline in my mental well being. Panic, aversion, depression, disgust....a set of sensations that is difficult to articulate, in short a full emotional recoil unless the narcissist in me exaggerates.

Coming back: a year or so later, after many visits to psychologists (the second of whom was to identify narcissism as the offender), and after breaking contact with the girl, suffering from exhaustion and insomnia, I sought the kind of help you can swallow.

It wasn't my first time. I had been an on-off patient of the psychiatric services for many years, culminating in a six week stay on a ward, during which I received ECT treatment. Since that time, my life had remained more or less on an even keel, apart from the ebb and flow of a dysthymic depression; until this latest bout of devilment, I had taken nothing stronger that a pain killer, but now, I felt, I needed something, and since a doctor's pen is always ready, that's where I went.

A hospital waiting area seems singularly designed to alarm rather than calm; like most waiting areas, say in airports, or bus stations, it has a purgatorial feel, which is essentially what it is, a place between places, a time between events. The chairs were made from steel and felt cold beneath you, that smell that all hospitals have, that ambience, the conglomeration of so much illness and disease under a single roof, hope and dread and every little quirk of human feeling magnified.

There was only me and a single other soul there in the waiting area, as well as the administrative nurse, to whom I gave my name before taking a seat; everything so functional, pragmatic, bureaucratic, with little thought of comfort. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait long before the doctor, the cubist lady, came and called my name.

After a little while rifling ceremoniously through my file she announced, in a hushed and gentle voice that was none the less authoritative,

"Dr. C seems to have had trouble coming up with a diagnosis. Why don't you tell me what has been troubling you?"

And so began an hour and half long conversation, the longest I had had with a psychiatrist, at the end of which, again a first, she didn't want to medicate me, saying my depression was not a clinical one, a disruption in the flow of neurotransmitters, but rather caused by my sense of isolation, owing to the problems I was having relating in love, owing to this narcissistic personality structure, as she called it. I tried to protest: I didn't recognize myself in the online descriptions.

"Your narcissism doesn't necessarily mean that you love yourself or think you are fantastic; at it's base it is actually a lack of self esteem, a fear of the other."

In truth, I am ad-libbing here, which fits in cosy with what she said next, referring to some objections I had with the work the psychologist and I had been doing.

"You sometimes think you know better than everyone else."

It seemed like a fresh observation from someone who had spent only an hour with me, and yet I can't deny it; but how do you get from arrogance and frivolity to the kinds of sensations I had been having, the total physical response I had had to something so simple. That she told me, was an issue for me and my therapist.

I made a final plea for pills, something to help me sleep at least, and this time she agreed, turned a page in her notepad and scribbled a prescription; I thanked her and went away, feeling at once relieved and cheated. I wasn't happy with the assessment, had gone running to the web and tried to make the pieces fit, and some did, but from this personality structure to the feeling I had been having...I didn't get it.

Then, I have a tendency to think I know better than everyone else. At least, I knew what I was feeling, or did I? In fact, I wasn't so sure anymore. Everything that surrounded me, everything inside of me, every little detail, no matter how simple and obvious, seemed somehow doubtful, all smoke and mirrors.

Seabound

I don't know how to love. It starts there. That's a bad beginning. Let me begin again. Call me Ishmael. I don't know how to love, and what at all is there for a man of such prejudice, lacking in heart and with little else to do, and in any case in search of adventure, except to set sail on the seven seas, there to meet his maker, face to airbrushed face. "Sweet lord is there any sense to it all?". I got as far as the port. It began to rain. I grumbled something, picked up my bag, and returned home. I hated the sea.