I’ve written before about how much I hate myself, most specifically in Column-Shaped Boy. I’ve also written about depressive thought spirals not once but twice, and in fact I’ve themed this entire week of Daily Tableaus about depression. There’s a saying you’ll hear, often when a hard boiled detective first kisses the femme fatale, when the vitriolic coworkers finally fuck on the their desks late at night after everyone’s gone home, in slash fiction between a hero and a villain—love is much closer to hate than we might think.
I reflect that inwardly. I hold the mirror to my psyche and, my perspective flipped over a horizontal axis, I perceive. To love and to hate are not so much opposite emotions as interlocking snakes. They are emotions of extremity. They are similar in their temperament and vigor, and both drive us to do things we wouldn’t normally.
Vanity and narcissism are normally portrayed as warped forms of self-love: to love one’s self too much. Narcissus gazes into the waters and loves what he sees. But the truth, with narcissists anyway, is a bit different. They are not over-confident delusional people. They are scared people. Frightened. Self-hating. Their greatest terror is that they will be exposed as lesser than, and then discarded. Their vanity, their confidence, their lack of empathy for others: it’s all a smokescreen for that fear and persecution deep down.
Depression is just more obvious about the latter part. There is a narcissism to gazing into your own heart, obsessing over your own flaws, running your own conversations with others over and over again in your mind. It’s narcissism to write a personal essay about the various times men have abused me—it’s certainly over indulgent. But there is a healthy narcissism, a kind of self-interest that protects us. In the previous example, my narcissism allowed me to believe that uplifting my own story could help other people.
Perhaps all writers are narcissists to a less-than-clinical degree.
Lately, I’ve felt every tiny ache and pain in my body. The way my stomach pokes over the line of my shorts. The way my thighs spill outward when I sit down. The circumference of my skull, how low my hairline is—is it getting higher? And I feel at times like I weigh three times as much as I do. I feel everyone’s eyes on me, or worse I feel them glide past me.
This is narcissistic delusion. In fact, the only difference between me and a narcissist is that I don’t take my delusion and weaponize it into an unstoppable armor that batters everyone around me constantly. Because the narcissist does not truly love themselves. They hate themselves, in fact.
A fixation on my own body. A fixation on the way I move through the world. A fixation on the way men perceive me. This is not a form of self-interest that serves me. This is no way to live. But like the calculator-brain I’ve discussed again and again, like the body dysmorphia I’ve touched on, these behaviors cannot simply be ceased cold turkey. They were learned over a long period and must be unlearned.
I’m still forging the weapons against my narcissism, my self loathing. I’m sure the readers are too. So, let us keep the narcissism that serves us; that creates art and in doing so helps others; that fuels our confidence and our self esteem, that allows us to believe we can succeed and surpass others; that tells us we do deserve more. Discard all else.