I KNOW WHO I AM
AND YOU DON’T
an opinionated piece by SMH
This world is full. It’s full of all sorts of creatures.
This piece of writing is dealing with
NARCISSISM, MENTAL ILLNESS, AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN
There is an element belonging to humanity— It is the personality that self defines as GREAT. Some might call it Narcissism, some might just call it Arrogance, but either way, if you have it, you are in possession of REAL POWER.
Why or how is it real power if it is only an attitude? How can an attitude, ego, or way of thinking of the self become actual power that can be used on Earth and among other people?
Well, we all know that confidence breeds opportunity and often leads to manifesting what one desires. But I am referring to power on another level.
What I mean is: When a narcissist truly thinks they are The Best and deserving of worship and attention, I believe they start to control the thoughts of anyone sharing their environment with them.
Imagine a sea creature that can manifest itself from a minnow to a killer whale simply by believing it is a killer whale and not seeing that it is a minnow. I believe that the way it works is that the minnow believes so completely that it is the killer whale that it can embed the thought and the image inside the inner eye of other creatures. It is almost like being a magician but without the intention of creating an illusion. Unlike a magician, a narcissist’s magic is scary because it is a lie being told as truth by a minnow believing it’s a killer whale, and actually getting its way much of the time.
The savvy amongst us would be able to spot the ruse. Often, it takes only one awful experience, i.e. realizing that your majestic unicorn is actually the goat ass from Hell, to start identifying the signs of a fake friend and an abuser. But those who have never gotten to know a narcissist long or intimately enough to see the truth he hides from his public never realize the killer whale that they fear and respect for its size, strength, and intelligence is actually just a mindless ankle-biting minnow.
As you can imagine, in the human world this leads to quite the circus. If politicians were stripped naked and forced to show the public their spirit animal instead of their narcissistic projections, I doubt many of them would be sitting in their cozy positions of trust and power. Most of us already know we are being governed by a bunch of hyenas but wouldn’t it make a difference if we could actually see them in that physical form?
My personal experience with narcissists has been downright terrifying. One of the narcissists was so convinced that he was a kind and gentle person that every time he got drunk and started scouring my phone, giving me the inquisition, and calling me names like “dumb whore”, even restraining me physically as I tried to leave his house and claiming it was because he “cared”, I forgot the abuse almost as soon as he came back around when he said, “you do the same kind of thing to me”, “you know you deserve it”, “you know we’re the same”. Because I have trauma that is Borderline Personality Disorder in nature, I believed him.
Because of his accusations, I had to attempt to clean up every bit of jealousy and possessiveness in my brain and heart, not to mention ditch all of my male friends and exes that I was still in touch with, so that I could not be guilty of what he was accusing me of. I often failed miserably. When he would start a fight and then go out with his friends, I accused him of starting a fight so that I wouldn’t be around and he could flirt with other women. My feelings turned to suicidal ideation, as it often does when I am rejected and forced into a blind spot with a man, and I would express these feelings to him, which is another no-no in society, another way of being abusive, and he called it as such. I could see his point, so I kept trying to weed the behavior out of me.
I quit playing pool, going to the bar, and going to jam sessions. Whenever I would mention going to a jam he would say “yeah, okay, have fun hanging out with all the nerds who want to fuck you”. Even though I wanted to scream at him for belittling a pastime I had enjoyed for years, also belittling decent people, not to mention outlawing one of the main networking tools in a career that I wanted to resuscitate, I ended up saying, “well, maybe he has a point.”
When that day finally came that I could hang out with him feeling completely guiltless, and actually pretty accommodating, compromising, and a good partner for sacrificing as I did, he still pulled the same act. “Are you sure I’m the only one?” “Have you been fucking around with anyone else?” “What was that text from that guy about, did you fuck him?” When I assured him that I was spending my days alone and not talking to anyone, and that I was actually really lonely, he would then blame me for his jealous behavior, saying that I “taught him” to act like that.
This trick, this smoke screen, this tactic, was a mind-fuck for me because I’ve experienced a lot of shit and have been questioning a diagnosis of “schizophrenic” for a decade. He wanted me to believe he was some kind of “build your own boyfriend”. He wanted me to believe he was only what I believed he was. He was using duality…or maybe non-duality… to make me responsible for his cruelty. That is psychological abuse. To negate his own presence, history, roots, being, and say that he was practically a hallucination of mine, a manifestation of my own consciousness, and to put the burden of his abusive behavior on me— it was heinous. It was an atrocious thing for one human being to do to another. And yet, because I am not sure if I’m dreaming my reality, so many unbelievable things have happened, I allowed it.
The violence of this schematic inside my machine of manifestation was caustic and drove me into an utterly isolated place in my psyche. I felt like I was seeing his pick-up truck everywhere. I felt like he was spying on my thoughts. But because he had attached himself so thoroughly to me, which made me feel safe and valued, and because, if the schematic he proposed were real, if I could just rid myself of my own flaws, I’d manifest the “ideal mate” who hatched from the disciplined desires of my own soul, I forgave him and I gave it a try, over and over again.
Beyond narcissism, this appeared to be a deeply disturbed and abusive individual who felt entitled to bring me down into his violent Hell, even though I tried repeatedly to clarify my expectations for what I would and wouldn’t accept in the relationship, such as daily alcoholism. When it was clear he wasn’t serious about quitting any of the things I found unacceptable, I even tried to rationally excuse myself from the relationship, pointing out that my mental health, neuroticism, and depression were making it impossible to function with him, and also pointing out that I, too, enjoyed drinking and so didn’t really have the right to tell him not to do it. He refused to show that he appreciated any of what I was saying and continued to keep the relationship going making promises he couldn’t or wouldn’t keep and showing zero compassion for the suffering I had pointed to in myself.
This is when I realized that I was being drained of all life force. Whenever I tried to break up with him, saying that his alcoholism and name calling, violence and physical manhandling, were unbearable, or that my own suffering was making it impossible to be in a relationship, he would make a show of going out with his friends while I cried in bed at home. He would then tell me afterwards, when he called to me from outside my window at 2:30am, drunk, (we were neighbors), first as Romeo, and then as the wronged lover, about how he told “everyone” at the bar or at the friend’s house party how much I made him suffer, and that they all said he should stay away from me.
Because I was so drained and exhausted of this cycle, I started to believe his lies. My body was codependent on his and he knew how to create pain in me. I started walking on egg shells and kissing his ass just so I could have a good day. We might have had two good days in 4 months of dating each other.
He had a way of using any transgression against his ego (i.e. I talked to a follower who was male, I ran into my ex on the street, etc.) as grounds for calling me a liar and a cheater. When I obviously wasn’t cheating on him physically, the topic was emotional infidelity. I have been on the other side of this. I have been the one who was paranoid about my partner potentially lying and cheating, and I had been the accuser. I see now how impossible this situation is for a well-adjusted partner to handle. Of course I’m going to feel like I’m emotionally cheating on my abusive partner when every other person I talk to is easier and more pleasurable to be around than them. Aside from this idea that my own character flaw was causing him to act this way, I tried to be truly patient and compassionate. I communicated clearly and calmly, at first, every time he started the inquisition. But when the accusations got violent and he started calling me names like “schizophrenic dumb cunt”, I lost my patience. I learned to return fire because, hell, he was sticking us together, maybe this was what my “role” was, what I was paired with him to do.
I roasted him pretty well one night (and it was an effort for me because I really am not quick-witted or mean like that). I did it in response to one of the outbursts where he was calling me an ugly ignorant bitch. The roasts were dangerously close to the truth and intimate. I enjoyed it because he had cut me deeply and ruthlessly so many times that I wanted to show him that I was not weak and that a woman could cut him to size as well.
I regretted returning fire. It made me feel ugly and low for stooping to his level. It highlighted that I was no better than him; I was unable to be compassionate and loving when my partner was obviously lashing out from a place of pain. But also, it felt like the narcissist machinist in him knew that he could use that one instance, that one roast, regardless of the number of times he had been so cruel to me before, to make me guilty of “cruelty worse than his”, and that he could claim it as proof of my abuse for the remainder of the relationship.
Each time he reminded me of the contents of the roast, he asked whether this or that were true, whether they were things that I actually meant. He knew they were good roasts because they came from kernels of truth, and from observation. He might have been flattered if he had realized that I was paying close attention to his attributes and quirks, but of course he didn’t look at it that way. Instead of being humble and acknowledging the truth in the roast/joke/burn, he would watch me squirm and ruin my voice while I had to lie that “I was just kidding” in order to keep the peace. He did it over and over again, and each time he watched me respond with my heart pounding at the injustice, I could feel him draining me of my honesty and dignity, through my throat and through my eyes. I told the lies so that I wouldn’t hurt his feelings or start a fight that turned violent or physical. Looking back I should have just left without saying a word. Every time we broke up he used a burner phone app to contact me after I blocked him, so I got used to feeling like I really mattered to him and he actually wanted me in his life.
The energetic drainage truly felt calculated and practiced. It was like I was watching this vampire do this primitive BDSM mating ritual, bonding us together with hatred and fear, tainting my blood with his cruelty, secretly liking it when it was returned so that he didn’t have to be the awful one. As someone who had always been trying to be a better and kinder person, but who had been suffering with pain caused by something like physical empathy and too much vulnerability, I was a good target for this treatment. When he told me I had to toughen up, I believed it. When he told me I needed to feel more passion and be more aggressive about what we were going through, I also believed that. He made me believe violence was romantic passion.
All of that rationalization must have been why I kept coming back to him. It was because I had turned into his projection, and turned into the weakened and subservient partner that he wanted to show off to the world in order to prove how strong he was. To please him I told him that all of the isolation from other men was working. At times, I actually believed that it was, which is what makes the narcissist so dangerous. I was “his woman” and in that role, I was protected by his “strength” and “knowledge”.
My letting him tell me I deserved the cruelty had everything to do with my past karma, and I believe I was interpreting the pain as a deserved punishment for who I had been. It felt like I was paying a karmic debt, and so I let it continue. But at the end of the day, either I let myself get completely eaten by the killer whale, or I run away.
Did you know killer whales will swim so fast into sunfish that the sunfish explode? They do this for fun.