Time really does seem to fly by faster the older you get. It seems like this year just started but according to my WordPress clock (it’s 4 hours off and I don’t know how to fix it) it’s already July 1, which means we are six months into 2015. In six more months it will be 2016. Where did a whole half a year go?
According to the largest study ever conducted on personality disorders (PD) by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), 5.9% of the U.S. population has BPD (Grant et al. 2008) and 6.2% has NPD (Stinson et al. 2008). As some people fit both diagnoses [BPD or NPD], about 10 percent of the U.S. population has BPD and/or NPD.
(From BPD Central: https://www.bpdcentral.com/faq/personality-disorders)
I’ve read elsewhere that this “rare” disorder (NPD) affects between 1 and 4% of the American population.
But narcs just seem to be everywhere. My boss is a narc, at least half of my family are narcs, every man I’ve ever been in a relationship with has been a narc, my roommate is a narc (low spectrum), my next door neighbor is a narc, and even random people I meet in places like the grocery store show a lot of narcissistic behaviors.
They’re all over TV, all over the news, hosting that obnoxious morning radio show as you battle traffic with more raging narcs on the road. They run for office and run corporations, they run churches and schools, and and they’re all over the Internet.
They’re lurking behind everyday people too. The nice lady serving you your morning coffee at the local Waffle House could be one. The guy who comes to mow your lawn could be one. So could the UPS guy, or God forbid, the woman you leave your kids with when you go out.
If I type “narcissists are…” in my browser, “narcissists are everywhere” comes up second. So evidently I’m not the only one who’s noticed this.
Since the planet does seem to be crawling with them like a bad case of lice, how do they make up such a tiny percentage of the population? ?
I’m the type of person who, if I walk into a room and everyone is glad to see me, I’ll focus on the one person who’s scowling at me, and spend the rest of the night fretting about that one grumpy person, instead of being happy everyone else wants me there. I’m a natural pessimist, a glass-half empty kind of person.
It just happened now. I got one comment telling me my blog has been really helpful, and another one that all but called me a narcissist. Instead of being happy about what the first person said, I’m worrying about the second…
I don’t always react well to criticism, but if truth be told, I thought this person might have a point, at least about the way I wrote something I now have set to private. I honestly can’t be objective about my own writing sometimes.
DISCLAIMER:
I feel like a disclaimer is needed, though the above photo should be enough of a disclaimer, because it says it all. Someone made a sarcastic remark about how I think I’m a celebrity because of this post, so I let their comment make me set this post to private, because I don’t have a thick skin and am too chicken to come out with a snappy or snarky comeback. I always think other people can get away with doing that, but I won’t be allowed to. It’s because of my past. I was never allowed to speak my mind or have a voice. Now I’ve internalized that and don’t allow myself a voice sometimes. I’m getting better but I’m not out of the woods yet.
In no way do I put myself in the same category as celebrities (who are just people who get wrinkles, have morning breath, and have to use the toilet sometimes like everyone else). I thought I made the distinction pretty clear. For someone who has felt like a nothing my entire life, and always been told I am nothing, and treated with disdain and disrespect, even by the people who were supposed to love me, a little thing like having 1,000 followers or having articles that get popular can seem like a huge deal. To a normal person with healthy self esteem and who felt loved and had a normal sense of belonging, such an achievement might seem like nothing, but to me, it’s a huge accomplishment. If people have an issue with this, and want to judge me for this, or think I’m saying I’m a celebrity, maybe they need to look in the mirror at themselves and stop being so judgmental. Nothing makes me more angry than being judged, especially by people who know next to nothing about me or what motivates me.
I’m tired of always feeling like I have to apologize just for existing. I’ve felt that way all my life.
So, here is that “offensive” article.
I think it would be hard to be famous. Imagine millions of people you never met and never will meet knowing everything about you, obsessing over every detail of your personal life, staring at your pictures, talking about you amongst themselves, worshipping you, hating you, carrying lunchboxes with your photo on them or wearing clothes or perfume with your name on them. Imagine going into a grocery store to buy some butter and finding your own mug plastered on every tabloid. Imagine total strangers walking up to you and addressing you by name and trying to touch you. No wonder celebrities hate the paparazzi. Sure, getting cameras shoved in your face comes with the territory of being famous/getting paid as if you’re a small nation (and should be accepted with grace under normal circumstances), but when a celebrity just has enough of the lack of privacy and punches a photographer in the face, I totally get it. Celebrities are only human, after all. They’re not “special” or somehow above the rest of humanity; they were just lucky or worked very hard or have a special gift to get where they are. Or they have a famous dad. *cough*The Kardashians*cough*
I’m far from famous, but lately this blog has gained enough visibility that I have “haters” and “fans.” I don’t want to be hated or worshipped; frankly I don’t think I deserve either. I’m just a regular and rather boring person who knows about a lot about something and knows how to write about it. I’m glad my blog is doing well. It feels good. It validates what I’m doing. It feels good to know that someone somewhere may find some help or hope through my words. It feels good when someone reblogs an article of mine or tells me something I said changed their life, or even just made their day a little better. It makes me feel like I have some purpose in this world, after years of believing I had no purpose other than to be an example to other people of how NOT to be. Someday I may achieve some level of notoriety if I write the book I want to write (and as of now, I have no earthly idea what sort of book I would write), or something incredible happens like The Huffington Post decides to pick up an article I wrote, or even if I ever get Freshly Pressed. More likely than not, I won’t be famous even then. I don’t really care either, because fame has never been something I strove for.
But there are still days when as a somewhat successful blogger (and by that I just mean this blog has grown steadily due to some fortuitous circumstances and a LOT of hard work on my part, not that I’m the new Opinionated Man or anything) I feel too naked and exposed. At these times I say to myself, “I’m not ready! Wait! This is too scary!” I feel that way right now.
When your blog starts becoming visible and coming up on page 1 or 2 in the search engines, sometimes certain articles you wrote suddenly get shared a lot or even go viral. If the article is one you’re proud of and worked hard on, it’s a great feeling. But sometimes an article you kind of wanted to get buried quickly and forgotten gets found anyway and starts gaining momentum. This isn’t really a bad thing. After all, if I really didn’t want an article to be read, I would have set it to “Private.” So sure, I suppose I wanted it to be read, but I didn’t want it to go viral either. So at this moment, I’m feeling a tad too exposed and naked for comfort. It’s silly to feel like this, but sometimes I just do. I’ve always been a reserved, shy kind of person (I’m textbook INFJ) and while I like a moderate amount of attention occasionally — just to make sure I still exist (how narcissistic of me) — I don’t want negative attention or an excessive amount of attention, whether negative or positive. I’ve always been uncomfortable being the focal point in any situation that involves more than two people. I’m easily embarrassed. I blush and stammer. I act weird and awkward. When I turned three, I cried when they sang Happy Birthday. This natural reticence is actually good, because it reassures me I’m not the raving narcissist I sometimes think I am (or God forbid, could be turning into).
So I have mixed feelings about having so much visibility right now. I know “Internet fame” is kind of a huge joke (visualize rolling eyes and knowing snickers), but I won’t lie–there are days I really do enjoy the attention. But not every day. Sometimes I just want to crawl into a hole and make myself very small. Sometimes I feel like I’m in one of those dreams where you’re walking down a street or into a classroom or something and suddenly realize you don’t have any clothes on. It’s a weird and surreal experience, knowing so many strangers, some in exotic places like Mongolia or Kenya, are reading words that once lived only within the shadowy recesses of my brain, and are having their own thoughts and reactions I will never be privy to. It’s like a tiny taste of what it might feel like to be famous, and while it has its moments, I don’t think I could ever really get used to it. It just ain’t in my nature.
My attitude really just depends on which article of mine is getting so many views, and what sort of mood I’m in. I’m not at all sure I would handle fame well if I ever write a book that becomes a bestseller (not that it’s likely to happen). I might want to show up at book signings wearing a paper bag over my head with eyeholes in it-or at least a pair of dark sunglasses. Or become a recluse like J. D. Salinger. Or contemptuous of fame like Kurt Cobain. Especially because most of the things I write about make me feel so vulnerable. From Day One, I made a commitment to be 100% candid at all times and to hold back nothing. I’ve probably only achieved about 95% Total Emotional Honesty (if you knew the other 5% you’d be hitting the “Escape Button” faster than I can type “Wait! Please let me explain!”), but I guess that’s close enough.
Writers are a weird and tortured lot, I can assure you of that. You wouldn’t want to be inside my head most of the time.
In 1968 our family moved to a Dutch Colonial three-story house built in the 1920s. We only lived there for five years, but the memory of that house is etched into my mind like veins of quartz in granite. Some other time I’ll write about how cool the entire house was, but right now my concern is the old oil furnace that lived in the basement.
Yes, it lived there. It wasn’t hard to imagine that furnace was alive. It had a personality.
Its squat rotund body stood in the sooty gray-concrete corner like a Russian sentinel from a lost age. Its concrete exterior had been painted what appeared to have been white in the distant past, but had turned a dirty tan with age. Rust stains snaked along it like varicose veins. Tumors of soot embedded themselves here and there and filled its crevices. The furnace was covered with guages and meters relating information about the furnace’s internal state my young mind couldn’t understand.
Snaking from the furnace were too many old iron pipes to count. Some were painted what had once been white but were now pock-marked with rust the color of old blood, others were unpainted and rusted over completely, and a few had been replaced with more modern steel pipes that looked out of place. All these pipes stuck out of the furnace like limbs, and converged along the ceiling, delivering their payload of heat to the house that was home to the inhabitants that that served it so lovingly.
The furnace chugged along in the cold months, clanking and blatting and hissing in its corner. Sometimes it leaked hot water all over the peeling painted cement floor around it. Other times it farted black smoke. There were a few times the entire basement was filled with its sooty miasma, and you couldn’t go down there. It was probably dangerous. I used to wonder sometimes if the old furnace might explode when it did that. I was assured it was safe but I never was sure.
Sometimes the furnace scared me when it did that. It also scared me when it made more hissing and clanking sounds than normal. I used to think it was angry that it had to live in the ugly damp unfinished basement and the only light it ever saw was the dim gray light that filtered through the filthy slit-like windows that dotted the white painted brick wall near the ceiling. Those windows were veiled with spider webs and caked with soot. Even my clean freak mother, who had a meltdown if she saw so much as a gum wrapper anywhere else in the house, never did anything with the basement windows. The basement was the one place she allowed to get dirty, except for the laundry room, which had been partially modernized with a carpet, fluorescent lights, and acoustic tile ceiling. The rest of the basement was lit–barely–with bare incandescent bulbs screwed in between the ceiling rafters and operated by metal pull-chains. An old rusted (but working) toilet sat in a tiny closet with only one bare bulb screwed overhead, and no sink.
I used a tiny room that at one time had been used for canning as my escape from the dysfunction that regularly went on up above. My bedroom was too close to the master bedroom, and offered little refuge from the oppressive tension and constant arguing. My basement room was outfitted with a metal desk with wood grain Formica where I did all my homework, and an old piece of salvaged carpet. The canning shelves housed my Barbie dolls and all their accoutrements. The cinder block walls were painted mint-green. A small painted shelf sat above the desk, and my favorite books made their home there. I loved my books. They opened parallel universes in which I could escape from my painful reality.
I’d stay in my little room for hours at a time, barely aware of anything except the world of my books and Barbies. Although I had a probably healthy caution of the furnace and didn’t like to get too close to it because it was so unpredictable, its clanking and hissing noises, when they weren’t too loud, were comforting to me. Its grumpiness and isolated loneliness reflected my own state of mind most of the time. I could relate to it.
Occasionally after one of its sooty temper tantrums, a serviceman would come and minister to it like a doctor on house-call, and then the furnace would be happy again. If a psychiatrist could have given the furnace a diagnosis, I bet it would be Borderline Personality Disorder.
I remember taking a picture of it shortly before my parents’ divorce. I kept that picture for years, but somewhere amidst my many moves, it was lost. I know the house is still standing and was updated at some point (my family never updated anything in that house), but I would be shocked if that old furnace is still there, and even more shocked if it still works. Sometimes I wonder what might have happened to it. I hope it was treated well.
Credit: Ramen Noodle Nation
Just the other day, I discovered a great blog called Ramen Noodle Nation. It’s all about the growing problem of poverty in America. Even 30 years ago, during the “Greed is Good” decade, there was far less poverty and people seemed to obsess less about money and survival. Most normal people still had disposable income to spend on things like miniatures and collectible plates. Now people are just trying to scrape together a decent dinner. The gap between the wealthy and everyone else has widened immensely since he 1980s. The poor still had safety nets and the middle class were far less likely to fall into poverty through circumstances completely outside their control (such as their jobs being shipped overseas). We’re becoming a third world nation, with a few extremely wealthy people–and everyone else, who either struggle to survive or are desperately trying to stay afloat.
This article discusses how things have changed in the past thirty years and also what life was like in the 1980s, for those of you who may not remember.
How Things Have Changed Since the 1980s:
http://ramennoodlenation.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-things-have-changed.html
One of my favorite activities when I was growing up was spending hours in our dusty, swelteringly-hot-in-the-summer, wood-pine-fragrant attic for hours at a time. In the attic were several old trunks filled with family photographs, both recent and very old. I remember being fascinated by them all but especially by the pictures taken of my grandmother when she was young. She was born around the turn of the 20th century, so when she was a young woman (“lady” back in those days) she was a flapper who could be seen decked out in the loose short sleeveless dresses, long beads, boas, and the short hairdo’s of the day.
Click on photo to enlarge.
My grandmother Earlene with my dad in 1930. I love the cloche hat. She was beautiful and always so fashionable too.
I think every family has certain photographs that capture the imagination of children born generations later. When I think of the future, say about 50-100 years from now, and my grandchildren (should I ever have any), great-grandchildren or great-great grandchildren are scouring THEIR attic (or whatever serves as an attic in 2085 or whatever) THIS is the picture of me I hope they find. It was taken in about 2000 and shows me holding Kimba, my cat at that time (she got run over by a car).
I know the focus is shitty because my camera sucks and the picture is so tiny (that’s a miniature pewter frame about 1 1/4 inches across), but I think this picture captures my personality in a unique way that shows me the way I really am instead of the me my parents wanted me to be in all the family photos (always smiling). I look a bit pensive and far away, but also vulnerable and a bit bemused. That’s what I actually walk around feeling like in my normal-for-me (meaning non-depressed) moods. It reminds me of a photograph of a woman of about 100 years ago–ever notice people in old photos almost never smiled? The men looked stern and mean and so did some of the women (especially older ones), but most younger women looked the way I do in this picture, and that’s why I hope to be remembered this way.
I faded the color a bit to make the photo seem more antique-looking.
Quite possibly, this GE clock radio maybe among the five oldest things I own (not including photographs). I know it’s not the oldest thing I own but it’s damn near it anyway and the only one I still interact with everyday.
I’ve had the thing since 1983 and it still works like the day I bought it or acquired it or stole it back in the day when I was still called “a kid.”
I remember when my kids were little, they liked to play with it, and that meant dropping it on the floor and pretending it was a factory being hit by a Lego hailstorm.
In spite of their abuse, its sturdy brown plastic housing that’s as firmly attached as a carapace has held up, its cord is supple and undamaged, and its red numerical glow never burned out or faded away. The GE clock still keeps the time and wakes me up with modern country or indie rock instead of Boy George or Cyndi Lauper or Asia.
For 33 years, it has kept up with the changing musical landscape that filters through its tiny but powerful speakers, its tinny sound wafting through my eardrum and finally lodging itself into the long-term memory sector of my brain which transforms the sound into long-forgotten recollections and emotions.
I bet that clock will still be waking me and making me remember until I’m dead and can’t hear it anymore.
Things just aren’t made to last anymore. In 1983, of course, we all said the same thing.
Political correctness has never been more in vogue than it is right now, and our society has also never been more narcissistic than it is right now. As Americans, we worship narcissistic celebrities, narcissistic politicans, narcissistic sports stars, and narcissistic CEOs. And the more narcissistic they are, the higher a pedestal we seem to place them on. It’s all about the clothes, the glitz, the glamour, the money, the bling, the presentation, the package, the trappings of success. Even many of the poor don’t vote for the soft-spoken candidate who will increase the minimum wage and food stamps or provide job training; no, instead they vote for the garrulous, rich CEO who bails out the banks instead of the homeless. Why? Because the overbearing, rich CEO is perceived as being on the winning team, and they want to be on the winning team too.
As a nation, we are so deluded. We live in a big dysfunctional family, with the narcissistic “parents” running the government and the corporations, and held up as role models, while the vulnerable–the homeless, the poor, the sick, the old, and the disabled–are held responsible for their own lot, and told they are to blame for it, even if their circumstances are completely beyond their control, which they usually are. The vulnerable in our society are the scapegoat children that everyone has permission to kick when they’re already down, because the narcissistic Powers That Be tell them it’s okay. We live in a seriously empathy-deprived society.
It’s a huge irony that at the same time we worship the material over the spiritual, the rich and callous over the poor and kind, the corporation over the individual, the aggressive and ruthless over the empathetic and cooperative, that we insist on something called “political correctness.” This ties in closely with a concept we call “zero tolerance.” It’s gotten so extreme that if we tap our child on the rear-end in Wal-Mart, we could be charged with child abuse. If a young boy draws a picture of a gun, they could go to jail. Not long ago, there was a case of an autistic ten year old who was accused of making terrorist threats because he wrote “bone thrat” on a wall.
We have euphemisms for everything. We have to watch everything we say for fear of offending some or another group of people. Political correctness, we are told, exists so we don’t hurt someone’s feelings or insult a group of people, whether they be of a certain nationality, race, have a particular disability or mental illness, or sexual preference. But I don’t think that’s the real reason for political correctness. I think the real reason is control. If we have to watch everything we say and walk around on eggshells for fear of offending someone, then we become anxious and fearful. That’s the way the narcissistic Powers That Be want us: scared to death and easily controlled. Zero tolerance is another way they can control us.
The same is true on the personal level too. When I think of most of the narcissists I know, almost every one of them insists on political correctness in some form or another. They make sure you always say the right thing at the right time. They are constantly warning you that you could insult someone if you don’t (as if they care). If I call someone “mentally retarded,” not meaning any harm by it, but just using that phrase because it’s the one I’m used to and the one I was raised with, a narcissist will rudely interrupt and tell me I should have used “cognitively challenged” instead. I can be talking about Cherokee Indians, and the narcissist will interrupt and say I should have said “Cherokee Native Americans,” even though that phrase is awkward as hell. I can’t talk about someone being “fat,” I have to use “larger framed person” or something equally ridiculous-sounding. If it’s a female narcissist with feminist leanings I’m talking to, I can’t use the word “girl” for a young woman without getting chastised, even though “girl” is a lot easier to say than “young woman.” Most everyone knows I don’t say “girl” to diminish the female gender or somehow compare her unfavorably with men, it’s just easier and sounds less awkward. I’m used to it. But the narcissist will interrupt and tell me that I was insulting my own gender my using that word. Hell, you can’t even say “Merry Christmas” anymore. You see, it’s all about the package, the presentation, the image: the narcissist is not listening to the message behind my words or really hearing a word of what I’m saying; they are using my choice of words to diminish and instill in me a sense of shame. They do this to instill fear so they can thereby exert control over you.
But they don’t practice what they preach. Narcissists aren’t politically correct themselves. Being PC doesn’t apply to them. They talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. They’re allowed to say the most hurtful and insulting and diminishing things to everyone else–you are fat, a cow, a pig, crazy, stupid, insane, a bitch, a whore, and so on. If the target of these slurs objects they are chastised for that: “Take responsibility for your own feelings” or “stop being so sensitive.” They take no responsibility for their own hurtful words and actions.
Narcissists have no empathy so when they tell you to be “PC” to avoid hurting someone, do you think they really care? Of course they don’t. When they tell you to be “PC” what they are really saying is “use the words I tell you to use so I can make you fear my wrath so I can exert control over you like the spineless puppet I have designated you to be.”
Painting shows a scene of people suffering from the bubonic plague in the 15th century from the Toggenberg Bible. — Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS
Thumbup posted a little piece about the rats being the culprits of the Black Death. Well, that’s wrong but at least he’s not blaming the cats.
Thumbup is on the right track but he’s only halfway to the shocking truth about the Plague. Lots of people don’t like cats and it’s still popular to blame them for the pestilence–or at least it was back in those days of yore when it was considered perfectly proper to toss your bodily wastes from an unscreened window out into a gutter in the street and warn passersby there was a shitstorm on the way. No wonder there was so much illness. Of course we all know the shitstorms of yore weren’t responsible for the Plague, or we should know it if we don’t.
Back in those sanitation-challenged days of high superstition and low-numbered lifespans, cats were blamed for the pestilence. Our furry friends were regarded by the average man or woman as commiserating in secret dwelling places with The Evil One. The ignorance was so rife in those days it never occurred to anyone that maybe NOT killing the cats off might have prevented the disgusting pestilence, because the cats would have killed the rats who harbored the fleas. But we should be aware too that the Plague was actually nature’s way of correcting an imbalance–it cut down the burgeoning population in urban areas and paved the way for the Industrial Age, for whatever THAT’s worth. As if that’s a good thing, which it might be. Or might not be. I never really thought about it much. I guess it depends if you’re a Luddite who likes to grind their own coffee and make bread from scratch or a high-tech lover of the processed and ready-made.
But I digress. I opened this post to set the record straight about the common misconception that it was rats were were responsible for the Plague. No, they really weren’t. Even though they aren’t particularly well liked, aren’t all that cute, and are usually feared because they are thought to spread disease, it’s simply not fair to stop with the rats. The rats were actually victims themselves! The rats carried the fleas which held within their evil little carapaces the bacterium Yersinia Pestis that made all hell break loose.
Yes. The fleas. The gosh-darn fleas. Those unholy little fuckers who make my lower legs look like a slab of pimiento cheese after it’s been through the grater. Those annoying near-microscopic specks of jumping hell that leap off my cats and burrow into the weave of my rugs and my bedding and make me eschew wearing shorts when it’s 104 degrees outside. The real familiars of Satan who love the taste of my blood over anyone else’s on the planet. Anyone who’s spent any time reading my online soapbox and spewing platform knows that I hold in my heart the same passionate black hatred for fleas that the medieval Catholic church held for heretics in their midst. It was the fleas who were the real harbingers of painful death by gangrenous exploding pustules, not the rats.
The rats never asked to be infested with the fleas. In fact, I bet the fleas drove them as insane as they drive me every summer. So let’s stop blaming the rats and place the blame on the source of everything that’s evil in this world–the fleas!
Lucky Otters Haven 