What's not to self-love?
Am I a narcissist? The question itself is self-indulgent and self-absorbed, but I can't help asking it. Maybe my six years demanding your daily attention here at Click Opera have been nothing but "digital narcissism", a daily seduction, an attempt to put myself at the centre of the world, to spin myself into every story, to make myself the
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People kick up these conversations about narcissism to which you can respond ("Isherwood was a narcissist!" "Was NOT!") because the actual concern-causing form of narcissism is so thankfully goddamn rare.
Actual narcissists who are of concern to anybody are capable of letting their loved ones die, in the house with them or in front of them.
An actual narcissist is somebody who wouldn't call an ambulance for you if you fell and shook.
Or who would let you spend the winter with one pair of bad shoes and no socks while they bought skin cream, not because they were mean, not because they were Dickensian, but you didn't occur to them as having physical reality. Because when you're a narcissist of that real, rare, concern-causing kind something really statistically infrequent is going on in your head.
Dearest Momus, if you have a rabbit in your house and it's alive even thought you've been called upon to care for it occasionally, you're no narcissist. Of an other-than-the-Isherwoody-"here's-my-cliched-headline" variety.
The only problem with the general living-room fluffery about BEING A NARCISSIST! ("Do you like my new wig?" "You must be SICK!") is that it does trivialize the actual situation, which the human mind has some trouble getting around. Because, frankly, we prefer the Dickensian situation. Malice is physically easier to understand.
The only real problem with posts like this is that they do, to a very small, probably only truly troubling to people in true trouble type extent, make actual help harder to come by. Because they kick sand over something already easy to miss.
Basically, I think enabling count_vronsky is lame. People say that shit when they haven't had their lives endangered by people with mental problems. (ETA: No, not true. There are a lot of people who've been in it or near it who spread it. "You're getting beaten up at home? Piffle! That's love! And you don't know what getting beaten up at home is like!" &damnedc.)That we as a we are still so bad at defining, much less handling, those mental problems doesn't make the near-death experiences less near-death. And so doesn't make the trivialization read as less aggressive.
On the other hand, who cares? Which is what I've been asking myself a good deal lately. Does it matter if a story is racist? How does it matter? Does it matter if a story misrepresents the common physical experience of rape to coddle perpetrators or date-rapists? How does it matter? Your journal is devoting to assessing that how - those various hows - quite a lot of the time, for which I adore it. So maybe it's something at some point you'd pick up. I would love to read it. As I've loved every single wig and eyepatch variation, and another gentleman's every single shoulder-padded, wasp-waisted, cut-away suit.
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