MY GIRLFRIEND THOUGHT MAYBE I WAS A NARCISSIST. WAS IT TIME TO LOWER SELF-LOVE?
This is the story of the love of my life: a 6 foot 2 bald man with a huge nose. We share first and last names. I am what is known as a narcissist.
I didn’t know my mind was different until my new girlfriend, Julia, started digging into it. “Tell me about your worst moments”, she asked me while we were in bed, with our naked bodies under the covers.
“How are those?” I asked.
“Let’s call it the five most embarrassing moments of your life,” she replied.
I tried to think of just one thing that I would have done wrong; no, there was nothing. “Which ones do you remember?” I asked him.
“Everyone, all the time, unless it distracts me. And I think about it even more when I meditate,” she replied.
I sat up with difficulty and many of our initial differences made sense. Why couldn’t she sit there thinking without immersing herself in her phone while I could stare at the wall for an hour. Why did she have two drinks when she arrived at an event to relax and I barely drank.
His mind was a hostile place while mine was not. That was why it was so surprising that she had become a workaholic political spokesperson, dealing with the world’s daily crises, while I stayed at home writing biographies, dealing with nothing at all.
Despite our differences, or perhaps because of them, we continue to date.
One day, at the post office, he saw me shifting my weight restlessly from one leg to the other, he laughed out loud, and said, “Why can’t you get in line?”
“Don’t know. I think, deep down, I don’t understand why someone doesn’t blow a trumpet and invite me to come forward,” I replied.
She laughed, my favorite sound in the universe. “Have you not thought that you might be a bit narcissistic? Let’s do a test,” she added.
I took out my phone and took a test of the narcissistic personality inventory, in which you had to choose the most appropriate answer among 40 pairs of statements, such as: “I prefer to lose myself in the crowd” or “I like being the center of attention”.
I scored 24/40, which was very much on the narcissistic spectrum. We repeated the test for her to answer: 1/40. It would have been zero if I hadn’t convinced her to check: “People like to hear my stories”. I liked hearing their stories. Not as much as I liked telling him stories, but we’re not talking about me (ha, yeah right).
“People with narcissistic personality disorder,” he read, “have exaggerated feelings of self-importance and a diminished ability to empathize. That is not you”.
“Are you kidding? Is tan yo”.
“Sorry”.
I shrugged. “I have no problem with that,” I said, because I thought that’s what a narcissist would think. I think it was okay with her too, because we soon decided to have a child, even together. We spent a year and a half trying to conceive, first for fun with the help of wine, then as work with the help of fertility apps, then as financial masochism with the help of clinics where Julia was examined, biopsied, drugged and extracted. ova while I masturbated from time to time in a large closet.
The fertility industrial complex—cavernous, endless, dehumanizing—made our divergent minds diverge even more. Julia’s, as was her tendency, tightened the nuts. She convinced herself that she would never work, that her body was hopeless. He lost small things (sleep, hope, the ability to experience joy) and then a big one (the patience to listen to me talk about all the great metaphors I had managed to write that day) and became obsessed with researching the science of fertility, in Search for your own cure.
Narcissists need control, or at least the illusion of control, but infertility gave me none; it’s a tortuous biological limbo in which, if you have money, science will keep selling you hope. I have always taken it for granted that reality will be what I want it to be and that is why I offered him little, only hackneyed phrases that everything would be fine. When things weren’t going well, I hid in my work, if you can call what I do all day long work.
“What do you think of therapy?” she asked on the subway back from one of our countless fertility clinic appointments.
“I always thought I would be good at it. But I don’t have the patience,” I said.
“I mean, let’s go us”, he added.
“Ah, why would we go? Our only problem is infertility,” I replied.
“I also believed that”, she said, but I only heard: “I think the same”.
Then came the Saturday when I got home to find my suitcase out of the closet and half packed in the hallway. The same suitcase that I had packed in my last two breakups. It was happening again; it couldn’t happen again.
Fortunately, I was not cumming. Rather, a spot had opened up at the last minute at a silent 10-day Vipassana Buddhist retreat that I had been begging me to go to. I protested, arguing that I had already met all my demons. She jokingly replied that someone whose passion was her person should know them better. I needed to help myself so I could go back and help her; infertility was too heavy to carry alone.
The retreat center was a quiet place, where we were separated by gender and had many rules (no talking, making eye contact, taking stimulants, exercising, reading or writing). The first 45-minute meditation block felt like I’d spent ten years being dragged over acid-dipped peaks and there was still another 11 hours left in that day.
During these sessions, my mind searched for ways to distract itself: an endless series of songs, flashbacks, ideas, traumas, fears, and unhappy childhood memories; my mind was tightening screws that I didn’t even know I had, in what quickly became the worst week of my life.
After one particularly torturous session, I ran out into the woods, punched a tree, and talked to a worm that talked back, which scared me so badly I killed a few ants nearby, got a confusing boner, and then realized She realized one thing: what she was experiencing, this madness and manic episode, was similar to what Julia was experiencing: intrusive thoughts that became dominant and crowded out everything else.
I felt it not from the intellect, but from the emotions, how terrified and alone she must be and how spectacularly I was failing her. Which meant that she was capable of much more empathy than she realized.
I returned to the meditation hall and began to really listen to the instructors, determined to stop hiding from those unpleasant things that were going on in my mind.
The next six days were still terrible, but productive. The retreat consisted of changing some of the stories I had started telling myself in childhood and one in a row at the post office. I am not a narcissist, although I know how to think like one, something that started when I was a shy and sensitive child in an environment that did not value such things. Because I was so sensitive, I began to tell myself that I felt little.
Just like when people don’t like you and you can’t decide if they’re right or wrong, if you repeat a lie often enough, you’ll start to believe it’s true. But these were decisions, like becoming a memoirist: to intentionally make my life small and self-centered. Choices that made me an emotionally unapproachable partner and would make me the same kind of father, if I were lucky enough to have that opportunity.
Back in the real world, I was very apologetic and took a break from work, not wanting to write about happier times until we had made the present, even childless, as good as it could be. Then, when we had already lost all hope, we suddenly found ourselves in consultation with another doctor, after an in vitro fertilization treatment, crying with joy at the first snowy glimpses of our daughter on the small screen.
The worms no longer speak to me. Thanks to the retirement and everything that came after, I know myself better, but I love myself less, which has created all this extra space for me to love others with an intensity that I never thought I was capable of.
Julia and I now use to have a drink together when we arrive at a party, to calm our nerves. I care what people think of me. Which means I buy gifts. Arrive on time. I listen before I speak.
Now I also have a list of my worst moments, with the times I have disappointed Julia. But a slightly hostile mind has its uses; keeps you honest.
In that vein, I must correct something that I hope is already quite evident. This is not the love story of my life, but of the loves of my life: a workaholic political spokeswoman with a mix of intellectual toughness and social anxiety who continues to choose to keep her world big, and our daughter, who, at 2, has her mother’s thick blond hair, her own brash sense of humor and, because the world can be cruel, my nose.
We don’t share a first or last name, but we do share almost everything else.
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