Well yeah, sure. It's a disability that makes me pretty incomprehensible to neurotypicals. The basics of the disorder are, I was abused by my parents and without unconditional love during my formative years, I never developed the part of the brain that's supposed to have a healthy ego. That's why neurotypicals are familiar with narcissists as being volatile and grandiose, it's because we have to replace our nonexistent healthy ego with a fake ego we made ourselves in order to function. The fake egos are brittle, so we build them bigger for redundancy. If the false ego is destroyed, it's instant suicidal depression. A person with absolute zero self esteem wants to die.
But ego isn't just self esteem, it's also self-identity and personhood. My personhood is fake. I'm not a real person. That's why neurotypicals struggle to have empathy for us, they only know how to have empathy for people. And society treats fake people horribly.
Over the past two days, I've been called a troll more times than I can count. On a thread I made that was the top ranked active thread on hexbear an hour ago, a user saw my name and decided to debate my gender, saying it wasn't real. Most neurotypicals refuse to believe that my identity could be that of a real person, because... in a twisted way, they're right. I really am my gender, and I really do think narcissists deserve basic rights (something that also earned me a lot of troll accusations), but I'm just not a person. Their senses of empathy are failing to work on me and all they see is this black void where a person should be, because in terms of reality that's what's there in my head. Nothing real. To a narcissist, personhood is a grandiose delusion. A fiction, a myth. We invented the idea that we are people who deserve to live, because without that idea we would die. Neurotypicals get taught that idea by their parents, but when our parents abused us, they broke the part of our developing brain that was capable of truly believing in that idea. We lie and say that we want to live. We lie and say that we deserve to live because we are people.
I'm not like most other narcissists. I don't play by the rules of neuronormative society, I reject them. I honestly tell you that I am the cheap imitation of a person, but that I deserve to live anyway. Most people think you have to be a person in order to deserve to live. That's why most people aren't vegan. Most narcissists believe that too, because they play by society's rules. It's really hard to see beyond them. And that's why they lie to try to fit in. We don't even know we're lying, because when you aren't a real person, truth is whatever you wish it to be. There's no foundation on which to build a set of truths because there's no person. I had to go and find a foundation for reality itself that didn't depend upon the idea of personhood, and it's VERY different to neuronormative reality.
I'd love to tell you more about the NPD experience, if you're still interested. But please don't call me a real person again.
Thank you
I'm active in plural spaces, or at least I used to be, and I saw a lot of arguments between sysmedicalists and endogenic systems. The sysmedicalists would say "The documented medical phenomenon of traumatic identity dissociation is the only way to become plural!" and the endogenics would say "We have a right to exist and plurality is not inherently a disorder!" And the funny thing is, a couple of times I joined communities run by sysmedicalists. And they would ask "Are you a traumagenic system or an endogenic system?" And I don't have DID or OSDD or any other dissociative disorder, but I'd say yes. Because NPD is a plurality disorder, and those bigots never really thought about that. Nobody's really thought about it. The idea has been picking up a little steam on r/NPD, but for the past two years I thought I was the only one who'd ever figured out NPD causes plurality. But when I introduce the idea to other narcissists, it makes perfect sense to them. Some discover they were repressing plurality, and some already knew they were plural and suddenly start being able to make sense of it.
Plurality is when there's more than one person in a single head. According to sysmedicalists, the only way for that to happen is a traumatic childhood experience that splits the identity into fragments. According to endogenics and their allies, it can also arise naturally or through effort. But I found a third way. Because a narcissist has 0 real people living in their head. They had to create a false persona to live as. And that persona is deeply malleable, and sometimes it's destroyed and the narcissist has to rebuild it. And, anything you can do once, you might end up doing twice. So narcissists often end up creating fake people to co-exist in our heads. They're just as real as the first one, because all of our identities are equally fake. But they are genuine, and they do think and feel and live.
i believe that user got purged, cant find those posts. hope youre comfy here
i believe thats because it isnt deleted on lemm.ee, but i cant seem to find that link here on hexbear. be sure to report stuff so the mods can find problem posts
This is a pretty empathy focused group, which would be really difficult for someone with NPD. The few rare cases of someone with NPD being self aware and more critically, self reflective and seeking to change and be more empathic is like looking for a needle in a haystack. More commonly you'll see narcissistic behaviors and traits in most people that will pop up in a given circumstance. I could share about those instances in my life, but they make me feel really ashamed, so I'm out.
Well, autism is also a disorder that impairs empathy with neurotypicals, and this space seems like it would be able to tolerate plenty of autistic people. I have ASD and NPD, and I think accommodating them requires a roughly equal amount of effort. There's just more available literature on how to talk to people with autism.
I wish I understood it more, I often times sympathize with that "not feeling like I am a real person" thing, but that might also just be depression. A lamb, walking alone, in the dark.
