Before the long-awaited Volume The Third narrative gets rolling I want to plant a seed in your mind, Dear Readers.

bear with me

I want to very briefly talk about Narcissist Personality Disorder.
The link has information that is so good I am going to reprint it below because I know most of you don’t click the links. I hope the Mayo Clinic will grant some Fair Use license here for the purposes of educating people about this condition.

And while you read what follows… I want you to be considering that if a person possessed all the qualities/behaviors listed below… would that person/people/group be capable of creating a System that could have all these same qualities?

And I ask you to consider as the 3rd Volume narrative unfolds whether human made Systems can suffer from the same pathologies as the creators of those Systems.

Can Narcissists create Narcissistic Systems?

And do you see any groups of people behaving in this manner these days?

Overview

Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. They need and seek too much attention and want people to admire them. People with this disorder may lack the ability to understand or care about the feelings of others. But behind this mask of extreme confidence, they are not sure of their self-worth and are easily upset by the slightest criticism.

A narcissistic personality disorder causes problems in many areas of life, such as relationships, work, school or financial matters. People with narcissistic personality disorder may be generally unhappy and disappointed when they’re not given the special favors or admiration that they believe they deserve. They may find their relationships troubled and unfulfilling, and other people may not enjoy being around them.

Treatment for narcissistic personality disorder centers around talk therapy, also called psychotherapy.

Narcissistic personality disorder affects more males than females, and it often begins in the teens or early adulthood. Some children may show traits of narcissism, but this is often typical for their age and doesn’t mean they’ll go on to develop narcissistic personality disorder.

Symptoms

Symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder and how severe they are can vary. People with the disorder can:

• Have an unreasonably high sense of self-importance and require constant, excessive admiration.
• Feel that they deserve privileges and special treatment.
• Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements.
• Make achievements and talents seem bigger than they are.
• Be preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate.
• Believe they are superior to others and can only spend time with or be understood by equally special people.
• Be critical of and look down on people they feel are not important.
• Expect special favors and expect other people to do what they want without questioning them.
• Take advantage of others to get what they want.
• Have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others.
• Be envious of others and believe others envy them.
• Behave in an arrogant way, brag a lot and come across as conceited.
• Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office.

At the same time, people with narcissistic personality disorder have trouble handling anything they view as criticism. They can:

• Become impatient or angry when they don’t receive special recognition or treatment.
• Have major problems interacting with others and easily feel slighted.
• React with rage or contempt and try to belittle other people to make themselves appear superior.
• Have difficulty managing their emotions and behavior.
• Experience major problems dealing with stress and adapting to change.
• Withdraw from or avoid situations in which they might fail.
• Feel depressed and moody because they fall short of perfection.
• Have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, humiliation and fear of being exposed as a failure.

When to see a doctor

People with narcissistic personality disorder may not want to think that anything could be wrong, so they usually don’t seek treatment. If they do seek treatment, it’s more likely to be for symptoms of depression, drug or alcohol misuse, or another mental health problem. What they view as insults to self-esteem may make it difficult to accept and follow through with treatment.

If you recognize aspects of your personality that are common to narcissistic personality disorder or you’re feeling overwhelmed by sadness, consider reaching out to a trusted health care provider or mental health provider. Getting the right treatment can help make your life more rewarding and enjoyable.

Request an appointment

^ copy pasted from the MayoClinic website. And yes that is a live link if you need help.

Being Wrong™ Pt. 1

In Lounge of Lunatics I wrote

What do you do when your entire existence is a pile of Broken Mirror pieces covered in blood and nothing is recognizable anymore?

And God Almighty™…

and all God’s Creation

does.

not.

care.

one.

bit.

It’s 1996 and I’m 18/19

I live in a shitty rented room with two other rotating roommates in the back of a church in Upland, California. I work odd jobs. The voice over demo sitting in a lockbox in my closet… my most valuable possession.

I try community college theater departments. I start working in the event industry as a DJ and performer. My “free” time is spent going to doctor’s appointments and therapist appointments and my head is swimming with new chemical concoctions. I don’t remember much of the next few years.

There’s not much worth remembering anyway. My life is a pile of Broken Mirror pieces.

Every night I return to my cloistered bedroom and try to figure out what the hell happened? Like, really. What the actual fuck happened?

2 years ago everything was fine. And now….

*sits amongst pile of Broken Mirror pieces*

*picks up random shard*

*stares at partial reflection*

*career*

*shard cuts finger*

red fingerprints

*picks up another shard*

*stares at partially obscured reflection*

*education*

*tries to see if career and education fit together*

*rotates each piece many many times*

slippery
and
painful

*tosses them on the pile*

What now Old SkyDude™

What the actual fuck do I do now?

How the hell do I fix this mess?

Like where do I even start?

I know 1 thing for certain.

1. I have a Broken Mirror. It is entirely and thoroughly not. whole.

I have no other insight into life on any level at this point. The shock of suicide and the mental health system is something that doesn’t even really settle in your bones until a long time later. Especially in my family where I was just pushed back into school then I’d fail and have to drop classes because my mental health was a disaster wash. rinse. repeat.
The trauma kinda never stopped for a few years.
Nothing got better.

Mental health patients share a trait that I have only observed in people who have been to jail. And I mean served time. Convicted and sentenced. Not a weekend in a drunk tank. But heard or said the word “guilty”.

And folks who have been incarcerated and folks who have been in mental health hospitals have this… I don’t even know how to describe it… scar tissue on your soul. It is a unique scar tissue on your soul. It’s the scar tissue that says “I fucked up in a way that everyone in my life knows about. And I can’t undo it.”

And unbeknownst to me… this is going to be the Greatest Gift I will ever receive from Mental Illness.

This is the story of:

Being Fucking Wrong™

Think back to 2 things I shared earlier. The SmugMan™ County Supervisor who was so smug while being completely wrong. And an article I shared somewhere back there about how Evangelicals are “the people who are never wrong”.

When you are raised in The Church™ you are taught that everything that you learn in church is The Truthiest Truth of All Time. And everyone sounds like SmugMan™. They LOVE to point how wrong you are all the time. And they do this constantly when you have been to jail or when you have been to mental health hospitals. You are seen as a sinner. But with people who go to jail… they can be forgiven and repent and serve their time and hey, even Paul was in jail. I’m sure they’ll make those comparisons to Trump should he ever feel the ZipClickity™ on his wrists.

With mental health patients we can’t really be forgiven because we’re Fucking Broken™. Demon Possessed™. ExtraStrengthSinner™. Bad Seed™. Lost Cause™. Prodigal™.

And while the shunning part of that sucks ass… there is something remarkably liberating about Being Fucking Wrong™.

When you have attempted suicide and SucceedFailed™ and had your stomach pumped and spent 2 weeks in a shitty hospital and had your whole life be destroyed…

You have to admit that it actually happened.

Now there is Denial for sure and that post is next.

But this post is about the gift of Being Fucking Wrong™.

As a white, upper-middle class, evangelical, male (who is not exactly dimwitted)… I lived in a world where I and everyone like me was right about everything all of the time. Every narrative I had about Life, The Universe, Other People Groups, History, Men & Women, Women’s anatomy, God, the history of the Jews, I mean literally everything I believed in across the entire stores of knowledge crammed in my twerking brain lobes… it all was this clear crafted narrative that made sense. And everyone I knew said and thought all the same things and believed the same narratives and it was an entire demographic– an information world bubble that I was raised in.

I don’t think this was malicious, I think it is what happens whenever a group of people run everything and control ALL the systems.

When you’re a mental health patient… you are effectively shut out of all the systems that everyone else gets to enjoy. School. Churches. Your families. Your neighborhoods. Your friends. Career/Industries.

And being on the outside of all the systems you are forced to deal with the reality that you are shut out. You have been removed. You are not allowed here. Like being in jail. You have suffered a consequence that has removed you from society in a total way.

Most people never experience this.

But for those that do… there’s something uniquely freeing about being cast out of Polite Society™.

You learn a very important thing that everyone needs to learn in life:

You. are. Fucking. Wrong™.

I know.

It’s upsetting if you aren’t used to it.

But just sit with it for a second….

You

are
fucking
wrong

Now in this case the you is actually me

I am Fucking Wrong™

I tried to die.

Thrice.

And that was Wrong™. Healthy people aren’t supposed to be gobbling dozens of pills to not exist anymore. That’s what sick people do. And they always say the word “sick” a little differently when they talk about my kind of sickness.

And ambulances and AlphaMedics™ and stomach pumping crews and county hospitals were involved… and now a year later I’m 18 and those hospital bills are fucking with my parents resources and there’s worries about what health care I can get now that I’m an adult– this is why the age of patients was raised under Obamacare, btw. The economic terror it put in my family‘s life coming out of the Year from Hell™ and the fear that I would be wandering the Earth without meds as a mental health patient… and all the conservatives and Fucking Evangelicals™ mocked the idea of staying on your parents health insurance until you’re 26 when it was first being touted, remember? That absolutely would have made my life better if it had existed when I was that age. That rule exists primarily for mental health patients because the primary age of mental health onsets of severe illness occur at the age of 18-22. (I was what’s called “early onset”.)

And so… Fucking Evangelicals™ bitching about severely ill young people having health insurance and how you all were against that because socialism– btw forcing people to buy health care is NOT a democratic idea it’s a republican one- never forget the Affordable Care Act that you dickheads dubbed Obamacare as an insult was actually the Heritage Foundation plan for healthcare that Republicans had been trying to force on the American people for decades and when the black president did it you all screamed that it was evil.

This. is. why. I call. you. fuckers.

you fake ass fucking christians

Anyway…

When mental health patients fuck up there’s shit tons of paperwork and bills and legal problems and moving from adolescence to adulthood with no safety net… you become aware very fast of how you fucked up. And you can’t avoid this reality.

It’s thrown in your face every day.

Because your family went through all that shit with you and now they don’t trust you anymore. Also, fun fact: some of your family members are bigots about mental illnesses. And for some of your family members, once they know you are mentally ill they will never, ever, ever look at you the same way ever again.

Usually the very first people to teach you about discrimination after you suffer from a suicidal near-death health emergency will be your family.

This is why I find it funny how much stock the Fucking Evangelicals™ put into the Family Unit. Families are not gifts from god. Families are the repositories of generations of ignorance and abuse and intolerance. Hell, it’s often the family itself that was the source of the original dysfunction that caused the mental health break in the patient.

And so the Idolatry of the Family™ is a concept we will return to much, much later. But, the first place you will ever be treated different/worse after you try to die thrice is from your family.

And you will not be able to avoid the fact that you fucked up and you are Fucking Wrong™.

My initial experience with Being Fucking Wrong™ was shame.

Humiliation.

Embarrassment.

You want to curl full fetal and hide under a rock.

Actually… if you’re a suicide survivor what you want IS TO FUCKING DIE.

But you can’t.

EVERYONE IS WATCHING YOU LIKE A FUCKING HAWK NOW.

My parents were told I was going to die.

Or that I would be permanently brain damaged.

My family is scarred AF, too.

I put them through trauma.

That I wasn’t trying to cause harm to them is irrelevant.

I did.

I fucked up.

I hurt people.

I am Fucking Wrong™

And in the early years of Being Fucking Wrong™ I wore that shame.

It was fed to me so often it oozed through my pores.

You avert your eyes to Polite Society™.

Your family starts looking at you different.

Like they’re waiting for you to fuck up again.

Cuz they are.

And you will.

And for a kid who grew up with the about as much privilege as it’s possible to have… Being Fucking Wrong™ is not something I was used to being. No, I was straight A student for most of life. In the gifted classes. Advanced reading and mathematics. Always knew all the answers in Sunday School. Awards. Trophies.

All of that is flushed the fuck away when ambulances take you to get your stomach pumped and you spend two weeks in hell.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. So Fucking Wrong™.

And you just want everything to go back to normal. You want everything to be reset so you can try NOT to fuck up. Trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

And this is where Denial is really a response to Being Fucking Wrong™. Like, your brain can’t process Being Fucking Wrong™ when you’ve always Been Smugly Right™.

As much as I want to try to reset my life, too much is moving too fast.

In June of 1996, all of my friends graduated from High School.

Together.

I sat in the stands as a guest of one of my best friends.

Sitting with his family.

I’ll never understand why they invited me. Perhaps they felt I might feel left out. And I don’t know why the fuck I went other than that I was a chronic people pleaser who wanted to see all my friends one last time before they all went away to college without me.

And if you want to feel like a fucking failure… if you want the full Being Fucking Wrong™ experience that life can create and deliver into your soul, sitting in the stands as your graduating high school class gets their names read off and all their families are there… and your family is not there to support your accomplishment. There was no cheering crowd two years earlier when you got your diploma in the mail. There are no teddy bears and gift cards and summer trips and college savings funds set up by whoever.

I remember after the ceremony and the caps all get thrown up in unison and the families mingle on the football field… and as I wandered trying to find the 5 or 6 people who still remembered me enough to say goodbye… to hear the pride as family members were talking about Soandso going to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, USC, I mean the 1996 Claremont High School graduating class was no slouch. These were the privileged kids who went on to all the top schools around the nation.

I tried community college for 4 straight semesters and can’t finish a single semester without wanting to blow my brains out.

I am acutely aware on this day, on this field, surrounded by all these people who are about to attend a Grad Night I am not invited to… that I do not belong here. My path is diverging diverged from their path.

And damn… it seems like all of them are going the same way… and I can’t go with them. I lost out. I broke my Mirror and fucked things up and I’m Fucking Wrong™.

That was probably the most intensely saddest moment of my life.

It broke my fucking heart to be on the outside watching as a spectator as everyone I had gone to school with since I moved from Texas all those years earlier was reaching the same life milestone together. Without me. I don’t get to share in their joy and they didn’t give a shit about my accomplishment 2 years earlier.

I had mostly distanced myself from my friends during those years anyways. It had become too painful as they all got to go proms and football games and have epic experiences together and stay in the mix.

Weirdly, I was shunned by circumstances. Once you leave school everyone forgets about you. Their lives are too busy and filled with SAT’s and visiting colleges and Spring Breaks…



you see the life you were Supposed to Have™
as it slips ever further
over the horizon
out of view
sailing away
forever
never to return to these shores.

It’s a shitty feeling holding these Broken Mirror shards.

And it lasts for years.

But planted within me is a seed that I never asked for.

And it’s going to grow into a giant sequoia tree called Being Fucking Wrong™.

And it’s going to be one of the greatest things to ever happen to Fucking Evangelical™ L’ilDaveyBoy™ who is Always Right™ because he’s SavedDave™.

And this shitty feeling that I can’t shake… this curse that hangs around my neck… This scar upon my soul… what I am experiencing in a very brutal and drawn out way is an ego death unlike any other.

When you’re raised in The Church™ you can’t even conceive of the idea that you could Be Fucking Wrong™. You have the Word of God™. There’s a whole fucking roomful of elders who will in unison tell you the same things you’ve heard every Sunday your entire life. And everyone parroting and echoing each other’s messaging. This has been happening for 2 millennia.

And for the first time in my family’s history… somebody is Fucking Wrong™.

And while I don’t appreciate this at all at the ripe old age of 18… a 47 year old version of me can see how this period of my life is what lays the groundwork for the journey ahead.

It’s years of wrestling with Being Fucking Wrong™ and being unable to escape it no matter how much Denial I’m in for years. Eventually, the soul that seed was planted in has all the nutrients necessary to one day have the presence of mind to admit: That I do not know everything. <—- And when you think things like that…. well, shit… you just might learn something that’s real for the first time in your life.

Most people never learn they are Fucking Wrong™ ever in the entire lives. They surround themselves and are immersed in worlds and bubbles where everyone in the system is Fucking Wrong™ but nobody has any practice at Being Fucking Wrong™ and so nobody knows what it looks like or how to identify Being Fucking Wrong™ and they sure as shit have no idea how to STOP BEING FUCKING WRONG™.

But a mental health patient… somebody who has served time… those of us who have fucked up spectacularly...

Well, the best part about Being Fucking Wrong™ is that you get to have practice Being Fucking Wrong™. And the more practice you have… the better you get at identifying it and avoiding it.

Everything that comes years later for me… the breaking of every cycle and system I was a part of happens because I couldn’t avoid the fact that I was Fucking Wrong™ at the ripe old age of 16-17-18-19-20.

I got a head start on Being Fucking Wrong™.

It’s why I’m not afraid of Being Fucking Wrong™.

When you learn you are Fucking Wrong™ you learn a very critical and valuable Truth:

You learn that it’s possible to be Fucking Wrong™.

And your brain is prepped to consider in every single moment:

Am. I. Fucking. Wrong. ™. Right. Now. ?™.

And I really can not stress how that simple concept, once mastered, will create a skill in you most people do not have called Listening & Learning.

*picks up shard of Broken Mirror*

*sees own eye in the reflection*

“I broke this”

“and I cannot unbreak it or fix it”

“and if I’m not careful it’s gonna cut me and hurt me again”

*holds Being Fucking Wrong™ delicately*

*carries piece away from pile and to the desk*

what the hell do I do with you
?™