N is for Narcissist

It’s been ages, hasn’t it? I know I tend to be away for long stretches, but I think I’m ready to start posting on here more. Give it a bit. Life’s busy. So, I’m here. In a happier state of mind after a pretty awful, punishing year, thankfully. Writing. Working. Exploring this amazing city in which I live. Thought I’d pop back in to write on a topic that’s been on my mind: Narcissists.(A personal subject for me considering, well…*gestures at my life and personal traumas*) They certainly lend themselves to many different points of discussion. I’m going to focus on their attempts to manipulate strangers into giving them sympathy over their estranged children. I got tired of seeing people online get fooled by them and even worse, insult their kids just because they never questioned the Nparent’s claims. Those kids suffered enough already, I promise you. Narcissists are the ultimate real-life Unreliable Narrator.

Where to begin? Ah, the red flags. Narcissists are all red flags and blame shifting. When they bring up the topic of their kids being no-contact to total strangers, the same red flags almost always show up. Let’s break this down:

1. The Blame Game: Usually a narcissist parent will not acknowledge any sort of blame or responsibility for their kids cutting contact. Their take on it is often to the tune of “I did so much for them, but they just didn’t appreciate it. They’re so ungrateful/spoiled/selfish.”(2nd red flag, see below) Sometimes they allow for the tiniest bit of responsibility to be taken because they think it makes them sound better. It’s typically just “I wasn’t a perfect parent, but…” and absolutely nothing more. Right back to putting it all on their children after.

2. “Spoiled!”: Wow, do they love describing their kids that way. Easiest red flag to identify. If you see/hear that word from them, you’d be wise to not take anything that follows for gospel. Nparents use it all the time behind closed doors. “Ungrateful” comes up a lot, too. These are the immediate go-to terms, but you will for sure hear “selfish,” too sometimes.

3. Missing, missing reasons: Leaving stuff out is key to maintaining the charade. They may vaguely allude to “reasons,” but you’ll never hear ‘em. They don’t want you to. 

4. “They used to be so sweet…”: Bonus red flags! The less common little manipulation points they’ll sprinkle on to milk it. Nparents might reminisce about how lovely their kids were when they were small (Ahem. Unknowledgeable about Mommy and Daddy’s hurtful behavior and unable to stand up for themselves is what that really means for them. They would never have even appreciated how great their kids were) Once they plant the idea that their sweet babies *must* have changed, they’ll go, “I don’t understand! I just want my good child back…” Uh huh, sure ya do. /sarcasm But what they really want is the version that was scared to tell them “no” or advocate for themselves because retaliation was inevitable. Kids grow up, learn more, and get stronger. Hence the sympathy farming from their in-name-only parents.

5. Theatrics: One last bonus red flag. Mommy and Daddy Dearest might ham it up and cue the fake tears. The quivering lip. The “I am truly such a victim, undeserving of this level of wretched cruelty! None before me have been so wronged!” attitude. If they come off as over the top/unbelievable, trust your gut. More often than not, you’ve found a faker who acted that way with their kids, too. NPs pile on the drama so much at home.

Now that we’ve talked about the red flags, which often show up all at once in each instance, what is there to do about it when you witness them? Sure, seeming suspicious isn’t always a guarantee that they were horrible narcissistic parents, but when you get bundles of the red flags presented to you, be wary. If you see this in the form of Internet comments, you can ignore it if you wish, but irl is another story. You could potentially keep your response semi-neutral. Maybe say something like, “I see. Perhaps your kids just needed their space or some time alone.” and leave it at that. 

Some of us get bold or petty after dealing with really ugly narcissism episodes personally. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it unless you yourself feel strongly about it, but that’s up to you. If you want to go that route, a tip: Keep your tone indifferent, but casually point out the missing reasons. Me, I like to tell them, “Well, how people treat others is often unclear to them when strong feelings cloud their judgment. Maybe your kids have a valid reason for going NC that you haven’t recognized.” They’ll get mad, but I’ve seen far worse. Don’t say that yourself. I’m a fiery, vengeful creature who’s been personally hurt by narcissists many times over. I don’t hold back on this stuff. I just make sure to keep others informed for future reference after I put Narcissistic Parent Cretins back in their place. I’ve shown you their NPC red flags, so now the rest is up to you. 

Of Grief and Lonely Midnights

 It's been a while, I know. I've been working through some things, just trying to survive while everything in my life is cold and complicated. Haven't yet figured out how to move forward, I'm afraid. I don't think I've talked about it much on here, but in the last four years I've had four family members die, plus one person close to me leaving. I am hopelessly lost. I never really knew just how much pain I could feel until I lost some of the people I loved most. Nothing even remotely makes sense to me about the way things are. None of it feels real or just, but it's there, haunting me in the silent dark of sleepless nights. Grief is an unfathomable thing. The more time goes by, the more I feel like something's wrong with me for still feeling this way. I know that there's no time limit for grief, but you would think there was with the way people scoff at you and chide you for not being "over it" by now. On top of that, the world doesn't let up for a minute or give me any sort of peace long enough to work through it. There's always more to endure, never giving me a moment to just breathe and properly mourn. All I know is that I'm struggling to survive when it seems like the world around me doesn't want me to. I haven't made it back into the light yet.

Grief is also an anger-inducing thing. My pain is mixed with rage. I have had so much stolen from me and more to be thieved away in the night. I just want answers. I want someone to make it make sense so maybe I can heal a little and not lay awake at night wanting to know why. I want someone to explain it because I don't understand why my loved ones had to die and leave. I keep thinking that if someone gives me the answers I need, maybe I'll be able to move forward. But there are no answers. No one is coming to tell me why or ease my pain. It's just me on my own, desperately trying to keep my head above water and not one person is going to come along to rescue me. I'm still struggling because I don't know how to live with this void in my life. I wish I could forget what was missing and live the rest of my life blissfully unaware that there used to be something so beautiful here.

These days I'm just trying to make it work, trying not to take it personally when another door closes. For the past four years, I've been afraid to get close to anyone because I don't get to hold onto people in my life. I always lose them in some way, be it tragedy or distance or reasons they keep from me. I guess first I need to save myself before I can think about trusting people again. For now, I'm trying to just live until I find some sort of peace. You'll find me in the dark, waiting for the sun to come up. 

The State of Things and Whatnot

It's been a while since I've been here, I know. I tend to forget I even have a blog sometimes. Kinda felt like time to post something new here now that I'm thinking about this space again. Just a post devoted to various things going on in my life now, the good, the bad, and the creative. Let's start with the creative, which coincidentally is also the good: I've completed my memoir, which was my MFA manuscript. I've sent it to 3 different publishers as I work steadily on multiple other books of poetry. One is about 80% complete now and the other is coming along nicely. It will probably be a while until I hear back from the publishers on whether or not they'll accept it. By that time, the second book will probably be finished.

Another good thing to mention: I graduated with my MFA in Poetry in May of last year! I'm very proud of accomplishing this and how I've become a stronger writer and better person through my time at IAIA. It's incredibly validating to know that I've earned this and worked hard to achieve it. Now, the next phase is getting my work out into the world to share it with more people. Writing is everything to me. That's one of the reasons I keep waking up every day and dealing with the difficulties of my life. If I didn't have my writing, I don't know what I would do. I'll still try to post the occasional poem here, but a number of them I'm saving to try to get them published in various literary journals. If some of them get accepted, I'll let you know here where you can find them. I have one online now that I've just added to my third manuscript because I feel it's a good fit for it. That can be found here: https://tcjstudent.org/saturday-night-mania/

There's a little bad news to report in my life. We can see the wildfire smoke and smell the burning from my house. I'm scared of all that's going on and struggling to deal with that lately. My insomnia is worse lately because of it. Nothing I can really do but stay alert and try to get through this time until things are hopefully safe again. Some days I don't know how to cope with the fear, but I'm trying. I'm just trying to keep writing and sort myself out. I want to make progress and improve upon myself as a person these days. Taking it one step at a time until I get somewhere.

To Be Unchained

 To be Unchained

Ask me what I would do if my synaptic chains no longer bound me and I would tell you that there are a thousand things I’d reach for to light the dark. I’d put on my glimmering sun pendant in any state, not a worry for the next time I’d wear it or the time after that. I’d read whatever book whenever I wanted to, fall asleep to dreams of stories set in fantasy realms and distant domains. Open the door. Take running steps. Pick wildflowers into ragtag bouquets. Climb the peach tree for the ripest fruit, braving the branches for a taste tart as lighthearted sass. Paint with every shade I have, render turquoise citadels and amaranth starfields over coral moors. Run a hand through my tangled hair. Part the umber waves with one movement. Roam sunflower meadows without shoes. Wake at dawn for breakfast at first light. Let go of waylaying fear in a steadying sigh. Go about my day like nothing is wrong. Believe for the first time since I was only nine that nothing is wrong. Live a year without crying. Play music just a bit too loudly, if only to set myself free. Stand without wanting to run. Breathe like I don’t fear air will escape me. Stare directly into your eyes unwavering. Hold my own gaze in the mirror. Hear the silence and hold steady, no scream behind closed lips. Cross the room in slow steps. Turn the doorknob of my own accord. Lift the shattered pieces from the floor. Stop wishing the night would end. Grab a pen without second-guessing, ink in any color at all. Speak above the din. Depart without waiting on myself to meet unreachable standards. Set aside years of wanting to just have, hundreds of miles and hours of struggling be damned. Wade farther into the waves. Catch a sunbeam on the open ocean, rising up from the silver surges to look skyward. Savor one last breath, slow and sustaining. Accept my fate in late night hours of wishing for morning. Say what needs to be said. Stop needing. Finally be free.

Technological Necessity

Evening falls on Santa Fe. The light is darkening to match the coming of night, the visibility in my room dwindling as minutes pass on this Tuesday evening. My need for the light grows too great to ignore, though I’d rather avoid the harshness of the overhead light as I sit down to write. Although the room’s main light irritates my senses, I still feel the need for light to set the stage on my writing space. The artificial glare of my computer screen’s white light piercing through the dark stifles my creative flow. Too deeply immersed in dark and electronic brightness creeping through it, I feel the craving of something other than the limited space of the dim. I need to see in this room that houses me against the dangers outside my door. Every corner, every vinyl figure of a princess or Marvel superhero, every necklace that hangs on the jewelry organizer beside my desk. I need them all in view, unobscured by the shadow the night imposes.

I hear the steady hum of the computer I’m typing on, its uninterrupted buzz of sound a constant of each day I spend before this machine upon which I write. I cannot feel it against my fingers, but still it permeates the room in this August of myriad emotions. Here alone with the sound and the screen, I contemplate the hum as a heartbeat for this silver and black laptop, or maybe an endless breath that sustains its existence of functioning. It is my lifeline to the greater world and the people I cannot speak to face to face in this covid-locked world. I rely so much on it and what it allows me to achieve in writing, though behind its façade, I don’t see its inner workings or what allows it to process information for me each day. I connect to it each day while spending many of my waking hours sitting in my tattered black swivel chair in front of it. I spend more time with this computer than anyone else these days and yet I’ve never thought about what fuels its on-and-off experience as an essential writing device before now.

Maybe it’s because of the video game docuseries I watched shortly before I began writing. Maybe the alchemy of circuits and CPUs is fresh in my memory, an indirect gateway to my understanding the laptop I watched the series on. I find as I write that technology is very much on my mind. I am more aware than I have been in days that this computer is keeping me sane and fulfilled during my struggle with isolation. What would I do if it stopped its constant hum? Would I fall back into a silent despair without waking for the sole purpose of writing in Microsoft Word? I suppose the various notebooks I’ve collected over the years would draw me back in so that I might reacquaint myself with pen and paper. I’ve spent so much time writing in a digital space that I feel most comfortable writing that way. I’ve given myself over to the circuits and digital byways, nearly a citizen of its LED corridors as Tron circumnavigating the electronic neon of the Grid.

I’ve reflected on my need for the laptop screen I see every day in this moment of listening to the motorized rush the humming produces. I’ve started to appreciate and fear my need for it as my fingers dash across the keys to form words before my eyes. In this moment, it’s only me, the laptop, and the Word document I type into. Behind the smudges on the lenses of my glasses, I see more than just this display of neutral-toned graphics. I see the thing that has the potential to keep me going in this pandemic. The hum intermingles with the sporadic bursts of my fingers tapping the lettered keyboard. The words in my head, my reflections, have taken shape on the very object I’m contemplating. I’ve spoken without making a sound. Though the hour grows later, I feel a tie to this moment and the space I’m occupying within the purple walls around me. My computer has been my company. Have I fallen too far into the rabbit hole crafted of code? Am I capable of distancing myself from its cyber gaze? I’m not yet at liberty to say. Only in this moment of a Santa Fe night in late August, I strike the keys, remaining in tune to the need of my device.

Before the Virus

Before the Virus

Before the coronavirus, we lived a charmed life of social interaction and the freedom to leave our houses. We took it for granted. It was the norm, the world as it had always been. No one thought anything of touching their loved ones. We came and went as we wanted. “Quarantine” was a word seldom used outside of hypothetical scenarios and isolated incidents nobody thought would ever happen to them. The world was built on people interacting, people crowded together. Gathering and interacting was always the norm.

Nobody foresaw weeks into months where we would be sequestered in the confinement of our own homes trying to avoid any risk of catching a life-threatening infection. It probably never occurred to most people that hospitals would come dangerously close to running out of necessary equipment meant to protect its workers and save lives. We thought we were safe. We thought those we loved could keep coming home to us just as they always did, that nothing like this could ever happen. No one thought life would just stop. When it did, we were so unprepared for the effects of it that for all intents and purposes, the world around us was in peril.

Socially, we were divided by the long-reaching effects of the virus. We couldn’t just venture out without a thought to what dangers there were anymore. Our only means of leaving the house came in the form of needing food and medical care in this dire time. When we left, store shelves were running empty, people wore masks and avoided nearing each other. It was like scenes out of the apocalypses we had seen depicted in movies, only real and terrifying in how much it threatened to take from us.

Before the virus, personal freedom and walking out into the world without caution were things we never thought would be lost to us. There was little to no risk of anyone becoming infected and dying from everyday contact. Our apocalypse came sooner than any of us ever expected, in a different form than the zombie movies we watched when movie theaters were still open promised in their vision of a destroyed future. We learned that things were more finite than we ever could’ve realized. We saw that in the worst of times, some people cared more about themselves than the danger they posed to others in leaving home. Pushed to our limits, we had to make sacrifices and reevaluate the necessity of things we once took for granted. We had to learn how be selfless in our actions, to put aside our need for the world as it was in normalcy just to keep those we loved and the people they’d interact with safe.

The coronavirus did more than separate us. It challenged our perspectives on a safe world where we were free. It required us to ask ourselves to let go in the name of doing what was right for society as a whole. Nothing the world had yet faced affected our way of living as much as the novel coronavirus. We lived as we wanted until it threatened the safety many thought was simply a given. Worst of all, it divided people in more ways than just the physical. Asian people saw the blame shift to them as ignorant masses treated them as carriers of this indiscriminate virus. Suspicion became the norm. Because we all lost our freedom and safety, the need for blame arose in the worst of us. The new vision of the world we were forced to take on was more divided than ever.

In the year 2020, we faced a crisis that held us apart. We closed and locked our doors, covered our faces, avoided everyone we could be distant from. We learned to let go because we had no other choice. The very notion of what it meant to be free became more precious than it ever was. Our world changed fundamentally, changing with it our view of what was necessary just to ensure everyone else’s survival. Coronavirus is a chapter in the world’s history that will be remembered for years to come. It was the pandemic that reshaped society and enforced a new normal we weren’t yet ready for. So much of how the world moves forward will be informed by the impact the virus has had. In this desperate time of seclusion, we must learn how to proceed in ways that protect everyone, our society now revolving around caution rather than the normalcy of social interaction.

Here Again

So it's been a while since I've been here. A lot has happened in this time, the most notable of which you're seeing play out all over the news. I felt like coming back to this whole blogging thing as I'm self-isolating here at home due to the pandemic. I have been lucky enough to be healthy and relatively okay during this time despite feeling a loss of freedom because of what's going on, but that's minor compared to what other people are going through. I have been watching this crisis result in amplified racism towards Asian people. Being Asian American myself, this has been difficult for me to witness knowing the division makes this so much worse on everyone.

So what am I here to talk about in this crisis? Simple. I am here to implore you not to let this crisis shape how you treat other people. A virus is indiscriminate in who it will infect. Coronavirus is not "the Chinese virus" and there is no excuse for calling it that when the name of the disease is literally all over the news. Using this crisis to scapegoat other people and intentionally divide while stoking fear is irresponsible and heartless as coronavirus continues to inflict enormous damage on the world. The powers that be trying to justify long-held racism in this time serves no purpose to the world at large other than to divide and instill fear towards people who are just as vulnerable as everyone else now. We as a society have to do better than pursuing blame when the real enemy here is the virus itself. Discriminating and casting blame is not going to help anyone.

Though I have been fortunate enough not to have this current xenophobia directed towards me, I have seen plenty of it directed towards other Asian people. It's given me anxiety over how things will be towards us if/when this all returns to some semblance of normalcy. The future is uncertain, but the racism is not going to just go away if the virus does. Now more than ever, we need to keep rational and not let this virus influence our view of others. Unfortunately, we have history repeating itself here and not enough people remaining reasonable during this time. It's something that's going to further what racial divide there was prior. I hope more than anything that the world can learn to weather this crisis without further harming people based upon their ethnicity. That is the last thing we need now.

I'll try to come back to posting here during this self-quarantine. I'm trying to be as productive as possible during this time and I feel the need to keep speaking from my own view of what is going on. Stay safe, everyone. Be reasonable and kind during this time.

Until next time,

Debbie