How to fall out of love with yourself
This is the story of the love of my life: a six-foot-two bald man with an enormous nose. We share a first, middle, and last name. I am what’s known as a narcissist.
I didn’t know my mind was odd until my new girlfriend, Evelyn, started poking around in it. “Tell me some of your worst-of reel,” she asked as we lay in bed, covers pulled up over our naked bodies.
“What’s a worst-of reel?”
“It’s like the five most embarrassing moments of your life.”
I tried to think of a single thing I’d ever done wrong; nope, there was nothing. “How often does yours play?”
“All the time, pretty much, unless I distract myself. It’s particularly bad when I meditate. Have you ever done any meditation? There are these crazy retreats where…”
I scrambled to sit up, many of our early differences now making sense – why she couldn’t sit with her thoughts without diving into her phone while I could stare at a wall for an hour. Why she’d slam back two drinks as we arrived at an event to take the edge off her nerves while I barely ever drank. If you only care what five people on earth think of you, even if there’s steak at the dinner party, there’s very little at stake. Her mind was a hostile place while mine… wasn’t, which made it so surprising that she’d become a workaholic political spokesperson out braving the world’s daily shitstorms while I was a stay-at-home memoirist, braving absolutely nothing at all. That I didn’t understand, not yet anyway…
Despite our differences, or perhaps because of them, we kept dating until, “Why can’t you ever queue?” she asked at the Post Office where I was keeping myself busy hopping from foot to foot and tutting loudly.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think, deep down, I just don’t really understand why someone isn’t blowing a trumpet and inviting me to the front.”
She laughed, my favourite sound in the universe. “Do you think you might be a bit of a narcissist? Let’s do a test.”
I took out my phone and took the Narcissistic Personality Inventory test – picking the most appropriate from forty pairs of statements:
Being an authority doesn’t mean that much to me -or- People always seem to recognise my authority.
I prefer to blend in with the crowd -or- I like to be the centre of attention.
I scored 24/40: deep into narcissist territory (the average for US adults is 15.3). We repeated the test for her: 1/40. It would have been zero if I hadn’t talked her into picking – people like to hear me tell stories. I liked to hear her tell stories. Not as much as I liked to tell her stories, but let’s not make this all about me.
Ha. Yeah, right.
“People,” she read from her phone, “with Narcissistic Personality Disorder have exaggerated feelings of self-importance and a diminished ability to empathise.” She shook her head. “That’s not you.”
“Are you kidding? It’s so me.”
“I’m sorry.”
I shrugged. “I’m fine with it,” I said, because I thought that’s what a narcissist would think. She seemed fine with it too because we soon decided to have a child, and together, even. 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 Evelyn was probed, biopsied, drugged, up-and-down regulated and harvested while I… occasionally masturbated in a cupboard.
The fertility industrial complex—cavernous, interminable, dehumanising—made our very different minds diverge further. Evelyn’s, as was its tendency, really turned the screws on her. She became utterly convinced it would never work; that her body was beyond redemption. She lost small things – sleep, hope, being able to experience human joy, and then a big thing – the patience to listen to me talk about all the great metaphors I’d nailed that day, instead, becoming prone to violent, spontaneous acts of emotional combustion and obsessed with researching fertility science, chasing her own cure.
Narcissists need control, or at least its illusion, but infertility offered me none; it’s just a torturous biological limbo where if you have money, science has Hopium it’s selling. I’ve always assumed reality will be what I want it to be, and so I offered her little except platitudes it would all be fine. When it wasn’t fine, I hid in my work, if you can call what I do all day work.
“How about therapy?” she asked, on the subway back from our one thousand and seventh fertility clinic appointment. “I always thought I’d be good at it,” I said. “But it’s like eight years of studying. I don’t have the patience.”
“I meant us going.”
“Oh. Why would we go? Our only problem is infertility.”
“I used to think that too,” she said, but I heard only I think so too.
Then there was a Saturday, deep in the nadir of our relationship, when I came home and found my bag packed in the hallway. The same bag I’d packed in my last two breakups. It was happening again; it couldn’t happen again.
Fortunately, she wasn’t kicking me out. Instead, a last-minute place had come free on a ten-day, silent, Buddhist Vipassana retreat she’d been bugging me to go on, the same one whose flyers she’d dotted around the apartment. I protested that I’d already met all my demons. She joked that someone whose passion was themselves should really know that person better. I needed to go help myself so I could come back and help her; infertility was too heavy to carry alone.
The retreat centre was squashed between a meadow and forest—a weird, quiet, sad, gender-separated place full of rules (no talking, no eye contact, no stimulants, exercise, reading or writing). The first forty-five-minute block of meditation felt like a decade dragged over spikes dipped in acid, and there were eleven more hours that day. During these sessions, my mind constantly searched for ways to distract me—an endless cascade of songs, memories, ideas, traumas, fears and unhappy childhood memories shouted, my mind turning screws I didn’t even know it had, in what rapidly became the worst week of my life.
Somehow, I limped through until day four, where, after a particularly torturous session I ran crying into the woods, punched a tree, and talked to a worm which… talked back, scaring me so much that I furiously murdered some nearby ants, got a confusing erection, and had a realisation – what I was experiencing, this madness and mania, was similar to what Evelyn was going through—intrusive thoughts becoming dominant, overwhelming thoughts to the exclusion of everything else. I felt this, not intellectually but emotionally, how terrified and lonely she must be and how spectacularly I was failing to help her. Which meant I was capable of much more empathy than I realised (and an internet test suggested). Shocked, I went back to the meditation hall and began actually listening to the teachers, resolving to stop hiding from the unpleasant things looping in my mind.
The next six days were still awful, but productive. It’s very easy to tell yourself stories, I should probably have known as a professional storyteller. The retreat was about changing some I began telling myself in childhood, and one in a post office queue. I am not a narcissist, although I know how to think like one, something that started when I was a shy and sensitive kid in an environment that didn’t value those things. Feeling too much, I began telling myself I felt little. Similarly, if people don’t like you, you can either decide they’re right or that they’re very wrong. Repeat a lie often enough and you’ll start to believe in its truth. But these were choices, like the choice I’d made to become a memoirist—intentionally making my life small and self-centred. Choices that made me an emotionally unavailable partner and would make me the same kind of father, if I were lucky enough to have that chance.
Back in the real world, I did a lot of apologising and took a break from work, not wanting to write about happier times until we’d made this one, even childless, as good as it could be. Then, after we’d both given up hope, we found ourselves in yet another doctor’s office, sobbing with joy for a change, seeing the first snowy glimpses of our daughter on the tiny screen.
Worms don’t talk to me anymore, I’m happy to report. Because of the retreat and all that’s followed it, I know myself better but love myself much less today which has created all this extra space to love others, and with more voluminous intensity than I ever knew possible. Evelyn and I often knock a drink back together when we arrive at a party now, just to take the edge off our nerves. I care what everyone thinks of me. Which means I buy presents now. Arrive places on time. Listen before I talk. I work less, but my work is better—readers like vulnerability, and now I’m being more honest with myself and the page, I can tell richer stories.
I have a worst-of reel now too, looping the times I’ve let Evelyn down. But a mildly hostile mind has its uses: keep you honest. I pay close attention to the stories I tell, checking they’re still true, and so, I need to correct something that I hope is already blindingly obvious…
This was actually the story of the loves of my life—a workaholic political spokesperson with impossibly thick blonde hair and a curious mix of intellectual strength and social anxiety, who pushes against her weaknesses, ignores her hostile mind, and makes her world large, not small. We don’t share a name, first, middle or last, but we share just about everything else.
Enjoyed this? It was inspired by/adapted from my memoir, That Time I lost My Mind.
A slightly different version of this was published by The NYT’s Modern Love series (paywall).