I used to wonder how people like Psycho (my stalker) are thoroughly miserable all the time. How does she manage to frown, complain, piss and moan at every waking moment? Everyone gets crabby at times, sure, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking always, perpetually, constantly sour and negative, like her life depends on being an insufferable bitch at all times. I’m quite sure she’s a petty, shriveled shrew even in her deepest sleep.
I still find myself sometimes feeling sorry for her. I can’t help it. Moments when I am wrapped up in my husband’s arms, content and peaceful, or when I look at him and feel intensely happy, that rush of emotion and tenderness, or when he holds me tight and whispers to me how much he loves me, are all moments she will never authentically experience with anyone. A narcissist is incapable of feeling love, with or for anyone (their own children included). I couldn’t imagine life without the love that my husband and I share. I wouldn’t want to live without it.
Learning more about narcissists, especially malignant narcissists, has made it easier to understand her self-defeating behavior. A narcissist has no fully developed sense of identity. They pick and choose pieces of personality from other people, parasitically copying, aping. Their self-esteem depends completely upon attention and validation from others and their own self-deception, constructing a false self, a mask that must be worn at all times. Their entire existence is a never-ending, ultimately futile attempt to regulate their public image and their precious and hollow façade of a life.
Pleasure and happiness are two different things. Narcissists like Psycho experience pleasure when they cause chaos, trouble, or pain for other people. They are the eternally joyless people who only seem happy when they are making others miserable. But it is fleeting; that satisfied feeling will quickly pass, and the narcissist is right back to feeling empty, back to chasing the next high from abusing, using, or stealing.
“If happiness is defined as a deep and abiding sense of contentment, satisfaction and inner peace, occasionally sprinkled with joy, then by definition, a narcissist can never be happy.” – Dr. Marcia Sarota, psychiatrist
“As time goes on, the narcissist becomes more and more furious and more and more destructive. They exact revenge on everyone whom they perceive as interfering with their gratification because they can never see that the problem lies within them.” – Dr. Marcia Sarota
So yeah, on a textbook level, I get it. Psycho is incapable of love, true happiness, or honest self-awareness. She is the absolute definition of a narcissist, nothing original or unique whatsoever: a psychiatric diagnosis turned puppet. A walking personality disorder. A terminally diseased mind and soul.
In my heart, though, I can’t truly grasp being that way. Why live at all? That sounds dramatic, but I mean it. Without love, passion, peace, affection, happiness, connection, sincerity…what is the point to even existing?
Sweat & Sparkle 