OMG. I was the narcissist. Not him. I’d started watching the videos and reading the blogs, expecting to get emotional support for the torment I’d gone through with Guy. I mean with a name like Guy, you expect a certain level of narcissism, right?

But I was wrong, I realized it’d been me all along. I did all the things they said a narc did (the community called them narcs). I gaslit – or gaslighted, I isolated him from his support network, I hoovered him back after we split, every time we split. I created brain fog in him. I remember him in the kitchen once. I’d just thrown a casserole in the sink, a grand gesture. It steamed there. He put his hands to his temples, moaning: I just have this fog in my brain whenever we argue. I just can’t even…

Yes, the community, because there was this huge narcissist hunting/outing community out there – intricate support networks of people swapping their narc and borderline stories. Some even told of probable sociopaths and psychopaths, but they were in the minority. NPD was the biggie here, and while I chipped in comments on YouTube videos about my experiences, I noticed I got few likes, if any. The things I was saying were actually what a narc would say: the justification, the projection, my tales of early love-bombing – I gave it all away. I was just waiting for the moment that the channel owners or bloggers would out me in front of the community. You saw the same names all the time; it was a small, tight, crazymaking world, full of ravaged and trauma-bonded survivors of narc hell. Mostly women, like me, but a fair few men, too, often with ponytails, as I noticed from their profile pics.

I began to feel sorry for the narcs, especially since I might have been one, was still one. I rang Guy but he’d blocked my number. He’d blocked me on Facebook and Twitter as well. Just like a narc to do that, go grey rock on you – the full discard. But also like a narc to try and get him back and not take no. I signed out and found my way to his Twitter without signing in. He was flirting with at least twelve women, as far as I could tell. New Supply. Creepy GIFs, all that. I knew two of them, from the reading group. So maybe he was the narc after all, or perhaps we both were, both narcs in a co-dependent stew, dragging each other down. Thank God it never ended in violence. Although, as Carol from Toxic Free Life says, narcs cause more violence on the inside, that we’re left bruised on the inside, and that’s worse, if anything, than a good bashing. I’m not so sure.

All my spare time I put into watching narcissism videos, I watch and re-watch the same ones, and spend hours studying the comments below. I’m on twenty-six forums, and signed up to over fifty blogs. I’ve stopped commenting myself though. I’m lurking, as I think the term is. All these wounded souls, hating on their narcs, yet somehow needing them still to explain their lives, their complex pain and entangled failures – trying to go no contact, but getting hoovered back, looking for a way out of their intimate prisons. Meet-ups, conventions, Ted Talks – I considered them all, but lately it’s making me nauseous. I’m slowly getting sick of these whiners – maybe they deserved to be hauled over the coals, maybe they’re all narcissists, whether covert or overt. They only ever talk about their own pain, their own unmet needs, and I wonder about the nameless, and sometimes named, others, who were always the devil incarnate, despite being an angel at the start. Yeah. Maybe there are two sides to every story, at least. I begin to wonder if these moaning Minnies are the real victimisers. My head swims.

I saw Guy in Waitrose the other day. Didn’t see me – I hid behind the fancy bread section. He was with Tamsin from the book group. And she’s married as well. Bloody pair of narcs – they deserve each other.

(header image: Narcissus, by Caravaggio – 1599)