DO THESE PANTS MAKE ME LOOK LIKE A NARCISSIST?
(This is a long one, y’all…get a sandwich and a glass of scotch)
APRIL 2022, HARCOURT, ONTARIO
I’m laying in a bearably uncomfortable bed, inside a slightly rundown but lovely old-school cottage that I’m fairly certain is haunted…as cottages sometimes are.
Jolene and I are under many blankets, weathering our first thunder storm and paranormal experience as a team…which is fairly badass, if you ask me.
It’s all a very spooky kind of solo-with-dog-companion fun that I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy about five years ago.
In 2017, being any kind of alone in an old-school cottage, on a rural road where you discover on your first walk that ALL the other cottages are boarded up BUT the one you rented on Air B and B from an artist named Kiki where the pictures on the wall seem to be staring back you, would have scared the living crap out of me…throw in a dramatic weather event, and just forget it.
As the skies open up AGAIN outside the window of the fake wood panelled bedroom, I joyously realize THAT story of alone-type-of-fear is no longer true…I am quite simply not afraid today.
I take a breath and poke around inside me just to be sure.
Nope.
Not at all afraid.
Well.
What a thing.
I look at the picture on my wall of a child standing on a bluff staring right the fuck at me and I stare back at her.
Nope, still not afraid.
I cannot say the same for Jolene, who is shivering a bit against the thunder.
I reach under the covers, placing my hand on her back, and I feel her quiet a bit.
Magic.
On my IPAD, I open my email (with the other hand that is NOT holding Jo) and see the notification for the latest episode of THIS IS US, I gasp like a girl at prom and click the link as fast as one hand can manage.
You guys, I’m SO here for this last season of THIS IS US AND I’M NOT ONE BIT ASHAMED about it.
Though, I must admit, each episode is killing me a LITTLE TEENY TINY bit at a time BUT the masochistic/highly dramatic part of me is not totally mad at the long, drawn out murder.
I will even venture to say that the spiritual pain I’m experiencing watching this final season…a pain that, in the past, I’d usually reserved for shows like GREY’S ANATOMY…is a bit exquisite.
And yes god, it’s me Sharron…I’m the one still watching GREY’S ANATOMY.
I’m a Virgo, we like to finish what we start, but since McDreamy went (OLD SPOILER), the show’s really been trying my patience, though I’ve quite enjoyed watching the not-oft told story of a mid-life woman falling apart in meteoric way, living through it and coming back swinging.
My ex used to know when I was in the other room catching up on GREY’S, because I think my despondent GREY’S weeping sounded a tad singular, having not QUITE the same tone as did the forlorn bawling that occurred when I couldn’t stop myself from watching Humane Society Commercials that were underscored with IN THE ARMS OF THE ANGELS, by one Ms. Sarah McLachlan.
Yes, I come by ALL this TV love/obsession honestly, I’m a television watching professional from way back in the day.
From banshee housewives, to Battle of the Network Stars, from death bed confessions, to people who marry after getting to know each other through a wall, from anything created by Norman Lear, to people singing in front of audiences for the first time…then straight to the last perfect episode of Six Feet Under, I AM A GODDAMN TV WATCHING BOSS.
THE TV YOU THINK IS FANCY?…I love it.
THE TV YOU THINK IS CRAP?…I love THAT too.
I LOVE IT ALL.
Also, it bears mentioning here that I’ve seen the final episodes of MASH, ALL IN THE FAMILY, FRIENDS and WILL AND GRACE about 100 times each….
FUTURE COMMENT WITHIN HISTORICAL STORY: My repeated watching of the FIRST final Will and Grace episode was a fact I MANAGED to keep to myself when I recently spent two hours alone in a horse drawn hansom cab with Eric McCormack.
True story. END OF FUTURE COMMENT.
…and while I love the TV, I LOOOOOOOOVE the final acts (both series and storyline) the very most…and THIS IS US is giving me EVERYTHING I need in that department, winding it all up with an extra dose of angst that is just sending me into a GREY’S sweeps-week-catastrophic-event euphoric fog.
Uh huh, the sixth and last season of THIS IS US has me 70% triggered and 80% entertained by what might be the most wrenching and MANIPULATIVELY heart breaking final season of a TV show that I’ve ever seen which, if you’ve been paying attention to my love of final acts, is REALLY saying something.
In the middle of watching this latest episode of THIS IS US (titled KATOBY) on my IPAD while laying in this bearably uncomfortable bed, I mused that if twelve year old entertainment-console fixated Sharron could’ve spied into the future, seeing how much TV would influence her adult life in every single way, how much it would still entertain, heal, help and also employ and inspire her all these years later, I think it would fill her slightly asthmatic chest with a welcome warmth and not a little bit of justification and vindication.
TV, you see, was one of my best friends growing up…a fact which I was ashamed of for a long time.
Yes, the above could be taken as a sad statement, but the truth is, it was what it was and I’m thankful for its comfort, companionship and teachings in many ways.
It honestly helped me make it here in (basically) one piece.
(Basically)
Back then, all my favourite TV shows (Laverne and Shirley, Charlie’s Angels, Happy Days, Love Boat, Fantasy Island) were on the AMERICAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION.
Last summer, I worked with Robert Pine on a limited series called Five Days at Memorial (what we used to call a mini-series but I guess that became too minimizing for marketing and advertising) and while everyone on set was excited that he’s Chris Pine’s father, I could not stop myself from telling him how thrilled I was that he’d worked on both of my young-life, staple Friday night shows, which were the aforementioned Love Boat and Fantasy Island.
Happily, he was a very good sport and while we sat around waiting for the next set up, he told me a few stories about being on the LB and FI sets…which gave me no small amount of joy.
THIS IS US is on NBC, but I don’t hold it against anyone.
This show is madly tying up all the loose ends in the lives of the Pearson family, weaving back and forth through about four hundred interesting and sometimes confusing timelines, all in the span of 60 TV minutes, which is 42 real minutes…excluding commercials.
Those poor, overworked hair, make up and wardrobe departments must have been fucking exhausted at the end of shooting.
As the show careens through ALL it’s highly satisfying endings, it feels to me like we in the audience are on a collective toboggan ride, flying downhill without breaks, and as we speed along, instead of fully formed pictures we’re seeing bright flashes of each characters highest, lowest and/or most important moments, past, present (such as it is) and future.
Honestly, it’s a PERFECT final season for people whose attention spans have been whittled down to almost nothing from the collective pandemical doom-scrolling social media experience, when even a simple TIK TOK post exercises the limits of our patience.
BUT I love the speed of this final season, I LOVE the answers, I LOVE the wrap ups, it’s also what? Delicious.
I find it akin to reading the first chapter of a book and then getting to skip right to the end…over and over again.
The latest story line wrap-up highlights the sad demise of the marriage of Toby and Kate, a couple that was set up for great marital success early on but who’ve ended up not being able to go the distance, something that was teased at the end of last season, if I’m not mistaken.
But, I guess THIS DISTANCE was the actual distance this fictional couple was meant to go, and the reality of their very human trajectory has been (mostly) a breath of truthful air…freezing ice-cold air that hurt my lungs a bit…but still, it’s a storyline that’s been captivating to me, especially in it’s conclusion.
Even with my marriage four years in the rear view mirror (about exactly seven days away from the four year mark if I am keeping score, and I am because I’m a VIRGO and I believe in benchmarks) I have to say that watching it has been…bittersweet.
Sometimes, as I mentioned, breathtaking.
In this last episode, moments after they sign their divorce papers, a calm Kate tells a devastated Toby that their story is not over.
That their story will continue…just in a different way.
That they were meant to meet.
That they were meant to have children together.
That they were meant to be together and then not.
I paused the program right there, petted my now sleeping dog, and look up at the water-stained old timey cottage ceiling for a spell…considering and mulling…finally coming to the conclusion that I was robbed of my own happy/sad marriage ending.
God-friggen-damn-it. Trigger alert, Sharron.
Instead, the ending I had was angry/dishonest/sad/mad/sad/confused/angry-as-eff/insert-very-strong-feeling-here.
When MY marriage ended…
…again, yes, I’ve said or written these words seemingly a million times in the last four years, and you may depart here with my blessings if you’ve had enough, I get it…
…when my marriage ended, I had quite the opposite reaction.
I had to see my soon-to-be ex at some sort of weird end-of-partnership event, I told him that during our whole time together I believed in my heart that I was, we were, building and contributing to OUR collective, forever story, but after my first few gross and stumble-filled months alone, I’d come to the conclusion that THIS…
…THIS LIFE…
…THIS is actually MY story that I’m living in, a life story made up of chapters and that his chapter was over…much like MY chapter was now over in the story of HIS life.
Though I could have kept that nugget of discovery to myself, I did indeed tell him of his closed chapter, and I did it to wound him, to let him know he just might be as disposable, over and CANCELLED as he’d made me feel, BUT now I know I was not at ALL correct about our story being over.
Stay with me.
Over and over again, I’ve wished that our story ended as the door closed behind him that very last time…but it did not.
When marriages end, they seldom end well AND, guess what and SURPRISE they don’t really end at all.
The ex-person you slept with for years and years becomes an unwanted, reoccurring character in phone calls, emails, mediation, meditation, conversations, musings, pictures, memories, screen caps, online worlds…they show up on the TV show of our lives again and again, whether we want them to be cast or not.
The story, the unwanted connection with my ex, goes on and on in a weird way that can continually and SUDDENLY out of nowhere piss me off…freak me out…trigger me by way of a TV show…can give me just a moment’s pause before I move on… makes me momentarily sad…and sometimes (insert very strong emotion here)…and then, other times, not bother me at all…I just never know which it will be.
Because triggers, Man.
The triggers.
DECEMBER-ISH 2018. THE DISTILLERY DISTRICT, TORONTO
In the middle of a quite pitiful and joyless attempt at scraping the VERY bottom of my psychic barrel during my first holidays alone in 27 years, I took my body and its shaken-up contents to the Distillery District Christmas Market.
Goddess help me, as I slowly walked through the crowds I silently wondered if there had EVER been more paired-off, cute, handholding, laughing-into-each-other’s face, unsuspectingly happy, chic-beanie-hat-with-accompanying-Canada-Goose-down-coat-wearing couples in entire fucking world?
EVER?
Instead of finding the Christmas Spirit, I ended up getting haunted by the Ghost of Gaslighting Past in the form and words of a not-often-seen friend…who is alive, well and NOT Jacob Marley…but whose message to me was, IMHO, just as chilling.
After the initial HELLO, HELLO, HAPPY HOLIDAYS the conversation took a fast right hand turn when she told ME that SHE was informed, on these very streets no less, that the one reasons my marriage ended was that I was a NARCISSIST.
Instantly, my feet go numb and not from the cold.
My mind raced, because THIS was the fourth time in a couple of months that I’d been delivered the same shitty, shitty information.
Twice it was shared with me face-to-face by two different friends and once it was sent through a SUPER GROSS email from an acquaintance, AND the numb feet is my body’s latest ridiculous reaction to this continued bad news, which is a change from the dragging foot I had for about a month that a neurologist informed me was caused by NOT a brain tumour, but stress.
Jesus Christ, isn’t the way my marriage imploded enough?
The branding of my character and person in response to someone cheating on ME has been an super unwelcome added ingredient on the crap sandwich of this shit show I’m living.
On this particular day when I heard this news…again…I stood frozen on one of the many cobble stone walkways in the Distillery District in Toronto, stuck in the stiff mud of this terrible conversation with someone I really like, but wished I could run the fuck away from.
AND as I stood there heart beating, face hot, feet numb, breath taken, pretending HARD to be fine, listening to this person continue to talk, I silently ask myself for the thousandth time, am I a narcissist?
My right hand white-knuckled my phone in the front pocket of my winter coat in an effort to NOT google the word narcissist AGAIN as I continue to try to wrap up this conversation with my well-meaning, truth-bombing friend.
While I’m fairly certain I know now by heart what the ugly, aggressive word entails from all the other googles, I cannot wait to be alone so I can obsessively remind myself of all it’s cutting nuances…and feel bad about myself, DOUBT MYSELF and be mad as hell…again.
Yes, our story continues on in a way I do not like at all.
APRIL 2022 HARCOURT, ONTARIO
Much like how the content of my post about THE SMILE circled around and around inside my spirit till I wrote it down and hit publish, FOUR unbelievable years later the label of NARCISSIST has been plastered on my forehead again and again and again.
AND the shit stain (there is no better way to describe it) of possibly BEING an actual NARCISSIST has been sullying my well being on and off for far, far fucking too long now.
AND AND much like the way I metaphorically unpacked and unloaded from my own mental baggage the tale of FUCKING DEBBIE, I want this label out of my insides, my bloodstream and into the ether.
The challenge has been, for a long time I’ve figured that I can only write about it if I present it in a way that will NOT make people uncomfortable, in a way that will not incur wrath or head shakes or judgement or questions about why I couldn’t just keep this story to myself, about why I’m telling it all these years later.
How do I, without sounding like a woman scorned (fuck I hate that saying), share with the people who read my shit that the story goes ON?
That while I continue to move on, live my life, evolve, love and create, the story does not end?
Then, one day last week, almost four years after the start of my SUDDEN solo life, I was sent another message, from another well-meaning person in which the hated word appeared in regards to me.
Again.
You’d think I’d be quite used to it, by now…and in some ways, I am.
I filed it away inside my brain folder that bears the title OLD NEWS, and went grocery shopping to try to shake it off.
I was quite happily dragging my chic, not-old-lady bundle buggy through my west end Longo’s, when for no reason that I can put my finger on, as I mulled over possible purchases in the spice and condiment aisle, I was hit by the following thought like a thunderbolt:
Why the fuck do I need to keep being so fucking agreeable?
Why do I have to just grin and bear this label?
nar·cis·sist
/ˈnärsəsəst/
noun
a person who has an excessive interest in or admiration of themselves.
“narcissists who think the world revolves around them”
DECEMBER 2018. BACK AT THE DISTILLERY CHRISTMAS MARKET
Twenty minutes after the truth-bombing friend went on their not-so MERRY way, I was sitting on a cold wooden bench across from the place in the Distillery where they sell the really good sandwiches, the freezing, naked fingers of my right hand scrolling through a million articles on narcissism…as my stomach boils, my head buzzes, my feet continue to be numb and I feel the NOW familiar dread in my stomach that this experience, this event, this ending…will NEVER fucking end.
I want to strangle someone.
I want to grab someone and drag them over to MY lonely side.
I want to snatch the ironic beanies off the happy heads of happy couples, shaking the expensive cashmere in their horrified faces, informing them that the dear person whose hand they are clutching against my unhinged onslaught might cheat on them some day.
None of that will, of course, ever happen…because THIS?
This IS a lonely fucking journey and I don’t really get to talk about it to more than a handful of friends (god bless them), because it makes people…uncomfortable.
AND I don’t REALLY want to commit violence, but man, five months after finding out the truth of it all, there are still whole days that I want the WHOLE fucking world to side with ME and feel sorry for ME and fight for ME…wait, does that make me a narcissist?
Does THAT make me a narcissist?
JUNE 2018. DUBLIN, IRELAND
I’m laying in a single bed in a boutique hotel in downtown Dublin weeping out loud after talking on my cell to my VERY recently estranged husband about an odd VISA charge that has appeared on our STILL joint account.
While we argue across the ocean, my sister sits with her back to me, on her own hotel twin bed.
After the call suddenly disconnects in the middle of the long distance screaming match, I’m frustratingly torn between righteous anger towards him and a strange terrified worry for him that I cannot shake no matter what I do.
Which is very fucking frustrating.
This is a stinking part of my work-hiatus trip with my sister to Ireland, that she’s graciously agreed to come on knowing that I’m always 98% a potential mess, every day.
With that spectre, we are somehow STILL really enjoying our trip, but the war zone that makes up the end of my relationship is a constant third character and subject in our day to day life here in Ireland…and she is there for all of it.
As I lay on that bed in Dublin, tears finally drying up but feeling no end in sight to this fucking shitty situation and story, my sister gets up, pulls back the curtain, gazing quietly out the window.
She too has been divorced, and it was also pretty awful. As she looks out over the city she almost whispers:
Gwen: It’s a lonely and ugly business, the end of a marriage. You only know if you know. No one can understand it but you. No one really wants to participate in it with you…because it’s relentless, dirty and undignified. No matter how good your friends and family are, it’s still a really lonely and terrible experience, sister. Cry it out. I’m here…then lets get out of this room.
And I did, and eventually we did.
DECEMBER 2018. BACK IN THE DISTILLERY ON THE BENCH ACROSS FROM THE SHOP THAT MAKES THE GOOD SANDWICHES
As this fairly festive event moves all around me like a stinking fog of seasonal joy, I sit still as death, in the cold, on that fucking bench, mind in another realm, obsessing about being a narcissist for a very long time, till I finally shake myself, and trudge home in the brown slushy snow, past all the Christmas decorations in the world…desperately not wanting this to continue to be the lonely endeavour my sister described back in Ireland.
When I arrive in the warm lobby of my rental apartment building, I stop and message my therapist.
Me: Am I a narcissist? I DO have a lot of interest in myself…but shouldn’t my world be of concern to…myself? Shouldn’t I care? Shouldn’t I care about me?
The three blinking dots appear almost immediately, and like a heroine hit, it triggers a comfort that pleasingly winds its way through my muscles and bloodstream.
She: Everyone has narcissistic tendencies. Narcissists don’t ask if they are narcissists, …they would never even consider it…which is part of what makes them narcissists. You aren’t a narcissist.
After a bit of back and forth about why I’m asking, what I’m feeling, and some suggestions on how to move past this and deal with this continued fear and tear in the fabric of my forward movement…her last suggestion, which is always the surest tool for me, is this:
Write it ALL down, Sharron.
When I get up to my apartment, I strip off all my over clothes, then most of my underclothes as I walk the short distance to my computer, sit down in front of the bay window in my underwear, open my computer and madly type the following in a new document…
NOW HEAR THIS:
The fucking effort to constantly be on alert and vigilant in all my reactions, writings, emotions and conversations, trying to prove to myself (and others, let’s be totally honest, Sharron, to others) that I didn’t ask for all of this or DESERVE IT by being a terrible wife and person, that I’m not a monster, toxic or a narcissist, all the while struggling to stay silent, to not scream to the heavens, to be “classy” and slap on the face of no-I’m-fine-really…mostly for my career so people don’t think I’m having a breakdown and can be trusted to work…is exhausting…and I wish I didn’t have to do it anymore but till my divorce is wrapped up, I really have no other productive choice. NONE. So, suck it up, Matthews.
There.
I said it.
And I did…suck it up.
THAT was December-ish 2018.
This, is now.
April 2022. Harcourt, ON
The rustic but super-cute, haunted cottage that I rented is just outside the south east border of Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada.
Times have changed since that day at the Distillery, that afternoon in Dublin, that night sitting in my rental apartment in my underwear with the floor around me heaping with in my winter layers of clothes…times have changed since April 2018, when I was terrified to the very bone of being alone…and scared of being labeled a monster…as well as afraid of a number of OTHER names AND nameless things all at once.
But as I moved on, trudged on, laughed on, talked on, walked on, cried on, leaned on, raged on and WROTE on, THAT terror slowly disappeared, replaced by a want of adventure, replaced by a curious heart, replaced by a voice of reason, replaced by love, replaced by volume, replaced by silence, replaced by peace, replaced by passion, replaced by a belief-in-self that I’ve steadily, carefully built and continue to fortify every single fucking day…and replaced by opinions and ideas of my own…replaced by a streak of fearlessness.
I am not afraid to be alone.
Don’t get me wrong, there are other fears that I’m working on, but being alone isn’t one of them anymore…and THAT was a fear I’ve had since I was old enough to log what alone meant.
So this haunted cottage visit on the dirt road ALL by myself (with JO) is really something.
In fact, I quite like it…alone.
Cool shit happens when I’m alone.
For instance today, I started a friggen fire (in the fireplace, people) in this old-school cottage ON THE FIRST TRY.
I started this friggen fire with kindling I’d collected this morning on mine and JO’s FIRST walk, kindling that I left to dry in the sun while my dog and I went on a glorious hike to a beautiful waterfall.
I’m teaching Jolene to walk on a leash that’s tethered to my waist, which leaves my hands free to joyously swing as I walk and look at the view…a totally underrated freedom when you have a dog, if you ask me…and not without it’s own learning curve, for both of us…a task I’ve happily taken on…a task she seems to revel in.
I build a friggen fire for us EVERY day in this old-school cottage.
Every morning, after our walk to collect kindling, I stretch my body for forty minutes in front of picture windows that stare out over a thawing lake, then I play fetch with Jolene for another thirty minutes and laugh out loud at her shenanigans…she’s pretty fucking funny.
Then she sits hopefully at my feet in the kitchen while I make my breakfast, and we listen to Maxwell sing about Pretty Wings or Amos Lee sing about…well, anything.
Then after we BOTH eat, I sit down to write…which is literally ONE of my most favourite pastimes…and she curls up in her bed beside me, her head rested on her favourite toy and falls asleep.
What a time.
I fucking love it.
Write it ALL down, Sharron
Yes, my life and times are quite different now, and I’ve NO shortage of gratitude about that fact.…and my writing practice helps me process and see my whole life…much like THIS IS US…past, present (such as it is) and all possible futures.
ALL.
I think and write in an effort to make the rest of my life just fucking better and clearer and happier and more curious…and to occasionally remind myself I’m not a monster, or deserving of shit labels.
AND I have not had the numb feet in years, or the draggie foot, I’ve not wept as a result of my ex-husband in years, I’ve not obsessed about what happened in years, I’ve not doom-scrolled the google meaning of the dreaded word in years (except to copy the meaning to include in this post)…but I occasionally still hear or read (even though I think I’ve made it fairly clear that I keep my own council and don’t really want or need to live in the past or hear anything about the people that were in it) that my name is being uttered very near the word narcissist…still…and it’s usually in response to my writings.
Pfft.
You know what?
I get to tell my story…because it’s mine.
Honestly, it should NOT be a surprise to anyone that I’m telling it, I’ve been telling my story for literally YEARS and YEARS.
Like Taylor Swift, ALL of THE CHICKS and the many, MANY fucked over women before and after them, I get to write it all down…AND share it, IF I SO WISH…and move the fuck on standing outside of it, and looking back AND DOWN at it.
I GET to create art in response to my journey….I GET to take my broken, battered and healed up heart and make something with it…while holding it protectively behind my hands.
Does THAT make me a narcissist?
Was I a narcissist?
No.
No, I was not.
I am not.
Was I perfect?
No.
Of course not.
And even if I was grievously flawed somehow, does that make the ending I was handed or the label that was pinned to my metaphoric lapel after said devastating ending something that I deserve…does it justify the ending? Fuck no, no, it does not.
Read that again.
Enough.
I will do my very best NOT to read more than my own chapters anymore…watch more than my own storyline.
Enough.
AND if THAT makes me a narcissist?
Bring that NARCISSIST shit on hard, BABY.
Today I’m sitting on this old-school cottage couch beside a wonderful man named Hugh.
He drove up to visit me here for Easter weekend and we are just about to go on a hike with Jolene. She seems to love him dearly, in a way that makes me only a bit jealous.
We’ve been quietly seeing each other for while and…it’s nice. It makes me feel good, he….
STOP!!!
That is not at ALL true, people.
THAT would be the THIS IS US wrap up, with me made happy and whole by a relationship…that would make this story better for some people…but no, it’s just me and Jo in the middle of the forest and that is more than fine for me.
My therapist asked me a couple of weeks ago if I’ve given up on love, and I tell her I am remaining cautiously hopeful but focusing on myself.
Narcissist, much?
Too soon?
At night, when the sun has set over the steadily thawing lake in front of this old-school cottage, my friend Ari and I usually catch up on our TV shows VIA a fairly dependable wifi signal.
Right now we are watching UGLY BETTY, a show I missed the first time around…and I really quite like it.
I DO love the TV, yes.
Oh, the project I did with Robert Pine?…it’s going to be airing on ABC Signature.
ABC, y’all.
Yes, the same network that featured all my favourite shows and TV friends growing up, this project in which I work with a man who worked on Love Boat will air on ABC.
Twelve year old Sharron would be gobsmacked and proud, she would not have seen it coming…none of it…but I think she would be proud of the way I’ve handled it all.
Her story continues.
Stay Tuned.
To Be Continued.
Forever now.
All that and a bag of chips.
Started December 2018, Toronto, ON
Continued June 2018, Dublin, Ireland and Toronto, ON.
Continued April 2022, Harcourt, ON.
Finished June 7th, Toronto, ON.
by S.M
As usual, dear people, thanks for reading and following along. It you enjoyed this, pass it on, please, and if you want to fill in the little box below and subscribe, you will always get the post one full day ahead of promotion. During that day? I edit the shit out of the writing. It’s my favourite day, really. Be well, Humans.
I was going through something and my husband told me that’s their perception of me..
But that’s not everyone’s perception of me….that has help me so much
Okay, you are so not a narcissist. You have always been exactly as you present: open, inviting, funny, fiercely talented and smart. Oh…and KIND. I’m grateful to know you. x
Thanks, mama. (Winky Eye)
Having gone through a divorce myself, not sure if I’d call it narcissistic necessarily, I guess it could be misconstrued that way, you were married a fairly long time, in some ways you were couple Sharron. Everyone knew you two as a couple, you were invited to couple dinners and parties and couple vacations. And then one day you’re no longer part of a couple you’re Sharron again, and you have to do Sharron things and sometimes you maybe thinking WTF is a Sharron thing somewhere along the way you forgot what Sharron’s thing was and now you’re centred on finding what once was all those years ago when you were just Sharron, so to answer your question of do these pants make me look narcissistic? I can emphatically say the pants don’t make you look narcissistic, now the socks on the other hand. LOL. And why do I think that’s what you were going or maybe still are going through, well I had to make that particular journey as well, I had to find myself again, and from that first story to this one I can see how far you’ve come in finding Sharron once again.
I think you misheard it. I don’t think they were saying narcissist. I think they were saying Narcissus.
“THE MEANING OF NARCISSUS
Daffodils are some of the first flowers we see in springtime and are a great indicator that winter is over.
Because of this, they are seen to represent rebirth and new beginnings.” (from interflora.co.uk)
Yup. That sounds more likely.
Well, how lovely is this?
“when she told ME that SHE was informed, on these very streets no less, that the one reasons my marriage ended was that I was a NARCISSIST”
I can only surmise the source of this egregious mischaracterization…
Has he fucking met himself?! Geezus… Pot…Kettle… you’re black.
What the fuck ever… moving on to bigger, better, greener pastures.
Just LOOK at the life you have created since you became untethered to that albatross!
I look at the life that I created since I became untethered all those years ago and all the amazing people and experiences that would never have crossed my path, and it takes my breath away that I may have missed out on that.
Do not dim your light my friend. Those that think it “narcissistic” are themselves narcissists who can’t handle someone else living loudly in their truth. Fuck em.
Now back to the TV addiction.
I wonder if it’s a Virgo trait?! LOL! I literally have a spreadsheet that I fill in each season with all the shows I watch and all the “new” shows I want to test out (with all of the premieres and finales in my calendar)
I do this so I know which to watch live and which to record on my PVR… I am hopeless I know.
When Grey’s aired their 400th episode last month I celebrated and then quietly judged myself… as I have watched all 400 episodes. (some several times… oh Denny…)
I can say the same about ER (15 seasons), West Wing (7 seasons) and pretty much every other mega TV series drama and a few comedies. I LOVE episodic tv.
I love that I I watched them all weekly… playing the long game, rather than binge watched them on a weekend like the kids do now.
Ok… enough from me. (sorry about the blog post! LOL)
Enjoy the final episodes of This is Us. OH how it peeled me open… What a treasure this series was.
GREY’S FOR LIFE!!!!! FOR LIFEEEEEEEEE!!!!!
When McDreamy died I had to sleep for two days. Xoxoxox
I’ve been trying to come up with something clever here, but you’ve said what you needed to and I really have nothing to add that’s as smart as what you’ve written here. I do identify with the Television thing, though, particularly about the final episode of Six Feet Under which is one of the best things to have ever been on TV , and I do mean ever.
I’m a bit horrified that so called friends would say this. Using this word to describe a person to their face is more likely to be done deliberately to be cruel… ugh. Just…horrible!
I love your story telling of things that make some people a bit uncomfortable. Go you!