Little Narcissists Everywhere
If a misogynist-narcissist builds a platform inspired by his petty misogyny, are we surprised when others key into that "advantage" and weaponize said platform to their own depraved ends?
This was written after the first “debate” which was a shitshow but also master class in narcissistic abuse. This morning, I woke up to a senator in Utah tweeting he doesn’t believe in “rank democracy”, essentially coming out on behalf of the Republican Fascist Party as a fascist! I have really had it with facists, y’all including all the ones I’ve had to navigate in my life. I thought long and hard about not publishing this as I’ve held on to these abuses against me for years now—out of fear of reprisal and possible violence—but I can’t live with that cowardice any longer.
Last night, I had a front-row seat to my mother abusing me for an hour and a half. Last night, I had a front-row seat to my father-in-law harassing me for an hour and a half. Last night, I had a front-row seat to all the White people who have ever berated or bullied me for an hour and a half. Last night, my country reminded me we have never been taught to punish the bully because we’ve been taught, instead, to admire the bully.
But tell me, did you see anything worth admiring on that stage?
Chris Wallace is a trained journalist (supposedly) who said he couldn’t imagine how quickly and how badly that debate was going to go off the rails. This meant there was some assumption that firstly, the man would be able to speak in coherent sentences, and secondly, that the behavior we’ve all been exposed to for the last three years was somehow an anomaly and what we would be privy to would be something far more civil, something decidedly human.
Historically, however, there is literally no reason to assume he would be civil (or capable, frankly) when the president has proven himself to be both a pathological bully and a pathological liar.
The most potent piece of advice I’ve ever come across was Dr. Maya Angelou saying when someone shows you who they are the first time, believe them.
America has a serious problem with believing people the first time.
I used to be one of these Americans, actually. I am actively working towards trusting my gut feelings and reading the fucking room when I walk into it.
—
A few years ago, I deleted my Facebook account.
I’d had the damn thing for over a decade which, actually, terrified me. I logged on one day and Facebook reminded me I’d been friends with a photo editor for a decade —we’d gone to college together. At some point in time, I was his photo editor. At that point in time, he’d become mine. Before I could marvel at that, I felt a sense of dread creep into my GI tract. I had been on Facebook for years, logging into a website to pour my data into, thinking I was interacting with my friends, and “hanging out” on the Internet.
By the time I was reminded of that friendship anniversary, my Facebook profile had gone through a rebirth, so to speak. I had only lost my entire friends group a few years prior, during the beginning of the Movement when all of the White people I knew openly began making me aware of how much they despised me, through combative responses when I posted about my frustration of finally seeing America for who she actually was.
I hadn’t seen her one of the first times I was meant to recognize her: on Delray Beach in Florida, waiting for some fries and an ice cream during a day spent with my dad. All of a sudden he was terse and loud — not typical behavior from that gentle Cancer man. He was angry, I thought then as a sixteen-year-old. Only now do I realize he felt demeaned, having been spoken to like a child by a racist white woman who felt she shouldn’t be working a fast-food counter.
Governor Bush had introduced the Stand Your Ground law just a few years prior. My dad apologized for getting upset, telling me in the next breath, “these white people are crazy, especially after that stand your ground bullshit,” A prophet? No, just a Black man who believed America when she showed her ass the first time.
Just one year later, Trayvon Martin would be murdered by a vigilante, thanks to that law, and Florida would remember its former title as a lynching capital of the South.
America was telling me who she was and I was actively refusing to listen until I was forced to.
While all those White people were on Facebook, emboldened to talk big shit behind a screen, I was watching my partner be terrorized on a daily basis by his narcissist father. We’d been tricked into moving into a home in North Carolina with a parent who had ulterior motives. We didn’t need to move to North Carolina but my partner felt such deep guilt for not having the monetary ability to see his chronically ill father more often.
We hadn’t thought too deeply about the hesitation to visit nor lack of visits to us in the Midwest. We weren’t going to burden a man navigating debilitating MS with taking long and possibly fatiguing trips to Chicago, but not one visit in three years registered as odd to me; only I was in no place to make judgments, seeing as though my broke ass parents were not going to have the ability to come and see us, either.
With the option in front of us to spend time with family, all I could offer was I’d lived with my family before — having recently ended a stint of sleeping on the floor of my aunt’s studio apartment — and as an adult, I did not recommend or feel comfortable with the idea of living with other adults.
My aunt thought I was her child and treated me as such. She was also incredibly traumatized and volleyed her fears, insecurities, and pain at me on a regular basis. We were connected by blood and by caste, however, which meant she was genuinely concerned in my wellbeing though she had no healthy way of showing that.
I was, at the time, a mealy-mouthed, jelly-spined liberal who thought the best way to approach moving in with my potential in-laws was to ignore what I knew deep in my gut: my presence in their space could mean trouble, seeing as though historically, White people have shown little regard for the wellbeing of people like me.
I looked at the Anti Defamation League hate crime map and cross-referenced it with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate map. Eden, North Carolina was surrounded with dots signifying groups comprising of the klan and other assorted White supremacist groups.
I didn’t tell my partner or my family. I just kept that detail in the back of my mind.
We we’re only going to be there for two months, what could really happen in two months?
—
Admittedly, last night was the first time I listened to the president speak for more than thirty seconds as I am not in the business of willfully consuming the words of fascists and narcissists. I’m protective of the information that pierces my psyche.
In listening to the man speak for an hour and thirty minutes straight, I became irate.
I was appalled.
A person who speaks the way I imagine a can of alphabet soup would sound like is the leader of ‘the free world’ and an entire embarrassment to our nation. I remembered, quickly, supremacy is not the realm of rational beings, and rational beings, by and large, are also critical beings. Furthermore, people who are susceptible to authoritarian whims are typically authoritarians themselves and lack the cognitive capacity to think rationally or critically.
An authoritarian is a person who believes, under delusion, that they should have absolute power in absolutely every situation, over every single person they encounter.
Narcissists, who suffer delusions of grandeur, are excellent candidates for fascism; be it followers of fascist or becoming fascists, as they are familiar with and susceptible to employing emotional terror and physical violence —or the threat of potential violence, which can be seriously psychologically disorienting as we are all discovering in real-time.
My mother was a adept at both emotional terror and physical violence, but her most formidable power lied in how she could weave an alternate reality that I was forced to inhabit alongside her, by constantly critizing me, lying to me and lying about me to others, and using her position as a parent to weld absolute power over me as her child.
In the presence of this sort of narcissist, you are not allowed to have your own thoughts, or opinions. They don’t care for you having people around you to remind you of your autonomy as an individual and they will do whatever necessary to keep you isolated from anyone who doesn’t think and act the way narcissists do, lest they lose their grip on your mind. The only way is the right way and the right way is whatever the narcissist says it is. The narcissist sees you as a direct reflection of himself, therefore your misdeeds, your incompetencies, and your deficiencies are all liabilities for the narcissist and they must be corrected because a narcissist believes she has no flaws, is never incompetent or deficient.
That’s the delusion at work.
What we collectively experienced last night was how a narcissist lashes out when you do not want to be forced to inhabit their alternate reality any longer. The gloves come off so quickly, you’d forgotten the glove were even there, to begin with.
By our second month in North Carolina, my father in law could no longer hide his hideousness from us and I was beginning to recognize the thread that connected him, my mother, me, and this country together: the pursuit of absolute power, to totally control others.
He complained about his new partner’s concerning drinking, yet he never stopped purchase wine for her, allowing him to have reason to complain about her drinking, and in much the same way, he complained of his stepdaughter being lazy, yet he was as a parent to her, acquiescent to the point of being purposely ineffective. His son, who walked away from his hard earned autonomy to make up for lost time with his parent, was berated, belittled and bullied for any reason but specifically when it came to anything having to do with adulthood — finding a job, paying certain bills, having a pet.
These are all methods of control, and this control is a pillar of emotional abuse.
My partner recalled to me past rages his father would go into about their home not being clean to his father’s standard and he recalled the hurtful things said about his body as means of deflating his self-esteem — these acts of violence were not deployed against his stepsister and it really hurt him to see clearly the abuse he’d be subjected to, for no reason.
I was just beginning to articulate my own experience with family violence in my journal, but the best I could do in that time was feel the rage of a fourteen-year-old me, saddled as I was with the responsibility of being my mother’s punching bag and also the glue that held my wounded family together.
What I was witnessing was both similar to and yet different from my own experience of living with a personal dictator.
You see, this new dictator’s method of control for me would be attacking my personhood, but in a way only I as a Black person could pick up. The attacks would never register to anyone else as attacks but the general curiosities that come with learning about someone new we’re skewed towards my race, my gender, and my caste status: there were too many questions about my income and how I made a living as if to suggest it were my fault we had to move from Chicago and as the worth of my person was dictated on how well I played the game of capitalism, which I was already disadvantaged by due to my caste status as untouchable.
There was never any seeking to find common ground even though I shared in common a love of writing and reading with my father in law. There was no curiosity around my work as a photographer and almost zero curiosity around my family as if I had spawned myself into the world, rudderless and without a point of origin. There was a sense of discomfort with me coming off as ‘too’ smart in front of his new wife and daughter.
There was a sense of discomfort around the fact that the daily machinations of this dictator did not, actually rankle or bother me too much. I had survived a dictator before I ended up living in the upstairs guest room of this one.
I knew my father in law had a tendency to fish personal information out of people, only to later use those disclosures against you. My mom spent two decades teaching me how this worked, by simply doing the same thing to me so I knew if I provided signs of being frustrated with, or angered by him, it would please him so I did the very opposite: I basically ignored him.
After all, I was a witness to this abuse, not the intended target —to make me, his son’s Black partner, the target of abuse was to betray his latent racism, which would betray the portrait he painted of himself as long-suffering and under-appreciated, and any betrayal of the portrait would provide his family reason to question his absolute power over them.
No one needed to tell me this was a household in which the husband was the ‘head’ of the family. It was evident in the lack of autonomy everyone had around this supposed head.
My father in law was cordial in the way racist White men are cordial with anyone they deem less than and he was cordial in the way narcissists are cordial to people who they think have outsmarted and duped: he pretended most days I wasn’t really there; I was, in his head, a momentary problem that would be dealt with, eventually.
I was contented to respond in kind, by minding my business but Mike Brown was murdered and the elephant in the room was now on the television and in the news all the time.
He had accompanied us to the original Woolworth Counter museum in Greensboro and, after a vicious hate crime that occurred just after our arrival in North Carolina, he quantified the lives of Muslims by telling us he thought them to be ‘hard-working’, whatever that meant. We were told of two Black friends we never saw in the eleven months we lived with him. But I was living in his house, thus there was just no way he’d be clocked for a racist.
He made certain of such by deploying my mother in law to tell me she was concerned, suddenly, that I might “start making things about race” in the wake of a series of public executions of Black people. No one asked me if I were okay, or how I was feeling or if I was scared, even. No one asked me if my father and brother, both vulnerable Black men, were okay or safe or scared. No one cared how the deaths of Black people by the State might be actually affecting me.
Instead, the focus was shifted and centered towards the unverified fears of my White family that I might begin to make things about race, whatever the fuck that even means. It was then I recognized that the man was afraid of what I might cost him if I did indeed decide to make space to talk about my experience as a Black person. Within a few weeks, he went into a series of rages that included him berating my partner in front of me, trying to cling to power that I was not at all interested in taking from him, but suddenly, he needed to make sure I knew what his anger looked like.
Dictators and narcissists are deeply traumatized people who believe a “show of power” is subjecting others to the anger and rage they have carried for so long without theraputic intervention.
He couldn’t articulate coherent thought, so he demeaned and launched insults, he bulldozed over his wife when she asked him to calm down and he attempted to bait his son into a physical altercation. That is when I stopped minding my own business and I stepped in to calmly tell my partner not to take the bait. My father in law mimicked me the way a child mimics an adult, in jest and annoyance, but in fear of reprisal, too.
After the rage subsided, there was a knock on our door and the offering of a timid nonapology. To this day I cannot pinpoint what exactly set the rage off, but it doesn’t have to be much outside of a rogue thought that crosses the mind of a narcissist.
Everything was back in its right place: the narcissist had reified his absolute power over the entire household. Or so he thought. He had never been challenged, nor punished for welding his power inappropriately.
To ensure our safety, we put a plan in place to leave North Carolina, for good.
—
Many, many years before I met my partner, I received what felt like a clandestine message on Facebook. A really cute boy was wondering if I was currently on campus and if so, would I like to hang out. After having spent some time on my Facebook profile, he decided there was something about me he liked. I had just turned twenty, was currently living and studying abroad in Tokyo, and had only been in one relationship with a man — I’d dated girls pretty exclusively in high school, so I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into as it regarded to men.
I just knew I was ready to get into whatever it was they were offering me.
That was a grave mistake on my part.
I hadn’t noticed in the few months that I had departed my home campus in Chicago, that said really cute boy had been studying my profile, leaving comments on old posts, sometimes years deep. By the time I ended up in said boy’s bed, something wasn’t feeling quite right. He was coming on hard as though we’d been in a relationship for months when all I really wanted was a fun bed partner.
He said, upon my departure one morning after a sleepover, that it was going to ‘hurt’ when I left him. We’d only been sleeping together for a few weeks, what was he going on about? I thought. My gut told me not to come back after that slip, but somehow I kept finding myself in his bed, falling deeper into the gunk of his manipulation and grooming.
Within a few weeks, suddenly, I was feeling as though I should match his energy.
I had not yet sought out therapy, so I didn’t realize at the time I was a survivor of a narcissist, or of grooming and manipulation, or of long term abuse and trauma. This made me a perfect target and this narcissist could smell on me that I was a person who had been made to be easily manipulated and suggestible.
Before I knew it, I was strung out.
His method of control for me was denying me his time: he didn’t respond to phone calls or texts, which left me frantic and I would drop everything the moment a long-awaited text or phone call came. I would get limited amounts of time with him — one night after months of silence, a few hours in the darkroom together, but when it suited him, and then silence again for weeks or months on end.
I felt stupid, and I was angry about feeling stupid over a boy.
All I’d wanted out of the interaction was casual sex, and somehow I caught feelings! I told myself I had no self-control and that I was being treated so poorly because I loved too hard but I didn’t even want love from this person so why did I feel like that’s what I wanted? I was so out of sorts, another narcissist was able to dig her claws into me, using much the same methods — denying me her time, then flooding me with too much of it.
I was showered with gifts, told I was too good to be treated so poorly by some Usher-resembling wannabe deejay. I became the trusted best friend, which meant my behavior was held to the standard of everyone who had ever left her behind because of her petty manipulations in order to maintain power over them — I was forced to prove my loyalty, which often meant taking her side and not criticizing her, even when she was clearly in the wrong. And I had to stick around, or I’d be just as bad as everyone else who left her.
I had not yet become estranged from my personal dictator, who was constantly interrogating me about both narcissists.
She wondered if I would get married to the boy? She wondered when she would meet ‘my best friend’, since it seemed my mother saw herself in this woman. I should have seen that as a warning but I was living in my mother’s alternate reality still and in her alternate reality, this boy was my ticket out of being queer and into being the sort of child my mom could be proud of.
I finally felt brave enough and frankly, tired enough to walk away from this dictator, but only after an interaction in which I began to see how this boy was manipulating me.
He asked me to sit for a portrait, which I knew meant getting his time after a few months of not getting it. When I arrived at his apartment, not only did he not seem particularly thrilled to see me, the energy in his space felt hostile. When he raised his voice at me in an attempt to exert control over me, I snapped out of the alternate reality he’d been weaving for me and told him to never raise his voice at me, ever again. He shrugged as I gathered my things and walked out of his apartment.
My personal dictator had taught me that raised voices and yelling were signs of impending violence.
I was determined, in that moment, to not let it escalate to violence.
I recognize in retrospect, I wouldn’t have paid that joker the time of day had I met him in person, but by the time the spell had been cast via his instant and direct messages, it was too late. How could I have forgotten that the platform had been masterminded by a mealy-mouthed misogynist for the purpose of preying on and bullying women who wouldn’t pay his narcissist ass the time of day?
A tool created for the purpose of perpetuating misogyny can only perpetuate more misogyny.
—
When my father-in-law created a fake profile posing as a Black woman for the purpose of harassing me online, I was again in Tokyo, this time on a work trip with some wack male chefs who were also misogynists. Friends who offered public support on Facebook began texting me screenshots of rage-induced messages they were sent via fake profiles (also made by my FIL) about sexual acts involving my anatomy, I was volleying the similarily violent comments of two supposedly grown men as one of two femmes on the trip.
I was in an echo chamber of misogynistic verbal violence, expected to go along with the mansplaining and the shitty racist jokes. I told the compliant, White femme how absurd it felt to be on what amounted to a glorified boy’s trip with two adults who simply refused to act like adults because it was annoying for the women and femmes around them.
They purposefully welded their patriarchal power over us because they could get away with it and they knew they could.
My father in law, keying in on at-the-time the recent uptick of ‘hackings’ in which folks’ Facebook accounts would “randomly” send horrific racist and misogynistic direct messages to people, welded this precedent in misbehavior to get into some typical narcissist trouble. There were some serious giveaways that he was “Megan Barrett” from the jump, however: the initial message he sent was not only written exactly the way I heard him speak for eleven months, the abuse focused specifically on intersection of my race and gender, in a way he would not have been able to get away with had he attempted to abuse me in this manner in front of his family.
Facebook allowed him a veneer of anonymity and the recent coordinated attacks against Black women on the internet by way of Twitter and other platforms allowed him a societal exit chute.
In the eleven months we lived with his man, he spent the majority of his time at night on Facebook. I believe now he may have been interacting with bad actors in Facebook groups to radicalize him, but I also believe that his new, racist family members were helping that radicalization along. All of the White men on his wife’s side of the family were not only misogynists, they were open racists. They were uncomfortable exchanging hugs or handshakes with me, they recoiled at the suggestion of my touch.
They did not interact with me in conversation.
They often treated me as an intruder and I did not observe them treating any of the White women in their family with real respect. In the years since our departure from North Carolina, my partner has recalled moments throughout his childhood and adolescence in which he heard his father making racist and sexist jokes, and I personally witnessed him lobbing sexist jokes against his wife with regularity when we lived with them.
After consulting with my partner, I made the direct message sent by the faux account public to my Facebook feed and a frenzy began. Many people—specifically women of color— had been dealing with similar abuse and easily clocked the message as coming from: 1) a man attempting to sound like a woman, 2) a boomer-aged person trying to pretend to sound young, 3) a White person attempting a faux Blaccent or Southern accent.
My partner and I were already under the suspicion that the message was coming from my father in law so we figured my posting a screenshot of the direct message publicly would fish the culprit out. If it was an industry colleague, they’d employ others to continue with the abuse. If it was a bot or troll, still they’d employ others to continue with the abuse. Doxxing might have occurred: conversations I’d had via direct message or emails might have been leaked.
Oddly enough, no other social media of mine had been compromised. Just my Facebook, the only form of social media my father in law had access to me through.
What everyone on my feed clocked, which gave me pause and immediately made clear to me who the message was actually coming from, was how personal the message was: calling out my partner by name, attacking my capability to make a living, the suggestion that my male partner was making more money than me and as such I was ‘using’ him because of this. I was called skinny and ugly and bipolar — he enjoyed calling women especially who wouldn’t put up with his shit bipolar as insult.
All hallmarks of misogyny but specifically of misogynoir, the idea that a Black woman would “seduce” a White man for the purpose of draining him of his money. The playbook is old, y’all and it’s at least Jim Crow old.
My father in law must have forgotten that he lobbied this exact series of “accusations” against me in person, during the rage that pushed us to leave North Carolina.
When my partner bravely confronted his father a few days later, asking for the truth, he wasn’t offered sympathy or concern, at any point. At no point, was I ever spoken to directly by my father in law about the incident. No one on that side of the family offered any concern despite one of their family members having been attacked online. It didn’t quite matter to them what harm I had suffered by the hands of their family member.
My partner was told by his father that his account had been hacked and that’s how the message ended up getting to me.
You see, when your account gets hacked, alternate accounts are not created by the hackers for the purpose of disseminating abusive messages. Hackers just use the account they’ve already broken into to spam your friends list with typically similar or the same message. He had admitted to the abuse without even recognizing it and that accidental disclosure severed his relationship with his son, forever.
Dictators are known to use lying by omission as a tactic to avoid responsibility or consequence for their actions. Omission lies can allow for the shifting of blame and shifting the target away from the narcissist.
—
By December 2017, I deleted my ten-year-old Facebook account.
I knew something that Chris Wallace didn’t know: when you are being harassed by a dictator, by a narcissist, by a misogynist, you have to understand they feed off of the power you relinquish to them by allowing them to lie without impunity, by allowing them to harm without consequence, by listening to them when they tell you the real enemy isn’t them, (despite the real harm and pain they’ve caused you), it’s actually someone else.
When you hold them accountable and tell them you will not, under any circumstance, participate in the charade they’ve created for the purpose of welding absolute power, you render them powerless. You make them wither by divesting your energy and attention away from them because it’s all they have fueling the delusion they inhabit.
By divesting your energy away from these bad actors at home, at work, and in the world, you make narcissists, wannabe dictators, and violent misogynists and supremacists unimportant.
Last night I had a front-row seat to my mother abusing me for an hour and a half. Last night I had a front-row seat to my father-in-law harassing me for an hour and a half. Last night I had a front-row seat to all the White people who have ever berated or bullied me for an hour and a half.
Last night my country reminded me my power lies in divesting my time, my attention, my resources, and my loyalty away from bullies, narcissists, misogynists, and other assorted villains of supremacy.
Last night I had a front-row seat to how I survived every single dictator I’ve ever had the misfortune of meeting and I remembered to admire in myself the capacity to vanquish the evils my country has not yet figured out how to combat.
—
This was an incredibly hard but necessary letter to write.
I’d like to thank the readers who joined me for discussion back in September— your disclosures around your families were brave and inspired me to be brave, too. I’d also like to thank my partner who didn’t even blink when I told him I was writing this. He told me he was proud of me and that I was brave. He’s been telling me this for about a decade, now, and I am eternally grateful for his bravery as it serves as an example for me. It’s hard to confront the moments of deep pain that are a result of being targeted because of my race, my caste status, and my gender. These assaults are relentless and almost always begin in the home, first. I hope that as we reckon with and vanquish our personal dictators, we find the power necessary to vanquish the dictator running the country now.
PS. If you have the ear of someone at Facebook, please send them a copy of this newsletter. Yuckerberg deserves to have his inbox filled with every instance of violence his platform has perpetrated against people. I hope he sleeps poorly and has irritable bowels for the rest of his miserable life. Fuck Facebook!
Thank you for being brave and vulnerable and sharing your experiences. I admire that about you very much, always. Love you!