Has the Black Community Become A Breeding Ground for Narcissism?
What if our community’s state is just as much about our skin as it is our psyche?
I accidentally dated a narcissist once — a malignant narcissist at that, a top-tier terror. If you’ve never dated a narcissist, I pray for your sake that it stays that way. It is, in fact, as debilitating as they say. These days, we’re all discussing narcissism, but through a limited lens. Social media has normalized the impact of narcissistic abuse while failing to focus adequately on where the disorder begins. I didn’t see my narcissist coming because I was looking in the wrong direction, on guard for a more sinister stranger than the charmer that chose me. It is the narcissist’s grandiosity that everyone warns you to watch for, but narcissism, at its core, is a deficit of self-esteem. What looks like confidence is really a ripped self-image, an obsession with people’s opinions and how they’re publicly perceived.
Now, narcissism is different from overconfidence and certainly not the same as egocentrism. The egocentric individual is like a child playing checkers, so glued to their side of the board that they cannot see things from their opponents’ perspective. On the other hand, a narcissist sees both sides of the board; they just don’t care about your half. For the narcissist, their story begins in childhood, where an…
