An Up-Close Look on Narcissism in a Relationship

Have you ever been inside a traditional funhouse (House of Mirrors) at a carnival or amusement park?  The basic concept behind a house of mirrors is a maze-like puzzle. In addition to the maze, participants are also given mirrors as obstacles, glass panes to parts of the maze they cannot yet get to.  Sometimes the mirrors may be distorted because of different curves—convex or concave— in the glass to give the participants unusual and confusing reflections of themselves, some humorous and others frightening. 

This whole idea of a funhouse of mirrors is much like being in a relationship with a narcissist.  Being in a relationship with one will feel like a game.  They run the “funhouse” while you are the confused, disillusioned participant.  They gain entertainment in morphing your self-image, watching while you question your perception of reality, ultimately doubting one of your greatest gifts from God—your intuition.       

Upon entering a relationship with a narcissist, you will be in the idealization stage.  Everything with them will feel fun and adventurous.  They will be highly knowledgeable about the latest hot topics and will unshakably vocalize their opinions.  You will respect their confidence on such things.  They will seem to have a handle on their likes and dislikes, hobbies, and interests.  The conversation with them will flow freely and easily.  You amazingly will have everything in common—from the rudimental, fundamental, a shared deep-seated belief system.  You will think you have found your soulmate as NO ONE else you’ve ever met has quite “gotten you” like this person does.  It will feel like a divine set up from heaven.  

You will have entered what is called the “love-bomb” stage.  This is an important stage for the narcissist to establish a hold on you, to hook you into them.  Like a quick-start button, a foundation to the relationship will be established.  You will hear from this person often throughout the day by email and text; they will plan memorable dates, spending as much time with you as possible.  They will fill up so much of your time and mind that you will not know how you lived without them nor can you imagine them not being there.  Within a matter of weeks, they will want to introduce you to their closest family members—their parents and siblings— as they are convinced you are “the one.”  Within that same time frame, they will say I love you well before normal people could form such a connection.    

You will become addicted to this person.  Every text, I love you, and interaction will feed like a high. As you can imagine, this stage is short-lived as it inevitably results into a freefall as keeping this up for anyone is exhausting.  You will know when the narcissist has become exhausted because the memorable, planned dates will stop for no reason; they will start to ease out of the routine they have created, and little by little, you will feel starved for the same love and affection they once gave you.  

Photo by Daria Sizova

Don’t look back; keep moving forward!

23 October 2021

It’s 4:00 A.M. on a Saturday morning.  Saturday mornings are usually my favorite time of the week.  Not having the responsibility of a family, I can wake up when I want, drink my coffee in peace and quiet, and write until my heart’s content.  But this is not that kind of morning.  

I woke up thinking of my students: strategies on how to prepare them for the ACT, procedures on handling “do nothing” behavior, and the list goes on and on.  What concerns me about them isn’t just where they are in their academics but the responsibility of helping them grow up and live a passionate life.    

When I taught middle school students, even in the past few years, I did it with passion.  A special education teacher who is now retired even said, “You have so much passion when you teach kids.  You are doing what you are meant to do.”  This wasn’t someone who complimented anyone very often.  I knew she wasn’t flattering me but meant the remark.  Her words carried weight, and I hid them in my heart.       

This year, my passion to teach has gone from a fiery bonfire and dwindled to embers.  Most days I don’t teach with passion.  I teach tiredly.  The students can see it, and they are responding to that in their academic performance and behavior.  My barely ember of a flame is not passing onto their empty torches; they definitely need someone who can.   

As Halloween approached, I decided to include a short unit on Edgar Allan Poe.  With him being an American writer, it would meet state curriculum standards.  It felt like “home,” teaching what I would have taught around this time last year and the many years before that.  I realized that the literature I had taught for so long had become a part of me, and I was terribly homesick– homesick for my old school, old friends, literature I taught effortlessly, and missed even the classroom where I had some of my best memories with students.      

Maybe my embered passion is a result of the job change. Making a job change has been harder than I anticipated.  With “Covid” school, last year came with its challenges.  This year seems a lot harder by degrees.  I feel like I am in a whirlwind of many responsibilities and that the day doesn’t give me enough time.  Maybe it’s the underlying stress of a world gone to shit with the stress of inflation and finances– so many unknowns with the current state of our country.  Or maybe it’s the aftermath of recently having Covid.  Maybe it is all of the above.  My doctor did tell me on a return visit that Covid has caused some to have insomnia and the kind of tiredness that even with much sleep, it will not absolve the issue.  

This year, “I’m so tired” has been the most spoken out loud words I’ve said all year and mostly expressed to my students because I see them more than anyone else.  I have decided that won’t be my go-to phrase even if I feel it.  Words carry so much weight, affecting ourselves and others. 

My greatest fear: I don’t want to undo what I have done– the work that has already been laid; whatever my influence was for my students during their 8th grade year, I want to build on that in their junior year. 

I could cry… okay, okay…let me rephrase… I could continue to cry, but this will not accomplish anything except for a moment’s outlet of my emotions with no real effective plan for change and forward motion in a productive way.  

I could look back on my last year and how great it was even though nothing about it was normal at first.  I could look back, wanting what I had last year, but what was there is gone.  It is so hard to trust the unknown.  

Outside of my job, my focus has been on self-care so that I can unwind and recharge anew each day and week.  

I ask myself this question a lot these days: What do I need to do for me today?   

Put up part of my Christmas tree (although I already have fall decor around the house) before Halloween?  If it cheers me up, yes

Take a day trip to a town of nature and mountains where nobody knows me, and I don’t know them? If it brings me peace, yes

Cancel or make NO plans over the weekend? If it brings me much needed rest in mind and body, yes

Anything to declutter and hear the tune God is playing in my life right now.  

I am not utterly discouraged.  I feel like these trials are only a short-stop or slow-go to my next destination.  I refuse to sit around and dwell on where I feel I fall short at this time in my career (in planning around a new curriculum and course of study, creating new assignments, and my less than best energy level) even though some might set up camp and do that among themselves. I’ve got somewhere to go.  I am in between where I was and where I am headed.  And it won’t look like what I have ever imagined at any time in my life.  With God, it has always been very different than I’d have imagined.  He is a God of wonders and surprises.  Because that is His nature and He doesn’t change, I welcome what is next: Bring it on, God! Bring my surprises. I will wait for them, cherish them when they come, and breathe easy because tomorrow will bring new challenges and blessings (A mixed bag always!) together, and I choose to embrace all of it! It’s the best way, and it is God’s intended abundant life for me.  Life– EVERYTHING that comes with it–  is a gift to be treasured.  For I cannot know good without the bad; I cannot know love without feeling unloved; I cannot fully embrace blessings if I have not known waiting.  I can walk this crazy life with the assurance of One who is unchanging: He has never been against me, and right now His strength sustains me even when mine fails me.  

Photo by me (November 2021): I had some of my students from last year come and visit me for lunch. It truly lifted my spirit. I guess the freshman boys were looking for a place or person of familiarity. I will cherish this forever. Some of the girls do visit sometimes, but those groups are a lot smaller than this! (lol) This is the memory I am keeping before me as I walk out this school year and is a reminder of God’s surprises for me.

I Dreamed I Was in a Bookstore with You

I strolled among books in a place we once shared some moments, and my spirit felt yours among volumes of poetry.  Can the energy of you– us– be contained to a place? 

I wonder. 

And I imagine you are here and without hesitation and in one fluid movement, your forward steps and raised arm reach for me and you place your fingertips on the back of my neck as you gently comb them upward through my hair and you pause looking me in the eyes like you might kiss me but you don’t.  Your hand cups the base of my head like one might a small child and we dance to the tune of “Dance Around the Room with Me” like we had done many times before but this song we’ve never heard before and the music turns up at the chorus like it’s our song, forgetting we are in a bookstore. Forgetting we ever parted. Forgetting time.

As we stop dancing, you take one small step back so that we stand face to face with little distance between our arms’ embrace. Your eyes lift mine to hold your gaze and I relax my head in your palm and I know everything’s going to be okay…

“Ma’am?  Are you looking for something?” 

I’m startled by the salesman as I’ve perused to the front of the bookstore, not remembering how I got there.  “No,” I answered with a far away stare as I faced the man but looked through him like he was a ghost.  

I hurried through the checkout line and placed my items on the counter.  The same salesman made small talk as he checked me out.  I nodded and smiled out of politeness but didn’t hear a word he said.  

I was sure I’d shed off my grief-stricken heart once I made it outside of the bookstore.  I walked the parking lot to my car where the overcast sky with its grey hues mocked me.  The world became cruel that day when I realized I was trapped between two dimensions.  I was a ghost too, wandering between a dream with and a reality without you.  

Photo by KoolShooters from Pexels

To Only Want You

We were a premonition, 
your fire (my earth),    
a warming lullaby of laughter 
and destroying me, 

to only want you.  To only love you 
in this lonely world of nothing else.  

You were the intensity of extremes—
a paradox I was not accustomed to.        

Memory is a strange thing.  

I feel no anger or regrets.  
If anything, I accept.  I accept that 
you and I were meant to meet, to exist 
and walk this earth at the same time in history, 
to share a common purpose… 
can I just say—

I miss you.  

What do I want?  
I want to feel alive again, even if 
it means to burn.

Art print by Aykut Aydogdu

The Surrender

I thought to abandon you, the memory of you.  To go about a ceremonial purge to free myself of you.  I talk to you as if you are here and plead of you to leave, for you were only for a season, the lifetime of a leaf. 

I cannot live in the fantasies of maybe’s, what if’s, and what could have been’s.  For I was asleep when you were awake; now I am awake, and you are asleep. Maybe.

I try to shut off any form of communication that can get inside.  Yet you speak to me in songs, scenes, lines, photographs.  Maybe we share a similar muse.  I don’t know.  Then I think, even if you write a line from time to time that reminds you of me, I’m only a rented muse.

I hate poetry.  I hate a whole genre of literature because of you.  And the genre hems me in to its purpose to talk about it.  To teach about it.  For every poem reminds me of you.  To introduce it to someone is like a greeting.  Hello, again.  A sadness comes over me because the sting is felt each time.  To approach you again, to think of you.  Even if the poem is about something other than love, somehow, I find a way to relate it back to you—a phrase, a line, a word— a maze I follow to find you.  If the poetry is handwritten, my eyes follow the curves of each letter to find your signature somehow—like how your “h’s” have a v-shaped roof next to its chimney.  It’s your mark on the world where other eyes pull to its shapes. 

I’m not obsessed.  I say this then think of storytellers who try to convince their audience that they haven’t lost their mind; and as the audience, for them to make such a statement, we are sure to think they have.  Well, maybe I have. But at least if we all must lose our mind at some point on this earth, for me, you will be the best reason for doing so.  Losing my mind over you. Love.  The reality of things.  And even when I am 80 or 90 years old— closer to the end than ever—if my mind fails me, I think you’re the only memory that I will keep.  I’ll speak your name in my sleep; I’ll speak to you in my dreams; I’ll speak about you to every stranger that’s passing through; and in my dying breathes, you will be my last exhale. 

Photograph by Marta Syrko

A Lost Star

I only have one wish and

pray you keep this promise:  

Let me not hear you speak my name,

for it coming from your voice would

send me into an interstellar oblivion,

spinning me out of control into years

I cannot recover.   

Photo by Killian Eon from Pexels

In Finding Him, She Found Herself

She was drawn to this place where they once shared space and time long ago.  It was dangerous to reenter as she knew it would open a part of her heart she had covered with the added years since the last time she saw him.  For to open her heart again with him would create a vacuum that sucks breath and life into a void of space where the spiritual transcends all things physical.  She knew it would be easy to open but harder to close—maybe even impossible to close— and that she would do it alone.  That there was no prescription for the gnawing hunger that would be there.  Nothing could nor would feed its appetite, for even if she could have him, she knew a place inside of her would be eternally insatiable; having him would mean wanting more of him. 

The pull ran deeper than anything she’d ever known.  It scared her then; it scared her now. 

Words streamed in her heart, an inner knowing she couldn’t escape: Love is as strong as death, unyielding as the grave. It feeds and takes and takes some more.  Even if one were to drown its flames of passion, it would be futile.  She had heard these words before; now she felt them in her bones and knew they were true.  

She entered.  As she glided among the marked gravestones, the grass folded like waves of hair and padded like a cushion under her feet.  And the trees.  They held a mystery all their own— long years of being and holding the secret conversations and moments of those who have crossed their path.  She stopped to listen. 

Oak trees draped in Spanish moss whispered their memory: While she took in that beautiful scenery, he always kept a few steps between them so he could watch her.  Although she never led on, she could feel when his eyes were on her; and to keep in time with his gaze, she spoke back to him with her petite hourglass frame, intentionally poised in each movement and step.  Then she turned toward his gaze to catch him looking at her.  He didn’t mind being caught.  There he stood with poised frame, fingertips tucked in his front jean pockets, the weight of his body mostly shifted to one leg, and his unshakable stare like she was a wonder he couldn’t fully comprehend. 

The memory enveloped her.  She welcomed with fear the flow of love and adoration she once felt for him.  It became clear to her now after all these years why she ran from something so beautiful and sacred.  It was his tunnel vision of her that scared her.  How could someone feel so much—so much for her?  And her worst fear then: How long would it last?  It would only be a matter of time before he would step out of the trance and realize she was just a girl, a girl with flaws—nothing special.

That’s all it took: One memory resurrected another, their shapes flip-booked in mind’s pages. 

She closely examined the contents—a life in review— with a feverish excitement and with worry.  What if I can’t remember?  What if I can’t remember everything?  She noticed things she didn’t see the first time around.  Where she once focused on certain parts she thought would be most important, she was surprised to find something new and fresh in another frame’s corner. 

Our memories.  They are all here.    

She thought she’d forgotten.  She had taken in more of him—the two of them—than she realized, a discovery with clearer vision.  One can appreciate the cursed gift of memories mapped side by side as a whole picture rather than how they unfolded, each destined moment reached one at a time. 

Each memory swaddled her into a cocoon of rest and warmed her like the first of morning’s sun, and yet unexpectedly, her relief was quickly followed by a terrifying realization she couldn’t deny: Her heart had deceived her for almost a decade.  Unconsciously or secretly like a separate entity unto herself, her heart had rehearsed their memories over the passing years, and ever since, she had been searching for him in everybody she’d ever met.

———————————————————————————————————————————–

I have been working on and off on this piece for months.  It is a difficult piece with its verb shifts and moods as the character struggles between her past and present.  It is still in draft stage and unfinished.  As a writer, I have come to realize that nothing written is truly in its final stage; it’s rather abandoned.  For now, I put this piece aside.  I hope you enjoy and can relate to that one person you’ve met that has changed your life forever—that one person who has changed how you view love and how you view yourself when in the midst of it.  And when those realizations and revelations come, I pray you have the courage to embrace what once was so that you are readily able to recognize and accept it the next time it comes—loving better and stronger with all intensity.      

The Eternal Kiss

Today I feel you near, more than the days before,  

more than the days where I could touch you. 

Even though we walk different paths, in directions away

from the other, everything in my soul runs back to you—

only you.

We were made from the same fabric of sinews and tendons,

forever patterned and weaved in each other.

Our fleshly eyes got in the way, and yet,

all we had to do was close our eyes to know.

Everything in me fights to and from you, and at times

I feel so strongly that you do too, with me.

Sometimes I even hear your faint whisper,

“Let me go,”

and my answer is simply the same every time,

“I can’t.”       

Painting image of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt (1908-1909)

Blurring the Lines of Mental Health

It has definitely been a different year teaching during a “pandemic.”  Our students were so glad to be back in the classroom this fall.  Discipline problems were at an all-time low.  However, students’ personal challenges seemed to surface more this year. 

Although I cannot share specifics on what surfaces in my classroom among my students, I’m a teacher who has a front row seat to their mental health issues.  I am extremely sensitive to these issues because I am a daughter of a mother who has a mental illness.  As a young child, I quickly learned of the stigma that came with her illness.  After some discussions and occurrences with my students this year, the stigma sadly still remains just as strongly as it did during my adolescent years. 

The stigma of mental health issues is harmful because it silences us.  Someone who struggles with mental issues rarely speaks out about them for fear of being ostracized, treated differently, or such information being used against them.  This sharing of information places one under a microscope where certain behaviors done by them might be seen as odd or “crazy,” yet for anyone else doing the very same thing would be seen as quite normal. 

Many families (including mine) that have been affected by mental illness in one way or another have learned through their familial generations that it’s the “family secret” everyone knows yet no one talks about it. We set ourselves apart from that “one” in the family, creating an “us” and “them” mentality when we all battle mental issues.    

An illness of the mind also can be keeping a record of wrongs, overthinking, forming habits, gossiping, gaslighting, inciting factions, needing control, etc. Because of our sin nature, we are all susceptible to these mental traps.  As unhealthy mental patterns are nurtured rather than squashed, they can grow to be quite powerful, holding dominion and mastery over us.  The effects of such mental entrapments are no less destructive to the quality of our life than individuals who have a “medical diagnosis”. 

Like mental illness, addictions can be viewed quite the same.  Although it is easier to explain away the ill behaviors of some because they are addicted to drugs or alcohol, if not for the grace of God, you or I too could be the drunkard or drug addict.  Substance abuse is a temporary escape from one’s mind where the underlying issues may be the mental entanglements of unforgettable shame, regret, and unhealed wounds.  Anyone of us can be caught in a net of condemnation where we replay what feels like an unrecoverable mistake on our part and, with that, “what might actual be” if only the mistake had never happened in the first place.       

Mental health, simply put, is measured by our cope-ability to life’s circumstances.  Because life comes with many tribulations, we constantly are working toward or maintaining balance.  At different junctures in our life, we are either surviving or thriving. Though not so much with ourselves, we undervalue the God-given trait of resilience in others.  We are more prone to judgmental attitudes about one’s former struggle than readily celebrating the victory of one who recovered and overcame.  This is where we fail one another, causing a breakdown in humanity.  

Admittedly, I initially came back to the classroom this fall mostly concerned about student learning gaps.  Certain events realigned my thinking and redirected me back to my purpose— to be present with my students, in tune to the deeper needs in their life, especially at a time in our world where “normal” vaporized as an illusion. 

Even though the 2020-2021 school year was unpredictable from day to day, I am thankful for the classroom setting.  It kept us connected at a time when distance was encouraged.  In our vulnerable state, the classroom served as a place to have honest conversations; our talks diminished some of the social barriers we’ve all hidden behind.  My students realized that as those barriers were broken down, the loneliness and isolation that comes with mental health became manageable and came with benefits: their grades improved; compassion and care for others increased; and the teacher-student relationship was less of a divide, for they witnessed that we are all the same— in need of each other.  With this group, we became friends, and instead of viewing each other as individuals, we became unified. 

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

Soulmate

Our eyes met, and like a magic trick,

you touched me without touching me. 

Your eyes went on a deep journey to my soul

without fear you’d find your way back. 

That was your intention though: a one-way trip

never to return but to possess me—

my heart wrapped in your arterial fingerprints.   

To separate you from me would mean death—

And even then, I’m not sure Death is that powerful.  

Photo by Atharva Dharmadhikari on Unsplash