Geek's Guide to Getting Better

One of my aims this year was pretty simple: no pretending, just honesty. So that’s what I’m practicing today. Honesty. The pure, simple honesty of saying: I do not deserve to be happy.

I don’t. It’s a difficult thing to hear and an even more difficult thing to say—and to mean—but the truth of the statement cannot be ignored. It sounds cold—heartless, even. But it’s true. I do not deserve to be happy.

I also do not deserve to be sad.

My aim is to face reality, and the truth is that reality is indifferent to me. I don’t matter to the universe. There is no grand design for the journey of my life and there is no cosmic point system the tallies up the effort put in and the reward that should come out. Life doesn’t work like that.

Narcissism

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson explores the idea of narcissism. It’s a topic I have done a lot of thinking about before reading the book, as it’s a trait I recognise in a few key figures in my life. My mother for one. An ex-boyfriend or two, definitely. But also in myself. It’s difficult not to be narcissistic sometimes. The only experience we get is our own, and so it is easy to default to interpreting the world through the lens of that experience and by that logic, I am the most fundamental aspect in all creation. Cogito ergo sum, so screw the idea that anyone else matters.

Manson breaks it down into two seemingly different, but actually similar, forms of narcissism. His description is far more effective, but how I have come to understand it is:

1. I am unique and special and talented and destined for greatness and therefore, I should be given special treatment.
2. My life is terrible and miserable and far worse than anyone else’s could possibly be and no one can understand what I have been through and therefore, I should be given special treatment.

Two seemingly opposite viewpoints, but the same goal. I am different from you and therefore I should be treated differently.

I had experienced little of the first form, to be honest. I heard about it, of course, and on very rare occasions could see it in myself. At university, it came out most. I felt I had particularly strong skills as a writer, as a cinematographer, as a colour grader. I was above everyone else, and so in those fields, my opinion carried more weight. I knew at the time that it was a form of narcissism and sometimes I tried to rein that in. Sometimes I didn’t.

The second form of narcissism is the one with which I am intimately acquainted. I grew up in an environment in which challenges and struggles were sacrosanct. Things that made your life more difficult were badges of honour to be worn with pride, polished up and displayed at every single opportunity. Show your scars, for they are what makes you beautiful. I thought this was empowering, reclaiming hardship and making it powerful.

As I have aged, I have begun to see it differently. There is a narcissism that comes from that kind of celebration of hardship. “She is so strong for managing to live through that”, “He is so incredible for not letting that stop him from trying”. It’s hardship weaponised. Turned into currency. A way to win points, sympathy, admiration. I had thought I was reclaiming pain. But maybe I was just rebranding it.

Now, it is important to say that I am in no way saying that we shouldn’t be proud of the challenges we have overcome, or that we shouldn’t take pride in the achievements we make against adverse circumstances. There is power in reclaiming hardship.

The difficult comes when that pride becomes an expectation. There is a fine line between “I am proud because I deal with this” and “You should be proud because I deal with this”. I grew up in a world where that line didn’t exist. Challenges were points that would earn you attention. The longer your list of challenges, the more valuable you were as a person. Ours was the family that if we didn’t go to the GP with a full list of problems, then it wasn’t worth going. We had a prize to win, and we were going to keep finding problems until we had enough to take the top spot.

Impact

I grew up with the knowledge that being broken meant I was important. Having challenge meant that I mattered. I was better than other people because of the struggles that I overcame. I was worth more because I had to try harder to achieve the same things. When I was first diagnosed with depression at 14, it was almost a moment of celebration. I had a diagnosis, that was worth a lot of points, surely? That meant I was having to work so much harder than other kids my age and I was still doing well at school. I was an inspiration.

My mother fed on this. She would routinely tell people about the struggles her children were facing, because she needed the validation of how inspirational she was to be supporting a child dealing with such difficulties. When the depression diagnosis lost it’s pull, she pushed for me to be assessed for bi-polar disorder. When my sister struggled with school and self-discipline, she pushed doctors to consider Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. My mother wasn’t a bad person, don’t get me wrong, but her value came from her hardships and that behaviour was one that I learned too.

It became so ingrained in me that my value came from my hardships that when I couldn’t find more, I learned to lie about them. I developed quite a skill at finding hardships that couldn’t be proven. Some of them I still lie about.

When I started university, I told people that I was unable to drink alcohol due to a medical condition. It was a clever lie, because the medical condition is probably true. But I added the part about alcohol, because it set me apart from everyone else. I was different, and that made me special. A long time ago I lied at an opticians appointment during some tests and they said I was colourblind. I still tell that lie now. I told that lie three days ago. Not because I had to. Just out of reflex. A way to remind people—and myself—that I still have value.

There may well be people reading this right now, people who know me offline, who didn’t even realise that some of these were lies. I hope you aren’t upset with me, though if you are I understand and I hope you can understand even if you can’t forgive.

So What Now?

So where does this leave me? What is the point of this post?

I’ve been trying to look at myself the past few weeks, through the lens of the radical honesty I want to live this year in and that has given me a new perspective. I grew up learning to see the narcissism in others. I never told my mother about the medical condition because I knew she would use it to get attention. I distanced myself from her for a number of years because I needed to separate myself from that cycle. But this year, I needed to turn that light inwards.

I have been a narcissist. I am still being a narcissist. I have catalogued my various traumas, and bulked out the list with some that I invented, because I believed that struggle would give me value. The truth is, though, that struggle is not unique. Everybody struggles. Different people struggle in different ways and my struggle is no more—or less—important than anyone else’s. My struggle is my own, and I should be proud of what I have overcome, but real pride is quiet. It’s something you see in your smile in the mirror, not something you should from the window at passers by.

Part of the journey for me now is to unpack the boxes of my life and interrogate what I find. I know there are untruths in there that are going to be difficult to dispose of cleanly, but mixed in with them will be things I need to acknowledge. I can’t get rid of the lie about alcohol without recognising that there is actually a core part of me that doesn’t want to drink. I haven’t had alcohol in 7 and a half years and I can see no part of my future where that ever changes. The lie is still there, but beneath it is a truth: that I genuinely don’t want to drink. That part matters. That part is real.

I don’t deserve to be happy. I don’t deserve to be sad. I don’t deserve to be admired, or hated, or praised, or derided.

I don’t deserve anything.

Nobody does. That’s the point. Life isn’t fair. It’s mostly chance, some choice, and a whole lot of chaos. What matters to me now is how I choose to view it and what those choices look like. If I want to be happy—and I do—then I need to recognise that it isn’t something I can force into existence. Happiness is a by-product of living a life that aligns with my values, and that means some serious realignment ahead. Who do I want to live as—and how will I know when I’ve become him, not just performed him?

That’s the next step for me.

---

References

[1] – Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (2016)