Memoirs of a Narcissist
I had big dreams and an ego to match. Until I realized they were never mine.
[Listen to this essay as a podcast, here.]
When I was seven years-old, my middle class father married for a second time. Sandy was pretty and athletic, an expert tennis player who came from old, Chicago money. This meant a drastic socioeconomic and cultural shift for us. Practically overnight, I went from playing Kick the Can on dusty, Little League diamonds to picnicking on pristine, Nantucket beaches. (Imagine if the kids from The Sandlot showed up on set with Slim Aarons. That was me.)
I was out of my league. And frankly, more than a little hurt about how inadequate I felt all the time. I might have even told my snobby stepmother and her Wimbledon-whites wearing cronies to pound sand if not for one major factor: I saw how much our new, glamorous life meant to my dad. He’d been the awkward townie at a prestigious, Connecticut boarding school and carried a chip on his shoulder ever since. So marrying Sandy felt like redemption. He was giddy. Like ‘80s beer commercial giddy. “This is first class, buddy,” he told me. And I felt pressure not to blow it for him.
So I swallowed my discomfort, ironed my Izod shirts, and combed my hair. I brushed up on etiquette and learned how to swing a seven-iron. In time, I found that - like my dad - I became really good at working a room full of elitist folks. I did it in college, where I wore seersucker, snorted coke, and dated one of the wealthiest girls on campus. And again in New York, where I set my sights on the fashion industry, becoming a GQ writer with a closetful of custom suits who flew to Paris for the weekend to gorge on croissants.
My life was glamorous as hell, but there was always a deep sense of imposter syndrome lurking beneath the surface. I could never really shake that seven-year-old who felt so out of place having his Reebok Pumps swapped for penny loafers. I never asked for this life. It was my dad’s dream. Yet here I was, some two decades later, gallivanting around the globe in Italian clothes, discussing the finer points of Postmodern furniture.
“You’ve changed,” one of my hometown buddies confided in me one night after some beers. We hadn’t hung out in a while. “I don’t know you anymore.”
What I wanted to tell him was: You never knew me. Because I don’t know me. I’m really lost.
But I didn’t say anything. I just went right back to chasing the high life.
In 2015, as my relevance in fashion faded and my girlfriend and I split, I hit a wall. Suddenly depressed and suicidal, I was confronted with the trauma behind my glamorous image. So I entered group therapy. A few sessions into treatment, I worked up the courage to share.
“I think I’m a Narcissist,” I said.
My new group-mates weren’t having it. I was too nice, they said. And had too much empathy. You listen. You aren’t a jerk. You’re in therapy!
But I was already convinced. By then I’d researched all the behaviors of Compensatory Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and had to admit I’d lived them all.
As a culture, it’s fair to say we’ve become fascinated by Narcissists—a simple Google search now yields what seems like endless books, videos, and online tutorials about what to do if you end up encountering, dating, or voting for one. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence we’re all paying attention: Many generations of less-than-skillful parenting (my parents’ generation — Boomers — are often called “the most selfish generation”) have produced a large swath of the population with chronically low self-worth.
Different shades of compensatory behaviors are born from this lack of self-esteem. Because many of us grow up feeling so inadequate at home, we come to require a steady stream of external validation to compensate for our deeply-buried self loathing. Dopamine is our drug of choice, and we’ll do whatever we need to acquire it: lie, cheat, manipulate, or - like I did - create an entire persona designed to attract it. Our dependency makes us putty in marketer’s hands, too: Tech platforms like Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, Tinder, Hinge and so many others that provide instant hits of validation become highly addictive. Desirable influencers become power brokers. “Love” becomes a commodity.
I was hooked on every source of validation I could get in my New York fashion days. And when I was getting it, life was good. But there were a few problems:
First, I was jockeying for recognition in a market saturated with some of the most beautiful, creative, and talented people in the world. The same people I either became rabidly jealous of, or spent all day fantasizing about, hoping they’d finally look my way. It was exhausting.
And second, I was at the constant mercy of my own upward mobility. If I could keep the dope coming, great. But when things didn’t go my way, I would plummet into a black hole of self doubt. Not to mention the shame I had for caring so deeply about what other people thought of me was a barrier to any real, meaningful connection.
I was lonely. Compensatory Narcissism is - if nothing else - a lonely fucking condition. A condition I watched my father succumb to: After his divorce from Sandy in 2005, he was cut off from his main pipeline of dopamine. In a matter of months, he went from living the high life to being just a regular guy again, and - as he told me many times during the final year of his life — he didn’t want to live as a regular guy. (For a Narcissist, mediocrity is a fate worse than death.) So he killed himself.
The more I started investigating my father’s life and death in earnest, the more I began to see the connections between my path and his. Just like him, I’d grown into a young man hell bent on proving himself worthy to the most impressive people I could find. And just like him, I’d let those patterns dominate my life: In dating, I gravitated towards sparkly women who were as starved for love as I was. That left me consistently disappointed in relationships. And though I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fortifying my glamorous image with clothes, cars, and exotic vacations, they just functioned as really elegant Band-Aids for the anxiety brewing below the surface. I think it was finally my fancy, New York literary agent who just came out and said it: “Whether we like it or not, Sean, we all become our parents. You became your dad.”
That hit. And I realized a course correction was needed. I didn’t want to spend my life desperate, feeding a hungry ghost, wondering when my next status high might appear. I was tired of the chase for recognition, tired of playing the game. There had to be a better way.
In the fall of 2019, after moving to Los Angeles, I hired a life coach named John - my dad’s birth name. In the first session, I told him: “I’ve been trying to be impressive for two decades. Can you turn me into an average guy?”
John just laughed. “I got you,” he said.
Oh, but I was naive. Foolishly, I went into that next phase of my life believing I could go from Patrick Bateman to the Buddha without facing too much discomfort. How hard could it be to renounce my quest for status and embrace a life of mediocrity?
Turns out, pretty hard. In my early sessions with John I saw how Compensatory Narcissism extended into every crevice of my life: from the food I ate, to the place I lived in, to the jobs I held, and the way I viewed my body. It was all one big, ego orgy. “GQ Sean” — as John and I now referred to the status-chasing aspect of my personality — had been with me for a long time. He’d helped me survive as a kid and now he held on with cold, dead hands, afraid of what would happen if he let go.
Ah, but life has a funny way of giving us what we need, doesn’t it? Shortly after paying John a sizable chunk of dough for his services, my bank account basically hit zero. I was broke. Which made keeping up with the Joneses much, much harder. I’ll always remember the humbling day I walked from the tiny studio apartment I could no longer afford to a local retail store to apply for an hourly wage job, the same store that had sent me piles of free shit in the past when I was a high horse magazine writer. My pride only allowed me to work two shifts before I quit, but I saw it as a victory. I could eat crow and live to tell about it.
The ego trials continued: homeless and unable to pay rent, I moved into a glorified hut in my friend’s backyard in East Los Angeles. And I swapped my gas-guzzling, vintage Mercedes for a Prius (about as mediocre, car-wise, as you get). The tipping point was when, in the early stages of romancing a very cute actress in Los Feliz, COVID-19 lockdown descended on Los Angeles, severing my most potent outlet for validation of all: dating. GQ Sean was officially cut off.
Suffering ensued. Sitting alone on agonizing, quarantine afternoons, bored and penniless, I would find myself scrolling Instagram, checking up on the old friends, colleagues and lovers apparently still living the glamorous life I had left. I was jealous, angry, and sad. The nostalgia was, at times, nauseating. Eventually, I deleted all my social media accounts—the only way of ensuring I couldn’t peek into the Matrix whenever I wanted. I knew I had to forget that world in order to heal. At least for now.
I felt the absence of my dad in a more acute way in those lean months to come. It was as if by letting go of GQ Sean a little more each day, I let go of my father, too. One day, after a conversation with John about loss, I sat recounting in my journal all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches of my childhood, trying to hold onto every morsel. The exercise propelled me into sobs. And as the tears left my body I knew I was shedding my past, shedding my dad and Sandy, shedding the boy whose chase for recognition kept him from facing the things he didn’t want to feel.
In addition to working with John, I started doing guided plant medicine journeys with a shaman named Amanda in the LA area. One night last spring, lying on the living room floor of her bungalow in Studio City with sassafras (a natural form of MDMA) surging through my body, Amanda spoke to me softly:
“You’ve been protecting yourself for so long,” she said, placing her hand in the center of my chest, over my heart.
“The love you’ve been searching for out there? It’s right here. Feel that? Breathe it in. It’s okay to open now.”
Even a momentary glimpse of self love re-colors everything. It’s like putting a drop of iodine into a glass of water. And after my experience with Amanda, I realized I had access to a truly unshakeable source: anytime I felt a thirst for external validation, I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths in and out of my heart. Ah, there I am. In time, I found I could breathe my way through even the gnarliest of cravings.
As my body cycled down from dopamine, my life got simpler and more serene. I spent a lot of time lying around my little house in Topanga Canyon, walking in the woods, and reflecting. I realized that my sole purpose in life for 30+ years had been getting the approval of others, and now, without that purpose, I needed a new one. That’s where this newsletter came in.
Even during years where I was afraid to express myself truthfully with my voice, I always wrote nakedly from my heart: through the shame, through the fear of what everyone would think of me. The words never failed to appear—even if I experienced a wicked vulnerability hangover after they were published.
I’m trying to live with my heart open everywhere these days. And it doesn’t always happen. Sometimes I shut down and act highly unskillfully. Sometimes I fuck up wildly. But the intention to exist from that place has changed everything. As totally woo-woo as it sounds, how we feel about ourselves is a vibration, and when it changes, what we attract changes, too. Friends, projects, and potential partners that reflect the new, loving version of me have flooded into my life. A welcome change. And thanks to the help of John and others, I’ve become a life coach with a thriving practice who guides other men on their own paths to self love and acceptance.
I have a nice, average life. A life that would have bored me to tears all those years ago when I was running around New York in pursuit of an elusive dream. Where’s the excitement? I might have said. Where’s the intensity? Where’s the chase?
But I’m learning something radical as I approach forty, now comfortably free from the existence I was sure I needed to survive in my twenties:
It’s when the chase ends that life really begins.
Great post Sean
In my life I am living in the closet which is not ideal but I am use to it now. I try to live simple life but like you once enjoyed a glamour life in downtown Toronto. Maybe someday I can be comfortable in my own skin. :-)
What a journey, thank you for sharing