…The problem with the clinical, psychological idea of a narcissistic personality disorder is that the narcissists aren’t really self-obsessed; they’re obsessed with how they appear to others. The clinical narcissist doesn’t love themselves as they are; they want to love themselves, but can never live up to the image of themselves that would be worthy of that love and need other people to do this for them. When Narcissus stared at himself in that pool; that’s not what he was really doing. He literally fell in love with himself, as he was, as he appeared to himself…

It wasn’t until very recently, when I got around to taking assessments like the one that got me the results below, that the other pieces seemed to fit together. Survey self-reporting, as I well know, is not perfect, and I am not an expert in psychology or mental health, so I take the results with a grain of salt. Multiple tests have put me on the autism spectrum. My own biases and ignorance may be misleading me, and so my next step will be finding people who know more than I do about this, and whom I can trust to help figure things out. I didn’t even consider this possibility, so I never bothered to take the assessments until now. But the other results led to new questions, and somehow knowing this makes a lot of other things make more sense, too.