In which direction are you evolving?
My grandmother, bless her passed beating heart, was a diagnosed narcissist. It used to be one of my worst fears to follow in her footsteps. In many ways that fear has held me back, kept me small, quieted my voice.
As if it were a prescription for not becoming a narcissist, I told myself (I still tell myself) things like:
No one cares what you think.
You’re not that important.
The world doesn’t revolve around you.
Everyone else is prettier, smarter, savvy-er, right-er… better.
These beliefs are a way of protecting those around me from the neediness I knew to be narcissism. But maybe the very narcissism I’ve feared is the LOUD we all need. Maybe narcissism was never a problem, but a vehicle for radical change. After all… the United States of America has now elected the world’s loudest narcissist to presidential office not just once, but twice!
Today I say “FUCK IT!” It’s time to try something new. I’d rather be a narcissist with morals than a sheep and a moral-less meangirl. It’s time to channel Gramma’s narcissism and jeuje it up with as many of the social justice flags the world can manufacture.
Get ready world, she is unleashing. Louder, bolder, wordier than she’s ever been before.
What’s the worst that happens? I change my mind and go back to quiet? That’s not really a loss. I have the loveliest quiet here and home; always ready to nestle back into.
Two notable things happened this morning. The first was when I dared to look at Nancy Mace’s instagram page. The second was when I saw the quote— “Unfortunately some people are not put here to evolve. They are put here to remind you what it looks like if you don’t.” ~Unknown
So now in the melting of these two things together I find myself wondering “What does evolution look like?” Does it look like Handmaid's Tale or Ted Lasso? Is it a world filled with hatred and control, or with character and compassion?
The narcissist in me isn’t afraid to preach and believe that the choice is obvious. There is only one “right” here. Ted Lasso is the future worth fighting for. But in the messiest of truths the devil’s advocate still pokes at my typing fingers. She uses her pitchfork to jab red hot thoughts into my brain like “What if evolution looks like oppression?”
My husband and I got as close to a fight as it gets last night. Post election he’s ready to go inward and focus on making our personal lives better. My attention pulls me in directions so far beyond me that they're almost intangible. He wants to figure out how to make more money and buy new snow tires. I want to figure out how Sarah McBride is gonna pee after a morning coffee fills her bladder.
While my husband renovates a bathroom at his job, here I sit wondering who decides what it looks like to evolve?
Merriam Webster says that evolution is “a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state,” And therein lies a problem. “Higher, more complex, or better state” by whose definition?
Nancy Mace (may she someday rot in a mens bathroom) would tell you the the evolution of our nation focuses on the word “better.” And in defining better I might argue she seeks a world that looks like her: white, pretty, Christian, hypocritical, and mean. In brighter light I would contend that a “higher, more complex, and better state” looks like taking a piss wherever lies a toilet, because the real work of a senator happens in legislation, not in the letting go of human waste.
These days being human requires the dizzying effort of keeping up with a rapidly evolving society. There are a hundred thousand places to get “information” and it’s arguably impossible to know who to trust. It’s unachievable to keep things simple in the world we’ve built so we have to ask our brains to think with a wider perspective and more nuanced processing. As primal animals this is hard, but I believe that it is the evolution we will need to survive.
In the closing months of 2024 I am finding myself in a minority that I never dreamed possible. One that follows a moral compass. One that doesn’t want to be led by a nation of billionaires, bigots, rapists, and TV personalities. In these cloudy days it seems more and more likely that the world before us will look like Handmaid’s Tale and not Ted Lasso, but I’m going to die believing that Nancy Mace was put here to show me what it looks like when we define evolution on a foundation of hate. And in the face of that belief I will choose love, even when it’s messy.
Maybe it’s because I’m woke or maybe it’s just the narcissist in me.
