Re:I tracked down my impostor
by sillysaurusx on Sunday March 28, 2021 @02:49AM
(#26608524)
Mm, no, I think I agree with your original assessment. You and the top comment both seem correct.
(Also, no need to think of it as a shame game. It's more interesting to learn something.)
Let's put it this way. If you're mistaken, then I don't understand it either, so hopefully someone will explain.
More concretely, reading the list of how to defend against narcissism, it felt like lots of people tend to have some of these traits, but usually not all of them. If it's a partial match, how should you interpret it? Is there some sort of narcissistic meter that goes up as you accumulate points?
It seems hard to define.
Pointing at who seems to be an insane man and calling him a “narcissist” is like pointing at a Chrome window and saying “this folder on Desktop” and okay grandma I get it but that is technically wrong. OP is just explaining the situation.
The Internet when I grew up was abundant of horror stories around encounter with insane person, and there were definitely multiple different modes of failure, like charging towards the storyteller with a knife in hand, the person leaving the identity behind as if it was nothing, storyteller being the unreliable narrator, etc etc. Usually the best response seemed to be either to display a skill that the imposter can’t replicate, or applying hard rules that allows no alternate interpretations so that they cannot elongate the drama.
I don’t know which cliche suggests which diagnosis and armchair diagnosis is at best useless, but it is true that there are types, and if OP thinks it’s not the same type as his own, that is at least an anecdatapoint.
e: ok I didn’t read the top comment. Clinical distinction don’t matter, you just have to know how to defend against. And it’s documented. That is right. I’ll keep this comment as a shame to myself.