I’ve tortured myself mentally over the years.—- As the Lou Reed song Dime Store Mystery put it, “From the front, the sides, the back, the mind itself attacks.” —I’m learning to calibrate the internal judge so I don’t tear myself down, and hobble my efforts thru obsession and indecision. —-You helped by suggesting in Dec 2017 I have NPD. It’s not NPD but it is a deeply entrenched psychologically defensive shell that often operates subconsciously, and it’s easily mistaken for selfishness.—- Because of it I’ve damaged my life socially, romantically, and professionally and maybe physically. —But I’m working on somehow putting all of that to use in a meaningful, satisfying way during the remainder of my life.—- When I recognized my psychological situation in May of 2018, suicide seemed an appropriate route, because I genuinely thought I’d wasted my life, irredeemably. —-That sense of wasting my life is still present, in daily life and in sleep states, but I’ve been making progress on managing it. —Progress involves using my sense of irretrievable loss to fuel my empathy and compassion toward others who are also subject to such pain, each in her or his own way. —-Mental pain seems to involve a ‘pivot’ of sorts. —It’s often not a choice but building the habit of channeling pain constructively is a choice. —That ‘pivot’ seems, based on my experience, to involve psychological pain either leading to bitterness, anger, hate, depression…etc or, alternatively, to deepening my compassion and empathy toward others, including being happy for others instead of feeling the stab of envy when they seeming to have & enjoy what has so often alluded me. —-I used to get depresses & angry in the presence of happy couples, for example. —Empathy & compassion requires forgiving, accepting, & loving myself.—- That sort of love is certainly not narcissism, though the self-aggrandizing, self-worshipping outer layers of self-hate involve narcissism or solipsism
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