Monday 2 July 2012

Vanity

The other day someone called me a narcissist.

I think it was a joke, and it was in reference to blogging and the fact that I wanted people to read my blog, which I admit is a bit indulgent. It was said tongue in cheek, but nevertheless I had a minor meltdown and my neurons got all crazy on me for a day or two.

During the neuron crazy day I went a bit overboard on questioning my motivation for publicising my blog along with reassessing parts of my character that I'm not happy with.

I came to the conclusion that there are elements of my personality that not so much seek attention, but seek validation and that can come across as narcissistic.

It's not that I go out of my way to look good, talk about the good things that I'm doing, boast about the opportunities that I get, blah, blah. I just make a certain amount of effort to cover up the stuff that might make me look bad or embarrassing or incompetent so that I feel like I'm as good as everyone else.

This is stupid. It's stupid because no human in the world is immune to being a knob sometimes. It also doesn't make any sense for me, personally because I'm totally unafraid of making mistakes. I'm completely comfortable with making mistakes and learning from them, and I'm not afraid of telling people that, either.

People seeing me make mistakes and looking like a dick doesn't sit as well with me, though. And that is probably vanity.

So seeking validation, for someone with insecurities is a tightrope because it can slowly turn into attention seeking and that, in turn, can slowly turn into vanity without them even being aware of the process happening.

I know myself and my flaws waaaaay too much for narcissism to become a real problem, but nevertheless, after crazy neuron day I committed to negating the potential problem by conducting a pre-emptive strike on vanity, anyway.

There are a few ways of doing this, but the best way for me is to remind myself of all the stupid, dumb, off the mark things I've said and done recently to bring myself back down to earth.

The first thing I can think of is that yesterday I had to ask my mum what 10% of £1 was. What's completely scary is its genuinely not obvious to me. Duh.

I also have incredibly bad logic. I'm really not a clever person at all, and although I can talk for Wales about international development and humanitarian issues, I wouldn't be able to pass my maths or science G.C.S.Es if I were to sit them now.

I cut corners. Big time. I can be quite lazy sometimes and I often find a way of doing things the quick way instead of the right way.

My hair is in terrible condition. I had dreadlocks for a long time when I was younger and it ruined my hair, which has never quite gotten back to the condition it was in.

I'm not an 'all rounder'. My skills sets are really limited. I can play guitar a bit and dance a bit, but I can't cook, drive properly, be in charge of children, do anything technical with computers, understand social media technology, draw or create anything artistic, sight read, write correctly, do anything businessy, manage money or understand anything vaguely sciencey or health related. Nor can I retain information very well. I did my first aid course, but if you're thinking of collapsing don't do it around me because I wouldn't know what to do.

But all of these things are the reason I have a twin, right? I have to admit I am a little complacent with her saving my arse all the time. If I'm in a pickle, which I quite often am, all I have to do is telepathically ask her to sort it out for me, and she does.

Hmmm...this all leads me to ask, how the f**k am I going to manage in Zambia on my own for a few months. Hopefully, the plus side to it is I'll come back skinny because I can't cook for myself.

The last thing I'm going to do in my effort to combat vanity is stick in a few pictures up of me looking quite disgusting. I figured with facebook, twitter and all those public places people put up the pictures that they want people to see, and it might add to the potential vanity problem. I've definitely fallen into this trap, so I'm going to counter balance it with some minging pictures of me....








The End




3 comments:

  1. My favourite quote regarding narcissism comes from spoken word/rapper Sage Francis:

    "I don't look into the mirror because I'm a narcissist, I simply like to see myself exist."

    Nice blog Lucy ^__^

    Dani C

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  2. sorry girl, in spite of your best attempts to show otherwise, you are still absolutely beautiful! xoxo

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  3. Haha! Nice quote, dani!

    And thank you, lovely Amarra!

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