On our inflated egos and delusions of grandeur
Aug 4, 2020 20:38:18 GMT -4
Baise-moi and Craxian like this
Post by Bannanachair on Aug 4, 2020 20:38:18 GMT -4
So when we were younger we definitely thought that we were more important than we actually were, and I think it's beyond the normal teenager self-centeredness. I'm going to be writing a bit about that, psychoanalyzing myself and attempting to do the same for the community at large. This might seem like another of those nostalgic posts in the vein of my retrospective on roleplaying itself, Purring's video montage of cyber-bullying or nothing else because those are the only two but I wanted three things for my list, and that's because it is. As for why I'm doing this, I think it's so that I have an excuse to examine my own mental state over the past decade so that I can better introspect on who I am now, but also that's not what I'm psychoanalyzing today.
So anyway, onto our discussion of the ego. If this were a paper for school now is when I'd probably cite Freud's definitions of ego, superego and id, but they have nothing to do with this discussion if we're being honest. We definitely were full of ourselves and rather self-centered; I know for a fact that I was. It was to the extent that I can vaguely recall "Ego the cat" being the "official mascot" of the ROBLOX RP forum. It was delusions of self-importance to an extent, or perhaps delusions of fame or cyber-fame, though I don't think I had used those terms. Perhaps extreme narcissism might be the best way of describing it, at least among me and other similarly toxic members of our little online community. Muddled up in it were delusions of being good writers - we certainly weren't bad by teenager-on-the-internet standards, but none of us were by any means exceptional when we were on ROBLOX.
There were also quality standards of writing for RPs that I remember being a thing for at least as long as I was on the forums, as though we were pretentious artists concerned for the integrity of the art-form. There was "RP criticism", which essentially was writing lots of paragraphs being mean to another kid writing an RP for fun where we quality-controlled over the dumbest of things. I remember that we (or at least a small handful of individuals from the ROBLOX forum, myself unfortunately included) even once raided another website's RP forum, because we seriously had our heads up our asses. Perhaps that was a different thing altogether, but I think that it's interrelated.
So, I suppose the first thing is, where did this notion come from? There was certainly something of it present when I started on the RP forums in 2012, literally most of a decade ago because I'm old, but I think it really started taking off in 2013 and in 2014 (with the whole "Tim-vs-Soard-vs-Swed flame war that lasted a year!" because we were fucking idiots). I think the thinking was as follows: ROBLOX is a large website, with maybe ten million or so kids playing. Maybe 1% of them post on the forums at any point, and of those, maybe 20% on the RP forum at any point and maybe 10% of those stuck around for any given time. Doing the math now in my head that's just a couple thousand people, but I guess at the time I thought it must have been larger. Anyway, my thinking was that, though a niche part of a popular website, the website itself was large enough that even that niche part had lots of people using it. And I thought, I'd become a fixture of the community in that niche area - there were at least more people on the forum who knew me than who I knew, though whether it's because there truly were over a thousand regulars or because I was an asshole I can't remember (probably a combination). Furthermore, threads tended to get far more views than replies, often ten times more. So in my mind, there were potentially around a thousand people who gave a shit about me and my writing and roleplaying.
Perhaps I should take a step back and contextualize this within my life. My life was far from perfect, despite my parents claims to the contrary. I was born in the USA, but moved to Singapore when I was 7. A great adventure, you may be thinking, and in some ways it was, but in many ways it was isolating, being raised in a different culture than my neighbours, and the expat community having been much smaller initially than it became. When I interacted with Americans, that resulted in me lacking many of the more recent cultural touchstones given my geographic difference. Furthermore, I was (and still am) very autistic. At the age of 10 it was decided that I could no longer be in mainstream school and had to be taken out and put in special ed; after a literal PTSD-inspiring year in an abusive hellhole I was put in a small school and a class of roughly three people, possibly adding one or two for a year. Lastly, my family life was hell on earth - I didn't get along with my brothers at all, and only now have begun repairing my relationship with one brother, and I was glad that my parents were divorced because it limited the time I had to spend with any one of them (when I got fed up with my mother, it was the weekend and I saw my dad for a few days, etc.). Suffice to say, offline, I was very, very isolated, and I know for a fact that many others who posted on the ROBLOX RP forum were similarly isolated in their real-lives and suspect that to have been true for about 90% of the population.
Offline, I was less than nobody, isolated from others my own age and with severely Freudian parental issues in all ways but sexually (then again, with my track record on repressed memories, who the fuck knows). Online, there was something that I thought I was getting good at, and which I reasoned in my head that thousands of other people gave a damn about. As I mentioned on another thread, at its worst the ROBLOX RP forum was a respite from my life. I'd imagine intricate fantasies, never shared with anyone in-person or online, about convoluted ways in which circumstances could force the RP forum members to meet one another, and we'd all be important in my head. Lastly, I was a mentally-ill fourteen-year-old with dysfunctional family dynamics and literally no other outlet - so, I invested a lot into my online persona. For several years, I thought of myself first as Timpookie and with who I was offline as an inconvenient secret identity, like a much dumber Batman/Bruce Wayne dichotomy.
All of that resulted in me being full of myself and, when I had some modicum of power over others, using it. Though I mostly did so in 2013 and 2014 and such, it unfortunately continued until much later - the most recent example I can think of is Happy's attempt at nation-building, Coural, for which I am truly and deeply sorry. There was also an element of righteousness in my mind - SwedishLemon was an objectively horrible person, and my attempts at cruelty towards him and at ruining his RPs and at yelling at him whenever I got the opportunity were thus justified. Soardlo was an objectively horrible person, a near-adult on a forum full of young teens and even pre-teens in order to feel like he was important. Everyone I considered my "enemy" was an objectively horrible person for some reason or another, even if just by association with other horrible people. At least, that was how my mind was working, with the belief that in addition to being someone important I was also some internet paragon of virtue standing up for the downtrodden and more importantly putting those who deserve it in their place (a thing I couldn't do in real life).
And that led to some sense of elitism about being a good writer and roleplayer. Now I know that the only requirement for being a "good roleplayer" is to roleplay in such a way as to ensure that you and everyone else involved has fun, but at the time I thought that there was more to it than that. You needed to use correct grammar and spelling for a first, you needed to be original in your ideas, self-consistent in your characterizations and whatnot, ensure that there were no plot-holes, behave "realistically" (whatever that means) and the like. This all emerged from my sense of being someone semi-important - after all, I must be semi-important for a reason, and the reason I was there was to RP, so that must have been it!
In retrospect, I think it would be fair to say that I had delusions of grandeur - actual, honest-to-god delusions of grandeur, the likes of which were not healthy. I'm still not mentally healthy, actually. I think that, in addition to all the things going on - even if I had friends offline and siblings I got on with and parents that were supportive of me - I would have still been a somewhat fucked up teenager, and I think that those underlying psychological issues were what made me one of the most egregious in terms of narcissism on the old forum. I was very autistic, which made it hard for me to relate to others. I was recently diagnosed with bipolar personality disorder, symptoms of which in retrospect I clearly exhibited on the forums. I've always exhibited extreme paranoia, as some of you may know from interactions with me where I've been paranoid, and recently found out that I have a family history of schizophrenia on my mother's side (specifically my grandfather). I also have a family history of something very wrong coming from my very, very mentally ill mother who still denies any illness and refused to seek treatment the last time I brought it up a few years ago - it's not Asuka Langley levels of mentally-ill-mother, but it's not nothing either. Basically, my brain-chemistry has always been fucked, and I would have been fucked up no matter what.
The next bit, where I attempt to connect it to the person that I've become now, is very dark and likely not relevant to anyone else, but I want to get in words anyway for some goddamn reason. So, uh, trigger warnings for basically everything that would get a trigger warning. It's in spoiler tags because it is much darker than I thought it would be when writing this warning. It is not relevant at all in talks of how we were all full of ourselves when we were younger and how I was compensating for insecurities in my offline life and assumed others were as well. I don't know why I'm typing it; I guess it's because this forum is dead, as is this identity for myself, with merely a handful of others left who know me but who likely won't have much more impact on my life going forward, so I won't have any negative repercussions of being open here, whereas telling the wrong person at college will ruin my new respite from my past.
Sorry that this thread ended up being all about me, but I decided fairly early on in this thread that I'm not qualified to psychoanalyze anyone else based on shoddy childhood memories. I'm currently trying to go on an inner journey of self-discovery and figure out who I am in a generally offline world that's not completely hostile towards me. My former narcissism, and the way that it flipped to self-loathing, is a crucial aspect of that journey. If anyone else is going through a similar journey, I hope that this helped you in some way. Likewise, if anyone else has any further thoughts on the old "RP forum big ego" thing, or are experiencing a similar reversal of it in your life, please feel free to add them; I'm curious as to other people's thoughts on this phenomenon (and, for that matter, whether I was truly one of the worst or only now think that I was).
So anyway, onto our discussion of the ego. If this were a paper for school now is when I'd probably cite Freud's definitions of ego, superego and id, but they have nothing to do with this discussion if we're being honest. We definitely were full of ourselves and rather self-centered; I know for a fact that I was. It was to the extent that I can vaguely recall "Ego the cat" being the "official mascot" of the ROBLOX RP forum. It was delusions of self-importance to an extent, or perhaps delusions of fame or cyber-fame, though I don't think I had used those terms. Perhaps extreme narcissism might be the best way of describing it, at least among me and other similarly toxic members of our little online community. Muddled up in it were delusions of being good writers - we certainly weren't bad by teenager-on-the-internet standards, but none of us were by any means exceptional when we were on ROBLOX.
There were also quality standards of writing for RPs that I remember being a thing for at least as long as I was on the forums, as though we were pretentious artists concerned for the integrity of the art-form. There was "RP criticism", which essentially was writing lots of paragraphs being mean to another kid writing an RP for fun where we quality-controlled over the dumbest of things. I remember that we (or at least a small handful of individuals from the ROBLOX forum, myself unfortunately included) even once raided another website's RP forum, because we seriously had our heads up our asses. Perhaps that was a different thing altogether, but I think that it's interrelated.
So, I suppose the first thing is, where did this notion come from? There was certainly something of it present when I started on the RP forums in 2012, literally most of a decade ago because I'm old, but I think it really started taking off in 2013 and in 2014 (with the whole "Tim-vs-Soard-vs-Swed flame war that lasted a year!" because we were fucking idiots). I think the thinking was as follows: ROBLOX is a large website, with maybe ten million or so kids playing. Maybe 1% of them post on the forums at any point, and of those, maybe 20% on the RP forum at any point and maybe 10% of those stuck around for any given time. Doing the math now in my head that's just a couple thousand people, but I guess at the time I thought it must have been larger. Anyway, my thinking was that, though a niche part of a popular website, the website itself was large enough that even that niche part had lots of people using it. And I thought, I'd become a fixture of the community in that niche area - there were at least more people on the forum who knew me than who I knew, though whether it's because there truly were over a thousand regulars or because I was an asshole I can't remember (probably a combination). Furthermore, threads tended to get far more views than replies, often ten times more. So in my mind, there were potentially around a thousand people who gave a shit about me and my writing and roleplaying.
Perhaps I should take a step back and contextualize this within my life. My life was far from perfect, despite my parents claims to the contrary. I was born in the USA, but moved to Singapore when I was 7. A great adventure, you may be thinking, and in some ways it was, but in many ways it was isolating, being raised in a different culture than my neighbours, and the expat community having been much smaller initially than it became. When I interacted with Americans, that resulted in me lacking many of the more recent cultural touchstones given my geographic difference. Furthermore, I was (and still am) very autistic. At the age of 10 it was decided that I could no longer be in mainstream school and had to be taken out and put in special ed; after a literal PTSD-inspiring year in an abusive hellhole I was put in a small school and a class of roughly three people, possibly adding one or two for a year. Lastly, my family life was hell on earth - I didn't get along with my brothers at all, and only now have begun repairing my relationship with one brother, and I was glad that my parents were divorced because it limited the time I had to spend with any one of them (when I got fed up with my mother, it was the weekend and I saw my dad for a few days, etc.). Suffice to say, offline, I was very, very isolated, and I know for a fact that many others who posted on the ROBLOX RP forum were similarly isolated in their real-lives and suspect that to have been true for about 90% of the population.
Offline, I was less than nobody, isolated from others my own age and with severely Freudian parental issues in all ways but sexually (then again, with my track record on repressed memories, who the fuck knows). Online, there was something that I thought I was getting good at, and which I reasoned in my head that thousands of other people gave a damn about. As I mentioned on another thread, at its worst the ROBLOX RP forum was a respite from my life. I'd imagine intricate fantasies, never shared with anyone in-person or online, about convoluted ways in which circumstances could force the RP forum members to meet one another, and we'd all be important in my head. Lastly, I was a mentally-ill fourteen-year-old with dysfunctional family dynamics and literally no other outlet - so, I invested a lot into my online persona. For several years, I thought of myself first as Timpookie and with who I was offline as an inconvenient secret identity, like a much dumber Batman/Bruce Wayne dichotomy.
All of that resulted in me being full of myself and, when I had some modicum of power over others, using it. Though I mostly did so in 2013 and 2014 and such, it unfortunately continued until much later - the most recent example I can think of is Happy's attempt at nation-building, Coural, for which I am truly and deeply sorry. There was also an element of righteousness in my mind - SwedishLemon was an objectively horrible person, and my attempts at cruelty towards him and at ruining his RPs and at yelling at him whenever I got the opportunity were thus justified. Soardlo was an objectively horrible person, a near-adult on a forum full of young teens and even pre-teens in order to feel like he was important. Everyone I considered my "enemy" was an objectively horrible person for some reason or another, even if just by association with other horrible people. At least, that was how my mind was working, with the belief that in addition to being someone important I was also some internet paragon of virtue standing up for the downtrodden and more importantly putting those who deserve it in their place (a thing I couldn't do in real life).
And that led to some sense of elitism about being a good writer and roleplayer. Now I know that the only requirement for being a "good roleplayer" is to roleplay in such a way as to ensure that you and everyone else involved has fun, but at the time I thought that there was more to it than that. You needed to use correct grammar and spelling for a first, you needed to be original in your ideas, self-consistent in your characterizations and whatnot, ensure that there were no plot-holes, behave "realistically" (whatever that means) and the like. This all emerged from my sense of being someone semi-important - after all, I must be semi-important for a reason, and the reason I was there was to RP, so that must have been it!
In retrospect, I think it would be fair to say that I had delusions of grandeur - actual, honest-to-god delusions of grandeur, the likes of which were not healthy. I'm still not mentally healthy, actually. I think that, in addition to all the things going on - even if I had friends offline and siblings I got on with and parents that were supportive of me - I would have still been a somewhat fucked up teenager, and I think that those underlying psychological issues were what made me one of the most egregious in terms of narcissism on the old forum. I was very autistic, which made it hard for me to relate to others. I was recently diagnosed with bipolar personality disorder, symptoms of which in retrospect I clearly exhibited on the forums. I've always exhibited extreme paranoia, as some of you may know from interactions with me where I've been paranoid, and recently found out that I have a family history of schizophrenia on my mother's side (specifically my grandfather). I also have a family history of something very wrong coming from my very, very mentally ill mother who still denies any illness and refused to seek treatment the last time I brought it up a few years ago - it's not Asuka Langley levels of mentally-ill-mother, but it's not nothing either. Basically, my brain-chemistry has always been fucked, and I would have been fucked up no matter what.
The next bit, where I attempt to connect it to the person that I've become now, is very dark and likely not relevant to anyone else, but I want to get in words anyway for some goddamn reason. So, uh, trigger warnings for basically everything that would get a trigger warning. It's in spoiler tags because it is much darker than I thought it would be when writing this warning. It is not relevant at all in talks of how we were all full of ourselves when we were younger and how I was compensating for insecurities in my offline life and assumed others were as well. I don't know why I'm typing it; I guess it's because this forum is dead, as is this identity for myself, with merely a handful of others left who know me but who likely won't have much more impact on my life going forward, so I won't have any negative repercussions of being open here, whereas telling the wrong person at college will ruin my new respite from my past.
I'm a very different person now than I was as a younger teenager or even as a 17-year-old mocking Happy's thread. I have essentially the opposite of that inflated sense of self - having seen that that was the delusions of a troubled young person, I've seen through to the truth that I am an ultimately worthless piece of human shit whose only impact on other people for most of a fucking decade was cruelty and arrogance. Nowadays, my friends on-campus comment about my self-deprecating remarks, telling me that they're unjustified. My first college friendgroup is of relationships that I ruined intentionally because I hated myself and I wanted others to hate me as much as I did. I have tried to kill myself multiple times in the past two years, and there was a period of over a month where I would lie awake, razorblade hovering over my wrist cursing myself for being too much of a coward to go through with it before ultimately crying myself to sleep. Now that I'm "properly medicated" (and utterly unable to fucking think straight), I still dislike myself in general for reasons I can not put a finger on.
The question becomes, what prompted this change for me? It's a complete and utter 180, from head-up-my-arse narcissism in 2017 to turning my forearm into a barcode in 2019. Logically, then, the year 2018 becomes the place to look, and oh boy, 2018 was quite a year for me. It was the first full schoolyear I spent living with my dad instead of my mother full-time, and so instead of being yelled at constantly for literally fucking nothing, I was heavily scrutinized occasionally for everything about me, deemed a failure if I failed to live up to the ever-higher expectations thrust upon me. It was also the year that I got my first and to date only romantic partner, who was emotionally, physically and sexually very abusive and the story of how I lost my virginity would read fairly similarly to Swed's fanfiction about me. In that relationship, I was gaslit constantly and made to seem like the "bad guy" of the relationship, which no doubt altered how I viewed myself. It wasn't the first traumatic thing to have ever happened to me; the thing I mentioned as happening to me in 2010 gave me PTSD flashbacks as recently as 2019, but it was the worst by far and the first done by a peer rather than an authority figure. I think that that fundamentally reshaped how I viewed both myself in the context of my relationships with my peers and other people of my own age in a way that has only been harmful.
That said, I suspect that my current complete and utter hatred for myself is at least in some part a reaction to my earlier narcissism, and an overcorrection of it. Whether my big head would have deflated without the events of 2018 is a question that I ask myself fairly frequently, and I think that my teenage self-centeredness would have had to come to an end no matter what. The question that I can't answer is whether I'd be as mentally ill as I am now without the events of 2018, and I think that that's a much harder question to answer. Every trauma seems to heavily distort not only memories of the year it transpired in but also of everything beforehand - the year I spent being beaten and locked in solitary by uncertified "special education teachers" and "child psychologists" is a blurry haze for me that only becomes even slightly clear when I'm drunk, and I remember very few details of my life beforehand. In 2016, when my grandfather passed away and then my dog was murdered by a veterinarian, the subsequent months were a mess in my head and I ended up throwing myself into my academics for years in order to cope. Likewise, all of the year 2018 is a confused mess in my memory, and I think of the version of me that I am now as having been born on my trip to the Swiss alps around Christmas and my 19th birthday.
Anyway, would I have ended up before a behavioral conduct committee for my multiple alcohol-based conduct infringements and told that I need to see a psychiatrist for my own safety or I would be suspended had I not gone through the traumas I went through, and merely as a result of reacting to my egotism of years gone by? I have no idea. Every therapist I've seen has claimed that my occasionally violent mood-swings and suicidal ideation are a result of innate brain chemistry and are separate from the traumas that I have experienced. If that's the case, then my comments about how I would likely have been troubled were it not for my real-life troubles were certainly correct. The thing is, I don't think that who I am can be separated from my past, my history and my experiences. Ultimately, the question comes down to whether I'd be a healthier person if I'd had better experiences. Would I even be me if not for my life up until now? Am I merely the sum of my traumas, mental illnesses and flaws as it so often seems? Come to think of it, has this darkness only been with me recently, or has it always been there beneath the surface of my mind, waiting for me to have enough peace and quiet in my life to come to the forefront?
To sum up this latest section with a Rick Roll:
These are very dark questions that I think I need to figure out for myself. Who knows, maybe all of us now deal with horrendous mental health issues - the ROBLOX RP forum was, essentially, a fucked up place full of fucked up kids trying to escape their fucked up lives. Maybe we're all still fucked up.
The question becomes, what prompted this change for me? It's a complete and utter 180, from head-up-my-arse narcissism in 2017 to turning my forearm into a barcode in 2019. Logically, then, the year 2018 becomes the place to look, and oh boy, 2018 was quite a year for me. It was the first full schoolyear I spent living with my dad instead of my mother full-time, and so instead of being yelled at constantly for literally fucking nothing, I was heavily scrutinized occasionally for everything about me, deemed a failure if I failed to live up to the ever-higher expectations thrust upon me. It was also the year that I got my first and to date only romantic partner, who was emotionally, physically and sexually very abusive and the story of how I lost my virginity would read fairly similarly to Swed's fanfiction about me. In that relationship, I was gaslit constantly and made to seem like the "bad guy" of the relationship, which no doubt altered how I viewed myself. It wasn't the first traumatic thing to have ever happened to me; the thing I mentioned as happening to me in 2010 gave me PTSD flashbacks as recently as 2019, but it was the worst by far and the first done by a peer rather than an authority figure. I think that that fundamentally reshaped how I viewed both myself in the context of my relationships with my peers and other people of my own age in a way that has only been harmful.
That said, I suspect that my current complete and utter hatred for myself is at least in some part a reaction to my earlier narcissism, and an overcorrection of it. Whether my big head would have deflated without the events of 2018 is a question that I ask myself fairly frequently, and I think that my teenage self-centeredness would have had to come to an end no matter what. The question that I can't answer is whether I'd be as mentally ill as I am now without the events of 2018, and I think that that's a much harder question to answer. Every trauma seems to heavily distort not only memories of the year it transpired in but also of everything beforehand - the year I spent being beaten and locked in solitary by uncertified "special education teachers" and "child psychologists" is a blurry haze for me that only becomes even slightly clear when I'm drunk, and I remember very few details of my life beforehand. In 2016, when my grandfather passed away and then my dog was murdered by a veterinarian, the subsequent months were a mess in my head and I ended up throwing myself into my academics for years in order to cope. Likewise, all of the year 2018 is a confused mess in my memory, and I think of the version of me that I am now as having been born on my trip to the Swiss alps around Christmas and my 19th birthday.
Anyway, would I have ended up before a behavioral conduct committee for my multiple alcohol-based conduct infringements and told that I need to see a psychiatrist for my own safety or I would be suspended had I not gone through the traumas I went through, and merely as a result of reacting to my egotism of years gone by? I have no idea. Every therapist I've seen has claimed that my occasionally violent mood-swings and suicidal ideation are a result of innate brain chemistry and are separate from the traumas that I have experienced. If that's the case, then my comments about how I would likely have been troubled were it not for my real-life troubles were certainly correct. The thing is, I don't think that who I am can be separated from my past, my history and my experiences. Ultimately, the question comes down to whether I'd be a healthier person if I'd had better experiences. Would I even be me if not for my life up until now? Am I merely the sum of my traumas, mental illnesses and flaws as it so often seems? Come to think of it, has this darkness only been with me recently, or has it always been there beneath the surface of my mind, waiting for me to have enough peace and quiet in my life to come to the forefront?
To sum up this latest section with a Rick Roll:
These are very dark questions that I think I need to figure out for myself. Who knows, maybe all of us now deal with horrendous mental health issues - the ROBLOX RP forum was, essentially, a fucked up place full of fucked up kids trying to escape their fucked up lives. Maybe we're all still fucked up.
Sorry that this thread ended up being all about me, but I decided fairly early on in this thread that I'm not qualified to psychoanalyze anyone else based on shoddy childhood memories. I'm currently trying to go on an inner journey of self-discovery and figure out who I am in a generally offline world that's not completely hostile towards me. My former narcissism, and the way that it flipped to self-loathing, is a crucial aspect of that journey. If anyone else is going through a similar journey, I hope that this helped you in some way. Likewise, if anyone else has any further thoughts on the old "RP forum big ego" thing, or are experiencing a similar reversal of it in your life, please feel free to add them; I'm curious as to other people's thoughts on this phenomenon (and, for that matter, whether I was truly one of the worst or only now think that I was).
