20.
“My father was officially diagnosed in the last year at almost 80 years old. He is now in a nursing home with health problems, and this has finally allowed him to get some psychiatric treatment, thus the diagnosis. It’s been an amazing relief and weirdly vindicating. I have described my dad for most of my life as a limited human being. Fortunately, his narcissism isn’t malicious; it’s just sad and unfortunate.”
“He may ask me a question about my life or my children’s or husband’s, but will revert the conversation back to himself within a sentence or two. As a result, he doesn’t know what I do for a living, he can’t remember where my kids go to school, or how old they are, or what my husband does or cares about. He never calls anyone on their birthday unless my sister reminds him. He talks endlessly and can’t pick up context clues about people’s desire to get away from him.
His ego is profoundly fragile. He cannot take responsibility for anything and is a pathological, uncontrollable liar. Anytime anything goes well, it is probably due to his extreme heroism, intelligence, or accomplishments. Anytime anything goes poorly, it’s never his fault and only a series of terrible events of which he was an unwitting victim, even about tiny things that no one cares about. Like if he forgot to stop at the store and get something as asked, he would claim that he was mugged. Or that the store was closed due to a power outage when it wasn’t.
Anyone in a position of authority eventually becomes an asshole to him because he can’t stand any negative feedback AT ALL. He once quit a job because he got a poor performance review, but we found out later that he told them (falsely) that he had cancer, and that’s why his work was subpar. He likes sympathy and attention and praise and profoundly dislikes anything else, including people that just aren’t very impressed by him. He is very charming when you first meet him, but eventually, people catch on to his lies, and then he loses friends. His brothers and sisters won’t speak to him.
He is extremely materialistic about weird things and likes everyone to think that he is rich and successful, and spends money he doesn’t have to make it look that way. If I do something, he has to do it too. When I got engaged to my husband, he got engaged to a woman we’d never met a month before my wedding. When I bought a car he particularly admired, he bought a similar one a month later. He is profoundly broke now and living on VA disability because he squandered his money on poor choices, and it eventually became a hoarding disease.
He is obsessed with the looks of his children. It’s nice that we are reasonably attractive, but it’s gross the way that having pretty daughters and grandchildren is clearly important to him, like we’re things that he can brag about instead of people with feelings and value beyond our looks or jobs or ways that we make him look good.”