You cannot look in the mirror and look for flaws in others.

I asked my mom to look in the mirror in a spirit conversation. She replied: “You think I am not successful and glamorous like your new friends.” That is MY fault, the way she sees it, isn’t it? To remedy it, I should change my opinion about her. (She’s a little off there, too, but that’s typical of her, to blame me for something that is just not quite right.)  So I laughed: “So you look in the mirror and you see my flaws.”

This is typical narcissistic behavior. A narcissist sees another person and their opinions about them and directly associates them with who they are as a person. To fix their flaws, they feel the need to fix other people instead. Still, if you’re a shitty person incapable of fixing yourself, it’s a growing number of people you need to manipulate into seeing you in a positive light, OR you can become a person who EVERYONE sees in a positive, or at least nice enough light.

We all need to learn to cope with other people’s successes.

One of our most important life lessons is to cope with other people’s successes. Most of us are a bit bad at it. Most of us feel the need for a level of avoidance to cope with it, especially with people who are your age and background and people who are much younger than yourself finding success much over yours.

To look at oneself in the mirror, to seek one’s own flaws when wondering, “Why am I not as successful as those people?” can be painful. Also, if you’ve been busy telling beautiful lies about yourself to yourself at the same time as lying to yourself about the traits of other people to make yourself feel better about yourself, such as “everybody cheats,” it might be a bit of a kick in the gut when you notice that while you cheat, others might be winning while playing fair.

Nobody can make you see yourself or others in a realistic light.

Nobody will be able to make you see yourself and others in a realistic life if you don’t want to see it. You have all the power in the world to keep lying to yourself as much as you like. You can ALWAYS find an angle to keep fooling yourself, but it’s a lot harder to fool others. They may see you for the clown that you are, while you refuse to see it and to fix it for yourself.

I dare you.

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