“I have never met someone more uncomfortable than when I have been calm, and experienced no one more convicted than when I have been reactive.”
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In over 25,000 words on my website, I have only used the term “narcissistic,” or its derivatives, twice. Yet a majority of my essays contain descriptions of such patterns and their implications on me. I avoid the word because I too only came to understand that what I experienced as a child had a name well after I reached adulthood, and coming to understand it resulted from having lived it first, not hearing a label on the internet and memorizing its habits. To see it is to resist it, so I developed a habit to show you.
One of psychology’s most widely-recognized names in the public discussion of narcissism, Dr. Ramani Durvasula, suggests that the behavioral profile is vastly underrepresented by clinical diagnoses, and broadly describes it as a maladaptive personality type that develops as a defense of the self. This adaptation is marked by traits such as deficient empathy, entitlement, grandiosity, and excessive pursuit of validation and admiration. The external behavior orbiting those core conditions manifests as attempts for control, manipulation, gaslighting, lying, blame-shifting, exploitation, chronic betrayal, invalidation, and rage. Non-clinical discourse online tends to question awareness and level of intent around said behaviors, while professionals tend to describe them as reactions to internal states rather than premeditated maneuvering. The psyche of a narcissistic-patterned individual is frequently driven to counter shame, and it is easily activated by any suggestion, even imagined, that something about their behavior may be unacceptable.
In other words,
If reality suggests something about myself that I can’t accept, then your understanding of reality must be modified.
That is where it becomes most visible to the outside, and the moment of recognition often begins with, “that doesn’t make any sense.” I’ve experienced this enough in my own relationships that I have recognized a recurrent 403 responds to it:
You have not been authorized to alter what reality is to me. Thus, all requests for access to my perception are denied.
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My smile has no shortcut; it is not generated with a command prompt. It cannot be recruited as a firewall against emotional violence.
It is not a productivity interface, nor a nostalgic CD-ROM.
It is a background program that can truly only be viewed, or shut down, by those with the code. You won’t know you’ve been given it until it’s already been keyed in.
-’Ring 0,’ December 18th, 2025
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On June 22, 2025, I posted an essay titled ‘Projection, Your Honor.’ In this piece, I used courtroom metaphor to build a series of cases where the behaviors of certain individuals diverged from the impressions they seemed to be trying to make. The conflict in the first case remains one of the sharpest even as it appears innocuous when viewed from the surface. I am including it in its original form, although I would write this differently now.
Statement of Record– Builder of the Fourth Wall
When I moved here a little over a year ago, I had followed someone high-profile in the local cycling community on Instagram. I had intended on reaching out directly to ride together later because we had a lot in common. When I got around to doing that, I saw I had been blocked. I had never had a single conversation or encounter with this person, so I was puzzled. I explained this result to a mutual friend who had encouraged reaching out, but was met with little comment.
Weird, but oh well.
Encounter #1– Weeks later, this person approached me at a race. They asked if I was Genna, and if I was racing that day. I told them I wasn’t- that I was opting to stay fresh for an ultra race the following weekend. They said “Oh, you’re doing that on those tires?”
Wait, what?
“Yeah,” I stated. “My frame doesn’t accommodate wider, unfortunately.” They responded by insisting that I should run wider, and that I could borrow their bike.
This is a wild course-correction from blocking me.
I thanked them, but declined. We parted ways and I said, “It’s nice to finally meet you.” They said, “It’s nice to meet you… finally.”
Nothing about that interaction was natural. That was uncomfortable.
Encounter #2– After the start of the race, I drove to the aid station I was working. My best friend was in town from out-of-state and hung out with me and one other volunteer for hours that afternoon. Eventually, this individual, our mutual friend, and another mutual friend all rolled into the aid station as a trio. The mutual friends stood at the table and talked to us, but this individual kept wide physical distance from me and didn’t make eye contact with me once.
Okay. Maybe they’re struggling today? But that would generally just look like weariness, not evasion.
My best friend, with very minimal context, saw exactly what I did.
Encounter #3– I didn’t see them again until the next race. We were both on the line this time, but racing different distances. My new boyfriend was standing next to me when this individual left their group to come over to us, and asked me if I was nervous. “Actually, yeah,” I said.
“Oh, there is no reason to be nervous,” they said.
The words were kind, if we are being completely objective. But the delivery was subtly condescending. My boyfriend saw it too. It was here that my thoughts and the feeling in my body eclipsed.
This person isn’t saying what they mean.
Encounter #4– Not long after the start of the race, I had found myself settling in solo for a really long day. This person came up from behind me, again alone, and asked “Are you watching your heart rate?”
By this point, I was no longer open to further interaction with this person. They kept approaching me in this interrogative way. No real warmth, just like they were keeping tabs on me and attempting to ascertain dominance in the most underhanded way possible. But all I said was, and I’m not paraphrasing- “I don’t need your advice. I know what I’m doing.” No inflection, no emotion, just dry. It was automatic. I wanted to turn this off without theatrics, because I didn’t like any of it.
Their jaw dropped. They fell back for a few minutes and I thought the interaction was done, but they came flying back past me, yelling “I wasn’t trying to give you advice, I was trying to be nice!”
Nothing about that felt nice.
There was also that delay. Not responding on-scene, instead dropping back to then come by me again, felt like when the GPS says “recalculating,” and has to pause to find a new route.
Our mutual friend was the race organizer. I later heard that this person went back to them crying, and expressing how mean I was.
Encounter #5– The next day, I was still feeling this behavior in my gut. Had it stopped after I told them “I don’t want your advice,” I would have left it alone. But the “I was trying to be nice,” spit like venom, was the incongruence between words and behavior that I had been feeling. As you can clearly tell, I am not a passive communicator. If there is a problem, and I feel it’s worth addressing, I go to its heart. I bring what’s uncomfortable into light. So, I sent them a stern but deathly accurate Facebook message (where I had not been blocked, yet) about how their approaches and use of language had made me incredibly uncomfortable. I twice referenced the blocking in those messages because it was too big of a paradox to write off.
I was promptly high-roaded. Their responses were brimming with “The world isn’t out to get you. I’m a great person. I even offered you my bike. We need to support each other and embrace our differences. You’re the problem, not me.”
But what did they not say? “I hate that this was misunderstood. Let’s talk about it.” There was no open door to real conversation here. There was no intent to understand. I did go in pointed, and I did so because I trusted my perception that this was not actually misunderstanding- it was design. Even with my edge, though, I asked the question “Can you at least understand why I took it that way?” A person who is interested in repairing after conflict is going to at least try to appeal to that question. Instead, I was met with blame. And the blocking? Completely ignored, both times I mentioned it.
The next day, our mutual friend (who had been a huge support to me while I navigated a lot of struggle, and had even shown me the skeletons in their closet) called me and asked “What’s up?”
“Not much, what about you?” I said.
“I’m done doing you favors. I saw your messages to them. I understand now why everyone thinks you’re a bitch,” they said, coldly. They didn’t even ask me to explain myself.
“Okay…” I said. I did not argue.
My boyfriend was beside me on the couch when I got that call. He heard it too, and while I was sitting in shock, he was furious that I wasn’t given an opportunity to tell them my side of the story. But I already knew it didn’t matter.
They didn’t care.
They chose allegiance and bias over “drama.” Because on a surface-level account, I had looked like the aggressor- that is the foundation that was already laid. This person had only ever spoken to me in isolation or in sight of my friends. And they validated that I was seeing it clearly because it was off for them too. The one encounter we had where both of our circles were present, this individual acted like I didn’t exist. Because they knew, too, that they would have had to change their tone.
I have not had interaction with this person since. I had to create all-new social media accounts recently because I got locked out of my old ones, and I noticed that they promptly blocked me on all three of those, too. They couldn’t just ignore me- they had to erase me. It still is all a game of optics- of yelling “kindness!” but whispering “I don’t want you here,” and expecting me not to respond. Because in the silence, they conceal.
They were trying to fly under the radar by employing calculated moves that would make me look like the “problem” if I called it out. I chose to anyway. They were playing social checkers, and I wasn’t playing at all.
Final observation: The mask slipped under questioning. Observe.
Since I wrote this, I have come to understand better that human behavior is often automatic when a stimulus interacts with something invisible in the psyche. Without conscious admittance, it is impossible to determine another person’s reasons for their responses. And depending on the level to which they have investigated themselves, sometimes even admittance isn’t the whole picture. I was incorrect to suggest the above behavior was calculated, methodical, or intentionally manipulative.
With that being said,
I responded calmly to the driver that seemed to be present across all of this individual’s approaches automatically, not the comments themselves. And when I looked back, and then wrote this passage, the unspoken assumption that best explained this person’s reaction was: I am the more knowledgeable and experienced party in this domain, and you’ve rejected that.
403 forbidden. I do not accept your position as above me.
The events that followed occurred after I had already decided that this was not a person I was compatible with socially. Yelling at me about how nice you are after I said “no” is decisive ground for me. That informed the aggressiveness of my messages to them the next day, which was accurate. That is rather easy to diffuse if the core problem can be addressed in earnest, and it was not.
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Over the course of the summer, he encouraged me to go to school, to enjoy this time of my life because I was “being taken care of.” I was told I was “brilliant.” I was invited over for dinner with his family and on bike rides. I was told I was an “investment,” and was gifted a new bike frame to, in his words, “get you on a bike that matches the kind of rider you are.”
I was “being reparented,” he said. A man who had a reputation for being a voice of the community, once platformed me next to him, and rooted for the underdogs of the sport, also knew how much weight those words carried to someone whose parents had historically been chronically untrustworthy at best, and outright manipulative on the regular.
-’Chiaroscuro,’ March 21st, 2026
A married man with daughters near my age, who was supporting me while my life was even more precarious than usual, stood on the above at the beginning. By the end, the pattern had come to include consistent comments about his sexuality, “permission to have a girlfriend,” not getting a return on his “investment,” emphasis on his own dissatisfaction and solitude, a palpable behavioral change after I had started dating someone, and recurring sensitivity to being perceived negatively even when that wasn’t being asserted. It all clicked simultaneously once support was withdrawn with verbiage that orbited his objectives exclusively. I left the house he had allowed me to stay in weeks early and sent a text that said, “I am not interested in any chat going forward.”
“Thanks,” he replied. At a bike race not long after, he approached me just as I was about to enter the course for a warmup and told me how much he appreciated me leaving the house in good condition, and how considerate he thought I was for that.
Why the hell wouldn’t I?
But also,
You know I don’t want to talk to you, and you’ve ignored that.
So the next day, March 19th, I got firmer.
“In case my prior text wasn’t clear for you, do not bother me again,” I texted.
“Thanks!” he replied.
In September, he was announcing at a bike race that I was participating in. Even while I was losing steam every lap, where the course rode within about 20-feet of the announcer’s tent, I remained aware of the voices and commentary from everyone outside of the tape.
And the ones that were absent.
The announcer generally reliably narrates how a race develops and names riders often as they come across the finish immediately next to the tent. The women’s race was remarkably quieter in general, and my name was skipped, every lap, for the whole hour. I was never called to the podium, either. I’m a public writer about my own life experience and that predicts some individuals appear within that work in unfavorable contexts. I’m more aware than anyone that I am easily disliked. Fine.
There was a time in my life where I would have marched right into that tent to point out the problem of that bleeding into a professional space. I know now how that decision would have easily made me the instigator even if I was responding to a preexisting behavior. My opinion that the non-announcing was a massive disservice to women’s racing at large, which is already regularly devalued against the men’s field’s sport-wide, could be confidently sidestepped by pointing at my aggression as the problem. That lesson was hard learned.
So I took my observations to a party with real power in this scenario and limited my address to the announcer to a single text sentence: “I want to make you aware that the difference between how you present the women’s races versus all other categories is noticed by your audience.”
“In case my prior text wasn’t clear for you, do not bother me again,” he replied.
Touché.
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“Be attentive to the repercussions that might cause for your future. The story you tell is from your perspective, and not deemed the whole truth,” is the response I received after sending my dad a heads up that this post, which I have been struggling with since February, was going to be made. I made it clear months ago that this was imminent.
Dear reader, I’ll leave the interpretation of that response up to you, but I must first point out that I have lived the repercussions already. That’s what this is about.
-’My Mother’s Shadow Sister,’ November 3rd, 2023
I was shaken as an infant and temporarily removed from my parents custody. My dad threw a coffee mug at my mom and narrowly missed her head. He broke a television and punched holes in doors and drywall. The house was riddled with trash. Soiled dishes left piled in the sink. Black mold was left to thrive in the bathroom. Trails cleared through hoarded stuff so the house remained passable while my dad flaunted the highly-skilled trim carpentry work he built into multi-million dollar homes. A sibling slept in a urine-soaked mattress. My mom was shopping, watching TV, or shut in her room. I lost count of how many times the police or the ambulance was in the driveway.
I was the eldest sibling and called CPS myself, twice. They provided counseling. I was considered the provocateur from all angles for refusing to accept it.
As an adult, I could have a relationship with my parents only if I didn’t push back. After publishing ‘My Mother’s Shadow Sister,’ which my dad supported in conversation beforehand, he became harder to reach. When I pointed this out, an argument ensued, and he blocked me.
He texted me over a year later with “I think there is a fault in understanding.”
I am pretty sure that my understanding is the only reason I wasn’t destroyed by you. You won’t look at this; I won’t look away.
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I have heard many individuals with histories of abuse say that the worst damage isn’t from the visible abuse itself; it’s the reflexive contortion that those responsible exhibit to avoid what their behavior says about them, and its persistence when the reorganism sees that too.
And what’s most devastating for me is that there are no words that make their landing page reachable, either.
