I was good friends with a bloke in university, and it would take some years after we’d long lost touch to realise that he was a compulsive liar with some pretty deep set narcissism.

I really don’t love the word because I think it’s thrown around a lot. And also because I think we all have narcissistic tendencies, sometimes more overt that we even realise, and we’d do well to get honest about that instead of calling everyone else one.

But here I am anyway lol

I remember him workshopping a piece in our creative writing class, and it got ripped to bits because it was a short fiction about child abuse, but it was just utterly devoid of any complexity. It was so shallow and strange. I’m almost certain he wasn’t telling his life story although I know some will argue that trauma can breed a kind of detached story telling. It read like the lyrics of a death metal track. Just gratuitously grim for the sake of it. He listened to a lot that music.

That workshop probably should have been a sign.

But I’m reflecting on it now because I made a few close friends during that time who were frequently and flagrantly untruthful and destructively self absorbed.

(I don’t think self absorption is an issue - even healthy - but I do think it can become destructive i.e damagingly narcissistic)

And do you know what was funny?

So was I.

And more specifically, I wasn’t in the house. Just wasn’t there. I related with people who - albeit unconsciously - sensed that their nonsense could go unnoticed with me, because I was so outside of myself. Could barely see a car coming - inches from running me over - because I was so far away from myself most of the time.

(What's funny, is that I have the gift of sight.)

I came to uni at the height of the chronic disassociation that would lead to a break down at the end of it.

Unsurprisingly, post mental break, those friendships fell away, very quickly. Almost all in one go. It was like I’d come out of a really deep fog, one that I knew even then was eventually gonna kill me if I didn’t shift.

I’m pondering it because I’m pondering this way that we can carry the exact kind of velcro that hooks into other people’s.

Cultivating presence - the kind of presence that is so clear and quiet it transforms everything it touches - is how you become velcro-less. Because when you see that clearly, nothing gets past you, and deception knows when it won’t get away with it.

I chose not to see for a while because I didn’t have the emotional capacity or maturity to hold the truth. And when you see the truth, there are places where you are also gonna need to start telling it.

It’s funny that my core gift is sight and also it is brilliant. I had the exact initiation around it that I was supposed to have.