“CALL ME stubborn, call me dogmatic, or whatever you prefer, but up until the last moment, I’ll be sticking to my guns. And when the time comes I am proven wrong, then admitting it by just uttering the magic words ‘I’m sorry’ will have me covered. No harm done, to me that is.”
Not till just recently did I realize, personality types such as this could also fall under the category of a narcissist. Incidentally, I saw that from watching an algorithm-full of IG videos on the subject. We have to be thankful, there’s something new to be learned every day. Thankful yes, despite contentions by some more knowledgeable people that only 4 out of 10 of whatever we read on the internet are true these days.
So, where are all these leading to? Well, it was a week ago I met with some former office workers and we chatted about how things were in their part of the universe. (the last time I worked in an office was in the year 2000) During their cha-time (I only drink coffee), a few whom I have known since the 80s (TMI), had brought up the case of one overly dominant boss who, in today’s speak, liked to gaslight us a lot; always drumming about how the staff performance was always ‘below par’. In those days, nobody took him seriously, and some even said they even felt for him, a pathetic figure. True enough, when his fall from grace came, the lamentation “I am sorry” sounded oddly similar to the monotonic expression uttered by one lady president many years ago. It was pathetic yes, but at the same time funny. Shades of schadenfreude.
From there, it wasn’t difficult to round up every colorful personality we encountered who shared the same talent, and we laughed about it all as we went. All for the fun of it, we said, just a part of reminiscing, we said. And in that instant, I realized one thing. Why was it that, whenever people talked about their past villains, these people were now transformed into laughable objects, not any more threatening or dominant as they had been in the past… I thought, perhaps there must be a sigh of relief embedded in there somewhere. I likewise remembered a phrase, “We’ll laugh about it in the morning”, and that pretty much summed up our attitude that afternoon.
Writing about all that has happened afterward, I often wonder why there always has to be a certain amount of sobriety that comes along with it. Surely, is there an unwritten rule somewhere, that as with all reunions, if there’s a symbolic deck of cards intended for play and merriment, must there also be equal space on the table for an equivalent pile of victim cards, for fear the assembly becomes imbalanced.? Is there a Yin and Yang for everything then?
In the end, we’ve to accept our villains are people too and they’re heroes even to those who love them. Quite sadly, it may be a bitter pill to swallow, but the truth is that everyone’s a villain in someone else’s movie. Like the parable where children stone the frogs, we may have gleefully seized the high ground, but in a parallel universe, we’re undramatically the “it” in the game, narcissists all that we are.
