Life with Narcissism

One day last semester, I was sitting in the back room at the University Writing Center, doing some homework while half listening to my coworkers' conversations. At one point, one of the girls announced, "Sorry if any of you have relatives who are cops, but..." and then launched into a tirade about how she doesn't like people who are allowed to do things that she can't, so she has a problem with the police anyway, and one pulled her over for speeding, and blah blah blah.

Yeah, it's one of these kind of
moments.

I'm still wondering now, as I did at the time, what exactly brought her to this point. It's possible that her parents did not encourage this attitude and she's gone her own way, of course. However, had I ever made such an observation as a teen (and I did, more than once), my parents' reaction would have been "Too bad, so sad" if they were in a good mood. If I caught them in a bad mood, it would have been more like a long lecture about how the world was not going to conform itself around my specifications (insert swear word here, depending on which parent I was talking to), the sooner that I resigned myself to that fact the better it would be for all concerned, and in the meantime I should probably go outdoors and make my complaints directly to the universe, because no one in my immediate vicinity wanted to hear them. 

So you might say that "why can't I do what ______ is doing?" is a question that is not generally in my repertoire, especially where law enforcement is concerned. At the time, I thought about saying, "Hey, don't break the law and you won't have that problem," but I'm pretty sure it would have been pearls before swine. Instead, I ignored it for as long as I could, but when someone else joined in and they got to the point of declaring all police everywhere to be arrogant fatherless men who fornicate with alarming frequency, I finally said, "All of my cousins are cops," which, if not exactly a rebuttal, did at least serve to stop the conversation before it went any further. And then they all found something else to complain about instead.

It's at moments like this that I tend to mutter, "And to think I worry about being a narcissist," to myself. Why, when there are examples of self-centredness all around me, should I bother to worry about myself? But I do, of course, in my keeping-my-side-of-the-street-clean kind of way. I just hope the next time I start to say something that dumb, someone interrupts me before I make a complete idiot of myself.

Writers all have personality disorders, right? It's not just me who thinks she might be on the border of requiring medication? Or, what do you do when you encounter obnoxious people?