The Narcissist who saved himself, 2023
Behind the Beautiful Things
Autumn has settled over London, and golden leaves are beginning to carpet the pavements. I adore this time of year: the changing colours, the crisp air, nature in transition. Renewal that invites reflection, a reminder that change, however unsettling, can also be painfully beautiful.
I tend to share much of the beauty I see through images on Instagram. It’s curated. Perfectly kept. Palatable, even. Aspirational, as many would say. Aesthetic, as the prevailing buzzword suggests.
But beauty, however real, rarely tells the whole story.
I created this Substack to begin sharing the parts of my life I’ve historically confined to my journals. The thoughts I’ve written but never shared, the life behind the scenes, the experiences that aren’t particularly pretty. Behind the carefully framed images of a life, there is another life taking place, and sometimes it is the one that most urgently needs to be seen.
2026 has been, by far, the most challenging, self-loving, lucid and transparent year of my life. It was the year I began dismantling illusions and questioning how much of my existence had been spent accommodating expectations that were never truly my own.
It’s easy to describe that as a moment of clarity. Living through it is considerably less tidy.
Knowing Something Is Wrong
Although I keep referring to this year, a year is merely a measure of time. What I’m describing is the culmination of events that began around 2019, gradually crystallising my understanding of myself through societal expectations, professional conventions and intimate relationships.
What made this year particularly significant was the convergence. Questions about trust, fairness and whose account is given weight were present in both my personal and professional life. The circumstances were different, but I found myself returning to the same underlying concern: how do we preserve our judgment when our understanding of events is repeatedly challenged or discounted?
Gaslighting is part of what I have been trying to understand. I don’t use the word as a synonym for disagreement, criticism or every experience of unfairness. What concerns me is the repeated undermining of someone’s confidence in their own perception, and the effort involved in holding on to what they know.
Contrary to what some might imagine, my experience was not one of passively accepting another person’s version of reality until I forgot my own.
Quite the opposite. I challenged contradictions, questioned unfair characterisations and defended my intentions, my values and the choices I believed were mine to make. I knew when something felt wrong. What took longer was recognising the cumulative cost of constantly having to respond.
In my personal life, a conversation about responsibility could become a question of character. A disagreement about practical matters became an argument about my judgment. An attempt to establish a boundary required an explanation of why I was entitled to have it.
So I explained. I brought context, reasoning, evidence. I believed that establishing what was fair and true would eventually lead to understanding, because that is what I understood a difficult conversation to be for.
What I understood as standing up for myself had gradually become an endless obligation to defend myself. And there is a profound difference between the two.
The Life You Spend Defending
When we talk about gaslighting, we often focus on someone gradually losing confidence in their own reality. But what happens when you recognise the contradictions, challenge the accusations and refuse to surrender your understanding of events?
What happens when you keep doing this, and the pressure doesn’t stop?
The very qualities that compelled me to resist could also keep me engaged in the exhausting process of trying to resolve it. I could recognise an unfair characterisation without recognising how much attention I was devoting to answering it.
Because resistance takes energy. You spend it explaining why your intentions were reasonable, why your contributions mattered, why your needs deserved consideration. Then you spend more revisiting the conversation, wondering how something apparently straightforward became so complicated.
Meanwhile, the rest of life continues asking things of you. Work, motherhood, friendships, the ideas you want to develop, the person you are still becoming.
When difficult dynamics arise in more than one sphere, that effort can accumulate. There is less space between one demand for explanation and the next. You begin to notice how much time is being allocated to defending what has already happened, rather than deciding what you want to happen next.
That was the unfairness I struggled to articulate. The effort itself was taking up space that should also have belonged to curiosity, enjoyment, ambition and growth.
The Making of a Palatable Human Being
Looking back, I wonder how early I became accustomed to this kind of effort.
I was around seven when I began learning how to navigate educational environments that offered little support for my needs as a neurodivergent child. The expectation was largely that the child should adapt to the system, rather than the system making room for the child.
I grew up in a relatively safe and loving family. I had freedom to experiment, formulate my own ideas, wear what I wanted and explore who I wished to become. Yet beyond that environment, I was learning that being myself often required explanation, negotiation and justification.
You learn to explain yourself before you learn that an explanation shouldn’t always be necessary.
How often did I carry that lesson into adulthood? How many times did I interpret someone’s difficulty accommodating difference as a problem I was personally responsible for resolving?
For me, the instinct was to keep searching for the right words. If I could communicate more clearly, demonstrate enough patience or explain the connection they were missing, surely we would get somewhere.
There is a difference between being willing to learn from criticism and being expected to justify the foundations of your identity. Yet when you have spent years translating yourself into something more readily understood, that distinction can become difficult to recognise.
These questions extend beyond individual relationships. They concern what we make room for in our schools, workplaces and families, and how often acceptance depends on becoming sufficiently convenient.
Who Gets to Define What Happened?
After a decade working in corporate financial services, I find myself thinking about the relationship between authority and credibility. Who gets heard? Whose interpretation becomes the starting point? How much room remains for an account that complicates the accepted one?
Organisations need judgment, diplomacy and cooperation. Those things matter. So does the ability to question whether an explanation is supported by what actually happened.
A polished presentation is not evidence of an accurate account. Seniority does not settle a factual disagreement. Equally, expressing concern with emotion does not, by itself, make the concern less valid.
Yet appearances can influence whose account feels credible before its substance has been examined.
We speak about authenticity, transparency, psychological safety and inclusive leadership. The questions that interest me are what those commitments mean in practice. Can someone disagree without their disagreement becoming a judgment about their character? Can a concern be examined without the person raising it becoming the entire subject of the conversation?
What is inclusion if difference is welcomed only after it has been made sufficiently palatable?
Professional accountability is necessary. But accountability also requires accuracy, a willingness to consider context and the possibility of revising an initial interpretation. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to distinguish cooperation from conformity.
I am not suggesting that every disputed account is gaslighting, or that personal relationships and institutions operate in identical ways. The connection I am exploring is the burden of repeatedly having to establish that your perspective deserves a fair hearing.
This year made that question impossible for me to confine to one part of my life.
For women, it also intersects with familiar expectations: capable without making others uncomfortable, independent but accommodating, resilient but endlessly available. And when we become mothers, an entirely new catalogue presents itself.
The Motherhood Downgrade
When I became a mother, I found myself increasingly confronted by expectations that required a diminished version of who I was. Almost as though motherhood arrived with an unspoken instruction: you have a family now. You need to slow down. You cannot keep expanding. You cannot upgrade. You need to downgrade.
You are no longer entitled to the premium version of yourself. You must become the free version. Fewer features, limited access to your own ambitions, but somehow still expected to run everything in the background.
It’s an absurd metaphor, but it captures something familiar about the expectations placed upon women. We are expected to remain capable and productive while making our aspirations sufficiently convenient for everyone else.
I have been a working mother since my son was born. I continued developing my career, contributing financially, caring for our child, organising everyday life and supporting my partner’s professional ambitions. I believed that this was what building a life together meant.
I didn’t expect every responsibility to be distributed equally at every moment. There would be periods when one person carried more and periods when the other needed greater support. That, to me, was the essence of sharing a life.
Yet I did not feel that the support I understood as reciprocal was equally available when I needed it. I found myself asking a question I had never imagined would become so difficult: what happens when it’s my turn?
Where was the security we were supposedly building? Could the arrangement change when my needs changed, or was my contribution becoming a fixed expectation?
Care requires an interest in what matters to the other person. It requires listening, curiosity and a willingness to recognise that another human being may experience the world differently from you.
I spent years trying to articulate this. The more I explained, the more explanations seemed to be required, until I realised I was trying to convince someone that my needs deserved consideration at all.
We praise women’s resilience without always asking why so much resilience was necessary. We celebrate independence while taking for granted the labour through which women support everyone around them.
When the Pattern Becomes Clear
One of the hardest recognitions this year was that I could understand individual incidents and still underestimate the pattern they formed.
I could answer a particular accusation, explain a particular decision or identify a particular contradiction. What I hadn’t fully considered was how ordinary the obligation to do so had become.
Looking back, I began asking different questions. How much time was I spending on these exchanges? What changed as a result of them? Was there room for my explanations to be received, or did each one simply produce another demand?
This required me to reconsider what I meant by perseverance. I had associated it with integrity: staying engaged, being fair, allowing for misunderstanding, believing that another conversation could help.
Those qualities still matter to me. But effort cannot supply reciprocity on behalf of two people. Nor can a more detailed explanation, by itself, create a willingness to consider it.
There was grief in recognising that. The grief of looking back at decisions made in good faith and questioning what all that effort had sustained. Of finding that expectations I had treated as shared were not as secure as I had believed.
Disillusionment changes the meaning of things. Events that seemed disconnected begin to form patterns, and the future you imagined has to be reconsidered.
But it can also restore clarity. I began to understand that I did not need every disagreement to be resolved before I could make decisions about the life I wanted to build.
Reclaiming Where Your Energy Goes
For someone who values fairness, intellectual honesty and reason, leaving an inaccurate account unchallenged can feel almost unbearable. My instinct has always been to explain, bring evidence and demonstrate that there is another way to understand what happened.
There are circumstances in which establishing the facts remains necessary. Protecting our rights and seeking accountability can require precisely that work.
The distinction I am learning concerns where that work belongs, and how much of my everyday existence I give to repetitive exchanges that lead nowhere. Pursuing a matter through the appropriate process does not require rehearsing it in every conversation or making it the centre of every day.
In my personal life, that has meant questioning the assumption that someone else must agree with my understanding before I am entitled to act on it.
I can remain open to criticism without treating every characterisation as something I must disprove. I can recognise another person’s limitations without allowing those limitations to determine the boundaries of my own existence.
This year, I began making changes from that understanding. There were difficult decisions, practical consequences and uncertainties. Clarity did not make those things disappear.
But it gave me a different place from which to make them.
I still believe in compassion, reconciliation where possible and the capacity human beings possess to change. I no longer believe those things should require us to abandon ourselves.
If You’re Still in the Earlier Chapters
Perhaps you recognise yourself somewhere before that point. Still explaining, still defending, still hoping the next conversation will finally make a difference.
I understand why. I spent years there.
Be attentive to what those exchanges require of you and what they leave available for the rest of your life. Notice when a practical concern repeatedly becomes a debate about your character, when your boundaries require extraordinary justification, or when accountability seems to travel in only one direction.
The setting matters. A difficult conversation, a workplace disagreement and an abusive relationship are not interchangeable. But you can take a recurring pattern seriously while you are still finding the language to describe it.
You do not have to settle every question about someone else’s intentions before recognising the effect an interaction is having on you.
Recognising a pattern and being able to change your circumstances are different stages. Finding support, understanding your options and gathering the resources to move safely can take time. That is part of the process too.
What I hope to offer here is the possibility that your energy can begin belonging to you again. To your child, your friendships, your work, your curiosity. To the things you want to build, as well as the things you need to address.
Lots of love,
M