Blogging – Narcissist Style

I write a lot of posts… in my head while I’m doing something else, usually something which doesn’t require much thought, like washing the dishes.

Sometimes the thing which I’m doing inspires the head post because I notice something about it which makes me go hmmm… (Arsenio)

Normally most of the posts which I write in my head don’t make it to cyber page, they get forgotten, deleted, or dismissed as – you definitely can’t write that.

Some do make it to the cyber page, but don’t make it beyond draft form.

If I get bored of what I’m writing about, then it ends up in trash.

If I get interrupted and it’s not one of those interruptions which ties in with my post – which happens a lot so I love interruptions they’re great for added inspiration, and I have to leave the post in draft for a period of time, long enough for me to lose the flow, then that’s that.

If I get to the end of it… and realise the post is “private” as in just something I needed to say to myself which isn’t for anyone else, then poof it goes as though it never existed.

I don’t leave things hanging round – there is nothing except what I’m writing here and now in my draft folder.

I was just washing the dishes and in my head I started writing a post about blogging – narcissist style.

Several random things inspired it, and it reminded me of other things, some of which I’ve said before – I’m doing a lot of going over old ground lately, it is partly unintentional and partly intentional because I noticed I was doing it unintentionally so I thought I’d join in.

One of the random things was watching CBGB a few nights ago and thinking – “Look how Hollywood prettified Punk for the Instagram generation.” – and yes, I agree that’s a grumpy old person thought which is unfair. How about we fair it up with this thought – “The prettification was for the older generation who view the past through the rose-coloured glasses of nostalgia, erasing the ugly to make it all prettier than now which makes now appear uglier and that makes them think grumpy old people things.“

Another random was when, last night, I watched – Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten – which had a narcissistic thread running through it (most stories about fame have a narcissistic element in them, it’s part of the process) that was poignant.

Reinventions of self. Abandonment issues. Viewing everything as a competition, a fight. Battles with authority figures. People/relationships discarded along the road of life while in pursuit of a desired goal. Achieving a long desired goal and finding that it isn’t what you thought it would be. It’s empty at the top. People don’t see you as you, you’re a symbol for them. People use you, your creations in ways which make you feel as though you sold your soul… when did that happen… how do you get it back?

The story at the end about “Rock the Casbah”:

The song was chosen by Armed Forces Radio to be the first song broadcast on the service covering the area during Operation Desert Storm. In one of the campfire scenes late in the 2007 documentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, a Granada friend states that Strummer wept when he heard that the phrase “Rock the Casbah” was written on an American bomb that was to be detonated on Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War.

via Wiki’s Rock the Casbah entry

He was and is a fascinating man and life story in a man.

That film is a good one to see if you’re a blogger… once again while watching something which has nothing to do with blogging, I felt as though I was being given a masterclass from a master on how to express myself on my blog.

Yes, I sort of made the whole film all about me…

I wrote a sticky note to self about it which simply says – PUNK stay true to your message – I know what I mean by that, no idea what you’ll make of it.

Your message is you.

Another random thing was a post I read yesterday while browsing “Recommended Posts” on WordPress. It’s connected to – the message is you.

Does Information Come from a Mind? – The Two Brothers Weblog

Joe Strummer was his message. His creations, his songs, lyrics, were ripped out of him, out of his life like a page and shared with others – that was something he said or someone else said in the film about the creative process, about those songs which are infused with emotion, raw feeling, where you know the person who wrote it felt it, lived it.

Joe Strummer had Moon in Virgo and Mars in Scorpio like I do – I looked up his chart after my partner said there was something about him as a person which was a bit like me. The burning bridges (Mars) thing and the never quite knowing what is going on inside, in feeling (Moon), thing he did which I also do, have done – don’t burn bridges the way I used to though and I am more forthcoming about my feelings, blogging has helped with that but I’m not sure if it’s blogging or the way I perceive blogging and do it.

One of the reasons I might delete a post in draft is when I think it’s too thinky and there’s no feely to it – in other words it’s intellectual, it’s the mind alone floating around all pompous and full of itself, it’s a balloon full of hot air with nothing to tie it to the ground, to ground it. There’s no emotional connection, no heart to it, no soul, no rawness, passion, real deep grunt, groan, cry of freedom at expressing what aches, burns, courses through veins.

It’s empty words… they may sound good, look good, make you look good as you put yourself up on a pedestal and look down on others from your high tower… but that’s really boring.

I read a post recently… no link because I’m about to be unflattering about it, be a bitch… wherein the author pontificated. Intellect full of itself.

They started off by criticising others and going into detail of great length about what was wrong with everyone else, everyone else was doing it wrong it and this was upsetting to them because they had to force themselves to wade through all the wrong which others were doing. No they didn’t, they could have gone another way, avoided the mess of others, but that’s by-the-by. Then we finally got to where they really wanted to be – they did it all right, they were unsurpassed in their righteous rightness, they’d done it all and had leveled up to deity, compared to them everyone else was weak and meaningless, they were great and grand.

Their writing style reminded me of the speech patterns of narcissists, and of a post I came across several years ago when I was writing and reading a lot about narcissists.

Online Narcissism: Writers with NPD by Dr. Thomas Swan

The following paragraph and lists are from Dr. Thomas Swan’s brilliant post.

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“The clearest indication that someone has NPD is the presence of vainglorious, self-indulgent ramblings in their profile. However, there are other more subtle clues, such as:

• An excessively long profile, suggesting the writer believes he/she is important enough to hold someone’s attention and interest for an extended period of time.
• Use of adjectives such as inspirational or profound to describe one’s own work.
• Description of one’s readers as having excellent taste.
• Boastful accounts of unnecessary facts such as the number of countries one’s followers come from.
• The emboldening of boastful information to emphasize its importance.
• The use of astrology, past-life regression, or a spiritual experience to produce a delusion of grandeur regarding one’s potential or certain superiority.
• A description of what the writer doesn’t like about other people, suggesting a projection of the writer’s own negative traits onto others.
• A description of one’s work as beyond the comprehension of fools or inferiors.
• The grammatically incorrect capitalization of words to emphasize them. Most of the words chosen for capitalization will be flattering. Ironically, many readers will frown upon the poor use of grammar, but these individuals are outside of the narcissist’s target audience as they cannot supply what the narcissist needs (praise).
• Repeated claims of uniqueness demonstrating absurd and deluded levels of perceived superiority.
• Reference to oneself as being alone or stranded in one’s own brilliance.
• Often demonstrates poor spelling and grammar, but is oblivious due to an unwillingness to believe in personal faults.
• If they have a qualification, they will typically state it more than once, and will misrepresent it in flattering ways, e.g. describing an economics degree as a science degree.
• Will often end the profile with a lengthy copyright notice and/or disclaimer. While most people using these notices are not narcissists, an NPD sufferer will always have one because they believe their perfect work is at considerable risk of theft.
• Will use overly legal language in the notice and disclaimer. This warns potential thieves not to mess with the writer, and satisfies the writer’s belief in being professional and capable of intimidation.
• Will take self-publishing to self-indulgent extremes. They often have over-priced vanity projects on Amazon, as well as numerous blogs.

These aspects will also appear in the narcissists work:

• The placement of the writer’s own quotes onto images to `immortalize’ them.
• The lack of linking to or quoting other people; even famous writers whose words could add a worthy perspective on the subject.

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Years ago, around the time when I first came across Dr. Thomas Swan’s post, there was a short narrative label being applied to a group of people – All bloggers are Narcissists.

One blogger had fun with it, and did a hilarious post, saying something along the lines of – Of course we are, we have to be to blog.

That was back in the day when a typical blog was more like an online journal, a log where people shared their thoughts, feelings, memories, daily musings and happenings, life stories… usually without pictures unless they shared their own photos or artwork.

I was thinking about that last night because I read a post on an astrology blog, which has been around since the early days of blogging when the whole process was much harder to do and you really had to want to do it, wherein the blogger compared and contrasted past blogging with how she views blogging today.

First, “blogging”, became facebook, then twitter and now Instagram. I don’t have anything against photography. But I do see a lot of people who essentially let their breasts, their butt or their biceps do most of their talking. It’s astonishing, really. Page and pages of poses and poses and poses and more poses. There’s no reading involved.
I’ve noticed, more often that not, when I click to read an “article”, the message is very simple. Further, the uncomplicated information is repeated in the article in a way that’s blatant. Typically, the info-byte is offered in the first paragraph, repeated in the second and gone over a third time in third or fourth paragraph, if these exist.
As a result, it’s as if you’ve read more than is actually there!
If you do this all day, you’re going to become stupid. It’s sort of like gambling in Vegas, where the odds favor the house

excerpt from Who Is Brainwashed & “Functionally Illiterate”? by Elsa

Elsa is one of my favourite bloggers, sometimes what she says bugs me but it’s the kind of bugging which helps you to think and figure stuff out. Inspirational bugging!

She has a Mars/Mercury aspect, so do I = it can make your communication (Mercury) rather aggressive (Mars), it can be blunt and hit you like a blunt object. It also makes the owner of the aspect argue with themselves, debate, and be bold (Mars) enough to share what they’re thinking (Mercury), even if it bugs those who read/hear it.

The message is you as you are.

I don’t totally agree with what she said in her post… not now anyway, I think blogging is returning to a new version of how it used to be. But I could just be seeing what I want to see… which is what we all do really, including narcissists.

What also caught my eye was a comment on her post – someone said they were getting increasingly frustrated in their search for World News because most news sites have turned tabloid.

I’ve bitched about the BBC news website being too tabloid, they use clickbait headlines which make me not click on them. Most of the articles have a lot of words which tell you absolutely nothing about the news story they’re supposedly covering.

The other day I read a News item on the BBC about the Paris Police Station stabbing, and it was so informative and well written, old school journalism, that I was surprised. I shouldn’t be surprised… it should be the norm.

But I do also agree with Elsa about blogging going through an other social media platforms phase.

I think a lot of people who used to post on Facebook migrated to WordPress when they became disappointed in FB after all the security issues and other stuff happened, and they’re simply doing here what they did there which has created – blogging social media style. And I think a lot of old style blogging bloggers went elsewhere, like Medium.

Shifts… shifting…

Earlier today I read a post which touched upon the subject of bloggers who blog about blogging…

Blog posts about blogging are, for the most part, boring to anyone who isn’t a blogger. I never read them when I wasn’t a blogger and I read a lot of blog posts in those days too. I loved blogs, but didn’t care about How-to-blog because I didn’t.

But for a blogger, especially a new blogger, they can be very interesting.

Blogging is as easy as it looks and is also not as easy as it looks.

When I started blogging, I simply signed up and did it – that was on tumblr. I learned as I did it, and looked things up when I didn’t know what it was.

WTF is a tag? Oh, okay… I’ll plop some of those on. Oh wow, they work… shit people are now reading my posts! PANIC… no, don’t panic, yes panic, I’ve just been writing whatever I wanted to but maybe I should be writing something people want to read!?! How do I do that????

This is where you end up searching for more in depth blogging advice and may end up following a blogging guru’s advice.

Most blogging gurus give good advice – it’s usually the same advice which all blogging gurus give because it’s good advice and it’s all you need.

However even good advice can go wrong for you once it gets in your head and your mind reorganises it (Bill Burr).

My mind turned a lot of blogging guru advice into the sort of advice which a narcissist might give:

If you want people to “Like” your posts just “Like” their posts – these are “Like” biscuits to train your people-dogs. You don’t have to read the posts, that’s a lot of hard ugh work, a chore, besides it’s not like they’re saying anything interesting only you’re doing that, just “Like” them, they don’t care they just want to collect “Likes” on their posts like you do. Of course they’ll read your posts when they “Like” them because they’re stupid and you’re not and what you’re writing is the best thing that’s ever been written.

That one is inspired by the way narcissists study other people to manipulate them better. They don’t really understand people, such as the real human reasons why people really like other people, but they want to be liked so they try to find the perfect formula. Narcissists love those psychological How-To’s which have done all the work for them and simply give them the results – 5 easy ways to get people like you and be a social winner! In other words what they want to know is – How To Win Friends And Influence People.

The biscuits bit and training people like dogs came from an old film I saw decades ago which was about wives training their husbands to be good husbands – I think Stephanie Powers was in it when very young, she was the “dangerous” woman. Narcissists do treat people like “pets” sometimes. Good doggie, bad doggie, into the doghouse doggie!

If you want to collect lots of followers just follow lots of bloggers and “Like” their posts, leave flattering comments such as “Great post!”, “I love what you wrote!”, “You’re an amazing writer!” – just like the spam comments written by bots (old style spam bots, the new ones have taken up negging). Don’t worry unlike Twitter the blogging platforms don’t reveal how many people you are following only how many are following you so you don’t have to sneakily unfollow people after your follow of them got them to follow you.

This one is inspired by the tendency of narcissists to collect people like objects to boost their status, they like having “harems”, that’s how they get narcissistic fuel supply.

The insincere flattery, superficial super friendliness, the liberal use of compliments (which often are barbed), the “love bombing”, all of which narcissists use to get people to join their “harem”.

Plus something which pissed most Twitter users off when I had a Twitter – which is a very narcissistic thing to do – narcissistic Twitter users want to have billions of followers but only want to be seen as following about 10 people all of whom are “high profile” and “elite”, in other words who and what the narcissist wants to be.

If you’re having difficulty coming up with ideas for posts and need inspiration just visit the blogs of others – and copy what they’re doing if it’s popular. Be careful about copy/pasting as you might get caught and accused of plagiarism, but if you’re on a different platform and the idiot who wrote the popular post has an open copyright, doesn’t use an app to check the internet for plagiarism because they’re foolishly not paranoid and stupidly trust people not to do that, then give it a go.

The last one was partly inspired by someone doing just that to someone else and getting called out on it when I was a newbie blogger on WordPress, as well as severeal bloggers who’ve shared their stories of being copied and plagiarised, and having that happen to me too.

And a search term I spotted in a couple of weeks ago:

“is stealing & copying other peoples others ideas the same as stealing their energy”

It’s an interesting question, intriguing spin, and I considered doing a post about it… I wonder what Joe Strummer would say in reply to that.

In the film they used a lot of recordings of his voice in interviews, talking about how he created, and… he and others in The Clash spoke about energy.

They said that when they were starting out they fed off the energy of the audience, who was feeding off the energy of their music and performance.

The more famous they became, the bigger the venue and stages, the further away they got from their audience, and the less energy they got in return from their performances until they all felt emptied out, drained, exhausted by fame, popularity, being loved by many millions of people.

Which reminds me of something I saw on another blogger’s post which I thought was brilliant and considered copying.

The blogger is Goldie from The Daily Flabbergast – pick any post, click on it, look at what they say at the bottom about “Like”, Comment, Follow, etc.

Am I going to copy them and what they did?

No… I like my Leave A Reply – it’s the default comment blurb you get when you create a WP blog. Lots of bloggers change it to something friendlier, more personal to them. Some put commenting etiquette guidelines. I prefer to just leave you to figure stuff out for yourself, including whether I’m friendly or not and how to behave in the comments.

The message is you.

A lot of other bands, as well as other artists in other fields, were inspired by The Clash. The members of The Clash were inspired by other bands and artists.

Being inspired by someone else’s work, their ideas is great, it’s normal and natural, and part of a message we all pass along to and through each other.

If you like someone’s idea, don’t “steal or copy” it like a sneak thief, you’ll be doing yourself more damage than you know even if it brings you lots of “Likes”, popularity and success.

Because you’ll always know that you “stole and copied” it – it’ll eat you up from the inside out, even if you’re certain you can get away with it. All that “Like”, popularity and success will never feel like it’s truly yours, you earned it, deserve it… you’ll end up suffering from imposter syndrome, feeling like a fraud, and having to keep stealing and copying because you don’t believe you can do things without the trick which worked for you.

It didn’t come from you, you’re not the source of it… you’re empty inside, you have to use others as your source. Welcome to Narcissist!

The thing is you have an uniquely individual message to add to that idea which you noticed and are tempted to steal or copy – you can improve on it.

Give credit where credit is due and add your particular you-ness to it. Only you can do that!

Here’s a funny twist though, Jim Jarmusch was interviewed in the Joe Strummer film because they were friends and worked together… and there’s a quote of his which I’ve seen regularly online which I both hate and like:

Is he really saying steal it, as in sneak-thief take someone else’s idea and just copy it, copy them and their work, without improving on it, transforming it, adding your vision to it, infusing it with your own heart and soul?

Or is he saying be inspired by everything, get the message everything is and has, and let that inspiration message flow through and out of you – thus it becomes your original and authentic work, your message of you?

And is he someone who never gives credit where credit is due? But in the Strummer film he was doing exactly that!