Guide to Figuring Out Everything That Is Wrong With You on Wikipedia

So slate.com has a piece on Narcissistic Personality Disorder this week, and reading it has thrown me down a wormhole of self-doubt. The good news is the fact that I can even feel self-doubt excludes me from the rolls of the clinically narcissistic. The bad news is the more links you follow on Wikipedia about personality disorder, the more likely you are to find out that you’re nothing but a diagnosable series of symptoms with very direct causes and very predictable effects. The whole rubric of your life and, indeed, all of human experience, is reductive to a linked series of community-edited theorems of varying credibility.

I hate Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, it turns out that I have qualities that could reasonably qualify me, on a bad day, for five out of a possible ten diagnosable personality disorders. Basically the ones where you don’t like or understand people or the bullshit rules they make and follow. I’m not too worried about myself falling prey to the disorders where you make too many rules and/or are afraid of everything all the time.

Mostly I’m worried that my whole life is based on one of these “fixed fantasies” that they’re talking about on Wikipedia, which is probably accurate. I don’t know. I mean, I put up a pretty strong front here, but who knows? I don’t really buy it. Plus, part of these personality disorders is you can’t qualify for them if it’s a result of being drunk, and I think that’s why I get drunk so often. I’d rather qualify for alcoholism if it means the fact that I got really shitfaced and molested some dude’s balls as a joke that one time is not anything to worry too much about. I don’t typically ballmolest sober. And I get more of a comedy kick out of it than a sexual kick anyway. I’m not to blame here. That much I’m certain of.

Oh shit.

I just slid back into Narcissism again. This thing is a real tightrope walk. Wikipedia won’t even let you be a little bit weird. I tried to look up “a little bit weird” in Wikipedia and nothing came up. Fuck you, Wikipedia. I’m just a little bit weird. I forgive myself for it, and I try to rein it in. I’m a normal redblooded American weird dude who is probably not even all that weird.

Also: who is Wikipedia to tell me I’m Narcissistic or Histrionic or anything else? Wikipedia is a bunch of people who get a kick out of writing down what they know into a viewable database and then obsessively policing that database. I hereby diagnose Wikipedia with Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, which Wikipedia, I assume, is correct in distinguishing from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is the one where you count everybody’s syllables or you have to touch things five times or you’re super afraid of germs and have to shower for 2 hours a day and scrub until you bleed because you “did it wrong” the first time.

Point is, Wikipedia itself is borderline batshit crazy, so I’m not going to rely on it for information as to whether or not I’m batshit crazy. I refuse to accept that. I’m not batshit crazy. I’m just regular crazy, hold the batshit.

I guess I could go on further refuting the Slate article by asserting that Narcissism is an appropriate response to the meteoric rise in our culture of the primacy of the individual spurred by exponential increases in the illusion of choice (the old “500 channels and nothing on” saw) and increasingly targeted demographic research which seeks to flatter every individual consumer as a master of their own specific subset of preferences. But that would be Narcissistic. Actually, that would be normal, because everybody’s a baby these days. This is just my blog.