Behind The Spectacles: Superiority Complex

I once had the privilege, albeit unfortunate, of spending about 2 years of my life in close contact with a person who talks about herself and her awesometastic life all day long. (By the way, awesomtastic is not a real word. I heard Toke Makinwa say it on one of her Vlogs and I fell in love with it). Every general conversation had to find its way to being about her…her job, her husband, her sex life, her car, her dreams, her kid…she would go on and on with long speeches and the word ‘I’ would come up a gazillion times. It was rather exhausting and I was shocked, thrilled and amused to find out that other people, even those who I though worshiped the ground she walked on, felt the same exhaustion and slight resentment even. (what can I say, I am only human, and as a human, knowing that everyone in the room feels the same level of distaste for another person as you do is at least, amusing). She felt that her life, her story, her achievements where superior to all others and she made it a point to tell everyone about it. This phenomenon (which I think isn’t very rare) is a superiority complex, spiced with several table spoonfulls of conversational narcissism.

The life you live truly is the basis of your experiences and knowledge and goes a long way in defining the conversations you can have and stories you can tell. However, you need to know that you are not the centre of other people’s world and that most people really do not want to know what you had for breakfast or how good sex was last night or the fact that your child tied her shoe laces for the first time. 

As superior and perfect and awesometastic as you believe (or try to make people believe) your life is, please understand that consistently turning the spotlight on yourself in conversation is an indication of a deeper underlying psychological turmoil and is truly a façade for your feeling of insecurity, failure and dissatisfaction with your life. As if being a conversation narcissist in itself isn’t bad enough, this same phenomenon makes you boast, lie and talk down on people…needless to say, it makes you easily disliked. 

The lady I was telling you about is very skilled in her line of work, so lucky for her, as a result of this, she is ‘tolerated’ (I think being tolerated has to be the worst way to be regarded by people). She is even a person I would describe as ‘good’ but her need to upstage everyone else taints that.

Try bitting your lip when next you want to go into a long tale about you and your life and use that moment to think about whether or not this particular story of your life is relevant at the specific moment.