- I always say I'm not my diagnosis.
I'm more than that.
But at the same time it pervades everything I do.
My name's Tessa.
I'm 24 years old,
and I live with narcissistic personality disorder.
[gentle music]
From getting ready in the morning, to my community,
self care, exercise, my music, and relationships,
narcissistic personality disorder impacts
every aspect of my life.
NPD is a mental health condition
in which people can have an inflated sense
of their own importance,
a deep need for excessive attention and admiration,
trouble with relationships and a lack of empathy for others.
My feelings of emptiness and my perfectionism
impacts my morning ritual of getting ready.
I'm in the mirror every day doing my makeup first thing.
Practice facial expressions.
I practice body movements and stuff
'cause I just wanna come across exactly how I want.
I would have certain celebrities that I would idolize
and I would study them.
Okay, this person seems like the definition of perfection.
So since I wanna be perfect, I'm gonna be like them.
That really led me away from authenticity
to the point where I feel like I have to do it
in order to feel comfortable with myself
'cause I don't know what would happen
if I was just naturally existing.
I'm the type of narcissist that really wants
and needs the spotlight so badly,
but every time I get it, I find myself freezing up
due to past traumas of humiliation.
I can simultaneously feel utterly superior to others,
yet haunted by feelings of being an empty fraud.
I'll do positive affirmations in the mirror a lot
to boost myself,
go over compliments that people have recently given me
and just be like, "You're the best. [laughs]
You've got this, girl."
And [laughs] I really go into it,
and it makes me feel really good.
Self care is beyond important for me to regulate my symptoms
and to feel at my best and my most capable.
The symptoms that relate specifically
to my NPD are fragmentation of myself.
I feel like a million different pieces
that's struggling to be a whole person.
I deal with feeling like a fraud a lot, like an empty shell.
Anxiety and depression are connected.
Boredom is a massive one.
I really struggle to, [sighs] God,
be interested in anything outside of myself.
It's like this pathological self focus
where even if I wanted to be interested, I can't.
So I do mindfulness meditation to help with my symptoms.
I'll just close my eyes
and name five things I can hear,
five things I can feel, smell or sense,
and it gets me out of my body
and just back into the environment, which is super helpful.
Finding my community of others with NPD has helped
every single symptom I have.
So I got into social media post-diagnosis,
and I was looking for a community to call home
because I just felt really alone.
I realized that there was this massive Cluster B community
on there with people with BPD and HPD and ASPD,
which is antisocial personality disorder.
They were all on there helping each other figure life out,
and I didn't expect such a warm welcome.
It was just life changing, honestly.
It felt like I had found my people for the first time.
One of my favorite things
about the community is I met this amazing person
who also has NPD, The Nameless Narcissist.
It's the first time
in either of our lives we have felt less alone,
and NPD is honestly a very lonely diagnosis
because that changes the way you relate to people
and see people,
and with him it just feels so natural.
It's so meaningful to have that for the first time.
[phone ringing]
- Hey. - Hey man, what's up?
Can you hear me?
- I think so.
Well, kind of, close enough.
- How's it going?
People always see us
as everyone with our diagnosis is the same, right?
It's not that we don't care deep down.
It's just we have a different way of showing emotions.
And personally when I was growing up,
it was like if I showed emotions,
I would know that it didn't matter.
- For me it was very similar of, oh,
I have to be independent.
I have to- - [Tessa] Yeah.
- I can't show any of this stuff.
And people think that they can take advantage of me.
- I hope that people can see our videos
and think to themselves,
especially if they're a psychologist,
maybe they'll learn something from it somehow
to make new methods of helping people feel better.
- My main goal is just to show that we're people.
You know what I mean?
And other cluster B's,
somewhere that they can be like, "Oh my gosh, I relate.
I don't feel so alone."
- It's like a safe space, yeah.
To be honest, part of the reason
that I'm doing this stuff is for...
I've always wanted to be famous.
There's the part where you feel like you've been growing up,
and you're not noticed.
I mean, that's what it was for me.
I really, really wanted to make up
for everything I didn't have,
but I want to help other narcissists get into therapy
and tell them that I see them.
It's the closest thing I have to empathizing.
- First of all, it's so on the nose that,
by being narcissist for getting famous,
which I think is hilarious.
Yeah, when I started my channel,
it was just 'cause I needed somewhere to vent
and get attention effectively.
- Yeah, same. [laughs]
- It would be like somebody's like, "Oh, thank God.
You make me feel less alone,"
or, 'Oh my god,
you're making me understand my mother so much better,"
and stuff like that.
- Yeah, and those things started meaning stuff to me.
I love this community, man.
This community saved my life.
- It was life changing, honestly,
knowing that there's other people out there
that struggle with the same stuff.
- I get people in my DMs all the time saying that,
like, "Oh, you've changed my entire perspective."
It's just so awesome.
♪ For you ♪
♪ In the match for me and my ♪
♪ Oh ♪
- [Tessa] Making music helps me the most
with my emotional dysregulation
and expressing myself when I find it very hard
to usually open up to others.
When I was 13 I had GarageBand,
and I was tinkering with it,
just making random sounds.
And I already had such a love
for the freedom of being able to express myself
through that medium and really put emotion into something.
Music allows me to just let that out,
feel free to express my thoughts and my feelings
without having to really be able to tell what they are.
It's just this pure raw expression of sound and myself.
My music is interesting.
I'll just say that. [laughs]
It's like pop, but kind of like EDM,
but kind of alternative all mixed together.
I don't try to categorize it.
♪ It's not the look for you ♪
♪ And I'm sorry ♪
- [Tessa] For me it's about just pouring forth
whatever is locked away inside me.
And sometimes I'll have a really hard day,
and suddenly I feel a song ready to burst outta me
and I'll rush to my room and just pour out everything.
I don't even know what I'm feeling.
I don't even know what it is,
but it just goes directly into my music.
I always say I'm not my diagnosis.
I'm more than that,
but at the same time it pervades everything I do.
So when I write my music, that element comes out in it.
When I exercise, it relieves so much
of my comorbid anxiety and depression.
Being in the water really feels grounded and centered
in that I can do anything I want with my day,
and it really helps me feel like my best self
and that I'm not weighed down
by all these unprocessed emotions.
There's a lot of assumption
that people with my diagnosis really love themselves,
but for me it feels like I do love myself,
but I also don't take care of myself the way I should.
I really want to get to the point
where I feel even more at home in my body.
I'm still in recovery.
Before I was diagnosed, I barely practiced self care,
and I didn't do anything that my body needed.
If I don't swim, I just feel so bad in my body,
and I can't rest.
But when I do it's like a whole new leaf every day.
It just feels so good.
[Tessa laughs]
- No, stop it.
I feel exposed.
Something about hiding my eyes feels safer to me sometimes
'cause no one can see in there.
No one can see my fragmented-
- What you're thinking.
- Yeah, no one can see what I'm thinking.
- [Tessa] My relationships are often negatively affected
by my grandiosity, my cognitive distortions,
and my depression.
But I've found that
once I've worked through my negative symptoms,
my healthy relationships have helped every symptom I have.
I've never had a healthy relationship up until I met him.
I had a lot of toxic relationships.
So this was the first relationship that I really feel seen
and loved and like I can communicate,
and it's just so important to me.
When you grow up without unconditional love,
you don't really know how to love somebody.
Lack of empathy is one of my symptoms,
but it doesn't mean I don't have empathy.
It's just very impaired.
Grandiosity for me can look like
feeling on top of the world,
feeling utterly superior to everyone I know.
But it can also really perpetuate my lack of empathy
if I don't keep it regulated.
I think he could see that softer side of me
through my more harsh behaviors that I used to do,
and he could see that I was hurting.
- She thought she had to be a certain way
in order for me to adore her.
- [Tessa] I felt like I had to be perfect
and I still kind of am struggling with that,
the idea of just being loved on your hard days.
- [Boyfriend] She needs a lot of attention.
- [Tessa] [laughs] Thank you for saying that so bluntly.
- Have you ever heard of the story of Narcissus,
a Greek story about a guy
who was so in love with his own image, that he-
- He drowned.
- He looked into a pond and he just stared at it for forever
until he turned into a flower,
and now a flower's named Narcissus.
And I've caught her looking in the mirror
and I've had to physically pull her out.
- We just tease each other.
- Sometimes it's really easy to make her happy
'cause I can just give her a really good compliment.
- Oh, please.
- She'll be happy for the rest of the day.
- I just truly love him so much,
and he's helping me get to the point
where I have more of a solid sense of reality in myself.
As a narcissist,
I have dealt with a very common symptom of NPD,
which is cognitive distortions
and delusions that make it hard to see myself correctly
or others and made it very, very hard to be self-aware.
There is definitely a silver lining to my diagnosis.
I think it makes me so resilient.
This is the shit that saved me when I was six years old
and I felt utterly alone,
or when I was 16 and I was still going through trauma.
I would never give up and I have this fire in me,
I feel like can't be defeated
by whatever trauma I go through,
and that's definitely part of my NPD.
It's this feeling of deservedness,
like I deserve to be happy.
I deserve the things that I want in life.
It gives me a strong sense of self,
even if I feel an emptiness in my core.
But I'm working on that.
Now I'm seeing it in a bigger picture,
and I'm also seeing the fact that I'm not just my diagnosis.
I'm a person, I'm an individual.
I have hopes and dreams.