Narcissism as a Societal Trait

As many painters and artists before me have done, last year I made my first effort to create a self-portrait. I set-out to capture in abstraction the nuance of my being, any clear markers of identity and my chosen existence.

What I found instead was murky. I found a being molded on the cultural identifiers of Yoruba people, transmuted through a lens of western capitalist expectations and expressing the global consciousness demanding freedom.

As the primordial flowers that reached for the sun to beautify the world, I found softness and sensitivity enveloped in resilience and an irrefutable instinct to survive.

I also found mental illness.

My mind struggled to reconcile my authenticity within my surroundings and through the process of visual interpretation, I realized feelings of general anxiety, panic and narcissism.

The piece evolved into a series of work titled Atypical Psychology. The series explores human psychology as a framework for identity.

The pieces, one leading into the next unfolded to tell me a story I’m not sure I was prepared for. Tales that visually elaborate on the complexity of identity, even in a society where you are entitled to belonging.

The neural pathways that you cultivate through time reinforce your responses to the world around you. Who you are and who you can be is best understood by the way one’s neurology functions.

As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote in Half of a Yellow Sun “ …I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.”

I am Yoruba, for God and Country, it is the most comfortable identifier I have ever lived with. I understand the language and can speak an iteration of it that is mixed with so much English it could only be understood in the urban epicenter of Lagos.

The Lagos I was born into is a cluster of islands, planned and designed by Portuguese & English colonists amongst a melting pot of West African trading cultures strongly influenced by Yoruba cultural ideologies and practices.

Yoruba people and their culture feels like it has always existed. It draws so far into our historical consciousness that it feels like it’s been on autopilot.

Individuals with atypical psychologies are often tasked to find ways to make themselves palatable to a narrow spectrum of human understanding.

For me, Yoruba culture has always been difficult to understand, it includes me but only at the concession of my authenticity. I don’t know if that’s the way we all feel but it’s definitely the way I feel and where my resentment begins.

Upon closer inspection though, it seems that the psychology I assumed was an anomaly, could be argued to have markers in our mainstream societal dynamics.

Psychoanalysis defines narcissism as a self-centeredness arising from failure to distinguish self from external objects. A perceptive struggle of many to live in a reality that makes one feel inconsequential.

I’m not sure when the disconnect happened for me. The moment when I would have realized that to function within the society I was born into, I had to abandon empathy-even for myself.

In my experience, culture is the practice of “discipline” and “obedience” that are the bedrock of personality disconnects. Expectations that breed narcissism as a primary form of motivation.

We are groomed in a reality that struggles to validate each of us. We live in narratives of racism, heteronormativity, sexism and ableism(to name a few) that identify the lines of what our collective projections can comfortably accept and we willfully, cohesively disregard the consequences for our narrow interpretations of humanity.

We adeptly transition through life mirroring expectations in lieu of emotional depth and clarity. We are taught to take advantage of each other as due course and assume there are no consequences until we “get caught”/scrutinized or criticized. And sometimes not even then.

Narcissism also means that our follow-through is shit. We struggle to tie our individual actions to our collective outcomes and live in generational patterns of trauma and cognitive dissonance.

For the sake of survival or resilience or brute force, we subconsciously give ourselves and each other permission to ignore the nuanced and complex humanity of others because we expect/perceive “no other option.”

Narcissism is the root of zero-sum psychology. It distrusts abundance. A psychology that fuels the living fear of a subconscious assumption that you are not worthy of good things, the few that there are.

We are all struggling for spaces we belong to, communities where we can be flawed and evolve as divinity intends.

I make art that represents the world I want to live in. That speaks to the humanity of each and centers the abstract of who we can be when we are committed to our own evolution.

In the series Atypical Psychology, I am existing in a space that believes that our communities are made more sustainable by its ability to adapt to our individual psychologies.

There is no easy road, our complexities cannot be ignored. We are in desperate need of redefinition of our humanity and we must learn to be held accountable and demand space to grow.

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Poetic interpretation of Isaiah 51:5 — They will wait in hope for my arm.