I’ve noticed a pattern in myself that another autistic narc has confirmed they experience. I ended up internally calling what experience a narcissistic meltdown, where my autism and NPD combine to cause me to have a narcissism fueled meltdown.
I guess it would be similar to a narc crash but it’s a lot more specific and crashes can last for a long time, whereas with a meltdown it can last from 10 minutes to just a few hours.
For me, it’s when something triggers my NPD, and because I’m either unable to fix it or don’t know how to deal with it, I can get overwhelmed and a meltdown happens.
I feel like autistic with NPD have a very specific experience, and this would be a useful term.
So when I was a teenager, I got chronic nosebleeds.
Because of this, my mom tended to buy really cheap bedding for me, since I tended to bleed on it anyway when I’d get a nosebleed in the night. Cheap bedding, as it happens, can tear kind of easily.
So what happened one night, is that I got a nosebleed without waking up, AND, my nails somehow caught on my sheets and in my nightly thrashing around (I was a very active sleeper), I managed to rip them up pretty badly.
What I experienced on waking up, however, was being tangled up in tattered bloody sheets with blood in my mouth and in that moment of semi-lucid horror, my fourteen year old brain reached the indisputably certain conclusion that oh fuck I’m a werewolf.
(My mother’s reaction to my panicked scream of “MOM I’M A WEREWOLF” at 5:30 in the morning was to sigh, point out it wasn’t a full moon and I needed to wash up for school, then go about her morning.)
So when I was a teenager, I got chronic nosebleeds.
Because of this, my mom tended to buy really cheap bedding for me, since I tended to bleed on it anyway when I’d get a nosebleed in the night. Cheap bedding, as it happens, can tear kind of easily.
So what happened one night, is that I got a nosebleed without waking up, AND, my nails somehow caught on my sheets and in my nightly thrashing around (I was a very active sleeper), I managed to rip them up pretty badly.
What I experienced on waking up, however, was being tangled up in tattered bloody sheets with blood in my mouth and in that moment of semi-lucid horror, my fourteen year old brain reached the indisputably certain conclusion that oh fuck I’m a werewolf.
Man, I hope that girl managed to figure things out.
I distinctly remember during Ye Olde Hellish Childhood Days of being dragged to Baptist churches this one guest preacher that went on and on about how important it is for Christian men to be friends with other Christian men but how difficult it is for men to have friends, because of course when you become friends with another man you will naturally want to have sex with him, so the temptation, y'know? It’s tough, resisting those urges to have sex with all your man friends when you’re a man, all you men know what I mean. It’s so hard. You must be Very Strong In Your Faith before you can handle the responsibility of being friends with another man, so you will be able to Resist The Devil and not have sex with them.
14 year old me sat there in my pew, thinking. I think I know something about this man that he does not know.
Me, hearing about this preacher: (Frank Reynolds voice) Boy the Catholics really did a number on you, didn’t they?
Alcoholism and catholicism are very much the same in that you’re always recovering, there is no ‘former’.
…Derek Jacobi got a copy of Hamlet from Peter O’Toole …In 1963, Jacobi was Laertes to O’Toole’s prince. One day, O’Toole presented him with a book of Hamlet that once belonged to celebrated Victorian actor Johnston Forbes-Robertson [See below]. Jacobi later passed it on to Branagh who, in 2017, gave it to Tom Hiddleston when he directed him as Hamlet at Rada…
So at work there is a soda delivery guy who comes in almost everyday to restock and though we’ve barely said a word to each other, we definitely Know Of each other. Well this morning I finally got a shift where I could sleep in but my dad was like Hey the cable guy is coming at 7 to replace the cable boxes and I was like alright whatever I’ll just sleep in but forgot there was a cable box in my room. So it’s 7 in the morning I vaguely hear my dad let the cable guy into my room to just swap the box and I wake up to see??? Soda Delivery Guy???? in my room???? Turns out his second job is working cable but wow here Soda Man is standing in my doorway and I’m wrapped up in a pink bunny blanket surrounded by stuffed animals like
@my-darling-boy I refuse to leave this in the tags, I’m sorry.
I can always tell when people have been misgendering me around the 4yo because she comes home, points very firmly at me and says, “[Derin], you’re a they.”
Sometimes I forget that I really am pretty weird and my experiences are fairly far afield from “normal.”
This girl who I vaguely knew from the coffee shop showed up one day and said she thought her mom had died that morning and I figured she was probably overreacting so I said I’d go check with her and it turns out her mom HAD died but we honestly weren’t sure when it had happened so I lifted her off the bed and attempted CPR and then ended up having to talk to cops and this poor girl’s family for HOURS as she called her dad and brothers and the cops wanted to know if the mom was on any medications or if she had been depressed and I was like “I have no idea, I had literally never met the lady and I don’t even know the family’s last name, the first ever full conversation I had with the daughter was this morning.” And apparently THAT was super suspicious or something.
So anyway that was a rough day and the next day I go into the coffee shop and the manager (who is basically never in) comes over and says “Debbie says you had a rough day yesterday.” And I was like “uh, yeah. It was pretty weird.” And then he was like “Debbie says that you handled it really well. And that you filled out an application to work here a couple weeks ago.” And I was like “I guess?” And he was like “Okay you can do a training shift today and you’re on your own tomorrow. We don’t normally hire people under 21 and we don’t normally hire regulars so don’t fuck up.” (I was 18)
So I started working at the cash-only coffee shop that was patronized exclusively by the weirdest people in town (who had all slept with each other, had no money, and had the most drama of any group I’ve ever been part of) and was used to launder money made by the owner’s cocaine sales for the local gang.
The first shift I worked alone was the next night and when I called the manager and told him one of the regulars had been chasing people out of the parking lot to sell meth the manager told me to ban him so I was like “Hey dude, manager says you’re banned” and he was like “You’re a fucking cunt and I’m going to wait until you’re alone and I’m gonna fucking kill you” and then he drove around the block about twenty times and screamed “cunt” out the window every time he passed by where I was cleaning the patio.
One of the regulars, who was a nearly-seven-foot-tall hacker and gunsmith who worked graveyard in Hollywood, waited around for me to finish closing and then offered to drive me home because otherwise I’d have to walk three miles alone and there was that whole “circling meth dealer” thing going on. I decided to take a chance on getting a ride from tall, dark, and scary and that paid off pretty well because it’s been fifteen years and I’ve been married to that tall weirdo since 2011.
Everyone who hung out at this coffee shop was in some way or another the weirdest person I’ve ever fucking met.
Like the evidence she presented for “I think my mom died this morning” was “She didn’t wave to me like she normally does when I was leaving the house and it didn’t strike me as odd until just now.”
Like that’s why I agreed to go check, I was really pretty sure she was just being paranoid and needed some mental health support not some “Oh god I’m sorry your mom did actually just die and I need to coach you through a 911 call and hold your hand while you tell your dad over the phone that his wife is dead” support.
But then again her mom had been dead for. A PRETTY LONG TIME. By the time I got there. Long enough for blood to pool on the lower part of her body, which I didn’t realize until after I’d moved her off the bed and attempted CPR because the room was very dark and also lined floor-to-ceiling with stacked newspapers and magazines so I didn’t really see what we were dealing with until the girl opened the curtains and I realized that her mom’s face was half green and purple with pooled blood. (I, uh, maybe sometimes still have nightmares about this because the whole thing was note-for-note like a scene out of Se7ev except for shit like her boyfriend and his roommates showing up to comfort her and also hauling along a cat carrier full of very pissed off cat which wasn’t like a scene from Se7en it was just an additional layer of surreality on an already very surreal day - said boyfriend also yelled at me for saying I was going to call another coffee shop regular to come get me because “this family doesn’t need this kind of chaos and attention right now” and I was like “you brought three people here and also I don’t have a car and I’m miles away from home so unless you’re calling me a cab I am getting THE FUCK out of here and this other coffee shop regular is the least likely to cause a scene”)
So there’s a very reasonable possibility that this girl was very, VERY aware that her mom was dead but needed to go get somebody to help her process this and understand that it was real because fuck it, I can see having a little bit of a mental break and needing to GET AWAY and get another, potentially saner, human to verify before I started really internalizing what had happened in that situation.
But still, I don’t know how long it takes for blood to settle in a body or what the sleeping arrangement was with mom and dad but daughter and I got to the house at around noon, she’d come to the coffee shop at around 10 (we had to spend a long time convincing her to call mom’s cell phone and the house phone and then convincing her to go check and she wouldn’t go alone so that’s why I went) so if mom died in the night I don’t know why nobody noticed until at least10am.
Anyway then the girl and her boyfriend showed up at the coffee shop later that night and she said she wanted to talk about LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE so we distracted them by talking about the best way to shave genitals and, protip, don’t use clippers on your junk.
One time one of my coworkers came in to open and somebody had broken into the patio and moved all the furniture to the perimeter to better frame the giant stinking shit they’d taken in the middle of the floor.
This coffee shop was the only place I’ve ever had to come in and clean tampons off the ceiling.
At some point our coffee maker just stopped working so one of the shift leads brought in his grandma’s Mr. Coffee.
That same shift lead once randomly shut down the coffee shop all day because he needed help editing his chapbook because he’d gotten a contract with Crown Publishing. That same dude skipped out on paying rent for his apartment for like three months because every time the owner came by to ask him for his rent his answer was “Fuck you, I saved a baby” because he’d saved a baby from a fire. Eventually that was his answer to every criticism and it was still relentlessly charming until he became the night manager of a Denny’s and then it was just kind of sad.
My elementary school DARE officer came in at one point because of “suspicious activity” because cops were always coming in for suspicious activity to see if the regulars had left paraphernalia out because one time somebody literally left a three-foot-tall bong set up next to one of the potted plants on the patio. I was like “oh shit, you were the DARE officer at my school, sorry for smoking” and she was like “don’t worry about it, I’ve been an alcoholic since my girlfriend left me.”
I went to a school TWENTY FOUR MILES away from this coffee shop. This was a SMALL shop. In a stupid, shitty suburb that nobody goes to. This wasn’t a coffee shop that had ever been on California’s Gold or made the news or been featured in a “Best Coffee Shops You’ve Never Heard Of” article. So I’m at my school TWENTY FOUR MILES away, in a totally different county, and I mention to one of my classmates that I work at this coffee shop and he just goes “Holy shit, so you know where to get good drugs?” And I was kind of offended but he wasn’t wrong and I had actually blown a guy in the back seat of the Good Drug Dealer’s car. (Unrelated to drugs, it was basically pity oral) (and not that the Good Drug Dealer was a good guy compared to the shouty meth dealer, just that he was the one who sold the Good Drugs)
There were twelve WLW who hung out there regularly and we all had the worst lesbian sheep problem and somehow the fact that none of us could get our shit together and fuck each other did NOTHING to prevent the kind of “I’ve slept with all your exes” drama that you expect out of insular queer scenes which culminated in a confrontation that ended like six friendships. Turns out Debbie had told the manager about my adventure with the body because Debbie thought I was cute and that worked out well for me because I thought Debbie was cute and we made out, like, twice but her girlfriend lived with her literally less than a hundred yards away and wasn’t open to a poly arrangement so instead me and Debbie were just cuddle buddies and we’d nap in the lounge in the back of the shop where everyone else either fucked or did unimaginable amounts of blow.
When the coffee shop finally shut down the owners just told everyone that it was closing for four days for earthquake renovations and when we all met up to hang out in front of the shop the next day (because we were all fucking losers and had literally nothing else going on) we found out that the owners had changed the locks and thrown all the shit we’d left inside (CDs, a couple backpacks, paintings, ashtrays, board games) into the dumpster along with the broken coffee machine and they’d shattered every single bottle of torani syrup in the place on top of the pile. The only Chumbawamba album I’ve ever owned came out of that dumpster covered in butterscotch because fuck it, I wanted a souvenir and I wasn’t about to take Sheryl Crow.
I miss that coffee shop like you’d miss a lover you left behind.
Everyone imagining this with the fast food reaction meme was imagining it in the wrong direction.
As someone around for 9-11 and the “NEVER FORGET NUMBER #1 GREATEST TRAGEDY EVER IN HISTURY” response to it I am in thrilled and invigorated by the fact that younger people just make amogus memes and TikTok nonsense about it. A huge chunk of America cared more about it than any entire genocide and thought you would cry learning about it. They hoped it’d make every generation patriotically angry forever and ever and want to join the military. Instead you Photoshop the towers into squidwards house and shit. Never stop lol
I’m physically unable to take 9/11 seriously, entirely because my grade 9 english teacher was bizarrely obsessed with it. We basically had an entire unit on 9/11. We watched that documentary from those students that were doing a documentary of firefighters and wound up getting the only footage of the first plane hitting. We did a novel study of a book about some kid being in one of the towers for take your kid to work day and him and his dad squeezing past the wreckage of the plane to escape in time. We watched that Nic Cage movie of him being a firefighter during 9/11 that gets stuck in an elevator shaft when the place collapses. I am dead fucking serious, we had to make up fictional people that died in the attack, write an obituary for our 9/11sona’s, and then write and deliver a eulogy as their grief-stricken parent. At one point in the unit the teacher clarified that she hadn’t personally lost anyone to the attack, nor was she anywhere near New York when it happened. She never bothered to ask if any of us had actually lost someone in the attack, which kind of seems like a thing you should do before making us invent fictional victims to give eulogies for. The unit began with her demanding to know where we all were on the day of the attack and what we remembered, and she started crying when we told her that 1. we were two years old at the time and couldn’t remember shit fuck, the closest thing was one of the older kids kind of thought they remembered being very confused at adults freaking out over the TV but that could have been literally anything, and so this meant that 2. we were the last class she would ever teach that could possibly remember 9/11. Probably didn’t help that someone pointed out that we were the class born in 1999, so in two years she’d have students that hadn’t even been born during 9/11. That may have contributed to the teacher crying over the whole thing.
Hey Witchblr! Here’s a fun question for you: What’s the most unexpected result you’ve gotten from a spell you’ve cast?
I once did a money spell because I was broke and my grandma gifted me a small collection of foreign coins.
Ooo tie between:
Did a good luck spell that worked for exactly 8 hours and then inexplicably without fail 1 Terribly unlucky thing would happen. I tried this spell 5 times just to confirm it. Highlight includes the time my phone jumped out of my pocket as I was getting off the bus and the case came off midair during the 3 foot drop and the whole phone screen shattered.
And:
Did a finding lost objects spell. Started staring at chair after me and 3 other people had searched all over the house for the missing object. I turn around do the spell, turn back and the object is sitting plain as day dead center in the middle of the chair. I showed it to my roommates who Lost their Mind about it. Most immediate gratification I’ve ever gotten from a spell.
I love these! The chair one is particularly *chef’s kiss*
Super early in my witching. Did a spell to uncover hidden knowledge, thinking, oooh gonna find out about that cool occulty shit. Got unexpectedly let out of school early shortly thereafter due to something or other utterly dull (a short day for everyone, not just like me personally), and… walked in on my dad’s secret girlfriend. Yes I mean like as in an affair.
All right, this one REALLY cracked me up. xD Witches rule.
“But with frequent intimate evening conversations, the little brother, the Tsarevich, never asked an almost adult sister, the princess, about her girlish secrets. Being superbly educated, I understood that it was simply impossible to do this. Noticing that tears sometimes glisten in his sister’s eyes, he silently hugged her, stroked her hair, kissed her cool fingers, but did not question her. I thought that some seriously wounded man must have died again in the infirmary, whom his sister devotedly and carefully looked after .. Who knows, maybe she was even a little bit in love with him and - in love? Or - he is into her, which is most likely, because it is difficult not to fall in love with such a lovely beauty as Tatiana. That would be unfair! He carefully hinted about Tatyana’s sadness to Olga or Mama, and they, not trying to find out the reasons, redoubled their attention to her. The look of the proud beauty - sister immediately warmed and glowed with gratitude. A sensitive heart and soul, Alexei was glad to see this.”
Alexei and Tatiana’s relationship while Tatiana worked as a nurse during WW1
Fanfic authors are amazing like they could be literally anyone. That one coffee au you read last night? Could have been written by morgan freeman who knows
Dude I am acutely aware of this whenever I see people writing at coffee shops and stuff
Story time: I used to sit at the library for hours to mooch the wifi and work on my fics. Almost every day, the same person would sit across from me. We both had our established spots and no one ever really took them. Couple months passed and I was working when I got an email from Ao3 saying a story I was following had updated. I proceeded to take a break to grin and giggle behind my hand throughout the story. I left a comment and went back to my writing. Not five minutes later, the person’s phone went off, and theystarted grinning and typing on their phone. Another few minutes go by… And my phone pings that the author has replied to my comment.
Long story short, we traded a few odd looks while we both typed on our phones, before we finally put the pieces together and realized we were talking to each other while sitting across from each other. Turns out we were mutual followers of each other and ended up talking for hours about our favourite fics.
shoutout to my coworker for thinking that “illuminati” and “alumnae” meant the same thing and absolutely destroying everyone in the room when he casually dropped the sentence “i get a discount there because i’m an illuminati” into the conversation
rocking up to the 18th-century Bavarian Starbucks like
Had a dream last night where I lived on the fifth floor of a building where the first floor was a Burger King, and all the elevator buttons I needed to push were also rigged to set off the fire alarm
I had a dream that unless the teacher told us class was over, we were forbidden from going out the door. Our teacher was very forgetful, and maybe even malicious. After being forced to stay past sunset many days, my class decided we were going to break out every night. Eventually our attempts led us to discovering rifts in space-time where we could warp. So we never used the door. Checkmate.
the window
what? you going to critique my dreams? my subconscious creations, that I did by accident, while asleep? the chemicals in my brain? are you going to use your foul eyes and dissect all of the plotholes in my dreams? you going to critique the weather? harass the clouds? make fun of thunder for being off key? remind me to come to your house and shred your shoes
Toddler accidentally cursed himself into an identity crisis today.
He’s been crossing stuff out with chalk. He asked me to write his name for him, crossed it out, and had a panicked meltdown because he thought it meant he didn’t exist any more.
Every hour or so he asks me “am I [his name?]” and wants reassuring hugs.
I’m enjoying the implication that he was perfectly delighted with arbitrarily erasing things from existence until it affected him personally
Actually thinking about my time spent in purgatory, aka “the service industry”, I had some wild fucking events over the course of a decade.
There was the time a bride decided she didn’t want to go through with the wedding and tried to make her escape through the back kitchens of the venue and wound up sitting out back in the drizzling rain, bumming cigarettes from the delivery drivers, pristine white dress turning to mulch as she sat on an over turned catering crate. After a good half hour the groom came and found her and asked if she was okay. When she said she wasn’t sure if she wanted to go through with it he just nodded and said she should get out the rain because it was cold. The two of them ended up going back inside together, skipped the wedding part and basically had the most expensive party of their lives with all their friends and family.
There was another bride who could never decide on place settings, so in the end just turned to the coordinator and said “surprise me”. So we mismatched everything and called it “boho chic”. She loved it.
There was the groom who got caught in our supply closet during the late night reception…with the best man. And then there was also the father of the bride who absconded with the mother of the groom and had to be asked nicely to put their clothes back on and get out of the wine cellar.
At the same wedding.
There was the drunk best man who proposed to me using an umbrella cocktail and told me he was heartbroken when I told him I was flattered but married. He wore it behind his ear the rest of the night dancing like a mad man and telling anyone who would listen about “the one that got away”.
There was the Indian wedding with 800 guests. We rotated them in batches of 200 to fit them between spaces. All I can remember is never having enough drinks to hand out.
There was the arch bishop who only liked his coffee ground by hand because the effort of the worker “made it taste better”.
There was the time I took out the crystal drop of a chandelier with a champagne cork because the runners shook up the bottles for a joke.
There was the funeral party where the body couldn’t be delivered to the crematorium because the crematorium caught on fire.
There was the other funeral where a fist fight broke out over something our Jeanie said to our Mary 40 years ago, but then it turned out Mary was the one who said it.
There was the wedding where in a room of 200 people, the bride and groom only had eyes for each other.
There was the christening where the godmother kept crying to me over mocktails because she never thought she could love something as much as she loved “that bald little head”.
There was the old man at the wedding who came alone and smiled very kindly at everyone and always said please and thank you and who told myself and a coworker he’d been married to his wife for over 60 years and how she would have loved to see these two finally tie the not. She’d only passed the week before. He’d brought a picture of her so she could enjoy it in spirit.
There was the really tragic funeral where everyone kept hugging each other and saying “I love you” and us staff had to take frequent breaks to breathe because grief is tangible but so is love.
There were the times when nothing in particular happened at all, but they stand out so much because everyone there was happy.
Of course there was also the times when someone threw up on your shoes, or you got groped while serving the table, or someone was rude or snide because you were “the help”.
