The following piece is an opinion and does not reflect the views of The Eagle and its staff. All opinions are edited for grammar, style and argument structure and fact-checked, but the opinions are the writer’s own.
I fight the urge to cringe every time someone throws around the word bipolar in conversation with no regard for its real meaning. “You can never decide what you want to eat, you’re so bipolar,” someone chimes and my stomach curls. In the dining hall, the Bridge, or snippets of conversation I overhear on the quad, someone is dating someone or cheating on someone or breaking up with someone, and the person they’re in this “situationship” with is always a narcissist.
An estimated 1 percent of the population is diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, a cluster-B personality disorder defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, or DSM-5, as a “pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy.” It’s known for significantly affecting relationships due to trust issues, perfectionism, depression, anxiety and dissociation.
It’s a diagnosis people often throw around when they get hurt because it’s easier to say than “they just weren’t that into me.” However, it has life-altering consequences for those who actually live with the disorder.
The truth is that such casual use of the term is deeply stigmatizing, coming from a generation that claims to value mental health awareness. It takes away from the weight of what it means to have a mental illness: the nights spent overanalyzing situations riddled with anxiety, the uncertainty of how others view you, the obsession with being perfect, the inability to get out of bed, the panic attacks or hyperfixation on meaningless conversations and what you said. These disorders don’t come and go; they’re a part of people’s identities, their lives and their ability to function on a daily basis.
Having a disorder doesn’t make you a bad person, and proposing that narcissistic personality disorder is an inevitable tenet of someone’s character simply because they have hurt you or acted in a self-centred way isn’t just flawed, it’s discriminatory. We’ve thrown the DSM-5 out in favor of buzzwords and labels we place on everyone.
Oh, you can’t focus on your assignment? It must be ADHD. You like your room clean and hate that your roommates leave dishes in the sink? It must be OCD. You remember something embarrassing that happened a couple of months ago? Must be PTSD.
It turns the very real struggles people face into caricatures. The “trend” of mental illness isn’t a novel topic, but I’ve increasingly seen college students, who are arguably some of the most aware, affected by, and accepting of mental illness, go from using humor as a coping mechanism to straight-up ignorance.
When it comes to relationships, it all boils down to hurt. There is a commonly accepted notion that we have to hate people we once cared about to move on from them. It rests on the idea that the only good or worthwhile relationships are the ones that last forever or are flawless. In reality, people are multifaceted. We’re all the heroes in our own stories, and by association, so are many of the people we choose to love or invest time and energy into.
So when something — the not-quite-a relationship, not-quite-a situationship, amorphous something — ends, regardless of whether we choose to accept that we care about the other person or not, we often feel the need to rewrite the narrative. The sum of a person amounts to how they hurt you.
James Baldwin said the role of the lover is to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. It’s not about romance, it’s something that’s always been more about community to me than anything else: everyone is deserving of the chance to see things differently and to be made into someone better than they are right now.
The reality is that the best people you know will never always make the right decisions, and you might not be privy to their worst moments. I live by the principle that true care and true love, both platonic and romantic, are built on the practice of grace. If our friends are deserving of near-unconditional forgiveness and are allowed to grow with us, why not everyone else? Should we be defined by our worst moments?
Perhaps, you’ve thought it through. Maybe their actions are unforgivable. Still, I believe that your good moments should never be tainted by the memory of someone else, and especially not their bad decisions. Their actions can be enough of a reason for you to leave without writing off an entire relationship. You can hate what someone did and still care about that person.
Adria Liwewe is a junior in the School of Public Affairs and a columnist for the Eagle.
This article was edited by Quinn Volpe, Alana Parker and Walker Whalen. Copy editing done by Sabine Kanter-Huchting and Ariana Kavoossi.
