ONE
YOU’VE BEEN
GOOGLED
Vanity
surfing, v.t. to
search for mentions of oneself over the internet; to determine the relative
significance of oneself by conducting an inventory of citations over same; To
gauge one’s worth by how often one is Googled: to have one’s identity searched
via the web: as in, “Google ergo sum”, I Google therefore I am.
Madeline
has been unable to arrive at an accurate diagnosis, despite decades as a member
of her family. Life used to be so much simpler before she started reading
everything she could get her hands on from the American Psychiatric Association.
But now that she has taken that plunge,
she feels compelled to come up with a snappy, astute, two word definition derived from a Latin root. It would
at least sound more elegant than just saying, “My family is crazy” and leaving
it at that.
After all, who doesn’t make the claim that they have the craziest family around? Certainly Roger, Madeline’s husband did, the first time they met. He hastily withdrew that boast hours after he married Madeline. She had tried unsuccessfully to keep her relatives well hidden away until after the big day. She had seriously considered the idea of hiring a crew of drama students to pose as family members. But when her plans fell threw and her family learned about the wedding, the jig was up.
Luckily,
Roger did not make a mad dash out of the church. By then, he was in too deep.
The
closest thing that Madeline could come up with was ‘toxic narcissism’.
Certainly her brother Walter’s pattern of grandiosity, desperate need for
admiration, and sense of entitlement was straight out of a textbook. But how
could that explain the voices in his head? The delusions? The megalomania?
Then there was her sister Jillian, the failed Prima Donna. She was a classic case, with her constant demand for attention, praise and admiration worthy of an Oscar-winning actress. This is despite any noteworthy achievements. Her biggest acting role has been playing a near-dead crash victim whose corpse was later found in the emergency room hallway, untreated. It was a triumph, of sorts, since Jillian got to die on Prime Time, albeit with an oxygen mask hiding her features. The perpetual ingénue has been waiting to be discovered now for fifteen years, and is unwilling to face that her moment is past. In Roger’s words: Jillian is a woman crippled by high self esteem. But this overlaps with other troubling symptoms involving impulse control, (particularly involving Daddy’s credit cards), and histrionics, the unique combination of which has thrown a wrench into Madeline’s attempts at easy categorization.
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