In Defense of Narcissus: Hot, Haunted, and Misunderstood

Melissa Oley | Deprogrammed

When people say “divorce,” what they often mean is escape.

But the assumptions wrapped in that word—stitched together with hope, fear, and legalese—are pure delusion: That the disagreeable parts will vanish with distance.
That pain can be annulled by paper. That contradiction somehow equals closure.
That taking responsibility looks like suffering quietly while signing your name in blue ink at the bottom of a settlement. But when the smoke clears and the ink dries, it hits you: You miscalculated. What was just demanded can’t be undone. And the thing stopping you from screaming is a three-letter word— Ego.

Let’s talk about Narcissus. Not the TikTok meme. Not the custody-court diagnosis hurled like a grenade. Not the clinical villain. The boy. The myth. The metaphor. He wasn’t punished for being in love with himself. He was punished for not recognizing the reflection. He thought it was someone else—someone worth loving. Read that again. He thought it was someone else worth loving. Not himself. Maybe he didn’t have a mirror. Maybe he’d never been taught he was allowed to be the beloved.

The gods didn’t care. They rarely do. He rejected a nymph—Echo—who repeated every word he spoke back to him. No dialogue. No reciprocity. Just endless mirroring. Imagine that: Everything you say, echoed back to you until “no” sounds like “yes” and “please leave me alone” sounds like foreplay. She lunged. He fled. Forest lady vibes. And he became the villain. Nemesis cursed him. Echo withered. And Narcissus died longing for someone he was never meant to know was himself. So maybe Narcissus wasn’t an egomaniac. Maybe he was a metaphor for the human condition: Misrecognition. For falling in love with illusion. For discovering—too late—that the thing you were chasing was your own unclaimed self. That’s the tragedy. Not vanity. Not self-love. But self-forgetting.

So the next time someone says “narcissist,” Ask them: Are we diagnosing pathology, or are we grieving a mirror that broke before it ever reflected truth? Because if we can’t grieve our illusions, we’ll call it closure when it’s just paperwork over shattered glass.