What I Learned from Donald Trump: The Caretaker and the Narcissist

I woke up today with Donald Trump on my mind. Some may call this a day-mare of the worst kind. Indeed, it’s not my ideal first thought of the day. My pre-getting-out-of-bed thoughts grew into a curiosity about the word “demagogue”. Of course, what comes up when you Google that word: Donald Trump, and every article you can think of discrediting his run for the presidency. Then, the spiral. I had planned to get up, media free, sit outside with my coffee, meditate, journal, perhaps even do a workout. Instead, I spent 30 useless minutes injecting my brain with a steady stream of Trump. I was about to click one more article (that’s always the phrase, right? Just one more click…) about the disaster that is the Republican Party, when I, out loud, told myself to stop. I put down my phone, jumped out of bed, opened my back door and took a deep breath of reality: my day DOES NOT have to be defined by Donald Trump. Thank God.

I did end up sitting on my steps, crossing my prickly, unshaven legs and closing my eyes for a few minutes. I silently asked myself what I heard, felt, thought. I took some deep breaths. My ladies came to mind, the small group of brave women I’m beginning to host in my house weekly, learning how to love and support ourselves through life’s shit. I thought about what I was going say to them this weekend, how I’ll share my story, and how it will be received. Thankfully, I was able to detach from my earlier disgrace of Trump demagoguery obsession and listen to myself.

I am an admitted co-dependent, caretaker perfectionist. I know. My husband is so lucky to have a mildly neurotic wife that tries to chase him with love and LOTS of advice. How would he make it without me? Seriously, though, as such, much of my life is consumed with everyone else: what they’re doing right/wrong (according to Kelly’s rule book), how to fix all these problems, making brash internal judgments based off of zero facts and how to make all this happen in a perfectly square, safe little box…that I can hold. Tightly.

There’s a lot of talk about how unbearable Trump’s narcissism is. We’ve all known people (maybe even ourselves) that somehow manage to make every little thing, good or bad, stem back to them. It drives us batty. And yet, someone like me turns the spotlight around and makes a spectacle of everyone else’s problems. Yes, this is to ultimately make myself feel better, which still makes me self-centered, but it also gives me license to focus on anything but my own self. The evil opposite of narcissism, the Caretaker. 

This all came to a head, as I quietly sat, eyes closed and asked myself: Kelly, what do you really need to hear this morning?

It hit me, very suddenly, that I had spent much of the last 24 hours focused on other people, those I know personally, and those I just love to loathe. A complete time suck. I had inadvertently reverted to my Ms. Fix It. What I needed to remind myself, was to gaze back at my own image in the pond of life, take a cue from the narcissists and look long and hard. Just not so hard I fall in. 

Now, I’m not advocating that we all run to the nearest pond and gaze upon ourselves in true Narcissus fashion, but what if, just every once in awhile, we did actually pause and look, and listen to ourselves?  What if we all got a little narcissistic for a moment?

What my journey into narcissism revealed is that Donald Trump and I are two chapters in the same book. I know. It’s a horror story, really.

No matter which side you lean towards, and we all tend to polarize, we’re all trying to get the same thing: love. How a post that started with Trump, ends with Love is sort of a mystery, but what I know is that when I gaze upon my skewed image in the ripples of my life, I start to see the humanity in all of us. The flawed wake of empathy and co-dependency slowly stills to a mirror image of not only myself, but also everything that lies on the other side of the pond: the mountains, the sky, the boats, the people. I took a brief cue from Narcissus and realized that my lack of looking was just as detrimental as his obsession with looking.

I don’t want my day to be defined by everyone else’s shortcomings. When I actually type it out, I have to wince at the reality that I do, often, let my days be defined that way, just as Donald Trump allows his days to be defined by what people say about him. Neither one of us is actually allowing ourselves the privilege of being defined by what’s in our hearts.

I doubt that Donald Trump sees ME, and that’s OK. HIS narcissism doesn’t need to be MY problem. No. For today, at least, I’m choosing to look deeply into the murkiness of the same pond we all must look into, not so that I may fall into the ripples made by everyone else, but to see, even if for a moment, the clarity of my own heart.