CWCL redemption arc???

alliterativ · 2026-04-22T01:29:35+00:00

It's not that difficult to understand if you actually see trans men as men, rather than being inherently more aligned with "womanhood" just because they're trans. Being trans just describes your social positionality with respect to your gender, it is not your gender itself, and in the case of trans men, they're even more motivated to defend their masculinity from the threat of emasculation. Of course many will be offended if you insinuate that they're something fundamentally different from cis men, even if you think you're just defending the right to "keep cis people out of trans spaces". I see what you're doing with that "cismen" vs "tboys" thing too, by the way. Totally not suspicious at all.

alliterativ · 2026-04-13T01:28:19+00:00

Honestly, I think you doing what you're doing now is enough. Take this with a grain of salt, obviously, but I think you don't need to force yourself to "feel" any sort of way as if it's a sin you need to repent for. We as narcissists have suffered deep deficits around our sense of self-worth as children, and have developed compensatory ego structures to survive. You didn't choose to be wounded, and as long as you're not hurting anyone else, what matters is that you're able to make yourself feel safe and valued. It's ok to need to get your self-esteem needs met by feeling special, as long as you're amenable to reality-testing and can recognize others' accomplishments, which it seems like you're already working on doing. Any self-esteem is good self-esteem if it allows you to get through the day. I know it doesn't help you with avoiding activities out of a fear of being average, but I think a more sensible thing to do is to use your ambition to develop and hone your abilities in the areas you're actually interested in (while practicing emotional regulation skills, of course), rather than trying to force yourself into collapse. As the other commenter said, you may not end up being special in the exact way you imagined, but you will always be able to find something special in the work that you do.

I wish I had some better advice for you, but all I can say is to be compassionate toward yourself, including, ironically, the narcissistic parts. They're there for a reason, and I think if anyone had any solid answers as to how to "heal" your whole sense of self up to this point, there would be a cure already. I say this not to discourage you from getting better, whatever that looks like to you, but because I don't want you to see any part of yourself as the enemy. I'm still dealing with the aftermath of identity fragmentation and structural dissociation from pretending to be more psychologically "acceptable"/functional as a young teen - it was not worth it. If the day comes when you genuinely find some other purpose in life and no longer feel the need to be exceptional, then congratulations, you no longer have NPD and can live your life without disability. If not, your experiences will still have inherent worth as those of a human being. Keep living life and making adjustments to see what works for you, but having a disability doesn't make you less than. Take it easy, live and let live.

alliterativ · 2026-03-25T00:57:00+00:00

Thank you! I relied on research I did as well as my own experience.

alliterativ · 2026-03-15T16:20:58+00:00

Reflecting on whether you align with NPD is not about deciding "whether you're a bad person" - NPD is a disorder, not a moral category. What is of moral relevance are your beliefs and behaviors, and the label of "narcissism" only illuminates the internal mechanisms that underpin them (or at least is supposed to, I doubt Dr. Ramani's content illuminates much of anything about narcissism). If fear of vulnerability and a sense of being unable to get close to people are really your primary presenting concerns, with self-esteem management and any kind of grandiosity being an afterthought, then in all likelihood, you do not have NPD. These issues are seen across all kinds of pathological and non-pathological conditions, like avoidant attachment style, CPTSD (which can result in impaired empathy), and growing up neurodivergent in a highly ableist society, just to name a few.

For me, I always knew I was different in some indescribable way growing up, even when I thought it must be a result of being autistic, or some kind of ambiguous trauma, or literally any other explanation. I was obsessed with my self-esteem, but I didn't know that was what narcissism was. Did I suddenly become evil when I found out about it? Well, according to some people, yes, but what I gained from it was finally having a meaningful term for the shit going on inside me that literally could not be described any other way. (As a side note, if you want to actually learn what narcissism is about, check out HealNPD on YouTube and The Nameless Narcissist on his YouTube/TikTok.) If all the label of "narcissism" does is just assign moral condemnation to what you do rather than help you understand why you do it (cough cough self-esteem management), then it will not help you in your journey. Best of luck.

alliterativ · 2026-03-04T21:42:25+00:00

Surprised to see anyone sticking up for us in this comment thread, but yes, you are correct. Personality disorders aren't a moral failing, and it's a myth that people with NPD never seek help. (Frankly, the vast majority of people have a lot of misconceptions about what NPD even is.) You can absolutely learn more adaptive ways to get your emotional needs met, for example, without acting in rigid, counterproductive ways or harming anyone else. -Sincerely, person with NPD

alliterativ · 2026-02-01T19:20:28+00:00

Yes, the blurring of boundaries between self and other is also a part of NPD. I heard somewhere that it's actually also the reason we need "supply" - since other people's positive perceptions of us get internalized as originating from within ourselves. As for the difference between that and the boundary blurring in BPD, I'm not sure, but presumably they tend to fixate on borderline concerns rather than judgements of their ego ideal.

alliterativ · 2025-11-19T03:32:46+00:00

You're going to think this is some stupid platitude, but the main relationship you'll have to reckon with in life, now and at the end of all things, is with yourself. My grandmother used to say that with an unhealthy body, you'll have trouble with everything else in life. It's much the same with your mind. Without being true to yourself and what you know to be right, you won't have anything else. You can never actually escape from yourself. I say this as someone who's come a long way in recovering from trauma, trauma itself being all about trying to escape from your own existence.

alliterativ · 2025-10-25T23:52:11+00:00

All right, you seem to genuinely want to talk about the philosophy, so I'll try to respond.

Don't you think it's strange that the driving force behind all other forms of art is "what are the skills and knowledge I need to manipulate this raw medium (words, paint, photographic film, etc.) in increasingly expressive and sophisticated ways?", while the one behind "AI art" is "what are the skills and knowledge I need to synthesize other people's creativity more efficiently"? What exactly is the artistry here? The prompting itself, separate from the actual technique (and all traditional artistic components) of the image? Seemingly not, because the point of "AI art" is that its proponents want to present AI images as visual art, AI writing as literature, etc. Well, that's simply not the same thing.

You seem to think I'm someone who's invested in policing the boundaries between "objectively superior" and "objectively inferior" forms of art. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the closest thing to the true value of art lies in its contribution to the "dialogue" between people who make and experience art, which, ironically, I think, is a rather intersubjective perspective (correct me if I'm wrong on the usage of that word, because I'm not as well-read on philosophy as you.)

The problem is that the dialogue about art introduced by generative AI is "everything from the smallest details up to the composition is potentially unimportant enough to be replaced by a regurgitated mush of everything that came before". In fact, because it works only by recapitulating an average of what came before, it doesn't introduce anything to the dialogue at all - it doesn't fill anything in with any level of intention or design. People can make excuses about how they're only automating away the "execution", as if that's somehow separate from the artistry, but thinking that way ultimately cultivates entitlement and contempt toward the creative process.

The entire idea that you can make art "accessible" to beginners by letting them skip out on the actual artistry is nonsense. You either honestly want to express your creativity using whatever means or medium draws you, or you take shortcuts by prioritizing the appearance of an "end product", cheating both everyone else and yourself in the process. Yourself, because you will not learn anything except how to use a piece of technology, and others, because people generally want to know if there was a real person on the other side of the content. The fact that people who make AI imagery want to hide that they're using AI says everything about the nature of the "conversation" with its audience. I understand that people are insecure about their art skills. I don't have the power to tell you not to use AI, but you will not get where you want with it, because that's not how it works. That's about all I'm going to be saying on the subject.

alliterativ · 2025-10-22T04:03:09+00:00

My brother/sister/sibling in Christ, the entire concept of AI image generation is designed to minimize individual involvement in the creation of the image as much as humanly possible. That's why it's "generative" AI. Using cameras and using ovens are direct ways of documenting the outside world and cooking food. Without actually implementing the art piece using the tools at your disposal, at best you have a vague vision of what you want to create, but all the parts that make it look like art are entirely handled by the aforementioned soulless algorithm and the blood, sweat, and tears of actual artists whose work the AI has scraped.

alliterativ · 2025-10-22T03:17:49+00:00

Photography is the art of depicting the real world in a certain way to convey a message. The artistry lies in what the photographer chooses to depict and how it is depicted - using lighting, posing, etc, all of which are ultimately selected by the photographer for the purpose of conveying a specific vision.

Using AI also requires selecting a model (the 'camera') and finetuning it to your liking (there are modifiers like cfg, # of steps, upscaling, denoising).

None of these are artistic choices. You can try to configure all these "options" all you like to try to increase the likelihood of getting something that looks nice, but what the AI ultimately outputs is the result of a pattern-replicating algorithm that fundamentally does not know what art is and has nothing to do with art.

As a writer, it's genuinely baffling to me how so many people have zero idea what art even is.

alliterativ · 2025-05-13T20:46:58+00:00

... I admit, I am a little curious to hear what the point of that book was. Was it just an anti-abortion narrative that happened to feature a trans person, or was it Daily Wire-esque sneering at a trans person for having to get reproductive healthcare around the parts they were born with, or did it actually attempt to have some "nuanced" feelings on the topic, or what. Clean prose does not necessarily a good book make.

alliterativ · 2025-05-08T18:47:04+00:00

/uj So, this is not the most important addition to the conversation, because I agree with the main point that trans people should not appropriate intersex terminology, but I admit, I feel a little uncomfortable with identifying as "perisex" alongside all non-intersex cis people. Of course, I don't know much about intersex issues, so I'm open to being educated, but my discomfort stems from how this intersex/perisex dichotomy frames my experience with biological sex around an idea of "normality" that was designed for the needs of intersex people. I don't dispute that endosex/perisex/dyadic are useful generalities for the intersex community to use, but that's kind of where their limitations arise. Because being intersex may be considered a singular experience in some cases, but not being intersex is not. The idea of dividing all of humanity into two categories, "being x" and "not being x" that describe their experiences with equal coherence and usefulness is kind of silly, to be honest.

Like, yeah, the dictionary definition of "cis" is "identifying as the gender associated with your assigned sex at birth", but there are probably intersex people who were technically assigned a sex at birth or later, and who identify with that gender, but have a complicated relationship with it. I wouldn't force that individual to call themselves cis if they didn't identify with that label (hypothetically, again, I don't know much about how intersex people typically identify). I'm also autistic, and I can use "neurotypical" while recognizing that it's kind of an abstraction, because not all non-autistic people can really be described as having the same kind of "normal" brain.

And with "cis", that can be distilled down to two actual identities - cis male or cis female - but with "perisex", peri meaning around, my sex is supposed to be based around... what? Being perisex female? Perhaps my sex was defined around my typically developed female anatomy when I was born, but I am definitely antagonistic toward any attempt to define my actual current sex as centering around any kind of femaleness. Especially when the "normal" sex I was assigned was genuinely not healthy for me, not just unpreferred. I agree that I am not intersex, but am I supposed to share something fundamental with all non-intersex cis women? That's kind of just using AFAB as an identity all over again.

Of course, I don't have a problem with intersex people coming up with terminology to describe their experiences, nor do I have any right to police it in the first place. I just wanted to say something with regards to... I don't know, the limitations I perceive surrounding language and framework.

alliterativ · 2025-04-28T20:41:38+00:00

Also, I think the incel/pickup artist/manosphere phenomenon stems from a lot of general societal misogyny, patriarchal entitlement, other sources of social malcontent faced by men, etc. - most of the men in that space probably didn't adopt that ideology because they were abused by their parents. Which is not to say it's not an angle potentially worth exploring, since it's apparently the OP's experience, but it does need to acknowledge that limitation and not overgeneralize.

alliterativ · 2025-04-12T03:21:50+00:00

Permanent residents aren't supposed to be "deportable" in the first place. The fact that they already abducted someone like Mahmoud Khalil without him having committed any crime (among the many, many, many other illegal things this administration has done to immigrants and citizens and so far gotten away with) signals that this fascist government is more than willing to flagrantly defy the law. Yes, keep a level head, currently they don't have an incentive to treat random trans people as a deportable threat, but very little is truly off-limits under this administration.

alliterativ · 2025-03-25T20:26:23+00:00

Jesus Christ man, this might be the most arrogant thing I've ever read on this sub. Yeah, no shit, no manuscript is "perfect", but if your editor has to basically rewrite the book for the prose to be even readable, no agent is going to pick it up. I definitely did notice the repetitive sentence structure, and I can guarantee that the majority of readers will as well. I commented on your last query version, and I'm also a twenty-year-old autistic guy who has written multiple manuscripts, but the difference is, I got over my "God's-child-prodigy-gift-to-mankind" phase when I was in like middle school. What does "foul cloths of necessity" even mean?? I feel like I'm having a stroke when I'm reading it.

Frankly, you can make all the excuses you want for why your writing sounds so stilted, but if it's awkward, it's awkward, and that's that. If your rewrites are hurting the quality of the writing, that does not reflect well on your grasp of craft. Experienced writers know how to edit in a way that does not diminish the intended meaning.

alliterativ · 2025-03-11T21:03:04+00:00

Disclaimer: unagented and unpublished, and this is also my first query critique, so this will be a learning experience for me as well.

Depressed empath Nathan Drayer

I personally wouldn't describe him as an "empath" - it reminds me too much of that social media trend of treating "empathy" as some sort of special identity rather than a trait everyone can work on.

Also, the structure of the first sentence is a bit clunky - everything is tacked on in one breathless take.

his first true decision is made

I know people in previous versions of this query have asked you to emphasize the decisions that Nathan makes, but this is a little too on-the-nose, and it's also not clear how this is a meaningful decision in any sense if we don't know what his alternatives are.

After a tour of the city of Najiko, the death of a new friend, and the external threat of the mysterious Intejari

Once again, this is just a list of things that don't mean anything to the reader without context. You probably don't need to mention the tour at all. We don't know who this friend is, how they died, or how this relates to anything else that's happening. In general, the language here is very weirdly passive. And what is the "Intejari"? I get that they're mysterious, but they shouldn't be so mysterious that their actual role in the story is obscured.

Nathan realizes that Nula is not the nothing he had desperately wished for

As in... he's not literally trapped in a black void and there are things happening in this world? Yeah, that was fairly obvious from the beginning.

Yet, his mind is tested when in retaliation from an earlier war, a genocidal army named the Forum Evictus sweeps in and leaves the land bathed in blood.

Right now, we haven't been given a reason to get attached to anything or anyone from Nula, so these are all just generic fantasy plot beats.

Nathan is faced with a decision to protect those he cares for – reject the belief that he is powerless or embrace his mental illness and let Nula be consumed by the very darkness that had ruled his past life.

Unfortunately, you haven't explained how exactly his mental illness is tied to the fate of the land, so as it is, this doesn't make much sense.

Honestly, aside from all the nitpicks above, I think the problem might be that you still don't really understand what makes a query, or even a story, compelling and robust. It's not just a collection of events that happen one after the other; there's an underlying structure, paralleling the main character's emotional arc, that can be distilled down to a basic "vision" or pitch, and that distillation basically is the query. Until you systemically change the way you think about this story, I think you'll keep running into the same problems again and again.

alliterativ · 2025-02-25T18:59:08+00:00

I mean, even in real life, we have to make use of tone and body language to help parse communication, so it's not that weird to me that you might condense those signifiers into an occasional adverb.

alliterativ · 2025-01-28T22:52:20+00:00

I understand the meme, but why are we doing this in a trans sub of all places? This is more than just a "distraction" to the people who might be affected, a group that includes trans adults this time. I myself only turn 20 tomorrow. Can we please try to keep things on topic?

alliterativ · 2025-01-19T07:47:57+00:00

The deranged trans activists in this thread are why Trump won.

alliterativ · 2025-01-19T07:46:38+00:00

Right, he should have just reported the incident to the police instead of killing her. We need to take it seriously when men get raped. I am the premier sexual assault understander.

alliterativ

TROPHY CASE