On Narcissism & Women’s Power

There are sacred cows inside the female sphere that require a woman to speak them, because the moment she does the alarms go off and the ground turns to a minefield.

I learned this most vividly on Instagram. On most days instagram astonishes me. So many kind, intelligent, poetic people offering warmth I barely know how to answer. And then, suddenly, you hit a tripwire post and the air fills with shrapnel.

One of the most explosive tripwires I touched being the word “narcissist.” I touched it because I feel compelled to dismantle the soft cages women live inside—those well-intended messages that pass for help but work like a virus.

They’re carried by sisters who mean well and replicate an old script of passive sexism: you are fragile, you must be protected from archetypal him, and the way to be safe is to diagnose and banish. The culture we’re in rewards a particular strategy (passivity) as if it were virtue.

Passivity, though, is simply aggression with good manners. None of this can be understood without the basic sanity that everything is interdependent, dynamic, co-created.

Nothing arises alone.

The behavior we call “narcissism” never blooms in a vacuum; it shows up through a tangle of causes—family systems, wounds, cultural incentives, our own collusion. The moment we flatten a person to a diagnosis, we often unwittingly feed the very trait we fear.

Labels grow when we water them with attention. I want women free of the bargain that trades sovereignty for safety theater.

The real danger isn’t the flamboyant personality across from you; it’s the quiet habit of abandoning yourself and calling the aftermath his fault. The antidotes are simple and demanding: speak plainly, choose cleanly, hold your line, raise your capacity for love without grasping, refuse to flatten anyone, including yourself, into a label.  

Touch the sacred cows. Most of them are cardboard. And in the open space that remains, build a life animated by the kind of power that turns strangers into co-creators and hard soil into ground that can actually grow something.