Catching me in an introspective mood...

Every passing day sees me getting more and more personal towards this blog. I Jai Ganeshed it as a medium for me to post away some of my stories. However, I got slightly more involved in it in the coming days(thanks to my idleness), and my second post was an article which was written for the sole purpose of showing-off some intellectual crap. But down the line, I found myself incessantly absorbed into writing random garble just for the goddamn heck of it. What was I trying to prove? That I was some one-in-a-gazillion child-prodigy who knew just too much English to not belong to the crowd of students he studies and is growing up with? While I was at it, I realized that I was a victim of severe superiority complex. The other day, I was reading some column in the Times Life supplement of The Times of India, which, through a dozen of simple binary questions, claimed to determine the 'personality stereotype' of the answerer. One of the questions (infact, the only one my memory retains) was: 'Do you spend hours admiring yourself in the mirror?' My answer was a sure-shot yes. Later, when I was done with an array of similar questions, I turned to look at the answers, eager to see what the result had to say about me and my personality. I very convincingly belonged to the personality stereotype 'narcissistic'. I looked at the word as if it was Greek. It was the first time I had come across this word. I wiki-ed it, Googled it, and even Yahoo Answer-ed it, thus conducting my very own brief research on the topic. Though the details of the informative wikipedia article elude me, but I do recall the basic gist of it. Narcissism is essentially a personality-disorder in which a person is egotistical, self-centered and carries a very unsympathetic approach to anyone except their own self. I could not believe it. Was I just another cold, self-righteous and selfish bastard (mind you, no spelling mistakes!)? I had, till then been endlessly reminded by my dear ones that I very easy fell for others' influences and what opinion others had about me. My actions, (they said), were heavily affected and influenced by what people thought about me, and that I did care about what people opined regarding me, something which I myself preach strongly against, and work my very best to practice too in my life. In this case too, I was shocked by what my 'dear ones' said about me (Ironically, this only strengthened what they had said, that I easily get affected by others' opinions about me). Anyway, after reading the article on narcissism, I was conveniently reminded of the fact that I took opinions very hard on myself. The fact that my 'dear ones' had pointed out to me this drawback in my personality, actually eased me! I persuaded myself that it was just another feel-good newspaper crap, written by a struggling writer, who added the do-it-yourself personality test as a space-filler, in fear that his boss would fire him for not coming up with something creative in a deadline of a week. Nobody other than me was going to tell me that I was a narcissistic. All it took me was two seconds to rubbish the newspaper aside, close the wikipedia article tab, and shrug off the guilt. And thus, an hour of mine had peacefully and hedonistically passed, with me feeling better than ever. They are always right when they say that happiness comes in small packages. My moment of happiness had come in the form of an article, which could have proved to be the most depressing thing for the day for some people (including myself), but for me, it was a breath of fresh air, a refresher, another feather in my cap. And thus, after being proclaimed a narcissistic by the well-meant newspaper column, I ignorantly became one. I might not have given my personality a disorderly dimension. I would have peacefully remained myself, unique, before the society typecasted me forever (another of my narcissistic rantings).