I Love to be Hated
If I had to distil my quotidian existence in two pithy sentences, I would say: I love to be hated and I hate to be loved.

Hate is the complement of fear and I like being feared. It imbues me with an intoxicating sensation of omnipotence. I am veritably inebriated by the looks of horror or repulsion on people's faces. They know that I am capable of anything. Godlike, I am ruthless and devoid of scruples, capricious and unfathomable, emotion-less and asexual, omniscient, omnipotent and omni-present, a plague, a devastation, an inescapable verdict. I nurture my ill-repute, stoking it and fanning the flames of gossip. It is an enduring asset.

Hate and fear are sure generators of attention. It is all about narcissistic supply, of course - the drug which we, the narcissists consume and which consumes us in return. So, attack sadistically authority figures, institutions, my hosts and I make sure they know about my eruptions.

I purvey only the truth and nothing but the truth - but I tell it bluntly told in an orgy of evocative baroque English.

The blind rage that this induces in the targets of my vitriolic diatribes provokes in me a surge of satisfaction and inner tranquillity not obtainable by any other means. I like to think about their pain, of course - but that is the lesser part of the equation.

It is my horrid future and inescapable punishment that carries the irresistible appeal. Like some strain of alien virus, it infects my better judgement and I succumb.

In general, my weapon is the truth and human propensity to avoid it. In tactless breaching of every etiquette, I chastise and berate and snub and offer vitriolic opprobrium. A self-proclaimed Jeremiah, I hector and harangue from my many self-made pulpits. I understand the prophets. I understand Torquemada.

I bask in the incomparable pleasure of being RIGHT. I derive my grandiose superiority from the contrast between my righteousness and the humanness of others.

But it is not that simple. It never is with narcissists. Fostering public revolt and the inevitable ensuing social sanctions fulfils two other psychodynamic goals.

The first one I alluded to. It is the burning desire - nay, NEED - to be punished.

In the grotesque mind of the narcissist, his punishment is equally his vindication.

By being permanently on trial, the narcissist claims high moral ground and the position of the martyr: misunderstood, discriminated against, unjustly roughed, outcast by his very towering genius or other outstanding qualities. To conform to the cultural stereotype of the "tormented artist" - the narcissist provokes his own suffering. He is thus validated.

His grandiose fantasies acquire a modicum of substance. "If I were not so special - they wouldn't have persecuted me so".

The persecution of the narcissist IS his uniqueness. He must be different, for better or for worse. The streak of paranoia embedded in him, makes the outcome inevitable. He is in constant conflict with lesser beings: his spouse, his shrink, his boss, his colleagues. Forced to stoop to their intellectual level, the narcissist feels like Gulliver: a giant strapped by Lilliputians. His life is a constant struggle against the self-contented mediocrity of his surroundings. This is his fate which he accepts, though never stoically. It is a calling, a mission and a recurrence in his stormy life.

Deeper still, the narcissist has an image of himself as a worthless, bad and dysfunctional extension of others. In constant need of narcissistic supply, he feels humiliated. The contrast between his cosmic fantasies and the reality of his dependence, neediness and, often, failure (the "Grandiosity Gap") is an emotionally harrowing experience. It is a constant background noise of devilish, demeaning laughter. The voices say: "you are a fraud", "you are a zero", "you deserve nothing", "if only they knew how worthless you are".

The narcissist attempts to silence these tormenting voices not by fighting them but by agreeing with them. Unconsciously - sometimes consciously - he says to them: "I do agree with you. I am bad and worthless and deserving of the most severe punishment for my rotten character, bad habits, addiction and the constant fraud that is my life. I will go out and seek my doom. Now that I have complied - will you leave me be? Will you leave me alone"?

Of course, they never do.

The Music of my Emotions
I feel sad only when I listen to music. My sadness is tinged with the decomposing sweetness of my childhood. So, sometimes, I sing or think about music and it makes me unbearably sad. I know that somewhere inside me there are whole valleys of melancholy, oceans of pain but they remain untapped because I want to live. I cannot listen to music - any music - for more than a few minutes. It is too dangerous, I cannot breathe.

But this is the exception. Otherwise, my emotional life is colourless and eventless, as rigidly blind as my disorder, as dead as me. Oh, I feel rage and hurt and inordinate humiliation and fear. These are very dominant, prevalent and recurrent hues in the canvass of my daily existence. But there is nothing except these atavistic gut reactions. There is nothing else - at least not that I am aware of.

Whatever it is that I experience as emotions - I experience in reaction to slights and injuries, real or imagined. My emotions are all reactive, not active. I feel insulted - I sulk. I feel devalued - I rage. I feel ignored - I pout. I feel humiliated - I lash out. I feel threatened - I fear. I feel adored - I bask in glory. I am virulently envious of one and all.

I can appreciate beauty but in a cerebral, cold and "mathematical" way. I have no sex drive I can think of. My emotional landscape is dim and grey, as though observed through thick mist in a particularly dreary day.

I can intelligently discuss other emotions, which I never experienced - like empathy, or love - because I make it a point to read a lot and to correspond with people who claim to experience them. Thus, I gradually formed working hypotheses as to what people feel. It is pointless to try to really understand - but at least I can better predict their behaviour than in the absence of such models.

I am not envious of people who feel. I disdain feelings and emotional people because I think that they are weak and vulnerable and I deride human weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Such derision makes me feel superior and is probably the ossified remains of a defense mechanism gone berserk. But, there it is, this is I and there is nothing I can do about it.

To all of you who talk about change - there is nothing I can do about myself. And there is nothing you can do about yourself. And there is nothing anyone can do for you, either. Psychotherapy and medications are concerned with behaviour modification - not with healing. They are concerned with proper adaptation because maladaptation is socially costly. Society defends itself against misfits by lying to them. The lie is that change and healing are possible. They are not. You are what you are. Period. Go live with it.

So, here I am. An emotional hunchback, a fossil, a human caught in amber, observing my environment with dead eyes of calcium. We shall never meet amicably because I am a predator and you are the prey. Because I do not know what it is like to be you and I do not particularly care to know. Because my disorder is as essential to me as your feelings are to you. My normal state is my very illness. I look like you, I walk the walk and talk the talk and I - and my ilk - deceive you magnificently. Not out of the cold viciousness of our hearts - but because that is the way we are.

I have emotions and they are buried in a pit down below. All of my emotions are acidulously negative, they are vitriol, the "not for internal consumption" type. I cannot feel anything, because if I open the floodgates of this cesspool of my psyche, I will drown.

And I will carry you with me.

And all the love in this world, and all the crusading women who think that they can "fix" me by doling out their saccharine compassion and revolting "understanding" and all the support and the holding environments and the textbooks - cannot change one iota in this maddening, self-imposed verdict meted out by the most insanely, obtusely, sadistically harsh judge:

By me.

The Magic of My Thinking
When deprived of narcissistic supply - primary AND secondary - I feel annulled. It is a strange sensation, I am not sure it can be described.

Words, after all, do exist. But it is very much like being hollowed out, mentally disemboweled or watching oneself die. It is a cosmic evaporation, disintegrating into molecules of terrified anguish, helplessly and inexorably.

I lived through this twice and I would do anything not to go through it again. It is by far the most nightmarish experience I ever had in a rather febrile life.

I want to tell you now what happens to narcissists when deprived of narcissistic supply of any kind (secondary or primary). Perhaps it will make it easier for you to understand why the narcissist pursues narcissistic supply so fervently, so relentlessly and so ruthlessly. Without narcissistic supply - the narcissist crumbles, he disintegrates like the zombies or the vampires in horror movies. It is terrifying and the narcissist will do anything to avoid it. Think about the narcissist as a drug addict. His withdrawal symptoms are identical: delusions, physiological effects, irritability, emotional lability.

I want to tell you now about the two times in my life that I faced an utter absence of narcissistic supply and what happened to me as a result.

The first time was after Nomi abandoned me as I was in jail, deprived of all means of obtaining narcissistic supply and subject to the dehumanizing existence of a brutal penal colony. I reacted by retreating into a life-threatening dysphoria.

The second time was even more frightening.

I found myself in Russia in the throes of its worst economic crisis ever. I was a fugitive, having escaped the displeasure of a nasty regime I dared criticize and attack openly. Gaining access to sources of narcissistic supply was a tedious and narcissistically injurious process and my girlfriend was far away, in Macedonia. I lived in a decrepit apartment, with no hot water, with furniture in wooden death and tried to get accustomed to the brutish nastiness of everyday life there. I had no narcissistic supply of any kind - and this lasted for months. All my frantic efforts to generate supply - failed.

At the beginning it was a mere thought - following an exceedingly stormy night which I spent reading about Jack the Ripper. I imagined a decomposing body of a young woman emerging from the rusty bathroom (its creaking door half-hidden from where I slept). She leaned casually against the doorframe and said: "So, you finally came". Gradually, this gruesome image obsessed me to the point of terror. I was reduced to scribbling crosses on all doors together with special mantras I invented. At last, I could not stay there any longer and I moved to live for a few days with my client, a jolly, young and entrepreneurial Macedonian. His interpretation was that I was simply too lonely.

He couldn't understand why I was so uninterested in the ravishing girls that worked for him. He could not fathom my behaviour - reading and writing 16 hours a day, day in and day out, without a break.

But I knew better. I knew that my decomposing apparition was a manifestation of a psychotic break, the zombie of my disorder, my self-destructiveness embodied and my virulent self-hatred projected. I knew that "she" was as real an enemy as any I have ever come across. Narcissists often experience brief psychotic episodes when they are disassembled - either in therapy or following a life-crisis accompanied by a major narcissistic injury.

Psychotic episodes may be closely allied to another feature of narcissism: magical thinking. Narcissists are like children in this sense. I, for instance, fully believe in two things: that whatever happens - I will prevail and that good things will happen to me. It is not a belief, really.

There is no cognitive component in it. I just KNOW it, the same way I know gravity - in a direct and immediate and secure way.

I believe that, no matter what I do, I will always be forgiven, I will always prevail and triumph, I will always land safely on all my fours. I, therefore, am fearless in a manner perceived by others to be both admirable and insane. I attribute to myself divine and cosmic immunity - I cloak myself in it, it renders me invisible to my enemies and to the powers of evil. It is a childish phantasmagoria - but to me it is very real.

The second thing I know with religious certainty is that good things will happen to me. Good things always have, I was never disproved, on the very contrary - my belief only grows stronger as I grow older. With equal certitude, I know that I will squander my good fortune time and again in a bedeviled effort to defeat myself and to vindicate my mother and her transubstantiations, all other authority figures. She - and other role models that substituted for her in later life - insisted with a vengeance that I was corrupt and vain and empty. My life is a continuous effort to prove them right.

So, no matter what serendipity, what lucky circumstance, what blessing I shall receive - I will always strive with blind fury to deflect them, to deform, to ruin. And being the talented person that I am - I will succeed spectacularly.

I have lived in fairy tales come true all my life. I was adopted by a billionaire, an admiring student of mine became Minister of Finance and summoned me to his side, I was given millions to invest and have been the subject of many other miracles - but I was and am intent on bringing myself to biblical destitution and devastation.

Perhaps in this - in the belief that I have the omnipotence to conspire against a universe that constantly smiles upon me - lies the real magic of my thinking. The day I stop resisting my endowments and my good fortune is the day I die.

Looking for a Family
I don't have a family of my own. I don't have children and marriage is a remote prospect. Families, to me, are hotbeds of misery, breeding grounds of pain and scenes of violence and hate. I do not wish to create my own.

Even as adolescent I was looking for another family. Social workers offered to find foster families. I spent my vacations begging Kibbutzim to accept me as an underage member. It pained my parents and my mother expressed her agony the only way she knew how - by abusing me physically and psychologically. I threatened to have her committed. It was not a nice place, our family. But in its thwarted way, it was the only place. It had the warmth of a familiar disease.

My father always said to me that their responsibilities end when I am 18. But they couldn't wait that long and signed me to the army a year earlier, though at my behest. I was 17 and terrified witless. After a while my father told me not to visit them again - so the army became my second, nay, my only home. When I was hospitalized for a fortnight with kidney disease, my parents came to see me only once, bearing stale chocolates. A person never forgets such slights - they go to the very core of one's identity and self-worth.

I dream about them often, my family whom I haven't seen for five years now. My little brothers and one sister, all huddled around me listening cravingly to my stories of fantasy and black humour. We are all so white and luminescent and innocent. In the background is the music of my childhood, the quaintness of the furniture, my life in sepia colour. I remember every detail in stark relief and I know how different it could all have been. I know how happy we could all have been. I dream about my mother and my father. A great vortex of sadness threatens to suck me in. I wake up suffocating.

I spent the first vacation in jail - voluntarily - locked up in a sizzling barrack writing a children's story. I refused to go "home". Everyone did, though - so, I was the only prisoner in jail. I had it all to myself and I was content in the quite manner of the dead. I was to divorce N. in a few weeks. Suddenly, I felt unshackled, ethereal. I guess that, at the bottom of it all, I do not want to live. They took away from me the will to live. If I allow myself to feel - this is what I overwhelmingly experience - my own non-existence. It is an ominous, nightmarish sensation which I am fighting to avoid even at the cost of forgoing my emotions. I deny myself three times for fear of being crucified. There is in me a deeply repressed seething ocean of melancholy, gloom and self-worthlessness awaiting to engulf me, to lull me into oblivion. My shield is my narcissism. I let the medusas of my soul be petrified by their own reflections in it.

Narcissist, the Machine
I always think of myself as a machine. I say to myself things like "you have an amazing brain" or "you are not functioning today, your efficiency is low". I measure things, I constantly compare performance. I am acutely aware of time and how it is utilized. There is a meter in my head, it ticks and tocks, a metronome of self-reproach and grandiose assertions. I talk to myself in third person singular. It lends objectivity to what I think, as though it comes from an external source, from someone else. That low is my self-esteem that, to be trusted, I have to disguise myself, to hide myself from myself. It is the pernicious and all-pervasive art of unbeing.

I like to think about myself in terms of automata. There is something so aesthetically compelling in their precision, in their impartiality, in their harmonious embodiment of the abstract. Machines are so powerful and so emotionless, not prone to be hurting weaklings like me. Machines don't bleed. Often I find myself agonizing over the destruction of a laptop in a movie, as its owner is blown to smithereens as well. Machines are my folk and kin. They are my family. They allow me the tranquil luxury of unbeing.

And then there is data. My childhood dream of unlimited access to information has come true and I am the happiest for it. I have been blessed by the Internet. Information was power and not only figuratively.

Information was the dream, reality the nightmare. My knowledge was my flying info-carpet. It took me away from the slums of my childhood, from the atavistic social milieu of my adolescence, from the sweat and stench of the army - and into the perfumed existence of international finance and media exposure.

So, even in the darkness of my deepest valleys I was not afraid. I carried with me my metal constitution, my robot countenance, my superhuman knowledge, my inner timekeeper, my theory of morality and my very own divinity - myself.

When N. left me, I discovered the hollowness of it all. It was the first time that I experienced my true self consciously. It was a void, annulment, a gaping abyss, almost audible, an hellish iron fist gripping, tearing my chest apart. It was horror. A transubstantiation of my blood and flesh into something primordial and screaming.

It was then that I came to realized that my childhood was difficult. At the time, it seemed to me to be as natural as sunrise and as inevitable as pain.

But in hindsight, it was devoid of emotional expression and abusive to the extreme. I was not sexually abused - but I was physically, verbally and psychologically tormented for 16 years without one minute of respite.

Thus, I grew up to be a narcissist, a paranoid and a schizoid. At least that's what I wanted to believe. Narcissists have alloplastic defences - they tend to blame others for their troubles. In this case, psychological theory itself was on my side. The message was clear: people who are abused in their formative years (0-6) tend to adapt by developing personality disorders, amongst them the narcissistic personality disorder. I was absolved, an unmitigated relief.

I want to tell you how much I am afraid of pain. To me, it is a pebble in Indra's Net - lift it and the whole net revives. My pains do not come isolated - they live in families of anguish, in tribes of hurt, whole races of agony. I cannot experience them insulated from their kin. They rush to drown me through the demolished floodgates of my childhood. These floodgates, my inner dams - this is my narcissism, there to contain the ominous onslaught of stale emotions, repressed rage, a child's injuries.

Pathological narcissism is useful - this is why it is so resilient and resistant to change. When it is "invented" by the tormented individual - it enhances his functionality and makes life bearable for him. Because it is so successful, it attains religious dimensions - it become rigid, doctrinaire, automatic and ritualistic. In other words, it becomes a PATTERN of behaviour.

I am a narcissist and I can feel this rigidity as though it were an outer shell. It constrains me. It limits me. It is often prohibitive and inhibitive. I am afraid to do certain things. I am injured or humiliated when forced to engage in certain activities. I react with rage when the mental edifice supporting my disorder is subjected to scrutiny and criticism - no matter how benign.

Narcissism is ridiculous. I am pompous, grandiose, repulsive and contradictory. There is a serious mismatch between who I really am and what I really achieved - and how I feel myself to be. It is not that I THINK that I am far superior to other humans intellectually. Thought implies volition - and willpower is not involved here. My superiority is ingrained in me, it is a part of my every mental cell, an all-pervasive sensation, an instinct and a drive. I feel that I am entitled to special treatment and outstanding consideration because I am such a unique specimen. I know this to be true - the same way you know that you are surrounded by air. It is an integral part of my identity. More integral to me than my body.

This opens a gap - rather, an abyss - between me and other humans. Because I consider myself so special, I have no way of knowing how it is to be THEM.

In other words, I cannot empathize. Can you empathize with an ant? Empathy implies identity or equality, both abhorrent to me. And being so inferior, people are reduced to cartoonish, two-dimensional representations of functions. They become instrumental or useful or functional or entertaining - rather than loving or interacting emotionally. It leads to ruthlessness and exploitativeness. I am not a bad person - actually, I am a good person. I have helped people - many people - all my life. So, I am not evil. What I am is indifferent. I couldn't care less. I help people because it is a way to secure attention, gratitude, adulation and admiration. And because it is the fastest and surest way to get rid of them and their incessant nagging.

I realize these unpleasant truths cognitively - but there is no corresponding emotional reaction (emotional correlate) to this realization.

There is no resonance. It is like reading a boring users' manual pertaining to a computer you do not even own. It is like watching a movie about yourself. There is no insight, no assimilation of these truths. When I write this now, I feel like writing the script of a mildly interesting docudrama.

It is not I.

Still, to further insulate myself from the improbable possibility of confronting these facts - the gulf between reality and grandiose fantasy (the Grandiosity Gap, in my writings) - I came up with the most elaborate mental structure, replete with mechanisms, levers, switches and flickering alarm lights. My narcissism does two things for me - it always did:

Isolate me from the pain of facing reality

Allow me to inhabit the fantasyland of ideal perfection and brilliance.

These once-vital function are bundled in what is known to psychologists as my "False Self".

My Woman and I
No woman has ever wanted to have a child with me. It is very telling. Women have children even with incarcerated murderers. I know because I have been to jail with these people. But no woman has ever felt the urge to perpetuate US - the we-ness of she and I.

I was married once and almost married twice but women are very hesitant with me. They definitely do not want anything binding. It is as though they want to maintain all routes of escape clear and available. It is a reversal of the prevailing myth about non-committal males and women huntresses.

But no one wants to hunt a predator.

It is an arduous and eroding task to live with me. I am atrabilious, infinitely pessimistic, bad-tempered, paranoid and sadistic in an absent-minded and indifferent manner. My daily routine is a rigmarole of threats, complaints, hurts, eruptions, moodiness and rage. I rail against slights true and imagined. I alienate people. I humiliate them because this is my only weapon against the humiliation of their indifference to me.

Gradually, wherever I am, my social circle dwindles and then vanishes. Every narcissist is also a schizoid, to some extent. A schizoid is not a misanthrope. He does not necessarily hate people - he simply does not need them. He regards social interactions as a nuisance to be minimized.

I am torn between my need to obtain narcissistic supply (the monopoly on which is held by human beings) - and my fervent wish to be left alone. This wish, in my case, is peppered with contempt and feelings of superiority.

There are fundamental conflicts between dependence and contempt, neediness and devaluation, seeking and avoiding, turning on the charm to attract adulation and being engulfed by wrathful reactions to the most minuscule "provocations". These conflicts lead to rapid cycling between gregariousness and self-imposed ascetic seclusion.

Such an unpredictable but always bilious and festering atmosphere is hardly conducive to love or sex. Gradually, both become extinct. My relationships are hollowed out. Imperceptibly, I switch to a-sexual co-habitation.

But the vitriolic environment that I create is only one hand of the equation. The other hand is the woman herself.

I am heterosexual, so I am attracted to women. But I am simultaneously repelled, horrified, bewitched and provoked by them. I seek to frustrate and humiliate them. Psychodynamically, I am probably visiting upon them my mother's sin - but I think such an instant explanation does the subject great injustice.

Most narcissists I know - myself included - are misogynists. Their sexual and emotional lives are perturbed and chaotic. They are unable to love in any true sense of the word - nor are they capable of developing any measure of intimacy. Lacking empathy, they are incapable of offering to the partner emotional sustenance.

I have been asked many times if I miss loving, whether I would have liked to love and if I am angry with my parents for crippling me so. There is no way I can answer these questions. I never loved. I do not know what is it that I am missing. Observing it from the outside, love seems to me to be a risible pathology. But I am only guessing.

I am not angry for being unable to love. I equate love with weakness. I hate being weak and I hate and despise weak people (and, by implication, the very old and the very young). I do not tolerate stupidity, disease and dependence - and love seems to encompass all three. These are not sour grapes. I really feel this way.

I am an angry man - but not because I never experienced love and probably never will. No, I am angry because I am not as powerful, awe inspiring and successful as I wish to be and as I deserve to be. Because my daydreams refuse so stubbornly to come true. Because I am my worst enemy. And because, in my unmitigated paranoia, I see adversaries plotting everywhere and feel discriminated against and contemptuously ignored. I am angry because I know that I am sick and that my sickness prevents me from realizing even a small fraction of my potential.

My life is a mess as a direct result of my disorder. I am a vagabond, avoiding my creditors, besieged by hostile media in more than one country, hated by one and all. Granted, my disorder also gave me "Malignant Self Love", the rage to write as I do (I am referring to my political essays), a fascinating life and insights a healthy man is unlikely to attain. But I find myself questioning the trade-off ever more often.

But at other times, I imagine myself healthy and I shudder. I cannot conceive of a life in one place with one set of people, doing the same thing, in the same field with one goal within a decades-old game plan. To me, this is death. I am most terrified of boredom and whenever faced with its haunting prospect, I inject drama into my life, or even danger. This is the only way I feel alive.

I guess all the above portrays a lonely wolf. I am a shaky platform, indeed, on which to base a family, or future plans. I know as much. So, I pour wine to both of us, sit back and watch with awe and with amazement the delicate contours of my female partner. I savor every minute. In my experience, it might well be the last.

How I "Became" a Narcissist
I remember the day I died. Almost did. We were in a tour of Jerusalem. Our guide was the Deputy Chief Warden. We wore our Sunday best suits - stained dark blue, abrasive jeans shirts tucked in tattered trousers. I could think of nothing but Nomi. She left me two months after my incarceration. She said that my brain did not excite her as it used to. We were sitting on what passed as a grassy knoll in prison and she was marble cold and firm. This is why, during the trip to Jerusalem, I planned to grab the Warden's gun and kill myself.

Death has an asphyxiating, all-pervasive presence and I could hardly breathe. It passed and I knew that I had to find out real quick what was wrong with me - or else.

How I obtained access to psychology books and to internet from the inside of one of Israel's more notorious jails, is a story unto itself. In this film noire, this search of my dark self, I had very little to go on, no clues and no Della Street by my side. I had to let go - yet I never did and did not know how.

I forced myself to remember, threatened by the immanent presence of the Grim Reaper. I fluctuated between shattering flashbacks and despair. I wrote cathartic short fiction. I published it. I remember holding myself, white knuckles clasping an aluminum sink, about to throw up as I am flooded with images of violence between my parents, images that I repressed to oblivion. I cried a lot, uncontrollably, convulsively, gazing through tearful veils at the monochrome screen.

The exact moment I found a description of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder is etched in my mind. I felt engulfed in word-amber, encapsulated and frozen. It was suddenly very quiet and very still. I met myself. I saw the enemy and it was I.

The article was long winded and full of references to scholars I never heard of before: Kernberg, Kohut, Klein. It was a foreign language that resounded, like a forgotten childhood memory. It was I to the last repellent details, described in uncanny accuracy: grandiose fantasies of brilliance and perfection, sense of entitlement without commensurate achievements, rage, exploitation of others, lack of empathy.

I had to learn more. I knew I had the answer. All I had to do was find the right questions.

That day was miraculous. Many strange and wonderful things happened. I saw people - I SAW them. And I had a glimmer of understanding regarding my self - this disturbed, sad, neglected, insecure and ludicrous things that passed for me.

It was the first important realization - there were two of us. I was not alone inside my body.

One was an extrovert, facile, gregarious, attention-consuming, adulation-dependent, charming, ruthless and manic-depressive being. The other was schizoid, shy, dependent, phobic, suspicious, pessimistic, dysphoric and helpless creature - a kid, really.

I began to observe these two alternating. The first (whom I called Ninko Leumas - an anagram of the Hebrew spelling of my name) would invariably appear to interact with people. It didn't feel like putting a mask on or like I had another personality. It was just like I am MORE me. It was a caricature of the TRUE me, of Shmuel.

Shmuel hated people. He felt inferior, physically repulsive and socially incompetent. Ninko also hated people. He held tham in contempt. THEY were infoerior to his superior qualities and skills. He needed their admiration but he resented this fact and he accepted their offerings codescendingly.

As I pieced my fragmented and immature self together I began to see that Shmuel and Ninko were flip sides of the SAME coin. Ninko seemed to be trying to compensate Shmuel, to protect him, to isolate him from hurt and to exact revenge whenever he failed. At this stage I was not sure who was manipulating who and I did not have the most rudimentary acquaintance with this vastly rich continent I discovered inside me.

But that was only the beginning.