The NARCISSIST’s Curation Of Reality

There is a particular kind of person who believes that if they just say something with enough confidence, enough persistence, enough wide-eyed, unblinking conviction, it somehow ceases to be a lie and instead becomes an irrefutable fact. Enter the narcissist—an individual for whom reality is not an objective, external thing but rather a flexible, malleable concept that exists solely to serve their ego. Their version of events is airtight, not because it’s true, but because they refuse to acknowledge any reality in which they are anything less than righteous, brilliant, and entirely blameless. And so, they repeat their version of events—loudly, shamelessly, relentlessly—until you either start to question your own memory or simply run out of the energy to argue. Either way, they win, which is the only outcome they’ll ever accept.

This isn’t mere dishonesty; it’s a masterclass in psychological warfare. A narcissist doesn’t just lie; they curate reality. They revise history in real time, reshaping the narrative to cast themselves as either the misunderstood hero or the innocent victim, depending on which role suits them best in the moment. They will deny things they said five minutes ago with the confidence of a man swearing he’s never heard of gravity, even as he plummets off a cliff. And if you dare present evidence—texts, emails, video footage, sworn affidavits from God himself—they’ll dismiss it with a scoff, waving it away like a minor inconvenience. "That’s not what happened," they’ll say, as though reality were an opinion, as though your memory were merely an obstacle standing in the way of their preferred version of events.

But it doesn’t stop there. Because a narcissist’s relationship with truth isn’t just about lying to you—it’s about breaking you down until you stop trusting yourself. They understand, on some instinctive level, that truth is a fragile thing, that memory is fallible, that if you say something with enough authority, people might start to doubt what they know. And so, they don’t just repeat their version of events; they hammer it into you like a relentless drumbeat. They scoff at your protests, roll their eyes at your corrections, laugh at your insistence that what happened actually happened. They wear you down, little by little, until you start second-guessing yourself. Did I misunderstand? Am I overreacting? Am I the problem? That’s their goal. That’s what they need you to believe.

Because if they can’t control what you think, they can at least control how much you doubt yourself.

And here’s where it gets dangerous. Most of us like to believe we’d never fall for it, that we’d never let someone warp our perception of reality. But it doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in small, insidious ways—tiny, repeated moments of "I never said that" and "You’re imagining things" and "You always blow things out of proportion." It happens in relationships, in friendships, in families. It happens in workplaces and politics and in the quiet corners of conversations where someone with just enough charm and just enough audacity convinces everyone that they are the reasonable one, the wronged one, the victim of some cruel misunderstanding.

And the worst part? They don’t even care if you believe them. Not really. What they care about is control—control over the narrative, control over your perception, control over the space they occupy in your mind. They thrive on exhaustion, on the slow erosion of your certainty. They don’t need you to be convinced; they just need you to be too tired to keep fighting them on it. That’s when they win. That’s when they cement their version of events as the only one that matters.

And if you think calling them out will stop them? Oh, you sweet, naive fool. They love that. They live for that. They’ll scoff, they’ll mock, they’ll look at you like you’re unstable for even suggesting that they’re not telling the truth. And then they’ll double down. "I can’t believe you’d accuse me of lying," they’ll say, shaking their head in performative disappointment. "You’re really going to hold on to that? I feel sorry for you. You’re always so dramatic." And suddenly, the conversation is no longer about what they did, but about how you are reacting to it. The problem isn’t the lie anymore—it’s you. And now you’re defending yourself, scrambling to explain why you’re upset, while they sit back and watch you unravel, fully in control.

But here’s the thing about narcissists—they can’t rewrite the past forever. They can’t gaslight everyone. They may convince a few enablers, a few well-meaning but gullible souls who prefer a comfortable lie to an uncomfortable truth, but reality is not a thing that bends indefinitely to one person’s will. Reality has receipts. Reality remembers. And reality will catch up to them, eventually. Maybe not today, maybe not in a way that is satisfying or dramatic, but the truth will always be there, waiting, refusing to disappear just because someone wants it to.

And the people who have been gaslit into oblivion, who have been told one too many times that up is down and left is right, eventually reach a breaking point where they stop questioning themselves and start seeing the narcissist for exactly what they are—an unremarkable liar with a desperate need to be the main character in a story that was never actually about them.

So let them repeat their version of events. Let them spin their tangled web of revisionist history. Let them insist that their lies are the truth, that reality is subjective, that facts are merely suggestions. Because at the end of the day, the only person they are truly fooling is themselves. And honestly? That’s hilarious.