Narcissism or Self-Esteem

Teddy Eragbai
2 min readApr 6, 2020

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This table has been on a very precarious stance for a while now, people don’t seem to know the difference between narcissism and self-esteem, well i’ll first explain what they both mean.
Narcissism is the act of being too conscious and intoxicated by ones self, having to always think and put yourself over everything and everybody, according to Wikipedia,Narcissism is the pursuit of gratification from vanity or egotistic admiration of one’s idealized self image and attributes. This includes self-flattery, perfectionism, and arrogance. A narcissist would see himself in every topic and see his awesomeness displayed in every possible discussion with others.
Self-esteem on the other hand is an appreciation and carriage of ones self worth, according to Wikipedia, Self-esteem is an individual’s subjective evaluation of their own worth. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs about oneself and emotional states such as victory, love, hate etc.

People tend to be narcissist without knowing and they would say it is self esteem, my dear they are totally both different, self esteem first sees a worth whether positive or negative, while narcissism sees self regardless of worth. An example would be a person that always consider how he is seen by others regardless of his partner’s emotion is a narcissist, that cannot be high self esteem. Another test to check for narcissism is when you engage in discussions with someone trying to tell the person about your problem and the person ends up tell you about his and this has to be a continuous practice before it can be termed a narcissistic trait. Self esteem also puts into consideration other peoples esteem,

A high self esteem is good but of course there is always an error when it is over stretched and that is narcissism, i think it will not be wrong to say narcissism is an over stretched high self esteem.
Regardless of esteems, always try to be empathetic, putting your self in peoples shoe so as not to become toxic in a bid to display a high esteem, of course there is also a ditch to fall into when your actions are all fully based on other peoples emotions or feelings, just let there be a balance.

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Teddy Eragbai

Data Scientist, Digital Marketer, Music instructor, Recording Pianist, Creative Writer