Dear Diary,
A friend, let us call her Zara, has been dating someone for three weeks. Nice guy. Shows up. Texts back. By all available data, completely normal. Maybe even good. Naturally, this is utterly destroying her. Zara is in the group chat daily, not to share good news, but to build a federal case. ‘He was very calm when I cancelled on him. Is that normal?’ ‘He has not posted a story in four days. What is he hiding?’ ‘He said he had a good childhood. Do we believe that?’ She is practically begging for a red flag. Last week she sent me a TikTok titled ’10 signs you are dating a covert narcissist.’ She had circled three of them. The man’s unspeakable crimes? He sometimes takes an hour to reply to a text. He does not share his deepest feelings unprompted. He is, on occasion, in a mood.
I watched the video. Then the next one. Then six more. And what I discovered is: I am also a narcissist. Actually, we all are. The algorithm has diagnosed us. Every single one of us. If you have spent time on the internet, you have been assigned a disorder, a trauma response, an attachment style, and at least one toxic trait. You are either the narcissist, or you are healing from one. There is no third option. The TikTok algorithm does not allow you to just be a regular person who forgets their keys sometimes.
And the flags. The flags are a psychological hazard at this point. Bad communication one time? Red flag. Being emotionally unavailable on a Tuesday afternoon? Red flag. Having a complicated relationship with his mother? Red flag. Posting too much on Instagram? Red flag. Not posting? Highly suspicious. Texting back too fast? Desperate. Texting back too slow? Avoidant. Being in a good mood is ‘masking,’ and being in a bad mood is ’emotional immaturity.’ There is quite literally no correct way to be a human being anymore. We have successfully pathologised existing. Now, I am not saying real red flags do not exist. If he raises his hand at you, that is not him ‘having a bad day.’ We are not confused about those. Run.
But somewhere between actual abuse and ‘he took three hours to reply,’ we lost the plot. Completely. Here is what is actually happening; psychology discovered the internet, repackaged itself in a ring light, and now hunts us down when we are at our most vulnerable. Usually at 2am, right when the algorithm predicts we are the prime demographic for ‘signs he does not actually love you’ content. This stuff is not designed to help us build healthy relationships. It is designed to keep us watching. Anxiety keeps you scrolling. Certainty does not. A woman who has her life figured out closes the app. A woman who is actively spiralling hits play on the next 16 videos. So the content just keeps expanding the definitions.
It keeps making ordinary human messiness look like severe psychological damage. It keeps producing Zaras. Women who walk into a perfectly good situation and spend months trying to find the catch. Women who are not falling in love, they are conducting forensic investigation. Women who have been so thoroughly convinced that everyone is broken that they cannot recognise a functioning person when he shows up. And the truly unhinged part? We do it to ourselves too. We are diagnosing our triggers, our patterns, our wounds. We are trapped in therapy, buried in journals, drowning in meditation apps, and unpacking ourselves into microscopic pieces. And somewhere in all that unpacking, we forgot to just live.
So here is where I leave you. Not with a checklist, or a worksheet for your ‘healing era.’ Just a question: Before you opened the app, before the group chat weighed in, before the podcast that felt like it was personally attacking your life choices… what did your gut say? We have not lost our instincts. We have just buried them under five gigabytes of content and called it self-awareness.