Diary of an Oxygen Thief: Inside the Mind of a Narcissist

Facebook introduced me to Diary of an Oxygen Thief

While scrolling through Facebook, there was this photo of a page from a book, it said: “I liked hurting girls. Mentally, not physically, I never hit a girl in my life. Well, once. But that was a mistake. I’ll tell you about it later. The thing is, I got off on it. I really enjoyed it. It’s like when you hear serial killers say they feel no regret, no remorse for all the people they killed. I was like that. Loved it. I didn’t care how long it took either, because I was in no hurry. I’d wait until they were totally in love with me. Till the big saucer eyes were looking at me. I loved the shock on their faces. Then the glaze as they tried to hide how much I was hurting them. And it was legal. I think I killed a few of them. Their souls, I mean. It was their souls I was after.” Immediately after reading that, I said to myself that I needed to purchase this book. I was amazed by the brutal honesty of the narrator. Not only that, but I wanted to read a book in which for the first time the protagonist is not always a good person, I wanted to read about someone who would tell their story but not be a good person. Typically, the protagonist is a good person, but in this book, the narrator is a narcissist by breaking the hearts of women because he does not want to experience being heart broken.

Reminds readers of Holden Caulfield

Diary of an Oxygen Thief was written by an anonymous author, and the narrator himself is also unnamed, so there is the possibility that the book could be an autobiography, or it could also be that the author is not the narrator, but he still did not want his name to be known. Reading this story teaches us that when we have been damaged emotionally and we decide that we will hurt others emotionally, that is not going to help us grow at all, we cannot say we redeemed ourselves when we are becoming the people that wounded us deeply, all it does is create more pain for us. The narrator believed that since he got hurt in his past relationship, and hurt others, that he would be okay, he ends up falling in love again only to get his heart broken a second time; this is an example of karma. This makes readers understand how a weak broken heart decides to move on, which is by the need to hurt others. Diary of an Oxygen Thief reminded me of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye because the narrator has this mindset of closing his heart off to others. Holden Caulfield said "Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." What he meant by this is that opening to someone can lead to attachment or feeling close to that person, and when the relationship or bond ends, you are left heartbroken and miss them because they were important in your life.

What Comes Around Goes Around

The narrator is five years sober. He mentions attending Alcoholics Anonymous, which is a program where people come together and try to find solutions to end their alcoholism. He meets Aisling, falling in love with her, but the feeling is not mutual. A person can recover from alcohol for a while but then go back to being an alcoholic. In other cases, a person can fully recover from alcohol and still pay for all the terrible things they have done. The narrator progressively explains how Aisling emotionally took him apart and, strangely, how she likes breaking people's hearts in the same way he had. She, on the other hand, shattered people's hearts for professional, malicious reasons, whereas he broke people's hearts because he was broken. Although the author became sober, his cruel actions would not go unnoticed.

Low Self-Esteem Leads to Awful Choices

Low self-esteem is evident through the narrator's inconsiderate thoughts on all the girls he has dated. The narrator claims that people who are hurt decide to hurt other people, after he talks about how his four-year relationship ended because his ex-girlfriend, Penelope, would not say anything to him about how she felt. He uses the word need, saying that he needed to hurt her. But he did not stop and ask himself why she stayed quiet and instead assumed that hurting her was the only option he had to make himself feel better. Was it really Penelope that caused him pain? Or was it his alcoholism that turned him into a narcissist?

Broken Hearts do not Heal by Breaking the Hearts of Others

Although he is a recovered alcoholic, the narrator is still ignorant of what he did to other women because when his heart gets broken by Aisling, he cannot handle it. He says he had it coming, but there is no growth seen in him. Therefore, he should consider reaching out to a therapist because it can help him uncover so many things about himself. His narcissism is shown when he claims he did what he did because he was broken hearted and did not want to go through it again. A person who is not a narcissist moves on without the urge to hurt others around them.