Narcissists like Polissa don't seem to grasp that the people who are successful on places like TikTok or Patreon or yt are selling a wanted, carefully manufactured and maintained product. It might be some form of art, or information, or a political or social cause, or entertainment, or even merely a parasocial relationship. Even someone promoting a parasocial relationship spend a tremendous amount of effort on marketing, research, sales, and maintaining and supplying the product (I.e themselves).
Yeah, the idea that one receives money in return for providing things other people want, like, and admire is lost on Polissa. She believes she should be given money and all the comforts of life simply for existing. And that's before you get to her outsized estimation of her abilities as an artist.
She has no charisma, and her attempts at charm are unbelievably creepy.
Because they're completely fake. She's basically a bad actress, attempting to perform a role in order to gain others' sympathy, but since she has no genuine sympathy or tender feeling for anybody else (human or animal), she doesn't know how to do it.
She is not beautiful, she is not fashionable, she gives terrible advice, her arts and crafts are dreadful, her attempts at being a cat lady have downright horrific results, and instead of changing or improving her life, she just complains incessantly that no one will help her.
She could get away with not being pretty or stylish if she had redeeming personal qualities, including a solid work ethic. But she's just such a rotten, shiftless, self-pitying, ungrateful, animal abusing Narc, even good looks wouldn't get her very far.
She could have used the renovation of La Casa as the basis of an ongoing social media channel, likewise her "rescue", or she could even base a channel around her steady growth and improvement as an artist. [...]
No, she couldn't. I accidentally clipped the rest of the things you suggested she could do, but she couldn't do those, either.
I know our saying around here is, "It's not that Polissa can't; it's that Polissa won't," but she really could not have done, and cannot do, what you've described. She's too deeply entrenched in being a victim, and blaming anything and anyone else for her failings and misery, and is utterly lacking in self-awareness. She's a Narcissist. She's not going to have some great awakening, see how she's ruined her own life, and become somebody who does things, rather than being done to.
Chronic self-pity, learned helplessness, and a victim mentality are all crippling enough in people who are not Cluster Bs, and are immensely difficult to break out of, even when the person with those traits recognizes them in themselves and truly wants to change. But in someone like Polissa, who lacks even the most basic self-awareness? It's never going to change. She will be like this until the day she dies. Every action a saner human might be able to take to improve their lives is off-limits to Polissa, because she can never admit that the ultimate source of all her problems is herself.
But it's not that Polissa can't...
Yeah, it is.
There are lots of smaller, mundane things where "It's not that Polissa can't..." applies, but when it comes to the big things? No. She really, really can't.
