Everything Is Mine: Narcissists, Splitting, and the Politics of Disposability

When I was sixteen years old, something happened to me that changed everything. A man more than twice my age—my married saxophone teacher—raped me. When my father found out, I was hoping for help.

I got punishment instead.

He beat me. Tried to strangle me with the phone cord (phones had cords back then, friends.) He screamed, “you’re a whore just like your mother.” He put all my belongings in a trash bag and locked me out of the house. He threw me out of the only home I had. When the cops came after I called 911 from a payphone, they asked me what I’d done to upset my dad. I had nowhere to go.

Let me be clear: I was a child. A straight-A student. Class president. Chronic overacheiver trying to prove I was a good kid. The state of Louisiana had already removed me from my mother’s custody for neglect. I had literally nowhere else to go. But that didn’t matter to my dad. Not my safety. Not my trauma. Only his ego. His pride. His image.

As a machista man born and raised in Havana, Cuba, a man raised to think of women as property, a man steeped in the Madonna-Whore Paradigm, my dad couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see the difference between a child being raped by an authority figure, and a woman making a choice without her dad’s permission. To him, I had crossed some invisible, arbitrary line of feminine daughterly acceptability. Disgraced the family. And in that moment, I went from daughter to dead-to-him. From human being to trash.

I now know: That’s how malignant narcissists operate. It’s literally “my way or the highway” for them. And now, decades later, I see that same pathology replicated—on a national level—in the man who’s president again. Only he’s not throwing innocent people out of his house; he’s throwing them out of the country he thinks belongs to him.