Are you chasing a dream or feeding a narcissist?
Giving up has a terrible reputation. We are encouraged to keep applying, keep showing up, keep believing that the next attempt will be the one that changes everything. Persistence is an attractive quality in other people’s stories, particularly when we already know how those stories end. The years of disappointment become a necessary prelude to success, each rejection another detail that makes the eventual victory satisfying. Living through those years is a less orderly business. There is no narrator to reassure you that the humiliation serves a purpose. There is just another unanswered email, another opportunity that goes elsewhere, another evening spent wondering whether you are being patient or making a fool of yourself. At some point, a question becomes difficult to avoid: how much rejection can a dream demand before your loyalty to it starts to hurt?
That question offers a way into PEARL’s Never Ending Narcissist. In her account of its origins, she describes a friendship breakdown that prompted a broader consideration of wanting something that fails to return your commitment. The object of that longing might be another person, but it might equally be work or an imagined future. Moving between those possibilities gives the premise its interest. An ambition can occupy the space usually reserved for a difficult relationship: consuming your attention, determining your mood and making every small encouragement feel disproportionately important. You begin to arrange your life around the possibility of its approval. The thing you wanted to do becomes the thing you need to want you.
There is a difference between enjoying the work and needing evidence that you deserve to do it. The distinction can be hard to maintain when recognition seems to promise an answer to much larger questions. A job offer might mean financial security, but it can also become proof that the years spent preparing were worthwhile. An audience might offer company, but it can come to stand for permission to take yourself seriously. Once an ambition carries that much weight, disappointment reaches beyond the practical setback. Being passed over begins to feel like a judgement on the person doing the asking. The temptation is to respond with greater devotion: more hours, more availability, another concession. Perhaps this time you will become whatever the opportunity requires.
PEARL’s publicity places considerable faith in perseverance, presenting doubt and disappointment as part of a journey worth continuing. Yet the premise of this single leaves room for a less reassuring reading. If pursuing an ambition resembles pursuing someone who repeatedly lets you down, continued commitment deserves scrutiny as well as admiration. There is no easy point at which determination becomes self-neglect, and leaving can carry real costs. You may have invested money, organised friendships around the work or built an identity that is difficult to imagine without it. Walking away then means confronting more than a lost opportunity. It means accepting that effort cannot guarantee the outcome it was supposed to secure. That can be harder to bear than another rejection, because rejection still allows you to try again.
The useful question here is whether a dream still gives something back before it delivers success. There might be pleasure in the daily practice, companionship in the people it brings close, or satisfaction in getting better at something you value. Those returns matter, especially when external approval remains uncertain. But if the whole experience has narrowed to waiting for a decision from elsewhere, it is worth asking who now gets to determine its value. Never Ending Narcissist offers a starting point for that conversation through the uneasy resemblance between longing for a person and longing for a future. Both can make being chosen seem like the solution to everything. The harder task is deciding what you want your life to contain while you wait, and how much of it you are willing to spend waiting.