Narcissus' Self-Love Workshop
By Beatriz Seelaender
Location: Golden Ratio House, Styx—Tartarus
Description: Learn self-love from the OG! This cozy corner of the Tartarus, right by the Styx Bay, is a phenomenal place to cultivate confidence! Customers can choose the package that best suits their needs, from the weekly check-in to the intensive course! Don’t waste any time and sign up now! Feel better about yourself and where you are at death after just one session!
Relevant Customer Reviews
“Washed-Up Celebrity Resorts to Coaching”
A tale as old as time. When Narcissus isn’t constantly drunk on the Styx water, he murmurs about how below him this course is. He will leave the class to look at himself in the giant mirror in his adjacent house. He carries a portable mirror so he can look at himself at all times, but according to him it is too small.
The splendid thing is, the workshop does have the desired effect: seeing how Narcissus lives (in death) has made me feel much better about myself. Other people’s unquestionable failures have made me realize how much better I am than them. It’s true, I have been setting unrealistic expectations for myself—I am more than enough as it is. 10/10
“The Boost I Needed”
I don’t know how the man does it! While I’ve always been self-conscious about my appearance, dying has really worsened my anxiety—I was having trouble with the fact that I will look the way I do for the rest of eternity. Mr. N helped me with that! He said my nostrils are the exact same shape as his, which means I am beautiful by association. He helped some other participants with their own body image as well, always finding something of himself in them, then showering them with compliments! Simply knowing him, he said, already makes us special! Finally, what struck me the most was how he closed the lesson: “You must be your own reference, your own blueprint.” That really spoke to me.
“Just the Opposite”
I feel a lot worse about my choices after spending money on this! All we did was look at different types of mirrors! One particularly daft activity consisted of staring at those amusement park funhouse mirrors for a really long time until we “forgot what we originally looked like,” and then seeing the undistorted version of our reflections. I suppose the point was to make us appreciate our original proportions, but it only brought me dissociation, my facial features floating like Picasso forms, not quite harmonizing figuratively. After that, our coach went around complimenting random things about everyone’s appearance (mine was the cleft chin, which, unsurprisingly, is the one characteristic me and “Mr. N” share). He looked extremely uncomfortable doing it, too—the lines sounded as rehearsed as the lines on his face, as if he’d been told to scratch all his true feelings off a review and keep only the small concession before the tirade. I left before completing the workshop so as to preserve at least some of my self-confidence.
“Twisted Methodology”
This is the only self-love workshop in all of Tartarus, so I decided to give it a shot in spite of its sinking reputation. I don’t regret going because I know now what a mess it is: first off, it is very focused on external self-love: one session was based around learning his skincare routine, and another was a makeup tutorial. I thought the purpose of this kind of thing was not how much our eyeliner slays, but to learn to love ourselves as we are? The final paper was sort of about that, except in the most twisted way possible: it was a two-step activity in which we were supposed to point out things that we didn’t like about our fellow workshop attendees, then compare ourselves to them in a positive way. That felt mean and slimy, and I had to take a shower afterwards.
When I asked Narcissus the reason behind this method, he said, I kid you not: “You can either love yourself and hate the rest, or you can love the rest and hate yourself. This is a self-love workshop. If you were looking for the self-hatred workshop, come to our Open House on Wednesday.”
Beatriz Seelaender (she/her) is a Brazilian writer whose work can be found in multiple literary magazines. She is the winner of both the Sandy Run and the Bottom Drawer prizes.