Today as I look back at the person I was when I had started dating my narcissist LVM ex, I realize that being so intimately acquainted with what goes on in a narcissist's mind taught me a few things that have, over the last year, brought me much success in my career and interpersonal relationships. Let me list a few for you:

- I now go through life with a sense of entitlement that I only learnt by watching him life his life that way. He believed that he was entitled to anything he wanted and I can not begin to describe how freeing it is to genuinely live like that.

- I ask for what I want, whether its more space in a crowded bar, higher pay or promotion at my job or better service at a bank. He was unabashed in his demands, with both strangers and loved ones, and I saw the world bending over backwards to accommodate him. It has worked amazingly for me. I got a promotion and a 30% salary hike at a new job within 6 months because I asked the CEO. I then negotiated my way into another job that year that gave me an additional 30% hike.

- I don't budge on my boundaries. I remember how obstinate he was with his boundaries and he'd never go back on a no. Guess what, I do the same now. Not negotiating any of my boundaries has freed up so much headspace for other productive activities.

As a teenager, I was confident, opinionated and entitled but then as I grew up, I was conditioned into making myself smaller to appease others. And then I had to go through a shitty relationship to undo some of this conditioning, but I hope some of you reading this post will not need that. Mindy Kaling attributed her success to how her parents raised her with the entitlement of a tall, blond, white man. If you take away anything from this post, it should be that women need to learn a trick or two from narcissists!