Dignitectomy Personality Disorder

Once, a long time ago, I lost my dignity.

Nobody had explained to me what to do when one lost one's dignity; mostly, it seemed, they stressed that one was never supposed to lose it. Dignity was sort of like your passport, your social security card, your PIN - something you're supposed to keep close to you and never let out of your sight or control.

One thing you can do when you lose your dignity is to hide the fact that you lost your dignity. Problem is, dignity is one of those things you don't really notice until you've lost it. So what you end up doing is imagining what having dignity must have been like when you had it, and then pretending to be that way. Only, it doesn't really work. It's like losing a leg: you can pretend all you like that you've still got it, but the more that you pretend like the leg is still there, the more noticeable it becomes that you don't have it. The instant you try to walk on the non-existent leg, the whole charade comes crashing down. Literally.

But dignity is a totally different matter. Dignity is supposed to be intangible, invisible; if you lose it, you should be able to hide the fact far more easily than hiding a missing leg, right?

What I discovered, though, is that pretending that one still has one's dignity is just as noticeable as a lost appendage. There are tell-tale signs and characteristics - symptoms, if you will - of dignitectomy personality disorder (DPD). In DSM-IV style, DPD is characterized by two or more of the following criteria:

• Seriousness of affect and complete lack of humor, as demonstrated by the utter inability to take a joke;
  
• Heightened sense of self-importance, including transient, stress-related delusions of grandeur;
• Belief that one is being purposefully humiliated by inanimate objects;
• Pervasive inability to admit lack-of-knowledge or inferiority-of-skill in any area of expertise or life-experience;
• Affectation of a maturational level beyond one's actual maturity;
• Indirect conflictual or harmful behavior towards others, such as gossip, backbiting, slander, theft, cheating, etc.;
• Deep-seated fear of being just like everybody else.

To the best of my knowledge, DPD is incurable, though treatment may create a remission of symptoms.

DPD can be treated, I've found, by confession of one's fault(s) to another, maintenance of a sense of humor, and most especially by the ready willingness to recognize and accept the utter absurdity of human existence and one's place in the grand scheme of things.

The interesting thing about DPD, I've found, is that treatment does not necessitate the restitution of one's previous dignity or the acquisition of new-found dignity; in point of fact, proper treatment requires the relinquishment of all of one's dignity, a further abasement of one's self, as it were, to the lowest possible levels of humiliation, foolishness, degradation, and patheticalness.

The more interesting thing, though, is that the treatment has the potential to heighten the perception of one's dignity in other people's eyes, and that the further down the ladder one is willing to go, the higher the estimation of one's self, one's virtues, one's honor and one's dignity in the eyes of witnesses about you. Of course, to act in a manner by which one wishes to gain an estimation of dignity in the eyes of others immediately renders treatment ineffective, and therefore a willful abasement and loss of dignity is the key.

'Tis an interesting paradox, is it not?