Borderline Personality Disorder

Elphaba in Wicked: The Story of the Scapegoat Child in a Narcissistic World

And if I'm flying solo, at least I'm flying free.

Despite being a lover of musicals and The Wizard of Oz, I’d never seen Wicked until the movie version came out, which became the highest grossing movie musical of all time in just a matter of months.

I had a feeling I’d love it: I think The Wizard of Oz is one of the best metaphors for escaping trauma bonding from narcissistic abuse that exists in popular culture. (Read all about that in the link below).

Witches are also my favorite magical beings in all of popular culture; when I was little, I was pretty obsessed with them.

I did love Wicked, but I wasn’t prepared for the FORCE in which it hit me.

As Cynthia Erivo’s spine-tingling vocals enveloped my body and her cape grew and grew as she soared into the Western sky, I broke down in sobs I could barely contain.

It hit a pain inside of me that I carry as permanently as the pit of an avocado: it’s the story of a narcissist scapegoat child’s quest for kindness, goodness, and freedom in a corrupted and sick world.

As the show ended, people erupted into cheers. I kept crying into my handkerchief, saying simply to my friend through tears, “It was really good.”

For the next few weeks, I’d be processing the film and people’s reaction to it, and I found another emotion arise within me:

RESENTMENT.

It seemed to be another example of the frustrating hypocrisy of the world.

A lot of people imagine that they’d have gone with Elphaba — away from the oppressive politics of Oz and its evil masterminds — but the truth is that a lot of people lie to themselves.

They’d actually be pointing to the sky and saying, “Look at her, she’s wicked! Kill her!”

Or they’d be like Glinda, sacrificing all morals to grovel to oppressive men just for the sake of their own ambitions of power, worship, and grandiosity. Because that’s what they’re doing now when it comes to issues of oppression, abuse, and scapegoating.

Something people don’t seem to understand no matter how stories from our religions to our popular culture truthfully detail it is that the life of an empathetic scapegoat is tragic, lonely, and isolating.

People want the fantasy of being a trailblazing hero, of being morally good, of being beloved, of helping others, but they only want that because they fantasize that ADORATION comes with it.

The truth is that those who walk the path of good in this world aren’t beloved.

They’re maligned. They’re crucified. They’re smeared. They’re feared. They’re SCAPEGOATED.

They often end up exceptionally isolated and they’re often even murdered for their love. They suffer things that others simply aren’t brave enough to endure.

This is true in fictional and nonfictional stories of empathetic scapegoats for millennia — from Jesus Christ to 2Pac to Elphaba.

In Wicked, Elphaba’s origin story comes from being the daughter of a prominent preacher in Oz who was married to a hussy of a housewife: while he was at work, she was entertaining a revolving door of lovers. One of them, possibly an elf, knocks her up.

At her birth, they’re horrifed to find that the child is GREEN.

This is the birth of the scapegoat child.

In toxic families, narcissistic parents have split thinking: they see their child at birth as either all good (the golden child — their most common response), all bad (the scapegoat child — their most rare response), or irrelevant (the invisible child — a common response).

The scapegoats in these families serve as a trash receptacle for all family members to project their shame and self loathing onto. For everything they hate within themselves, they’ll accuse the scapegoat of being responsible; they’ll tell the scapegoat child that they were born bad and are fundamentally unlovable. Therefore, they must SERVE them and become PERFECT in order to earn love.

But the goalposts for perfection keep moving and are often impossible to achieve. For example, one of the ways I was told I was imperfect was because of my gender, which I couldn’t change. When I tried to prove to my family members that I could do the same things as boys with just as much success, especially academically, I was met with further abuse and disdain for my accomplishments.

The scapegoat child can’t win. Getting ANY scraps of affection and attention from narcissistic family members is dependent upon believing themselves to be worthless.

They can never, ever disturb the hierarchies of power or believe in their humanity or equality. They can never, ever LOVE THEMSELVES.

In Elphaba’s case, her green skin is a not-so-subtle metaphor for those who’ve been CULTURAL narcissistic scapegoats in America: people who aren’t white. It was a wise choice for casting to choose a black actress for this role, because it’s a reminder of the ugly, and still very present truth, behind this metaphorical story.

Elphaba’s skin color prompts bullying and fear throughout her life, and scapegoats in narcissistic families are groomed for abuse; we experience bullying at school and in our jobs, no matter how hard we try to people please and walk on eggshells. Something about us just triggers people: our love agitates their demons.

Elphaba's sister is in a wheelchair, but she’s her father’s GOLDEN CHILD.

She’s golden to Elphaba too: in toxic families, the scapegoat child is ALWAYS going to be defending their siblings, because we see how the golden child also suffers under the abuses of our parents and we develop empathy.

We know the truth of our parents unmasked: I was always trying to warn my sister that our mother would turn on her someday because she wasn’t a good person — I could see that she was only manipulating and fantasizing when she spoiled my sister.

For many years, my sister’s enmeshment with my mom was unshakable: my sister even joined in with my mother on beating me and emotionally berating me, doing as my mother instructed.

Regardless, when my sister got jumped by other school children at the bus stop, I threw down my backpack in the snow and jumped on them and started swinging faster than you can spit.

When my mother locked my sister in her room and she went into her earliest narcissistic collapses, I was the first one to greet her and hold her shivering body once her punishment ended, soothing her and promising her that we’d escape someday.

Despite that, my sister still hurt me more than anyone on this planet ever hurt me. Just like Elphaba with her sister, her love for her is her Achille’s heel.

The reason I write about this topic which is my darkest pain that I’d prefer to avoid is solely motivated by my love for my sister, and even as I write about our painful childhood and relationship, there are things I know about her that I'll take to my grave. I'm fiercely defensive of her.

Even if it’s a delusional hope, I pray that doing the work to raise awareness about this mental condition will someday lead to more research, treatments, reduced stigmas, and changed cultural values about childrearing.

I stubbornly believe that we can evolve rather than march into our own extinction.

I write because I have tremendous love for, and grief over, people with this disorder. This disorder robbed me of a family.

Elphaba, too, was robbed of all human affection. In the book, her birth is regarded with a stunning coldness, as the people who see her discuss the potential of drowning a helpless baby in a lake.

It becomes clear in the narrative early on that Oz is a backwards place with horrifically cold people, just like Earth.

Throughout life, it’s Elphaba’s desire to protect her vulnerable sister that gets her entangled in her misadventures, including her enrollment in a school for magic.

Elphaba, when she’s deeply upset over abuse of herself or others, has a supernatural power she can’t control, and her magic is witnessed by the professors at Shiz University, who convince her to stay and do directed study.

She’s paired to become roommates with a very popular girl who has her dreams set on becoming a powerful enchantress, Glinda.

Though Ariana Grande is a much beloved celebrity and her rendition of Glinda has been aptly praised, Glinda isn’t actually a likable character on paper.

She’s vain, power-hungry, bullying, stuck-up, and discriminatory. She taunts one of her professors for being a goat and not being able to properly pronounce her name. Glinda is narcissistic to her core.

But she wants what all narcissists want: grandiosity and fantasy. She wants to be viewed as ALL GOOD, as BEAUTIFUL, as THE BEST IN THE WORLD, as the GOLDEN CHILD.

But she doesn’t want it for the sake of love or goodness.

She wants it for the sake of POWER.

Glinda, in her hatred and envy for Elphaba’s powers and favoritism amongst professors, gifts her an ugly, pointed black hat. She also sidesteps a boy’s flirtations by convincing him to take Elphaba’s handicapped sister to the dance.

Elphaba feels grateful for how Glinda’s helped her sister, and she mistakenly sees Glinda’s actions as benevolent, so she shows up at the dance with her iconic pointed hat and black cape as a gesture of thanks…

…and she’s humiliated as everyone mocks her.

In a tender moment, Glinda feels compassion for the way Elphaba is ostracized, and she decides to dance with her in front of the others, and they begin a friendship.

But the friendship is put to the test when Elphaba is invited to meet the Wizard of Oz due to her tremendous powers. Elphaba invites Glinda to come.

They soon find out the secret that Dorothy discovers: the wizard is no wizard at all. The booming head is just a projection.

Elphaba points her finger accusatorily at the wizard, “You have NO REAL POWER,” she says in shock.

At this point, Elphaba realizes that the person responsible for oppressing the animals in Oz is actually the Wizard and her very own professor.

Once again, the people tasked to protect her and help her grow were the people who were also the greatest threat to her survival, and they were guilty of the oppression of others too. Like her parents, they were pathological liars and frauds.

However, Elphaba is now well aware that her own power is VERY real.

They wouldn’t all be so obsessed with hurting her if it wasn’t.

She isn’t great at understanding or controlling it, but she’s in a life or death scenario after unmasking the sociopathy of The Wizard.

In the final song of the film, “Defying Gravity,” Glinda berates Elphaba and begs her to apologize, to go along with their plans for oppression just so she can secure some political power with her magic.

But the problem with Elphaba….the problem with every narcissist scapegoat…is that her morals are genuine.

They’re attached to her FEELINGS of LOVE, something that people often deny giving back to her in return.

She doesn’t want any of her ambitions if it costs her scapegoating others. She knows what it’s like to be scapegoated. She knows it’s wrong.

"Too long I've been afraid of losing love I guess I've lost. Well, if that's love, it comes at much too high a cost..." sings Elphaba.

The cost to keep yourself trauma bonded to an abusive narcissist--whether it's your lover, your family, or your politicians, or your culture--is your SELF LOVE, your INTEGRITY, your FREEDOM, your mental and physical HEALTH, and your desires to experience the REAL LOVE you always deserved.

And Elphaba knows what she’s losing to walk away.

Which is….absolutely everything.

Because to walk away from a narcissistic culture is the same thing as to walk away from a CULT.

Cults are always run by sociopaths, and so are most of our institutions and government entities, no matter their political affiliation.

To walk away from a cult means to become feared, chased, maligned, smeared, envied, persecuted, and very, very alone.

That’s why so many people won’t do it.

They’ll go along with the group just to stay in the group even when horrors that they’d never want to face are reigned upon others--even when those horrors will eventually reach them too just by nature of these types of predatory and parasitic abuses of power.

Elphaba asks Glinda to come with her, and in a heartbreaking scene, it becomes clear that Glinda won’t. She’s siding with the Wizard.

This reminds me of the depth of despair I felt when I couldn't convince my sister to get psychological help along with me, when I realized my healing journey from our child abuse would have to be walked alone, without her, without the person I loved most in this world.

“I hope you’re happy, now that you’re choosing this,” Glinda sings to Elphaba.

“You too,” Elphaba says: her pain is undeniable but her well wishes are genuine.

Suddenly, as the Wizard’s fascist forces come in with weapons and grab Glinda, Elphaba panics in defense of her friend who’s just abandoned her.

“No! Leave her alone! It’s me! I’m the one you want! It’s meeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

At no point does Elphaba stop defending the innocent, even someone who's just abandoned her. Even knowing the persecution she faces, her integrity remains steadfast, and her magic becomes more powerful than ever.

As Cynthia Erivo hits the note that raises goosebumps along arms, she rises into the air on her magic broomstick. Her cape grows longer and longer until it cloaks the sky in darkness, nearly eclipsing the sun.

The magic that the scapegoat holds isn’t actually supernatural at all: it’s LOVE.

It’s powerful because God is love, so it’s a divine force that can’t be defeated.

It’s so powerful that those who chase power must mimic it in order to attain their power, so they can harm others and feel grandiose.

Her power lifts Elphaba into the sky, as she says the words that I can’t listen to without erupting into tears:

“So if you care to find me
Look to the western sky.
As someone told me lately, “Everyone deserves the chance to fly.”
And if I’m flying solo
At least I’m flying free.
To those who ground me, take a message back from me.

Tell them how I’m defying gravity.
I’m flying high, defying gravity.”

What looks to the audience to be something to cheer for, is, for me, the deepest pain of my grief.

I’ve done what Elphaba had to do multiple times. Each time was excruciating, and each time saw me fly higher and higher, achieving more than I thought capable, fully aware that I was harnessing the power of love.

But I also know the sacrifice, and that’s why I think so many people who pretend they’re an Elphaba when they’re a Glinda don’t understand the strength or sacrifice it takes to do what Elphaba did.

You have to let go of people you love dearly who refuse to walk with you.

You have to ignore those who persist in gaslighting, blaming, projecting, and staying asleep in denial.

You have to abandon places and institutions that are full of people you’ve loved dearly.

You have to turn away from your mentors or teachers who reveal themselves to be frauds.

You have to suffer the smear campaigns and gaslighting and projections as those who abused you accuse you of everything they did to you.

You have to endure your love being something feared, even attacked and hunted.

You have to learn to live alone in a world in which we are hardwired to be social.

You have to endure being an outcast.

Freedom isn’t free — you sacrifice EVERYTHING to attain it.

And people will often call you a wicked witch if you do achieve it.

You have to develop ARMOR to protect your self love and empathy from those who seek to destroy it--people who hate freedom because they're obsessed with control and dominance.

I had to walk away from my family who I loved who I could never be enough for.

I had to walk away from men I loved with gangrene soul wounds who physically, mentally, and emotionally put my life in danger when I attempted to love them.

I tried to do the right thing in jobs and experienced shocking backlashes. At one college, I was laid off with other professors after we reported a minor who told us another professor had assaulted her, which we were required to do legally. After going to a lawyer, I was told my contract had a clause in which I could be “laid off for any reason,” so they couldn’t help me.

At another college, my course was censored for teaching about racism, and I was promptly fired. I was able to sue and secure a settlement, but not without a gag order.

I was most astonished, however, to watch as all my so-called friends and colleagues who professed to be on my side, stood by idly, said nothing, and continued working for the institutions after.

Students defended me more than any adults did, afraid to suffer my fate by not cowering to abusive people in power.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the ugliness I’ve seen at our “respected” institutions. I’ve seen even more ugliness and complicity as a peace activist and within the writing and publishing community.

I always found a fraud pretending to be a wizard at the top of all systems of hierarchy — sociopaths pursue power.

My morals and love were always treated as a threat, something to be PUNISHED and CENSORED.

The majority of people catered to those in power and shunned truth, love, or morality to do so. To cling to their fantasies and uphold their trauma bonds required a denial of truth and repression of self love and love of others.

Sometimes, they clung to denial because they couldn't survive facing the truths of their partners, role models, or family members. Their lives were co-dependent upon seeing those people through the lens of fantasy.

Eventually I had to recognize that I couldn’t keep justifying staying at institutions with people who mistreated me and others. The college protests last year were a tipping point in which I realized I was as trauma bonded to my jobs as I had been to abusive friends, family, or romantic relationships.

I worked hard for my degrees, my accolades, my career, and my GPA. I paid a hefty price too--$100,000 in student loans with interest rates that make the debt more than double that cost.

But education doesn't mean anything to me if there's no justice, no equality, and no future that includes freedom for my students. It especially doesn't mean anything if there's no foundation of TRUTH, if I have to be afraid to teach certain histories or ethnicities without backlash or punishment.

In Oz, the animals were under attack, and animals were often intelligent academics. Sociopaths, too, have historically always targeted intellectuals and sought to ban books and shadowban on the internet. They see truth as the greatest threat to their power.

Narcissists don't see the challenge to learn, grow, and heal as the LOVE that it is: they see it as an ATTACK or a COMPETITION that they can't win.

"Look at her, she's wicked! Kill her!"

Walking away from a well paying and well respected job with benefits felt like walking off a cliff, but — much like Elphaba — I knew I could fly.

It wasn't my first rodeo.

Much of my identity was wrapped up in my job title and my financial security. To heal, I had to believe in my self worth even without all of that validation, leaving behind everything I'd passionately loved and worked so hard to achieve and do well.

Today, while I still sometimes teach as an adjunct, most of my work is in tutoring, coaching, and writing. If I’m short on money, you’ll find me at the plasma donation center sitting right alongside homeless people, selling my blood to survive.

I have no shame in that, because the alternative of continuing to co-sign my own abuses and the horrendous abuses and exploitations of others isn’t something I’m willing to live with.

I’d rather be mocked, villified, and outcast than bow to another “wizard,” especially ones who hate others unjustly with the same immovable contempt as my parents' hatred.

As Elphaba sings, "I'm through with playing by the rules of someone else's game."

I now refuse to enter into any relationship, friendship or romantic, in which I’m not met with the love I give and in which others aren’t invested in their own personal healing and accountability. I replaced my people pleasing with boundaries to protect what is the precious magic within me: my love.

For that reason, I’ve been celibate for nine years. And for that same reason, I got stalked, drugged, and repeatedly raped by my apartment maintenance man, a sociopath who stalked me.

People don’t understand the curse of the scapegoat or the vitriol we produce in those trapped in their own anger and insecurities.

No scapegoat child is a saint, and Elphaba wasn’t either, but what made her different is that HER LOVE WAS AUTHENTIC.

Her MORALS WERE AUTHENTIC.

The highest vibration that anyone can radiate is AUTHENTICITY.

If others couldn’t have a life free of abuse, then Elphaba didn’t want her ambitions anymore. It wasn’t worth it.

She chose to be alone.

She flew alone in her own power, in her divinity, in her LOVE.

Her love was something that narcissists feared because they can’t control it, and they fear it makes others better than them. They worry that if they let themselves feel love, they’ll turn weak and it’ll control them, just like it did with their parent who used false lovebombing to manipulate them and shatter their hearts while young.

A narcissist can’t love their true self because their true self acts in ways that are antithetical to love. So, they simply must create a fantasy self to love.

Ironically, they design that fantasy self after the very people they abuse and smear: their scapegoats.

I sometimes read slave narratives. I’m most fascinated by the stories of those who sought to escape and how they plotted it in a country which was so incredibly hostile and barbaric, without any paths to being treated humanely.

A story that strikes me is a band of slaves called Maroons who organized large, violent revolts and then created communities in nearby swamps. They constructed little huts in these swamps that had signs like, “Enter if you dare.”

For them, even a life amongst snakes and alligators in hot, sticky swampland was preferable to a life without freedom. They’d gotten abused to their limits where they’d risk anything to defend that freedom.

Cynthia Erivo performs the angst and exhaustion of breaking away from the social confines of an abusive world to fly free. Her voice breaks as she gasps from high in the air what sounds like both a hex and a promise:

“And nobody in all of Oz--
No wizard that there is or was--
Is ever gonna bring meeeeeeeeeeeeee down.”

Cue the tears. It’s as if someone sliced me open right down the middle and exposed the hard tumor of my pain.

While others cheer for the wicked witch, I can’t help but cry over the fact that she dies alone and unloved, as “no one mourns the wicked.”

She kept her values and her morals, but she sacrificed all she loved to do so and no one loved her back.

When I was little, I could see that witch stories were often scapegoat and underdog stories. Like many others, I rooted for them and liked to see them prevail in their powers to balance the scales of patriarchal injustices.

But now that I’ve lived the battered life of the scapegoat and am awakened to how it operates, I often fantasize that I can be like the Munchkinlanders. I often wish I could be a narcissist.

I want to be a part of the group.

I want to be Glinda in her bubble, beloved.

I want people to grieve to lose me and love me unconditionally as I've grieved to lose them and love them unconditionally.

I wish I could see abuses of others and not feel the pain of them.

Yet, I know freedom is worth it, and I’m glad my abuses haven’t erased my heart, even if many people will never appreciate or return the love I have to give.

When Erivo belts out that “no wizard is ever going to bring her down,” I feel that in my bones.

It’s what I felt when I decided I’d commit to no more trauma bonding, ending all toxic enmeshments, and HEALING.

I can see all the ways I’ve flown and harnessed my power of love by refusing to allow those who would abuse it to manipulate it any longer.

Those people were always holding me back.

They were always trying to keep me from the knowledge that I COULD FLY, THAT I HAVE MAGIC WITHIN ME.

And, though my heart hurts deeply for those I’ve loved and lost to the horrific mental diseases of NPD and ASPD, I’m never fully alone like Elphaba was. I have friends, former students, readers.

I’ve lived the scapegoat experience, but I don’t consider myself to be some supreme victim: part of being the scapegoat is recognizing that the pain being projected into you is the pain carried by your abusers. That’s why it becomes so impossible to walk the path of abusing others like they do, even in what seems like justified vengeance: empathy fosters forgiveness as you grieve.

What the scapegoat can always see from their view in the sky is our ONENESS.

What we all have in common is PAIN.

Therefore, while I have much to grieve, I also have much to be grateful for. This life is messy and gut-wrenchingly cruel, but it’s astonishingly beautiful and miraculous too.

Magic is real.

Magic is love.

I love this world. I love the people in it, even the Glindas and Judases.

The more I’ve healed, the more I’ve loved myself, flaws and all.

The more I’ve healed, the more happiness and peace I’ve had access to.

The more I’ve healed, the more I’ve felt as if I’m defying gravity.

And if I’m flying solo, at least I’m flying free.

My memoir, This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder, is now available on Amazon.

For individual coaching to recover from narcissistic abuse, BPD, or sexual assault, visit https://am-champion.com

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Anne M. Champion is the author of This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder (KDP, 2024), Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (KDP, 2024), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.