#antisocial feels

[inanawesomewave]

SOCIOPATHY AND CIVIL UNREST

LReaders, I’m sure you’re aware by now that I live in the UK, and as you probably know, yesterday our country elected a right-wing, elitist and bigoted prime minister. I know that sociopaths and psychopaths come from all political persuasions, I have seen psychopaths lean toward the right and psychopaths lean toward the left, I have not seen any evidence that we are more likely to gravitate to one than the other, despite what people say. I also see a lot of posts from the left referring to the right wing leaders as psychopaths and as a quick aside I’d like to say: psychopathy is caused by a gene alteration and environmental stressors. What you’re witnessing here is wealth and capitalism. Money can buy you the privilege to behave like the most malignant of psychopaths and one day I’ll finally be able to succinctly join the dots about what this says about psychopathy at large, if the ethereal component of our disorder that people cannot stop becoming seductively and grimly fascinated with is something has been removed, and in the case of the rich, it’s the obligation to care. 

Today is the day after the general election and already there are large, aggressive protests outside of Downing Street in London. The crowds are chanting the name of the leader of the opposition, yelling “WHO DO YOU PROTECT” at the police, and calling for violence against our new prime minister. I am delighted. For one, I cannot abide the idea that anyone would be moderate enough to see a desperate situation as “well, those are just the cards we were dealt and this is the situation and we’ll just have to adapt to it”, and I’ve never met a sociopath or a psychopath who could ever find themselves capitulating to something they didn’t want. Even on a small scale. Is it bratty and entitled? It doesn’t matter. Not now. 

On the other hand, what we’re witnessing globally is increasing civil unrest and what I’m witnessing in my country is the dismantling of morality, civility, propriety and obligation. And all I’m going to say about this, is I see this as the silver lining. Because if anything, this is where we thrive the most, when rules cease to mean anything and we can fly under the radar amidst what is already chaotic and riotous. So, whilst this is a terrible day for Britain, all isn’t lost, and whilst most of us with mental illnesses in the UK relying on the NHS to, oh I don’t know, protect us from killing ourselves, and are terrified about what might happen next, all I can say is: you know the option to fight is there, right? Take a tip from your antisocial friends. Exploit. Manipulate. Show contemptuous lack of concern to your oppressors. Don’t feel remorse for them. Don’t feel guilty for them. Be unable to control your anger. Blame the enemy for what the enemy has actually done. Break the fucking law. We developed our personality disorders because we were not helped or loved or protected and have spent the formative years of our lives being oppressed and abused. This is happening to all of you now by your government. Maybe now you’ll understand us a little better. Feel free to take a leaf out of our books. Don’t pretend you’re too good for that. 

Three cheers to the bold and the brave on the streets today. Agitate like a psychopath. You’ve been looking for an excuse for a long time, you furious ball of shining beauty. 

[inanawesomewave]

I GIVE UP

I can’t keep doing this fight any more. I have never known how to be a good person, but all I know is, I’ve been consistently told since my earliest memories that I’m irredeemably bad, unlovable, worthless and selfish, that this is why the parent who abused me did what she did -- I deserved it.

I try hard to be a good person, and when you don’t know what that is or how people function, it can’t work out. I’m angry all the time and the more I try to do the right thing, the more I find myself coming up against much harsher criticism than I ever did when I wasn’t trying in the least bit to do the right thing. I can’t see past myself, my lack of empathy brings a great lack of awareness and understanding that I don’t think people really consider when they talk about what a lack of empathy really is. How can I really assimilate in any meaningful way if I have such a wall up between me and the world? How can I ever try to pretend that I’m part of the world, part of society, part of human interaction, when I only have an extremely rudimentary understanding of people, and that understanding is based off of trauma, abuse and neglect? Violence? How do I know what good looks like? How do I know what bad looks like? How do I know where I am in all of this if goodness and badness is something I don’t understand? I make stabs in the dark about what I think is wrong and right according to my own moral compass: don’t hurt children. Don’t assault, rape, abuse, neglect. Nothing in-between. How am I even getting that wrong? Because I don’t know how to come across. I don’t know how to care about the things I care about without caring about them in purely antisocial and narcissistic ways. If everything I do to help anyone is filtered through these dark triad lenses, then is the output the same as if I never cared or never tried? 

I don’t fit here. I have never fit here. I used to cope with that by being hideously awful. My question is, which is better? Being awful and knowing you are? Or being awful when that awfulness is clouded by a drive to be a better person? Should I be a self-aware asshole or a completely blinkered asshole who has started to believe they’re doing good work? Which is the more toxic thing? Because those are my options. I’ve been here for thirty years and trust me, those are my options. I have exhausted every other avenue. 

I tried to learn empathy. I’m bad at it. I tried to learn remorse, I’m in the way of it. I try not to flout boundaries but then who the fuck am I to know what a boundary is? I don’t like people. I profoundly do not like or trust 99% of people. My pain comes entirely from having to be in their world and not my own. The whole pain of sociopathy is having to fit in a world that resents you and that your resent, and trying to mask that contempt with primitive efforts that convince nobody, not even myself, if I’m honest with myself. 

My understanding of the world is primary colours. I cannot see people for the whole of the person. I do not know how to fix myself and I haven’t had the will to, maybe ever. I learned very quickly in my efforts to be nicer and more appealing that this disorder has kept me alive for a reason. For three years I have tried and I’ve ended up in a worse place than before. 

Sociopaths run riot, there’s nothing here for us. I’m tuning back out and pretending no more. There’s a lot about love and compassion that I simply do not know and have tried to learn and cannot. I know I’m loving my children and my friends properly, but if I carry on trying to accommodate for anyone else at all then I know my empathy and love is finite enough that my own badness will find ways to spore outward, it always does. I’m going back to being honest about having no room, and when being honest isn’t in my best interest, I’m going back to outright lying. That’s what everyone else does. Those are the rules of the game. 

[inanawesomewave]

IT IS DOUBLE PLEASURE TO DECEIVE THE DECEIVER

Today I want to talk about what happens when the antisocial personality disordered service with complex care needs and behavioural issues -- ah fuck it -- the sociopath, finds out they have been lied to.  What’s your normal reaction when someone you trust and/or love comes at you with a lie? It may take you a while to figure it out, or maybe they’re a bad liar or have lied to you before and you can watch the lie play out as it comes out of their mouth, and a normal reaction would be anger, sadness, despair, all of those things. So what would you do in the wake of that lie? If you were healthy and strong, you might confront it in a controlled way. No matter how strong you are, you may behave irrationally, you may become suspicious or go into paranoia overdrive, perhaps you’ll find yourself becoming increasingly sarcastic or mean, you might just burst into tears, and all of those are normal reactions when you find you’ve been lied to. But today I want to talk about what I think might be the antisocial reaction to lies.  When I’m lied to, there will always be a part of me that feels wounded and in pain, if the person lying to me is someone i’ve let into my life and my mind. Yes, it’s true, we feel pain. I probably won’t know the name of the pain I’m feeling, and when this lack of emotional connection to myself happens, I react with -- yep, you guessed it -- rage. That’s my default setting. I’ve been told in the past, “what you’re experiencing is despair”, “it’s probably because you feel so insignificant”, “it makes sense that right now you would be going through a sense of unease”, or whatever, and when it’s pointed out to me, I can sometimes grab onto that description and root around in my psyche to see if that was a correct assessment, and if it is, I can latch onto it somewhat. But anger is what happens to antisocials who experience alexithymia (an inability to identify or explain one’s own emotions). Like this: 

I often need someone to tell me what they think I’m feeling, and then, if it starts to make sense, I’ll assume that’s what’s what. I’m not the kind of sociopath who will brag about how little I like to hear about other people’s emotions, because really, I love hearing about people’s emotional worlds. Yes, perhaps I despise the assumption that it’s my job to feel on behalf of someone else, that being a good person isn’t so much tied in helping someone with a problem as it is feeling that problem, but listening to how people process their emotions is useful to me, and also kind of fascinating. If you’ve heard that sociopaths have no feelings, what’s perhaps more accurate is we don’t know we have feelings.  So, we lash out. Anger is the most deregulated emotion in antisocial personality disorder, and I believe that’s because it’s our real emotions that are deregulated, but rage and hostility is the other mask we wear, the most pervading one, the one that we have even convinced ourselves with.  So, when experiencing a lie, we’ll get angry.  But it doesn’t end there.  Antisocial personality disorder comes with many choices. I once likened it to living in a constant click-and-point video game, and I stand by that. In moments of violent conflict or threat you might see a glass bottle on the ground and quick as lightening your brain will light the thing up and you’ll run through the options: do I want to pick up this bottle? Do I want to use it as a weapon? Do I want to hide it and come back to it? Do I want to leave it and scan the room to see what else is here? And, in times of interpersonal conflict, something rather more abstract, you may experience anger, and the angry part of your brain will light up (🎵hello amygdala my old friend🎵 ) and your rationale (if we can ever really have that) will say: what do I want to do with this anger? Do I want to direct it to the threat? Do I want to harm them with it? Do I want to pretend it isn’t there? Do I want to hide it and come back to it? Do I want to leave it and scan my brain to see what else is here? But then there comes the big one -- do I want to accept the truth of this anger? Do I want to display it?  Do I want to play the game? 

When you are used to anger being your default setting, you learn lots of different ways to express it, and whilst the explosive kind of “FUCK YOU AND FUCK EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR” is what we’d most likely think of when thinking of what rage looks like, there’s many ways it can come through, and the example I gave here of reacting to a lie I think is a good place to start when talking about this. Because anger isn’t always fireworks. A lot of the time, it’s silence. Amusement. Catharsis. Comedy. It’s like we have to take the “generic bad” feeling, reroute it to anger, and let it come back out as something else. It’s like, when it comes to our feelings, we have taken a sentence, run it through Google translate into a foreign language, taken that foreign language and put it back through Google translate again, and try to make something of the broken English we’ve come back with. 

You’re trying to humiliate me and now I am angry lie. My angry lie is that I think you’re a bad person. I think you’re selfish. I have never liked you. This is hilarious to me. I deserve better than this...  I deserve better than this is the biggest lie we tell when we’re lied to, because deep down, we don’t think we deserve better than this at all. If antisocial personality disorder has its roots in deeply embedded cynicism, pessimism, isolation and trauma, then every single mask we wear is one of ultimate power, control, self-assuredness and confidence. I deserve better than this can never be true, because that would require empathy, and our lack of empathy is most evident when it comes to talking about ourselves. If we don’t know the names of our feelings, we cannot empathise with them.  So what’s the next step? You know the old saying, “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”? When you have a lowered ability to experience remorse and guilt, no propensity to feelings of regret, shame doesn’t come into it. I’m not ashamed I let myself be lied to. I’m... what’s the word? What’s the name of this? Oh right, that’s it. I’m angry. But I did the shouting, kicking off, the big display of ego when I was fooled the first time. The second time, the lie lights up in my head: do I want to pick up this lie? Do I want to confront this lie? Do I want to pretend it isn’t there? Do I want to leave it there for a second whilst I scan whatever else is going on, for example: does the liar seem to also be sad, confused, misunderstood, are they nervous? Playing with their hair, looking off in different directions, are they shaking or babbling or misdirecting? And what do I want to do with that? Do I want to tell them my suspicions? And just what is this? Why are these things lighting up? Is it a game? Is this a game?! Can I win it?! And this is why Machiavelli once famously said, “it is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver”, and this is why Machiavellianism forms part of the Dark Triad of psychopathy. Because it’s abnormal to see a lie as a game, it’s clinically weird, psychologically speaking, it’s crazy cuckoo. Why would anyone watch someone lie and feel a sense of relief washing over them (in an awesome wave)? Why would anyone in their right mind see a lie happen, and then wonder for how long the rally of lies can go back and forth, to see who will break first, to take the liar and lie to them so hard they’ll regret ever lying to you? As I outlined at the beginning of this blog, there are normal reactions to lies and even the explosive and distressed ones are normal. What’s abnormal is the willingness and even eagerness to throw oneself into the pit and get right into it. Because people with antisocial personality disorder are always seeking out conflict. Even when we’re evolved, doing better these days, in therapy, writing a blog -- we don’t like the things you don’t like, and nobody likes being lied to. The motivation, however, to not come back fighting and transform the sadness into rage and the rage into a comedy that only amuses ourselves is antisocial. It’s an unwillingness and/or inability to read the social situation, and it’s cynicism distilled. It doesn’t matter who, it doesn’t matter when. We believe that everyone is capable, more than capable, of badness, deceit, immorality and sadism, and what drives our utter lack of faith in humanity is the lie that people tell themselves to prove they would never display those traits. When someone shows their hand, a good person without a diagnosis, it’s double pleasure. It’s the pleasure of overcoming whatever pain you almost felt, and the exquisite pleasure of finally having your worst fears confirmed. Because after all, if it really is a dog-eat-dog world, as evidenced by someone else’s deceitfulness, then chaos can thrive. And, being justified, it doesn’t need to hide behind a mask. And it’s hard to trust a liar again. Our personalities are built around distrust, so the best we can hope for is to feel/not feel that way, and make it work for us. That’s what ASPD is. That’s who we are. And for you, the thought that people are fundamentally bad and self-serving might be a terrifying prospect, so it would make sense you’d want to protect yourself from that. But for us, that thought is what protects us, and it protects us in more ways than you know. 

[inanawesomewave]

YOU’LL NEVER SEE ME AGAIN - WHEN SOCIOPATHS DISCARD, AND WHY

My favourite song in the world is probably Surfing on a Rocket by AIR. It’s not my most listened-to song in the world, it’s not one that I make other people listen to when I’m trying to get them onto my wavelength, I don’t even think I have it saved on my phone, but it’s the one that has been, undoubtedly, playing in the background of every single goodbye I have said, and interestingly, every single goodbye I have said, I have been happy to have said. 

 “Time for surfing rockets, for silver jets, for surfing bombs” . I took the plunge recently and googled “sociopathic friend”; “sociopath ex”; “how do you know you’re working with a sociopath”; “sociopath tactics for control”. I hate all of those articles that get written arming the general public away from the cold, dead eyes of the mythical sociopath, how the armchair diagnosis of the callous sociopath has become a panacea for all emotional ailments. In fact, I find it downright dangerous and maladaptive to offhandedly but systemically give a clinical name to bad behaviour and worse, a diagnosis to someone who just didn’t love you. I saw a thing the other day on Facebook (I’m on there, don’t be surprised) and it was this really painstakingly drawn picture of a guy pulling anal beads out of his asshole and within each anal bead was a tiny Pikachu figurine, crying, and the thing the guy was anally pleasuring himself to was the cold light of his mobile phone, and on the screen, a picture of himself. The caption was something like, “The Narcissistic Sociopath”. I look at stuff like that and I think, “Imagine going to all the trouble of drawing this, and still not realising that maybe the problem is you?”.  Don’t get me wrong, friends, I agree we should be able to put a name to the abuses we have suffered, but I just don’t think that yelling SOCIOPATH! NARCISSIST! whenever someone, oh I dunno, cuts in front of you in a queue (they’re in a rush, they’re busy) or cheats on you (maybe they were fucking depressed?) or tells you to go to hell (you were being a dickhead) is getting anyone anywhere. It’s not even the scaremongering I disapprove of because honestly, I was a goth at school so there’s something in that spooky ooOOOoooOOoo CREEEPY sociopath oooOOOoo! aesthetic that I dig, but I worry about what it’s doing to the accusers. I worry it’s self-appointed sainthood, that martyrdom is becoming a worthy cause, that the true narcissism is diagnosing someone with a complicated and pervasive mental illness because they upset you and then setting up a YouTube channel where you talk about the menace of the narcissist or the sociopath. I worry, because lack of insight is the most troubling part of insanity. 
So why did I google this stuff? 
Because I was so, SO curious. I wanted the gossip. How out of line was it? What do they SAY about us? Have we been clever all this time, are we not going undetected? What of our secrets do the general public know? And how do I spot a sociopath? Could I too be spotted? Is it my eyes? Are they empty?  It was exactly what you’d expect, and I didn’t feel too bad reading the myths and folklore surrounding us. For example, did you know that we’re incapable of love? We can’t keep friendships? That mind control comes naturally to us? I didn’t know any of this either, but if these are the lies that keep people entertained, whatever. Because what that means, is real sociopaths are going undetected. We’re being left alone. We’re getting on with our lives with impunity, because nobody suspected us when we married the loves of our lives, doted on our children and moved mountains to help our friends. 
But then I read something that made me feel a little bit… seen:

 “One of the most painful and jarring aspects of a pathological relationship is the cold and calculated discard… they say it’s over but you don’t understand why… they tend to catch you off guard and wholly unprepared for this horrific fate.”
 The writer of this diatribe even went so far as to predict some of the things we might say to you when we’re calculatingly fucking off and leaving you, they include:

 “I don’t want to be in a relationship” 
“We are just not compatible” What the fuck? 
 Okay. So here’s where the thrust of this blog is going to be. 
 Are sociopaths not allowed to need to leave something that is hurting them? 

I’ve ended relationships, I thought fairly, using those two phrases before. You know how hard it is to upkeep the performance of love and commitment with someone who has grown away from you in such a way that you can’t work out why you were ever together? Or what if that relationship has become stultifying, the person in question has neglected themselves and you to such an extent that you’re having to do everything, take on all the roles they need and do all of the things they can’t but it’s okay because they don't have a personality disorder? What's sociopathic about walking away? What’s so inherently evil about saying, “I don't want to do this any more”? Is it a quirk of sociopathy to realise your mistake when you thought you were meant to be near someone and then you realised being near them was painful because they aren't the answer to your problems and you're tired? I wondered, for all the talk we hear about self care and cutting out toxic people, are we not allowed to do that? Does self care not count if your self interest is clinical? 
 But I know what it is, really. I’m being naive. It’s something all sociopaths do that we think is normal so to conceive of anyone being hurt by this is impossible and then that good old lack of empathy and its failure to kick in is what keeps us doing this over and over with — if you’re anything like me — an unwillingness to change that behaviour. 
It’s the fact that we just walk away. It’s the word “discard”. Sociopaths are cold and callous when one day we tell you we love you and we’ll speak to you soon, and the next we’ve deleted you off all social media and out of our lives. Okay, I’ll concede to that. Here’s why, though. 
 “Five, four, three, two, one, zero, no-one can stop me to go”. Losing respect for someone is a big deal, in Sociopath Land, and if you believe that we are all incapable of love and so affection and commitment are illusions then you're wrong. Our love is based on respect, for everyone in my life I have adored, I have respected the bones of and I have been in love with their respect for me, since if I’m offering up a love and a life based around my overwhelming respect for someone, I expect it back, because it's not sociopathic to appreciate that the transaction of respect must be equal at all times. I will fight very hard for my respect for my partners, friends and family, and often, if I feel I'm losing respect for someone (and this never happens at random — I lose respect when I sense respect is being lost for me, because then I think that person is being selfish and lazy and exploitative because hi, yes, that's what it is) I will accept that I'm often paranoid and usually wrong and will fight tooth and nail to hang onto that shred of respect I have for that person. I will fight especially hard if that's a person I’d love to keep in my life, if I’ve analysed that their presence in my life is a good one: we make each-other feel good, I can talk to them, I want to help them when they're struggling. And people won’t like this but fuck it, people don't like us: if I see someone as weak by their own volition, I don't want them near me. 
 So these are the reasons I’ll stay, or leave. But what’s really cold, is it doesn't matter what came before. All that matters is the moment I decide I don't respect you any more. Yes, I will tell you one moment that I love you and can’t wait to see you again, and the next time you try to contact me my number has changed and my online presence has disappeared. All you know, is that something bad has happened, and whilst I didn't think of this, I'm aware that your reaction would at first be to worry that something has happened, something alien beyond both of our controls. You will ask around, if something bad happened to me, did I have to run away somewhere, was I in danger? And then it will dawn on you when you realise that I am what I am: I just don't love you any more, and I don't love you because you became someone I could not respect, or you used too much of my emotional energy up, or you started treating me as an afterthought, or you stopped listening to me and only cared about yourself, or you prioritised your ease over my pain, or I sensed you were discarding me, or you took the piss out of me and reminded me of the emotional neglect I came from, or you started to behave in ways I found deplorable, or you actively hurt me, or you simply just became someone I found myself wanting to laugh at rather than wanting to help, and the reason I want to laugh now is because I can’t find a way to respect you. But I respect you enough to leave. Because if I don’t leave, I’m going to have to stay, and if I stay when I have no respect for you, then I no longer have a filter. I don’t want to spare your feelings any more. You will talk about your life and your dreams and your loves and hates and nothing in me will want to listen or support you or love you or expend the psychic energy required to listen to you drone on and on and on again about your homemade problems, your bad behaviour, your pretend struggles. And I will have no reason to give you my mask — you no longer deserve the “I'm proud of you!” and “you can do it!” and “how can I help?”. And the more and more I sit there and listen to you talk the angrier I become. So in this sense, discarding is a panic move. If I were to play devils advocate, I'd say discarding is safeguarding. It’s better for you that I disappear from your life so hard that you have to wonder if I ever existed, because if I stay, I might have to tell you what I really think of you, and once I do that, I feel a game has begun. And when I discard you, it’s because, as I said above, I’ve started to sense your discard of me, and your discard is long and drawn out and painful — people all the time suddenly stop being there for their friends, become incapable of caring about anyone but themselves, failing to upkeep the relationship, asking for labour but refusing to give it back. At least the sociopath’s discard is quick and painless — I have no interest in sticking around and watching you squirm, I just want to get away from you so that sticking around and watching you squirm doesn’t become a viable option for me, one that I turn to out of sheer frustration and anger and aggressive disrespect made all the more furious with the betrayal that comes when you once respected someone with all your might. No, I’m just going to walk away and close every single door, tape off every single avenue, kill every single possible lead that could lead you back to me. This is done. We never met. You don't know me. Look the other way. 
 
So yes, that's something they’ve got right, but is it really so evil? Is that an example of true malevolence? It may seem fair to me, but what do I know? 
Let me know what you think. 

“You’ll never see me again”.

[inanawesomewave]

A PSA FOR SHANE DAWSON

A longer post will follow after I’ve watched the complete series, but for now:  In 2009 the American Psychiatric Association agreed that psychopathy and sociopathy, whilst not diagnoses of their own, include destructive presentations of both ASPD, and Borderline Personality Disorder. Would you scaremonger about BPD or would you take a beat and respect their feelings, because you know that trauma made them that way and they can't help being as intense as they are? Of course you would. If you wouldn't say it about BPD, don't say it about ASPD. Gaslighting is a term that comes from the film Gaslight, and our villain has symptoms of BPD. Fatal Attraction is BPD. A lot of the times when a person is describing a sociopathic ex girlfriend or workmate or friend, they are describing someone with BPD. But there's no support networks for victims of Borderline abuse, and you certainly wouldn't get Shane Dawson walking around the streets late at night saying "OMG, literally anyone here could have BPD, so scary" and if he thought about doing that, you'd dissuade him. Addiction and suicide are high with antisocials. If you wouldn't say it about someone with BPD, don't say it about us either.

Oh, and what you said about having friends who, when in the thralls of deep emotion, elicit no response in you whatsoever, is interesting. You decided to blame this on the fact these people may be sociopaths (a concept you’d only learned about moments before), rather than look into yourself and work out why it is you’ve got people in your life you are justifying and rationalising having no empathy for. Another interesting thing, if you’re such tender prey to evil sociopaths that it causes you to wander the streets at night, frightened, what is it in your psychology that thought the best way to handle this fear of sociopaths would be to PISS THOUSANDS OF SOCIOPATHS OFF IN ONE FELL SWOOP? Oh, that’s right, because if anyone retaliates it’s because they’re an evil sociopath, and not because you are deliberately agitating public opinion of a mental illness that, JUST LIKE BPD, is borne of trauma, sexual abuse, neglect, and pain. 

What’s it like being an empath, I wonder? Shane makes it look like such hard work. 

[inanawesomewave]

AND THEN THERE’S THOSE OTHER THINGS (WHICH - FOR SEVERAL REASONS - WE WON’T MENTION)

I haven’t written on here in a while and the truth is, I’ve been very busy. Things in my life have been moving quicker, I’ve been achieving some goals, organising my life, and the truth is I’ve been rather all over the place. But, there’s no time like the present, and for today’s blog, I have something a little different for you.  Normally you, my loyal readers, get the reformed-character version of me. The trying-hard-to-blend-in to the point where I wonder “am I even blending in? Or have I genuinely shaken off the sociopathy? And is that good?”. Yes, there’ve been real periods of time where it has been time for me to call into question my own personality disorder because I too have fallen victim to the narrative that sociopathy=extremely shitty person, and if I’m not being a shitty person, I must not be a sociopath. And I stand by the posts I have made and will continue to make about risk management and sincerity and mental health and compassionate care, but today, I am not feeling it. The reason I am writing today, my friends, is because I am having a BIG ANTISOCIAL DAY, and I thought, you know what? I might have people reading my blog who know what it’s like to know a sociopath, but don’t really know what it’s like to be one, who may wonder what it is we feel, what part of this is dark -- my blog may have even fooled you (through my own fault) that we might be wrong to assume sociopaths have inherently troubled minds or that the nothingness I mention can never feel dangerous to ourselves, but if I’m having this day, and feeling the way I feel, maybe I should just tell you all how it feels. Because we do feel.  I guess the way I would describe it if pressed to be succinct would be “aggressive indifference”, which is perhaps an oxymoron but now’s not the time for me to quibble. Aggressive indifference is the root of how I feel when I’m having a bad day. I feel offended by potential empathy I may have to spend because empathy is currency and on days like today I am in poverty. It’s that feeling when you know that today, half a dozen people that you love could come to you with real problems, and your level of not caring wouldn’t be easily hidden by the right words, the right actions, the right mask; it’s like I have dropped the mask and I have no energy left to pick it up. I am angry at everything and everyone. I simultaneously cannot bear to go outside and want to go outside, I don’t want to see people but then I really want to see people because today is the day that someone might cause a spectacle of themselves, might be bigoted in my direction, might be awful, and finally I would find that release valve that would allow me to really blow some of this quite intense mood off. I can’t feel sentimental and really, I can’t feel anything today that isn’t a primary colour. I know the big, brutal brush-strokes of my feelings but my ability to think about the whys and wherefores of them, their nuances and their shifting tones, has absolutely gone and left me.  There’s a level of cynicism to this and the only way to describe that is white-hot. This is a cynicism that goes really deep, it’s not just surface-level stuff, it’s not conspiracy stuff, this is a cynicism that goes down into the bowels of everything i have ever known and brings a disappointing black sludge up with it. I am unable to know anyone or anything today. I have lost that skill and on days like today I realise, it actually is a skill, and it really does not come naturally to me, not really. Every interaction with every human is an invitation to battle, every word and every gesture spoken not even to me, but near me, is an example of the doomed human species, everything I feel is second-guessed only by me, and any pure emotion I have is questioned by myself: “is this a real feeling? Or is it just something I think I’m feeling? What’s the name of this feeling?” because I don’t know, I do not know the names of my feelings. I just know they’re bad.  I feel a weariness of mind that is hard to explain, because it’s not like a depression or a psychosis, it’s just a very deep, very pervasive exhaustion that shuts down a lot of my more nuanced functioning. I am so tired I can no longer discern how I feel from what really is, I cannot prioritise anyone’s anything. I don’t want to argue with anyone, I don’t want to settle any scores, I just want to exist in this body and within this brain, both of which seem to know how to autopilot and I’m sitting back and letting that happen, no need to intervene. It’s a chronic what-will-be-will-be, knowing that if I found out I’d won the lottery I’d have the same response as if I found out my mother had just died - it’s not good, it’s not bad, it is what it is, a fact, a bare event that does not require any of my emotional energy.  And honestly, it feels funny too. That’s the positive thing that keeps the worst of it at bay, and that’s how I believe most of us get through the day -- because this is funny. It’s funny to run into the old friend of sociopathy, the man next door you always knew was there but never see but today came running up and down the street on fire. It’s a spectacle, a shitty, desperate, horrific and kind of brutally funny spectacle, just like everything is on days like today, I notice the stereotypes of people in a much sharper way, I notice people and I wonder about their backstories and I can flesh it out in a second, I see groups congregate socially in town and I know them without knowing them -- I know why they’re there, who they want to see, where they’re going, I know where they’ve been and I know what they love and hate and where they do and don’t want to end up -- okay, I don’t know but -- I know.  And finally it feels like an endless unwinding of the self. Like any construct I have previously tried to uphold is bandaging itself off of me like an Egyptian mummy and beneath the rattling bones of me will be exposed and I will wonder, why on earth I wrapped myself up to begin with, and I will wonder why everyone doesn’t just be a skeleton. It feels like I’m unspooling, or fragmenting out, but none of it is dissociation, and none of it is a loss of self. It’s just like shedding skin, it’s necessary and something will grow back. I hate the constant snake/wolf imagery surrounding sociopaths but sometimes it’s necessary and today I am slithering across the hot sands and darting in all directions, and the skin of me is coming off in one clean crisp of a husk and I can feel that direct heat of the sun on me and I’m seen and I’m here and it’s just me, the heat, and the sand. 

[laurensailsthenightskies]

When you find the most secluded spot in the hotel that has air conditioning and free internet, you know you've taken anti-social and hiding from your family to a new personal level.

[sven0xx]

So I'm going to the beach today with this girl that I've never hung out with before.

I DON'T LIKE MAKING NEW FRIENDS THOUGH.