In this previous post, I mentioned some confusing emotions that I was having regarding moving away from a respected acquaintance as part of much needed new start for my life. I wondered if I was seeing a glimpse of humanity that my mother expressed with her own tears upon my announcement that I am, at age twenty-nine, going to be moving out of her and many others’ lives. I wondered if I was attached to this acquaintance much in the same way, expressing sadness that they – the person – would no longer be in my life. After discussing with my therapist, I can now see much more clearly. No, I will not miss the person; I will be missing what they represent in terms of the games that I play on a daily basis. It is as if I will be losing a prized tool, knowing that I can do a similar job with another, but also knowing that no other tool will reach the level of craftsmanship that this one did.
Monthly Archives: April 2014
Wanderlust
I’m counting down the days until I move. The decision was fairly sudden and not particularly well thought out, much like my decision to transition years ago. I have relatively little holding me in place here where I currently live and it will be nice to live in an area of the country that is more tolerant and accepting of transgender people. However, I’d be lying if I said that was anything but a secondary consideration for my impending move. No, my main motivation is to help curb the wanderlust that is always present and can never truly be satisfied. My legs are restless and my head needs a new home.
Can Psychopaths Feel Attachment?
My interactions with others are purely purpose driven. Or at least that I what I have observed with every human interaction to this point. I treat others as potted plants, wishing that they can thrive with the minimum of effort on my part and tending to them only when it pleases me. I never felt attachment to another and I’ve written that the price to pay of psychopathy is the complete inability to form interpersonal bonds with the same intensity that neurotypicals can. As I prepare to move thousands of miles to a new playground, I wonder if it is truly impossible to form those bonds or whether the psychopath may merely find it less automatic.
It may seem strange to the neurotypical, but I fear making such a bond. I fear it because I do not want the pain of seeing a trusted and cherished friend die or vanish. I have never felt such a feeling and it both terrifies me and disgusts me to think of myself rendered feeble by such useless emotions. This terror is reality as the gravity of moving and leaving one such acquaintance behind invokes these emotions that I could never fathom.
Topics to Write About
I really would like to write more, but I simply don’t know what to write about these days. I hate retreading old topics, and I haven’t had any insights in a while.
Help me out. Send questions via email, comment, or tumblr. I would love to write again, but I need material.
Thanks.
Control – Revisited
The following comment was posted a while back and I wanted to wait until after the holiday to address it.
What if you can’t be in control, and others are able to have control? What feeling s are evoked in your at the idea of this hypothetical situation?
I experience this quite often as I am a control freak. I am my most destructive in this scenario. If someone has control, and I do not, I want to take from them that control with a vicious ferocity that is disproportionate to the control that they exert. I will turn to any means necessary in order to regain my place on top, even if their control is not remotely related to my own state at the time.
Resurrection
I’ve spent a lot of time away from writing and discussing issues of psychopathy lately. I wanted to see what a post-realization state looked like in the absence of surrounding myself with the latest accounts and anecdotes of psychopathy. I’ve still got much growing to do and maturing to seek, but I am at peace with the unexpected diagnosis and implications at this point. Had someone never admonished me for my parasitic and ruthless ways, I would have both neither appreciated the power that I hold nor the freedom of showing relative restraint. You cannot treat pain if you cannot identify the source. My pain, the ruin that I inflict on others and myself, needed a name. Someone had to tell me that name.
I don’t want it to seem that I am an angel these days. Far from it. However, there are degrees of most anything. To live in the grey areas of life rather than in direct discordance with the mandates society places on me is an improvement. Diagnosis (more accurately assessment or confirmation) of the condition was the first step. Learning how to live authentically with the mind that I have been given while staying in the good graces of those around me is the next. This next step will take my entire life and I am certain that I will never be free of shadow.
Dust to Dust
Yes, I’ve been bad (again) on updating daily.
Interpersonal relationships (professional, romantic, platonic, or otherwise) seem doomed for the psychopath. Either we get bored and let the relationship die, or our irritability will eventually cause the relationship to go nuclear. It seems inevitable that just as life itself dies, so will any relationship we engage in. Lord knows, I have left more acquaintances in the dust than I’ve kept by my side.