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.

So what does this have to do with having taken a break?  As I mentioned in the opening paragraphs, there is a certain knowledge to be gained by running away from compulsion and obsession.  I suspect those with any newly diagnosed condition seek out all the information that they can on the subject.  For the past nine months, that is all that I have been doing.  Learning.  Discussing.  There was no break and, in fact, often the rate at which I sought knowledge should have been concerning to those around me as well as myself.  I needed to let go, to see what life looked like in complete acceptance but with relative forgetfulness.  What I realized is that psychopathy is not unlike a chronic and physical illness.  I will always be hesitant to call psychopathy an unequivocal illness, but the parallels are certainly there.

Obsession is hardly ever a good thing.  One day I hope that I “forget” that I am psychopathic.  Yes, I believe that the condition is reflective of humanity and not of monstrosity.  However, I am not convinced that it need be a characteristic that is reaffirmed over and over again by one’s thoughts.  One can have chronic arthritis and eventually reach a point where the pain is separated from the knowledge of the condition.  One can be a psychopath and, while forever remaining one, turn from the endless rumination of the condition.  Only by acknowledging, rather than embracing, the condition can the psychopath find resurrection.