Most of my kind are rotting in jail.  Why?  Because they are mindless automatons that succumb to desire in its purest form.  They do not know restraint and they fall to the will of impulsivity.  More importantly, they are completely unaware of their own inner workings.  They fail to realize that careful dance that must be performed between the chasm and the abyss.  Do not misunderstand me, even with self-awareness, the damage inflicted by the disorder can be absolute.  My impulsivity and irritability have left me in relative desolation over the years and I am as self-aware as the psychopath comes.  I am not foolish enough to inflict sufficient damage upon anyone to result in my incarceration.  That does not mean that I do not desire such acts, just that I have the awareness not to succumb to desire.

I stumble more than I succeed.  I’ve blown hundreds of thousands of dollars due to my impulsivity and I’ve destroyed more interpersonal relationships than I’ve kept.  All of this is in spite of my self-awareness.  Self-awareness is relative.  Postmortems are easy; keeping myself safe in the moment is difficult.  One day, I may lose it all when I falter.  The successful psychopath must be self-aware 100% of the time, but even the most self-aware of us falter more frequently than we’d like to admit.  Therefore, it becomes a game of roulette.  We are safe so long as the house does not win, but we do not know when green will come up.  If my problems are as evident as they are, and I am aware as I am, then what fate awaits those that are less self-aware?  More often than not, ruin, prison, or death.

There is no such thing as a fully self-aware psychopath.  There are degrees of success and the majority fall utterly short.  For the rest of us, it is only a matter of time before we give into the moment at the wrong place and the wrong time.  The odds of my life ever turning around are slim.  Why?  Because I fail to learn from my mistakes, the greatest of which is a lack of sustained vigilance against my own desires.  That said, I recognize my place on the totem pole.  I am as self-aware as they come and that will give me a better shot of making it out alive.  I am clever, I am smart, and I am mostly self-aware.  These tools make me both placid and dangerous at the same time.  But they are insufficient given that my vision is only perfect in hindsight.