'Antisocial' or Outcast Disorder?

I suppose everyone experiences transitional moments in their lives. I sure have, if I think about it. As a person, I haven’t changed much emotionally since the age of maybe ten or twelve. Immature is the word the psych books use; them and every ‘significant other’ I can recall, which isn’t many to be frank. Mostly by choice; I hate people. Despise them, and most specifically I despise their revolting mating rituals. It disgusts me, and I suppose you can imagine what that disgust means for my ‘love’ life. I don’t have one, want one, need one. Or at least I didn’t.

Yet looking back on my life as I’m won’t to do, I see that my life’s path hasn’t really been written by me, not like I’d like. It’s apparent simply by the situations I have been in and the people I’ve been attached to. Who I am is an enigma. I use the word ‘who’ loosely, perhaps I meant ‘what’ or ‘where’ or ‘how’.

I’m an interesting person because I have quirks. But in psychology quirks aren’t simple traits, they’re symptoms. They tell a story purely by showing you the ending and letting you piece the beginning and middle together, fragment by fragment. The ‘ending’ is the person I am now, the tendencies I portray that characterize me as a uniquely warped individual. The job of the psychologist is to identify certain traits, piece together their story and use that information to eliminate, bury or most commonly “release’ said symptoms.

I once asked an FBI agent what a serial killer was. He said a psychopath. I asked him what a psychopath was. He said, ‘a guy with no emotional baggage and a lot of quirks’. I was impressed by his astuteness. That’s the best way I could describe myself-- quirky. It’s a funny word whose synonyms include; eccentric, idiosyncratic and peculiar.

I’ve noticed we often have ‘loner’ personalities by nature. A general dislike of other people, desire for privacy, and an aversion to intimacy. But, if you look at a psychopath closely, it begs the question of whether we have much choice. Even sitting in front of this computer, in front of an unknown and scattered audience, I couldn’t possibly reveal even a quarter of my LEAST interesting quirks to you all without getting a lot more incriminated than I’d like.

Now, if you ask almost any therapist what the ‘key’ to a healthy relationship is, they’ll no doubt say “communication’. And if you ask them what the key to good communication is, they’ll say; honesty, openness and acceptance. Without my spelling it out for you, it’s clear just upon reading those few lines that psychopaths are naturally disadvantaged in regards to creating and maintaining healthy relationships.

Not only do we have a tendency toward pathological lying, we have a valid reason for it too. Self-preservation. Even if I wanted to ‘come clean’ and be an Honest Joe, I couldn’t without screwing myself over. Something I’ve never thought about was how naturally alienating my personality-type is. I’ve never considered it because it’s irrelevant in a cyclic way. It compels me to hate people, which makes it irrelevant that me having it alienates others from me and vice versa . 

In its most clinical form it’s called Antisocial Personality Disorder. But I’m beginning to question if it’s we, the psychopaths, that are the antisocial ones. Or if we are just forced into antisocial behavior by others who can’t accept our little ‘quirks’.