The outsider

I’ve always known I was an outsider. It started from my very first days in school. I wasn’t able to articulate that then of course, but I knew it in my bones. I alternated between being an observer and playing the role of insider. In the years when I played observer, I’d watch with disgust as the kids who weren’t popular fawned all over the kids who were. I’d see them for the weaklings they were and wonder why they thought belonging mattered so much that they were willing to debase themselves. I couldn’t even conceive of the idea that anyone or any group was important enough for me to humiliate myself for. So I’d watch and I’d observe. I was never bullied or treated like a reject. I watched other outsiders be picked on with interest, but I was invisible until I was ready to change that. After I had observed long enough, I easily became one of the popular kids. But even when I was schmoozing with the jocks and the cheerleaders and the class clowns who everybody loved, even when kids from lower grades wanted my attention, I knew I was not one of them. I’d known that I would never really belong no matter how many people claimed to love hanging out with me. I did however enjoy playing my games with them and with teachers from time to time. From the outside, I made myself an expert on the staff in charge, always with the understanding that my friendly overtures and “good kid” image would be useful in the event any of my games were exposed. That never happened though. I was never caught, never exposed, and never held accountable -- all because I’d taken the time to watch, to take careful note of environment from top to bottom, and then acted accordingly.

I’ve never thought of myself as a predator because I’ve never raped or killed anyone. But looking back, I wonder if the internal understanding of my outsider status combined with the instinctive sense that I had to carefully observe other people in order to both survive and thrive is how the human predator thinks. I’ve always known that I wasn’t one of them, them being most of humanity. This wasn’t a choice; it was a realization. I didn’t know terms like "sociopath" or "psychopath." But I did know that since I wasn’t an “insider,” I had to figure out what to say and how to behave in ways that would guarantee a place among them as their leader. In other words, as a child I knew I had to wear a mask, one that would grant me power. Again, as a child, I could not articulate any of this and did not have the psychological sophistication to comprehend what I was. I just knew this is how the world worked, and how I had to work within it.

If you’re new to this blog and you’re wondering if you are a sociopath or have sociopathic tendencies, ask yourself if this story describes your experience. That’s not to say that thinking or behaving this way as a child and a teenager proves beyond any doubt that you are a sociopath. It could, however, serve as a starting place for further investigation and a validation of how you experienced your childhood.

If you were always on the outside looking in, separated from the other kids and maybe even from your family by a wall of emotions that they seemed to feel effortlessly while you did not; if you could instinctively get a sense of how power flowed between various cliques, between the students and the staff and within your family; if belonging never meant anything to you yet you found you could easily enter and then manipulate any group at will; then maybe, just maybe, you were a tiny wolf in lamb’s wool, a young sociopath without knowing it.