Why I started the blog, and why I continue

The percentage of my personality that my disorder represents is not actually that significant (does anyone walk around thinking "I'm a sociopath" besides fictional character Dexter?). Maybe it's 15%? What do I mean by that? Well, if I was a jigsaw puzzle, let's say, and the puzzle was a small deserted island, the kind that you always see in political style cartoons with two guys stranded on a desert island with a lone palm tree, then maybe the sociopathy is the lone palm tree. It is not the defining feature of the puzzle, although it is part of the defining feature. And how many pieces are devoted to the palm tree? Maybe about 15%. Some of those pieces are completely palm tree, and some of those pieces are mainly island and just a little bit of palm tree, or mostly sky and just a small sliver of palm frond. Add up all those percentages of palm tree against the total picture, though, and you have approximately 15% palm tree.

When I write on this particular blog I almost always write about the palm tree. Sometimes the piece is entirely palm tree. Sometimes there is just a sliver of palm tree, mostly something else. And every one in a while I will talk about the island and sky, inasmuch as I think they inform qualities about the palm tree.

Taking the analogy just a little further, if I think of my life as the process of assembling this jigsaw puzzle (understanding who I am), I tend to focus on one area until I reach an impasse, then focus on another. Or I focus one one part until another part compels my attention. When I first started this blog, I had just been fired from a very high profile and lucrative job for behavior that I believe stems from my more sociopathic characteristics. I had just had several relationships end on very poor terms, isolating me from many more sub relationships. I was having problems with my family, with my personal life, my work life had just gone to hell. I started looking for answers, so became re-interested in a casual diagnosis a friend had made of me years before as a sociopath. As I started doing some browsing of what was out there in terms of basic information, I was appalled that all of it reeked of a particular bias. I saw an opportunity for offering a different perspective that coincided with my own interests at the time, so I started the blog.

This was the not the only time of deep self-introspection for me. My first prolonged one was at University the first time my life really went completely to hell. I didn't have the label sociopath at the time to identify with, but after a long period of unflinching honesty and self-analysis I knew that I was a very manipulative, cunning person, who was unable to connect to anyone on more than a superficial level, obsessed with power, and willing to do anything to get ahead, among other things. To the extent that those things were negatively impacting my life, I tried to tame and control them.

The pattern here is this: I am doing fine, great actually, I get carried away and my life goes to hell, I take a step back and look at who I am, I gradually get better until I am doing fine, then great. Right now I am right at the point of doing great. I've had a couple of recent professional coups and all other parts of my life are growing and expanding. I'm less interested in the palm tree because that's not where the action is. Then again, part of me believes that the reason why I am doing so well is that the blog forces me to constantly consider those potentially destructive aspects of my personality -- to not get caught up in the here and now that I lose sight of the big picture. In an effort to stay focused on that, I'm both going to continue to write new material that I find interesting, but will also repost some older posts that I like and think deserve more attention.