Christmas Feelings

In the past couple years I've finally been able to identify and contextualize my feelings. I call it a sort of emotional puberty because emotions that other people have learned to understand and cope with, I'm still a little shaky at. 

I saw someone's tweet thread a few days ago about how people are rage porn-y to avoid dealing with like sadness, grief, loss, pain, fear, uncertainty. I didn't even re-tweet it because "duh." 

Still think that whatever its ostensible subject, an enormous amount of performative rage on the internet--and its audience counterpart, rage-seeking--is about using rage to suppress more normal anxiety and sadness about quotidien things like death, aging, loneliness, failure.

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) December 23, 2020

This morning I really felt the truth of it. My family is musical and I have over a dozen nephews and nieces who also have various musical talents. My sister suggested we do a family music album for my mother for Christmas. All my nieces and nephews did a song that my brother lovingly collected, spliced, and mixed for the past month. I even for the first time in over a decade downloaded some recording software, set up a mixer, bought an xlr to usb cord and did hours of recording for just 6 minutes of album time. The family had been hyped about this for a couple months and the plan, at least as I heard it from others, was to watch her open and listen via zoom, which would also be our family Christmas zoom time. One sibling had done nothing for the album but burn the cd, but was also the first one there at my parents' house Christmas morning and had my mother open it and listen to it without us in true Leroy Jenkins fashion. I woke up to seeing posts in the family chat, etc. about how much she liked it, but I didn't want to see posts, I wanted to experience it with her. 

My feelings were at first surprise, then confusion, then anger, which I didn't want to be the dominant feeling of my Christmas. On the one hand if I had anger and disappointment then I wanted to feel it and not sweep it away into the land of resentment, but I didn't understand why I was as angry as I was. I texted my brother and told him that I was 3/10 sad about him not waiting for us. He said he was sorry and he hadn't understood that was the plan. I had in my mind a bunch of rejoinders, like he would have known that was the plan if he had bothered to participate and read the family group messages and/or use a little common sense (what person gives a gift to a person that they themselves didn't buy or make?). I did explain to him directly that people who contributed had wanted and expected a listen party. But as I was typing more to him I realized that probably no one said that explicitly to him because he was out of the loop about most of it. And we have a little rule in my family that people cannot be held accountable for others' unexpressed expectations. So I found myself apologizing to him for getting upset about an unmet expectation I had, but had never expressed, and said that it was unfair to him that I left that expectation unclear but was still upset with him about it. And after I sent the text, I found that my anger had been released and I cried just a little bit with a sense of loss for what I had been anticipating most about Christmas this year. And it didn't feel good, but it felt much better than relying on the anger to shield me from those feelings of sadness. 

See also below "trying to avoid big [feelings] by focusing on small ones you're more comfortable with."

why would she do this pic.twitter.com/mxNsbx8z6h

— sgt balls: unabomber apologist (@sgtballsvevo) December 3, 2020

A sociopath's intimate

I liked this comment from a past post:

I had a friend who was a sociopath... learning about sociopathy in general was one of the most fascinating experiences. This person was incredibly perceptive, with a piercing intellect and spontaneous creativity, and seemed to excel at all he turned his hand to. However, life was ultimately unfulfilling for him because he felt so surrounded by idiots and imbeciles, and was himself so free of emotional inhibitions that he knew he could do more or less whatever he wanted. I always appreciated his complete and utter disdain for social norms, and the ways we would become each other's mutual psych experiment, even if it was difficult to learn that not one iota of his interest in me was emotional in nature. Sociopaths may be bereft of the empathic emotionality that constitutes the core of the neurotypical human experience, but I also feel there is much in the plight of the sociopath that is mirrored in 'normal' people, too; in essence, it is like gazing into a looking glass, seeing our basest, most ugly and unrestrained desires staring us back in our faces.

However, I feel so deeply sorry for people who had been in intimate relationships with these people. Honestly, I harbour no malice towards the sociopaths because they don't operate on the same emotional paradigm of most of humanity. Their actions are not 'evil' insofar as they are not malicious in intention, merely selfish, as they cannot be anything else. However, there is even an inherent selfishness to the most deeply emotional and sentimental of people - that we are not lied to, that we are never deceived or manipulated, that our feelings are viscerally understood and reciprocated. The sociopath, by nature of their very being, is unable to fulfil this requirement. I have no doubt that they do 'love' in their way, but never the twain shall meet. My heart goes out to everyone who has been unwittingly hurt by these people. Ultimately, I can't say that I hate them, as in many cases they are fascinating, beguiling and seductive existences, however I am quite content to watch that brilliant, chaotic maelström from a safe distance, never becoming swept up in its immediate vicinity. 

Double standard for empathy

Some of my readers have wondered how it can be possible to hurt a sociopath's feelings. In other worlds, given that sociopaths seem so calloused and unemotional, how can their sudden bouts of moodiness and hurt feelings be reconciled with their general icy, insensitive demeanor?

Sociopaths tend to have a double standard for lack of empathy, manipulation, bluntness, lack of manners, and generally people's inability to conform to social norms to avoid becoming a boorish leech. I am known for being very frank and upfront with people, calling things as I see them with little to no attempt to use tact, but I can get very offended when normal people do the same thing back to me. They don't do it right (without the same charm, insight, timing, or finesse), and to me it means something different than when I do it -- typically I don't do it with an intention to hurt. Maybe a good analogy is when a small child hits you or lashes out at you emotionally and you retaliate in kind. The child cannot really control himself -- you can. The child does not really know better -- you do.

If you're in a seemingly loving relationship with a sociopath and he reacts with a lack of empathy at something you have said, it is probably because he is unaware of the need for empathy, or he is trying his hardest but is still coming up short, or he would try but he is too tired, or at the worst, he simply cannot be bothered to summon up the emotional reaction you seek. He is like the child, unable to raise his behavior to that particular standard. When people react that way to him, he correctly recognizes that there is latent hostility in the behavior -- an intentional attempt to slight. He knows how normal people treat each other. If you don't treat him that way, he will wonder why (and probably assume the worst).

I don't cry myself to sleep about people hurting my feelings or otherwise being insensitive to me. I'm sure I deserve it most of the time. But if people are wondering how or why sociopaths could be offended by behavior that the sociopaths themselves seem to engage in almost daily, I think it is a little more complicated than a case of being able to dish it out, but not take it.