About me? (part 2)

I responded:

This is very interesting.  I also never fill these sections out (or the offline equivalent) if I can help it.  Sometimes I'll put one or two things there, just to not seem like a total creeper.  I try to avoid any personal information.  Part of it is intentional -- less is more when the purpose of those types of sites is for people interested in you to stalk you, when really I want them to have to go to the source to get what they're really looking for.

I'm actually going through a period of particular ambiguity in my personality.  When I'm actively engaged in something, it's easy to sort of define myself with whatever I'm doing (like defining myself as a diver).  It helps me to function to be able to think of myself in a particular role -- I'm so-and-so's plus-one, I'm in charge of this Acme project, I'm X's mentor, or whatever.  Thinking that way helps me to focus on the performance.  Have you ever seen a television show in which one of the actors seems to have forgotten he's on screen?  And drops character?  I've been caught doing that a few times.

Even when people are naturally attracted to "me," i.e. I have not intentionally targeted with a version of me tailor made to them, it's hard to know what exactly that means.  Is it my strength?  My humor?  My solicitousness?  Unflagging support?  If I don't know what it is they like about me, I don't know what to keep doing.  It can be very disconcerting.  I feel like I'm being interviewed for a job and I'm not really sure what all the job entails.

At times like these I feel like an engine with the clutch disengaged.  I am nothing, but potentially anything.  Like a discus, I could be sent me off in any direction, but ultimately it doesn't feel like it matters where I go or where I came from.  I guess this is freedom.  It also makes me a total anti-consumer.  I don't feel at all defined by my belongings or my socio economic status.  It's nice to run in the rat race only whenever I feel like it, not because my successes/money define me.  But I also can't really force myself to do things I don't want to do.

Here's a BPD blogger (and SW reader) describing a similar thing for borderline personality disorder.

About me? (part 1)

A reader asked me this interesting question:

The more I meditate and the more detached from my emotions I become, the harder I find it to be, to describe myself to people.

I begin to feel as if a personality doesn't exist for me and is dependent upon the moment and what's going on.

And because of this, I constantly find it impossible to put anything in my "About me" on facebook. Almost anything I can think of seems to have some reason behind me not wanting to put it, or mainly I can't find any reason to put anything there... mainly because I don't have a scenario that I wish to set up with words describing myself, which I don't even know how to do. If this makes sense? There's no problem to be solved so how should I portray myself to the world in my about me? I can't be the only person with sociopathic tendencies to have this problem. I literally find it impossible to describe myself to others, because I feel anything I could say would be lying, other than, who I am depends on the situation and the person I am interacting with. It's like how sociopaths have trouble with stable personalities on personality tests.

I would be very interested in reading what you have to think about sociopaths describing themselves, in places such as an about me on facebook.

Dichotomy

From a sociopath reader:

I've been thinking about this for a long time. There's a dichotomy that almost seems to be a contradiction in the way I feel. These are like two sides of a coin, opposite, but neither could exist without the other. These are my views of the world, and how I fit into it. 

The first is the macro-view, where I see everything from so far away that people turn into little specs barely visible to the eye. Humanity as a whole becomes completely insignificant. Even the infinite, God, the universe, and everything, shrink into irrelevance. I float in a void. An empty vacuous abyss. There's nothing around me. I have no body, there are no sounds, no feeling - I'm neither hot nor cold, because I don't feel. I'm purely an entity, observing from the beyond, and the only thing to observe are the little people, their god, their society, their universe, off in the distance, like a child watching ants in their colony. 

When I'm in the void, I'm separated from humanity, and I look down from the outside. I'm no longer part of this, but an outsider. The world shifts from first person to third person. 

The second view is micro-view, where I penetrate so deeply into the world that I see everything in extreme detail. Like in the movies when Peter Parker first wakes up the day after being bitten, or when somebody becomes a werewolf. All of my senses become hyper-acute. I no longer focus directly at anything, and instead let my vision widen. I see things with my subconscious, and anticipate actions before their required - as if I've shifted backwards a brief glimpse in time. When I feel like this, the world becomes very organic and material. I reach out and touch things, and absorb the sensations. I feel the power in my body. I sense people's emotions and reactions. I feel the intense pleasures and pains in my own body. 

I think I'm a dichotomy of emotions and this physical body. I feel no traditional empathy for these people, and I don't feel like I'm in the same sphere emotionally or spiritually. I have a deep intellectual understanding of these ideas, maybe more so than most people, but for me, they're mere philosophical concepts. I've attempted to seek spirituality, but all I've come up with are formulas. Possible algorithms, like solutions to a problem in programming to explain it all. Open mindedness is the greatest of all forms of disbelief, and I'm non-committal to the point of exasperation. 

Despite this, I am here and now in the flesh. Despite the philosophical constructs I build up to entertain myself, the present feels very real and very - present. Despite the emotional crevice between me and others, I'm not unaware of their emotions, and I soak them up like a thirsty sponge. Part of my mind is infinitely distant, while the other part is infinitely close. I crave her flesh. I crave the pain, and the orgasmic rush of wrath. 

I feel like this dichotomy, although opposite, is at it's core, one in the same. Just like a buddhist monk, who experiences the infinite beauty of world through utterly forgoing human desire, I feel much the same. This isn't simple emotional distance, but a glimpse of how the infinitely far is also infinitely near. At the exact same time, at any one time in all of eternity, I'm both completely outside of everything, and deep inside of her soul. I'm both the darkness in the beyond, and a flesh eating virus consuming her from within.

Misanthropy

I was searching for a particular old email recently and stumbled across an interesting discussion between me and a friend.  To give you some insight into my friend's view of humanity, this friend had one time suggested that it was easy for me to be so happy-go-lucky about humanity because I had more "faith" in love than she did.  It is weird for me to read things like this because I don't feel this way anymore--I am not as enamored with humanity as I was even a few years ago.  Then I saw this email (again, from several years ago) to the same friend about how I had been helping out with the political cause of a mutual acquaintance--a political view that this particular friend abhorred.

I'm very impressionable it is true. And yes, I did pick a conclusion first and then come up with ways to justify it to myself. I didn't realize that I had done such a poor job that you could see through me so easily.  

Anyway, this is how I have always been. I don't really think things are morally abhorrent. I usually don't think about stuff that way. I really am pretty much a blank slate. I just like people, I don't mind adopting their values on things and fighting for those values. It's like the Naomi character in the bible saying, "where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. your people shall be my people, and your god my god." People are my beliefs and alliances, you included. If the other side had gotten to me first, maybe it would be a different story and a different set of justifications. I can understand people not respecting that or not thinking it is a legitimate way of living, but I don't know. It seems alright to me. But I am not entirely surprised that my justifications didn't make sense to you. Don't be sad, though. I'm ok. I'm not about to join a cult or anything.

It's weird for me to read something like this. It's odd to see certain very familiar things about myself (i.e. weak sense of self, impressionable, people pleasing), but I also realize that I used to like people much more than I do now. It's as if my love and interest in humanity was a passing phase--a bit of a personal fad, like the careers or other exploits that I have picked up and dropped just as suddenly over the years. I think I exhausted the potential upside with people and then it became (and still is) just maintenance. There's no longer the same thrill that I used to get in interacting with people.

My current relationships take so much more effort than my previous relationships did.  When I was younger, I would just burn through relationships.  I confessed to one that I was using him like a paper napkin, to be disposed after I was done with him.  After a while I got a little tired of the drama and upheaval that went along with these aborted relationships.

Now I have a general rule that I don't mess with my intimates, only with people to whom I do not have many ties.  It's basically a policy of not defecating where I intend to eat.  There are real benefits in living my life this way, but there are also definite costs.  Now if I am fed up with someone, I don't blow up or try to hurt them, I distance myself from them and spend some recovery time alone.  Sometimes I have to spend the equivalent of several hours alone in order to be one hour of my well-behaved, solicitous self around certain people. It's odd, but the nicer I have become to my intimates, the less goodwill I have for the rest of humanity.