M. Thomas: Confessions of a Sociopath

I spent the next couple of years receiving unemployment insurance checks. My family was worried for me. They wondered what I was planning on doing with my life. But I never had those sorts of existential crises. I always live in two-year increments. I figure anything beyond that is just so uncertain that it can basically be disregarded as a possibility.

This compounding of losses was unusual for me, though—even my two-year plan seemed bleak. I found myself at loose ends, directionless and, I had to admit, fairly mindless. I had squandered a prestigious and lucrative job in my chosen field. I considered going to business school, but for what? To repeat a cycle of success and devastation for the duration of my life? I had heartlessly put aside a friend in her time of need. How many more relationships did I have to destroy? I knew these were not the actions of a normal person, and I began to admit that my life was not sustainable. If I wasn’t normal, what was I?

With a ruthlessness I usually reserved for other people, I stripped away my own artifices to discover who I really was. I realized that all my life I had been trying to be like the chameleons I had learned about as a child in my big book of small reptiles. The social part of me had evaporated, making it apparent that all of my efforts to entertain were designed to sit on the very outer surfaces of me, separate and apart from what existed inside. And those insides—they were impenetrable. I had never liked people to look at me; I wanted to be the only one doing the looking. But now I realized that I never bothered to look closely at myself.

I had grown accustomed to believing my own lies. I would fixate on moments that made me feel normal. A monster would not cry at a sad movie. Her heart would not break from a lover’s departure. So my tears were proof that I was normal, as was the pain in my chest, about which so many songs have been written. How could my heart be broken if there was no heart to break? It had been easy to convince myself that I was not the one with the problem.

It is one thing to lie to others, but I had been lying to myself for years. I had become reliant on self-deception and forgotten who I was. And now I didn’t really understand myself at all. I wanted to stop being a stranger to myself; for the first time in my life, that bothered me enough to want to do something about it.

Though it would prove to be a turning point, this was not my first period of deep introspection. During college, I got myself into an awkward social mess (I’ll relate the details in chapter 5), and my life went completely to hell. I didn’t have any label to identify with, but after a long period of unflinching honesty and self-analysis I recognized 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—or to at least divert them to situations where the stakes were lowest.

I didn’t know then what a “sociopath” was nor did I have any inkling that I might be one until a few years later during law school, when a coworker raised the possibility. We were working together as summer interns, largely busywork that didn’t matter. I was bored, so when I learned that she was an openly gay woman who had been adopted as a child, I started to pry into her personal life, hunting for insecurities. Slightly overweight, cheerful, and gregarious, she appeared to be a treasure trove of plush emotional vulnerabilities. It turned out that she was much more than that—she was intellectually curious and wide open to the possibilities of how to live in the world. We shared offices and spent hours talking about politics, religion, philosophy, fashion, or anything else that would distract us from the drudge work. From the very beginning, she felt compelled to mother me, giving me advice on how to dress appropriately at work and feeding me quinoa salads she had prepared for me to keep me from dining on cheeseburgers every day. I noticed and began to analyze how she made everyone feel comfortable around her. I hoped to replicate little nuggets of her charm, and I told her so. Whereas I viewed the world through the lens of bloodless rationality, she could not have been more touchy-feely; though she was an intelligent woman who valued rationality, she made a deliberate choice to abandon it occasionally in favor of soft intangibles like “compassion” and “mercy.” Even though I don’t naturally value those things, I respect that they are legitimate interests that people have, the same way that I acknowledge that not everyone will have my exact taste in, say, music or automobiles.

She had a master’s degree in theology, and I loved to probe her beliefs, first about whether God made her gay, but later about anything that seemed important to her. I remember specifically questioning her about altruism, with which I had little personal experience. I explained to her that, to my mind, to have the ability to measure with such stark precision the utility of a person—just as any other thing—made it senseless to regard that person in any other way. At that time, I had yet to abandon my friend whose dad had cancer, but there were plenty of other ruined relationships that I could have been referencing—I routinely disposed of people once their burden to me exceeded their utility. I told my coworker that one of these disposed-of people had accused me of lacking altruism. Perhaps, I had conceded. But perhaps this thing that I allegedly lacked—altruism—was nothing more than garbled thinking that did no more than freeze people in a moment of indecision, whereas I was free to cut off entanglements at will. My coworker nodded sympathetically.

One day, not long after our altruism conversation, we were discussing how to behave appropriately in situations in which I was expected to comfort anguished loved ones. Perhaps she could see that I seemed clueless, because she asked me then if I thought I might be a sociopath. I remember not knowing how to answer and having to look the word up, not sure exactly what a sociopath was or why she would think I was one. Socio- for social or society, -pathy for a morbid affliction or disease: a disorder of social conscience. That did sound familiar.

I was not offended. I was already well accustomed to the idea that there was something pointedly different about me that could not be altered. I realized early on that other people did not treat their lives as if it were a complicated game in which all events, things, and people could be measured with mathematical precision toward achieving their own personal satisfaction and pleasure. Somewhat more recently, I also noticed that other people felt guilt , a special kind of regret that did not arise from negative consequences but from some amorphous moral dictate that had taken root in them from consciousness. They felt bad in a way that I never felt when they hurt others, as if the hurt they had caused was so cosmically connected to the goodness of the universe as to reverberate back to them. These things I had pretended to feel for many years, had attempted assiduously to mimic the manifestations of, but had never actually felt in my life. I was more curious than anything. If there was a label for who I was, then maybe I could learn something more about myself. In fact, I had no trouble recognizing myself in the descriptions I found in my research.

It turned out that my officemate had been acquainted with a man she discovered was a sociopath. Rather than live out the sob story of the con artist’s innocent victim, she had maintained a deep and enduring friendship with him. In retrospect, her willingness to regard me as a human being despite her firm belief that I was a sociopath offered me the possibility that I could be understood and accepted as I was. She was proof that not all people with consciences and empathy were appalled by the existence of people like me.