Confessions of a Sociopath (27 page)

Sometimes, though, I’m very wrong, particularly about this. Sometimes I can’t see people’s disgust for me because I’m so single-mindedly inclined to see adoration. I have natural advantages, but I have my own blind spots, too.

While I can often observe a social situation and gauge each person’s place in the power hierarchy or her potential
vulnerability to exploitation, I have a very hard time gauging the emotional subtleties of a conversation, in ways that can be harmful to me. Sometimes it is impossible for me to tell when someone is mad at me.

Some researchers, like Simon Baron-Cohen, believe that people with antisocial personality disorders suffer from a degree of mind-blindness, the inability to attribute mental states to themselves or other people, which is intimately tied up with the ability to feel empathy. One reader of my website described being confronted (particularly by strangers) this way:

If sociopaths have mind-blindness, how are we able to manipulate so well? Practice. We have to deal with people daily, so we get a lot of opportunities to practice. We’re forced to compensate for our mind-blindness in whatever way works for us. Sink or swim.

I can seem amazingly prescient and insightful, to the point that people proclaim that no one else has ever understood them as well as I do. But the truth is far more complex and hinges on the meaning of understanding. In a way, I don’t understand them at all. I can only make predictions based on the past behavior that they’ve exhibited to me, the same way
computers determine whether you’re a bad credit risk based on millions of data points. I am the ultimate empiricist, and not by choice.

There seems to be some connection between empathy and the ability to understand sarcasm—apparently one’s ability to feel for another aids in correctly interpreting hidden meanings behind words. Many sociopaths have a tendency to take things too literally or otherwise not to respond appropriately to nonverbal emotional cues. I am often completely oblivious to sarcasm, to the disbelief of everyone around me.

Although I am often acutely aware of the power dynamics of social situations, I sometimes miss out on social cues that can be glaringly obvious to others. Often they involve customs related to authority, the little tokens of respect that are so bewildering to me as to be invisible.

One time, at an interview for a very prestigious clerkship, I met with the judge briefly. We talked for a while and he suggested that he was going to go off to lunch, but if I wanted to talk some more I should come back after. I never came back after lunch. I figured that we had already said everything we had to say to each other, and so that was that. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized that if I was interested in the clerkship, I should have at least come and reaffirmed my interest after lunch. I wish he had just told me that, but I guess the whole point of the test was that I was supposed to know what to do without being told.

Indeed I often am entirely literal, using words in their ordinary dictionary meaning. It’s actually odd to me how frequently empaths will say one thing and mean an entirely different thing, expecting their listeners to pick up on the true meaning. Fortunately though, widespread sarcasm and insincerity make it easier for sociopaths to “pass” in society. It
allows me to speak my mind quite sincerely and have people laugh it off, apparently because no one wants to believe that someone would admit to thinking such bloodless things. I regularly comment on my desire to exploit my admirers or to kill cute animals, and I don’t even need to laugh or smile for people to think I am joking.

Perhaps the best example of this is the first time (and every time since) that I casually admitted to being a sociopath in public. I wrote a humorous article for my law school newspaper in which I not only admitted my own status but conjectured that much of the student body was sociopathic as well. Because I was poking fun at law school in general and mine in particular, no one thought a thing of it. Another blog reader admitted:

Learning to communicate with empaths is like trying to understand and speak a foreign language. When I had taken four years of high school Spanish I figured I could understand the basics of what people were saying and reply back to them, but the truth is that I frequently don’t. Sometimes I don’t know enough to even realize that I have misunderstood.

When people assume that I am their ethnicity and start speaking to me in their own language (typically Hebrew or Spanish, but not exclusively), I just reply back to them in my
American English, which indicates to them immediately that I am not who they thought I was. Of course I don’t dare do that when people speak to me in an emotional foreign language. I don’t dare tip them off that I don’t speak the language natively, that I am not who they think I am. So I say my one or two rote phrases that I’ve learned for the most common situations and try to quickly leave or change the subject. It’s not ideal, of course, but nothing about my life is.

But despite these handicaps, sociopaths have a unique talent for getting under other people’s skin. I am often asked how sociopaths seem to be able to “see” someone’s soul and view them as they truly are. It’s a good question and a common complaint (compliment?) regarding sociopaths. I don’t think that sociopaths are any more perceptive than other people, they’re just looking for different things—weaknesses, flaws, and other areas to exploit—and concentrating a good deal of effort on it. Sociopaths are dangerous because they are such keen students of human interactions, closely studying others with the goal of picking up on the right social cues to blend in, imitate normal behavior, and exploit where they can. The more you pay attention to something, the more aware you will be. I am a musician, and I can listen to a recording and tell exactly what is going on, who is playing what, even the way the music was mixed in the studio. You could learn that too, if you practiced as much as a musician does.

R
uining people
. I love the way the phrase rolls around on my tongue and inside my mouth. Ruining people is delicious. We’re all hungry, empaths and sociopaths. We want to consume. Sociopaths are uniformly hungry for power. Power is all I have ever really cared about in my life: physical power,
the power of being desired or admired, destructive power, knowledge, invisible influence. I like people. I like people so much that I want to touch them, mold them, or ruin them however I’d like. Not because I want to witness the results, necessarily, but simply because I want to exercise my power. The acquisition, retention, and exploitation of power are what most motivate sociopaths. This much I know.

What do I mean by ruining someone? Everyone has their different tastes in regards to power, just like everyone has their different tastes for food or sex. My bread and butter is feeling like my mind and my ideas are shaping the world around me, which is of course why I bother writing the blog. It’s my daily porridge; it keeps me from starvation. But when I indulge—when I am hungry for the richest, most decadent piece of foie gras—I indulge in inserting myself into a person’s psyche and quietly wreaking as much havoc as I can. To indulge in malignity. To terrorize a person’s soul without having any real design on the person. It’s a pleasure to build something, to see the physical embodiment of your work. It can be equally pleasurable to destroy, to see the devastation that your hands have wrought, like swinging a pickax at a discarded wooden door with careless abandon. Both make you feel powerful and capable. But there is a special pleasure in destruction because of its rarity—like dissolving a pearl in champagne. Every day we are expected to be productive, pro-social. But if you’ve ever had an impulse to tell your best friend that yes, those pants do make her look fat, you understand how liberating it is to unrestrainedly lash out at another’s softest parts.

How many times have I done this? It is hard to say. Often when I was young, I did it without being aware of what I was doing. I remember I always liked being in friendship groups of three because they were so unstable. I used to invent drama so
I could pair up with one or the other against the third. There’s nothing too sociopathic about that. Every little girl likes to indulge in that sort of drama and many never grow out of it. People sometimes express shock to learn that there is someone out there who is not only actively working against them, but is doing so for no other reason than the enjoyment of flexing their power. In fact, I think that toying with people is something that comes naturally to all of us. I am sure you have done it or had it done to you—the way many people we admire can callously disregard our feelings, thriving on the self-importance they feel from the interactions without being self-aware enough to realize what they are doing to people around them and why. We can all tell when people have crushes on us, sexual or platonic, and we enjoy wielding that small amount of power over them. If anything, sociopaths are just a little better at it and enjoy it in a particular way.

When I have such thoughts of ruining people, I typically have a small tell—my tongue caresses one of the sharp points of my teeth. I grind my teeth like a champion and I’ve ground one of my upper canines down flat except for one jagged, needle-like point. (One time when I was a teenager, my dad accused me of being in a gang and filing my teeth down on purpose as some sort of sign of affiliation.) I love tonguing that tooth; it gives me shivers of pleasure. The physical sensations of sharpness on the soft flesh of my tongue would be enough, but what I really like to think about is how secret it is from the outside world, safely hidden inside my mouth. My teeth present as a whole, their dominant characteristic being an eerie but natural perfection. The sharp little point gets lost in my sea of gleaming white teeth. It reminds me of Bertolt Brecht’s lyrics about the charming serial killer Mack the Knife:

I wish I could tell stories of ruining people, but they’re the stories most likely to get me sued—situations that involved the police and restraining orders and professional lives derailed. Or they are failed attempts in which the person only suspects me of not having their best interest at heart and stops associating with me, and so are too boring to relate. Still, I think even my attempts to ruin people perhaps best reflect my sociopathy, and are the most consistent deviation from my current, relatively pro-social lifestyle.

I do have a moral code that I try to adhere to, but ruining people is my practical reality, the same way that picking up men in airport bathrooms might be the practical reality for a closeted gay, married Christian evangelical. I think that my adherence to my prosthetic moral compass is similar to the way most people adhere to their religions. I was recently at a conference with a woman who is Jewish. We went to a burger joint and she ended up ordering a grilled cheese sandwich. Why? She says that she keeps kosher, but when she travels she just tries to approximate. To her, kosher eating is an important moral goal, perhaps a good rule of thumb, but she accepts that no one can be perfect in everything. She understands that she is just human, that we are all just human, and that people will fail no matter what sort of code they set for themselves. If you didn’t fight constantly to maintain the code despite slipping up here and there (sometimes just to give yourself a break), you wouldn’t need a code in the first place. If you just naturally
behaved in a certain way, you wouldn’t need to consciously try to fight your natural inclinations with some rigid framework. You’d just live however you were inclined to live.

For me, I don’t feel a compulsion to break with my code in typical ways: I am not a compulsive gambler, I am not an alcoholic, I am not a sexaholic, I am not a drug addict. Most of my cravings are usually sporadic or harmless. To the extent that I crave something consistently, it is to cease my tireless efforts at impulse control. In other words, what I really crave is to be able to act in whatever way I want without having to worry about the consequences. I typically fight that craving. The worry is that if I let myself go just a little bit, I will revert completely back to the way I was before, which I know isn’t a sustainable way to live. But even so, I have to have a way to blow off steam. So I ruin people. It’s not illegal, it’s difficult to prove, and I get to flex my power. It feels good to know that I can and that I am good at it. The fact that it is wrong or can hurt people is not necessarily the point. No one has ever died from my ruining. I think some people have barely even noticed, or if they have noticed it is because I have had all the effect of a fly buzzing in their ear. This was probably true of one of my favorite experiences, a love triangle I constructed between me, Cass, and Lucy.

I dated Cass for a while, and though we considered the possibility of a long-term arrangement, I ultimately lost interest. Cass did not. He was sure to keep in touch and in passive-aggressive ways always seemed to be part of my life. Cass wasn’t going to tire easily, I could tell, so I tried to find other uses for him. One such use appeared on a night when Cass and I attended a party together where people were playing kissing games. As soon as we entered and got separated in the crowd,
Cass was accosted by someone as part of one of these games, a person who was later introduced to me as Lucy.