Losing Grip

I sometimes am afraid that I’m a sociopath. But then I think to myself that if I actually was a sociopath, I would not be scared of being one. At least I don’t think I would. But maybe I would be scared, not because of the implications of that fact, but because people could find out. Which would make me a sociopath.

I think you can see where this is going; around and around until I eventually have to shake myself out of this trance and back into the real world. Most of my thoughts go this way, circular in a never ending cycle of self-criticism, then trying to justify it, ultimately ending in the conclusion that I’m extremely selfish and I spend all of my time contemplating facts about MYself and MY existence. Me me me.

In my adult life, there are very few times that this monologue is not running through my head. At any given moment, odds are that I’m deeply psychoanalyzing something about myself, a perceived wrongdoing, or maybe a fully flawed trait that I’ve seen flash through someone else’s eyes; a flash of recognition that something is not fully right with me. Not fully perfect. I most often see this expression cross my mother’s face, clear as day. It’s only for a millisecond, but it’s unmistakable. Right when I get off a plane to see her. When I step out into the living room ready for dinner. When I catch her looking at me in the mirrored glass of a storefront. This realization, this disappointment that I am not all I claim to be, or not all that she expects of me.

I hesitate to use the phrase “not all that she expects of me”, because it is also what I expect of myself. It feels as if it is what I am supposed to be, deemed so by some omnipresent being larger than me or my mother, and she is only the bearer of bad news. I suppose one could suggest that it’s the patriarchy, or society at large, but this is not about that, and I don’t feel that the point I am trying to make is about Feminism, but about me being a flawed person who happens to be a woman.

From a young age, I always felt deep in my bones that I was being surveilled. When I was around 10, my family got two kittens. I loved them very dearly, and still have one to this day, but from the moment they entered the house, I would not change in front of them because I had a very deep seated fear that their eyes were cameras. Who was watching those cameras I wasn’t sure, and never really even stopped to consider, but I was downright positive that it was true. I wasn’t scared per se, rather just accepted the fact that I had an audience, and appropriately performed.

From that time on, and probably before that if I could remember, my life has felt like one long performance. Sleep used to terrify me because I was not able to appropriately control my appearance and demeanor, and I only was able to start sleeping around college when two things happened: I was introduced to substances, and life wore me down enough that not sleeping was simply not an option.

I don’t mean to say that I was or am addicted to substances, or even feel that I abuse them in an excessive way, rather that for the first time, I experienced the loss of control in an overpowering way. I had of course lost control of my emotions before college, quite often actually, but this in and of itself was a part of the performance; I was an angsty teenager, aching to leave home and “find myself”. I knew in high school that I was not myself, and it was extremely frustrating to not be able to accurately describe this feeling of otherness, not because I didn’t have friends, or was bullied, but because I was not putting on a good show, and I felt completely transparent. My mother describes it as “not finding your people”, but it felt deeper and more internal than that. I felt like a complete shell, a fake, and most alarmingly, I felt that this was on display for everyone to see.

My high school boyfriend was sweet and normal and completely gay. In reality, we were just very close friends, but through our “relationship”, I solidified something about myself that I had surmised but not known for sure: I love being looked at. We only had sex probably twice, but he saw me naked or almost naked a lot of times, and it drove me to tears sometimes that he wasn’t obsessed with me. I would lock myself in his bathroom and sit on the cold tile floor and cry. I would of course make up some other excuse, and I’m sure he thought I needed to be heavily medicated, but really it was because I wanted him to not be able to keep his hands off of me, and he… could. Looking back now, it’s obvious why, and it makes me laugh that I didn’t see it immediately (we met through our high school theater program), but at the time, it felt like my life was ending, when really, it was probably the relationship that should have.

My college boyfriend, on the other hand, was the complete opposite. The only good thing we had was the sex. I got from him exactly what I needed: thirst. Hunger. The knowledge that my physical being was not only desirable, but enough to consume an entire afternoon. My mistake was conflating great physical intimacy with emotional intimacy, which I now am convinced that, at least at the time, he did not have the capacity for. Why I was shocked when he cheated on me with multiple women I’m not sure, because I had to have known that he was too insatiable to last a summer without me there to yearn to be looked at. In fact, he didn’t even last a week.

My flippant tone is not to say that I moved on without a thought. I soliloquized, I wrote letters, I sobbed, I screamed, I cried. When I really thought about it though, the phrase that kept going through my mind was “you lost”. Not that I lost out on the love of my life but that he had Won and I had Lost. You see, I had put myself solidly in the winning category for a few reasons. The first was that he was a known… player (to put it nicely) and that I had not only locked him down, but he had asked me out. Secondly, and much to my pride, the day after we hooked up for the first time, he let “I love you” slip. I couldn’t keep the triumphant look off of my face and even though I hid it a second later with a calculated look of doe-eyed confusion, he saw it. What I’m sure he read as joy at a blossoming relationship was my swell of delight. I won.

When it became clear that I had in fact, not won, I crumbled. How had I so sorely miscalculated? I was absolutely humiliated. In the aftermath, many of my friends took his side, or didn’t decidedly take my side, and it was all the more confirmation that I had lost. I was a loser. To make matters worse, I had carried on for months with this false sense of security that I was Winning at being desired, and made a complete fool of myself. I completely spiraled, not eating or sleeping for months, over-analyzing every split second of the relationship with my friends and in my journal, until I felt that I could put it down to the minute in the relationship where I went wrong.

This is what I mean when I say that I fear being a sociopath. I analyze myself, my relationships, and people around me with a surgical precision that is never sated until I’ve essentially written a research paper on the subject. Everything is transactional. Every gift is received with a list already building in my head of what I am giving back to them. Every act of kindness the same. My first thought is often cuttingly judgmental, and even though I quickly rectify it, and chastise myself for even thinking it, it’s there. It’s easy to laugh off, and build a kind of Joan Rivers-esque persona of being bitchy haha, but sometimes it sends a chill down my spine that this is what my brain churns out.

In a rare moment when the veil fell, I got into a particularly nasty fight with my mother. She had been visiting me in New York for a few days, and one of the nights that she visited, I cut our night short to go to a dinner party at a friend’s apartment. I had only lived in the city a few months, and every chance at social interaction felt like a notch in the Having Friends column of my twenties. The next morning, my mother and I were in an Uber on the way to the airport. She was clearly upset that I had chosen my new friends over her. I am not here to debate who was right in this scenario, but the argument abruptly ended when she matter of factly told me that it was abundantly clear to her and everyone else that I was just desperate. My blood ran cold in that moment. She had said the thing that I feared most, and said it in such a casual way, like this was a fun fact about me that someone would just throw out when introducing me. “This is Mac! She just moved to the city… oh and she’s desperate!”

This is a fight that I have never and probably will never fully recover from. When I got broken up with a few months ago, the minute the door closed behind him, before I could even cry, I heard it so clearly in my mind: “you’re just desperate”.

And I am. I so desperately want to be loved, desired, wanted, thought about, cared for, saved. This fear will probably follow me throughout my life, there is no shaking it. There are days and even sometimes months that it never crosses my mind, but it just takes one look to send it right back to the headlines. You’re just desperate.

My biggest fear, my absolute worst nightmare, is someone seeing this in me, even for a second. This is, I think, really the crux of the issue. This fear has driven me to this calculating analysis of the world around me, to surveil everything back, because maybe if I can be one step ahead, I can hide it for just a little bit longer.