New here and I'd like to make the standard intro.
I guess I'll start with the usual 'I've always felt different'. It's true, and for a few years now I thought I'd solved it. I thought I'd figured out all my issues, taken care of everything.
See, I'm trans and I thought that was the only problem. That I didn't mesh with other people, didn't fit social norms, didn't have the inexplicable spark empaths seem to have because of my gender issues. So I fixed it - hormones, new clothes, new name, new life, even got my balls chopped off.
But that didn't change certain things. Sure I feel a whole hell of a lot better, but other people were still an irritatingly opaque puzzle. I realized I was set apart from them. I saw a much more black and white world than them. I hurt people and enjoyed their pain. I hurt my friends and lovers and didn't understand their anger. I imagined how much fun it would be to feed someone feet first into a wood chipper.
I looked inside myself and saw only a grinning skull.
But sociopath? Me? No, I knew someone with ASPD. I loved her, still love her. We clicked so well. But I'm not like her so that can't be it right? She's cold and calculating. And when she takes off her mask her soul has a raw beauty, it evokes an image in my mind of watching a neutron star from the surface of the lifeless planet orbiting it, knowing the shine of it is the same hard radiation that's the antithesis of life.
I feel these things, love and hate, I can't be a sociopath right?
But I've had two separate events make me re-examine that. One was finding M.E.'s book, she's a halfway decent writer. The other was a a fairly brief friendship with a self-professed sociopath in which she took the time to groom me - she showed me things, nudged at certain thoughts, pushed me certain directions. I was aware of it, but I enjoyed it. It was like we were playing in a purely intellectual way that I rarely get.
It's all these small things adding up, all this introspection and analysis. It all leads to feel I'm ready to finally claim my label, ready to stop going in circles about it, ready to just be.