I have been absent from the world of journaling for a while because my last post has received absolutely zero comments. Had I posted that same journal a year ago, I would surely have been inundated with messages from people who I no longer choose to associate myself with at present. Regardless of the reasons why I lost these associates, the fact of the matter is that I now know far fewer people than I did even six months ago. Now, even though this does not prevent me from writing very often, it does discourage me from expressing my thoughts and opinions through this particular format.

I'm not someone who talks in the middle of nowhere, when no-one else is around. Hell, I barely speak when I'm in the center of the city and surrounded by people. So much of our interpersonal communications fail to amount to much of anything. It's all just so much "Hello, how are you?" and "Ok, fine. And you?" Such conversations can last anywhere between a few seconds and a few hours, and most of the time little information of any real importance is exchanged. Whenever a situation like this thrusts itself upon me, I take quick, decisive action to end it. This isn't because I do not respect the intelligence of the person who is engaging me; I only question the intelligence of what he is doing. I am a direct, to-the-point person. This does not, however, mean that I reduce 'the point' to its most absolute simplest form. My world is a complicated, nuanced, and unpredictable one.

For example, three years ago, I felt as though I were a somewhat normal person. I'm an oddball, I know, but I always felt that I was only different because of my own personal experiences. This isn't to say that I felt completely normal, as I've always known that I was abnormal, perhaps extremely so. I was ignorant of one very important fact back then; a fact that I now cannot ignore, no matter how much I may want to.

The truth of the matter is, I am fundamentally different from the vast majority of my fellow human beings. One of the things that confounds me, day after day, are the bizarre motivations of those who share my company. The strange, repetitive speaking habits; the weird shades of grey in their emotions. People get into romantic entanglements, and then complicate them immensely. I'd see them fall victim to emotional attacks that I simply cannot imagine resonating with me. When someone dares to insult me on an emotional level, I simply reject that person completely. My Machiavellian view of humanity has always been at odds with something inside of most people, and now I think I know why this is so.

For a very long time I thought that I was a primarily emotional person, since whenever I did feel emotions they were extremely intense. It was as if a wrecking ball had come out of nowhere and clobbered me once or twice a year. Then again, I was spending a lot of time coming down off of antidepressants. Once, I was fascinated by the withdrawal effects of certain antidepressant medications. Whenever I'd quit a medication I'd become almost entirely emotional, and I'd think to myself, "Oh, so this is how it feels to be one of them!"

The 'one of them' I'm referring to, of course, are you relatively normal people. I don't really mean any offense by referring to my friends in this way, as it only means that in some sense I can't understand what you're all about.

All this thinking about my emotional retardation has led me to another grand moment of self discovery and revelation; today I discovered one of my deepest insecurities, and I also decided to share it with the world for the sake of understanding. While I was attempting to remember a very dark chapter of my own childhood I stumbled upon something a psychiatrist had told my parents; something they only told me in a moment of great distress. What this doctor had said about me resonates to this very day as a weakness in my soul: The boy, he said, is dangerous. By the time I was a teenager, he went on to say, I would be even more deadly. The only rational option he presented was hospitalization for me; that was the only hope for the world. I think that he may have deduced that I had the shallow emotional depth of a psychopath, a flattening of affect, while I only really have the outward appearance of flattened affect.

Or maybe he saw who I really was, and the sight of it terrified him. (Or, perhaps, I'm just exaggerating a very old memory!)

Back then, this revelation 'cured' me for the time being, and I managed to choke down all that rage and disappointment. For a while there, I passed as one one of you normal guys; I smiled when I was supposed to, and kept to myself. No more plotting to break free of society, no more waiting in the shadows to ambush and beat children who had made an enemy out of me. I was good, and just. For the sake of my own survival, I had chosen to give up my quest for the reasons why.

Ever since I was small child no-one ever tried to explain anything to me adequately enough for my curiosity. When they required me to do something the only reason provided was "Because I told you so," pretty much the most sorry-ass reason to do anything at all. Of course, I got no respect, non at all. They didn't even provide me with left-handed handwriting materials in school. As a consequence of this, I spent a lot of time feeling like a retard, and unable to keep up very well in school. This happened not because of any learning disability on my part, but a teaching disability on theirs. There's a lot of talk about learning disorders in this country because pompous ass teachers like having excuses for their own fucking incompetence. When children do not learn, we blame them immediately without question the educational system itself.

Writing in lousy print for my most of my life is the least of my frustrations at this point, however. What really digs into me now are interpersonal relationships. One of my deeper fears is that someone might actually care deeply about me, and that I, perhaps being a closet psychopath, would never return that affection; in fact, I would make a pathetic mockery of it. This distance is something I also experience whenever I communicate with my friends. I often fear that it's just a great, big, cynical farce, and I'm playing people that I care about because deep-down inside I'm still that conniving little boy who hurt everyone who tried to be his friend. No good at all can come from such a life, since all pursuits will yield the same utterly empty rewards. Without a rudimentary passion/reward system my life would not have any purpose or direction whatsoever, and my own inherent sense of order cannot allow that. I'm afraid of using people I care about, since it is my first instinct to manipulate others.

I have become addicted to my own weird, immature emotions because of this. Being an extremely introverted thinker can be a wonderful thing at times, though I doubt there's a human being alive who doesn't get tired of simply being himself. I have a plan now that involves perpetuating a myth about myself. You see, I'm might start telling people that I'm a high-level functioning autistic. That explains my lack of social graces neatly without having to go into the nuances of explaining that deep down inside I'm a scheming little Machiavellian dork-ass nerd, but despite these cynical tendencies I actually want a better world to live in. Evil could have served me very well but I decided to be a good guy, and that's actually quite profound. Alas, such a nuanced self-description will not connect with most people.

People do connect with autism, at least as much as popular culture does. When I came up with this idea I gave no thought whatsoever to how I may be misusing a very dreadful problem that many people suffer through. It took an entire hour or so for that empathic notion to hit me. Though, who's to say that I don't have autism? If my level of introversion is so great that my social skills are just as impaired as an intelligent autistic, what's the difference in perception?

Of course, I know there are great fundamental differences between autism and strong introversion, though I doubt that a lay person could tell the difference between them; controlling the perceptions that lay people have of me was the main purpose of my original scheme. Though, I suppose that now I'm just rambling on and on when I really ought to be getting to bed.

Now, I shall rest peacefully knowing that I'm a little bit more of a real human being. That empathy can be a part of my day-to-day life if I'm careful about how I interact with the world. Only you, friends, have readily perceived this inner well of humanity I have in me. Others will continue to see me as something like an inverse Terminator: robot on the outside, who knows what on the inside.

Though now, I know for certain now that I'm human on the inside, despite the inherent unnaturalness of my own expressions. I know I may never be able to prove this to anyone else, but knowing it for certain myself has made a ton of difference so far. Now I do not fear making friends and interacting with good, innocent people.

I'm back on my path, and I feel determined about my own future.

Good luck to all you emotional fuzz bunnies.