Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight

Chapter 7 EMOTIONS AND THE FINE ART OF RUINING PEOPLE

When we were children, my sister Kathleen and I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I didn’t identify with Dorothy and her wish to return to her Kansas home. I wasn’t the heroine who saved her motley band of companions from the forces of evil. Instead, I saw myself in the Tin Woodman, who began life as Nick Chopper, an Ozian logger.

His troubles began when he fell deeply in love with one of the Munchkin girls. The girl’s guardian refused to part with her and made a pact with the Wicked Witch of the East, who bewitched Nick’s ax to harm him. When Nick wielded the ax against a tree, it slipped from his fingers and cut off his leg instead. The next day it cut off the other leg, then both arms, then his head, and then finally split his torso in two. Each time his ax betrayed him, Nick would go to the tinsmith to replace his lost flesh with a tin prosthetic. However, when Nick came for the last replacement, his split torso, the tinsmith forgot to include a prosthetic heart.

Tin Woodman was unperturbed. Without a heart, he no longer cared about whether he could marry his former love; without a heart, he no longer cared about much at all. It was as if the Wicked Witch had given him a gift with her cruel and painful curse. Tin Woodman’s new tin skin was more durable than his old soft flesh, and he shone with brilliance in the daylight. He delighted in the beauty and strength of his newly improved, albeit heartless, self. In chopping up his flesh, she rid him of another and possibly more painful curse of wanting what he could not have, of holding on to the Munchkin girl as the answer to his happiness. I often wonder if, like the Tin Woodman, I was also given a kind of gift—a release from the things that seem to torture others. It is difficult to feel dissatisfaction when you rarely look to others for satisfaction. In some ways my deficits have freed me from wanting and not having that which seemed so essential to them—some purpose or identity in the world, some affirmation of the goodness and rightness of my existence.

The only disadvantage that Tin Woodman could see was that he was susceptible to rust, but he was always careful to bring an oil can with him should the weather happen to turn. But one day, the Tin Woodman was careless and got caught in a rainstorm without his oil can. His joints rusted shut and he could no longer move. He remained frozen for a year before Dorothy discovered him. It was only during that motionless year that he began to realize what he was missing: “It was a terrible thing to undergo, but during the year I stood there I had time to think that the greatest loss I had known was the loss of my heart.”

It took a long time for me to finally rust over—to reach that period of aimlessness, unemployment, and self-searching that slowed me down and gave me time to think about who I am and what I want. The rusting happened in fits and starts. I had long stretches of bewildering emotional arthritis, through which I trudged onward in my unyielding determination to ignore pain. These were punctuated with periods of success and happiness, of superior performance and pleasurable mastery of the world around me. But as heartless as I am, I have wanted to feel love, to feel connection, to feel like I belong to the world like anyone else. No one, it seems, can escape loneliness. I know enough, however, to understand that getting a heart isn’t a quick fix either. Even after Tin Woodman gets his version of one, he has to be very careful not to cry lest his tears cause him to rust. A heart can be paralyzing in its way. It is not at all clear that the Tin Woodman is happier or better after he receives one.

When I think of myself, I feel that I exist first as a will—I am the product of my desires and my efforts to fulfill those desires. I identify more as a sociopath than by my gender or profession or race. In my soul, it feels like I was cast first as this iron-hearted thing, this Nietzschean machine, and then the rest of me came later—perhaps my consciousness next, and then my body, and then the phenomenological awareness that comes with being inside a body and negotiating the world through it. You feel the universe as mediated through the particles of your flesh, viewed from the height of your eyes and touched through the nerves in your fingers. People perceive you in a certain way and treat you accordingly, and so you become a mélange of certain qualities and impulses and desires, all entangled at atomic speeds in the molecular space of your body. But at my heart I feel I am just want, need, action, and my sociopathic traits profoundly impact all of those things.

I have trouble navigating my own emotions. It’s not that I don’t feel them. I feel a lot of different emotions, but some of them I don’t recognize or understand. Often it feels like my emotions are without context. It is like I am reading a book one page at a time, but starting with the last page and moving backward. There are clues to help me understand, but there is no linear logic that allows me to infer simple cause-and-effect relationships between the vague discomfort I feel and the recognition that “I am sad because of X.” And if I can’t contextualize my own emotions, I have even greater difficulty understanding the emotions of others.

Recent research from King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry revealed that the brains of sociopathic criminals show distinctly less gray matter in the areas of the brain that are important for understanding the emotions of others. Studies indicate that sociopathic brains do not respond emotionally to words such as death, rape, and cancer the same way that normal brains do. We respond with about as much emotion as we do to a word like chair. More research has shown that sociopathic brains have a lower number of connections between the prefrontal cortex (which helps regulate emotions, processes threats, and facilitates decision-making) and the amygdala (which processes emotions), which could explain why sociopaths do not feel sufficient negative emotions when doing something antisocial.

This neurological disconnect between emotion and decision-making can be a decided competitive advantage in most professional settings, where risk taking is often richly rewarded, but it can cause real problems in personal settings, in which sociopaths are expected to make emotional connections. One blog reader said:

I am much like this reader. Because I am largely just mimicking emotional connection or understanding, almost all of my exploits have an expiration date at the moment when pretending to care ceases to be sustainable.

One of my favorite theories regarding a sociopath’s emotional world comes from psychopath researcher and University of Wisconsin professor Joseph Newman. Newman has advocated that sociopathy is largely an attentional disorder, where the sociopath is getting all the right input but is just not paying attention to it in the same way that everyone else is, so it is meaningless to him.

In the emotional realm, Newman argues that sociopaths feel the same breadth of emotions that normal people do, but that they do not attend to the emotions as others do and therefore experience them differently. Newman has noticed that if a sociopath’s attention is directed at a particular emotion, she can generally feel it the way that normal people can. The difference is that it is not automatic; the sociopath has to make the conscious effort to focus her attention that way. Therefore, sociopathy results in an “attention bottleneck” that allows sociopaths to focus on only one activity or train of thought to the exclusion of other social cues and “perhaps even signals sent over the prefrontal-to-amygdala pathway” that would tell them to stop doing what they’re doing.

This theory resonates with me. If I focus on an emotion, I can greatly amplify its force far beyond what it should be. For feelings that I don’t care to feel, I just tune them out. It’s easy to ignore anything that would be inconvenient or unpleasant to consider.

In this way, my sociopathy feels like an extreme form of compartmentalization. I can shut myself off or open myself up to emotions like fear or anger or anxiety or dread or joy just by flipping an internal switch. It’s not like I can’t ever experience these emotions in the right circumstances; I just have to know how to tap in to them. It’s sort of like looking for a signal by turning a dial, like a radio. All those things are out there, all the time, being broadcast through our airwaves. All I have to do is tune in to the right station. If I want to feel something—despair, anxiety, bliss, horror, disgust—I just have to think about it. It’s like seeing a glass half empty and then flipping the switch or turning the dial to look at it as half full. I believe empaths sometimes have a similar sensation and label it an epiphany—a sudden shift in perspective—that changes the way they think about the world. Because the scope of my perspective is so focused, and so limited, I experience this feeling of epiphany many times a day. It can be disorienting, but it keeps things interesting.

Most people have to listen to whatever signal is being broadcast the strongest, both within themselves and in their social environments. By virtue of my sociopathy, I get to choose which signals to listen to. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to choose who to mirror or how to feel, but it can also be a burden. If I’m in a social situation, I have to constantly and actively monitor the airwaves. Most people pick up on social and moral cues because they automatically tune in to other people’s emotional stations, reading body language unconsciously and displaying appropriate emotional responses in a natural, instinctive way. Empaths are like cell phones in this way—they automatically seek out the strongest signal from the cell towers. Sociopaths, on the other hand, are like traditional radios. I can only hear the strongest signal if I happen to be on that station, or if I’m being extra vigilant about scanning. It’s a lot of work; there’s a lot of trial and error involved. Often the best I can do is realize I’ve missed an important cue, then shift and shuffle through my stations to recover.

This happened the other day with one of my students. I had called on her about the meaning of the Latin phrase duces tecum because she had previously indicated some knowledge of Latin, but she shrugged the question off. After class she came up to me to say that she would be missing the next class, that her grandmother had died that morning and that she was flying out for the funeral the next day. My stomach sank and I became anxious. I spat out the usual, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” accompanied by a very concerned-looking face (hopefully it was concerned looking—luckily the grieving are not close observers of the authenticity of faces). She lingered. I didn’t know what else to say so I kept yammering: “Well, presumably you have asked one of your classmates for a copy of their notes. Also Mr. Smith usually audio-records the lectures; you might want to ask him for a copy of the recording …” She wasn’t making eye contact, looked down and away. I didn’t know what to say and I wanted to get away from her so I finished with, “But I’m very sorry for your loss.”

At that she understood that our conversation was over. I didn’t understand what the purpose of the conversation had been or whether I had properly met her expectations, but I got more nervous as she walked only five feet away to be comforted by her classmate, now visibly upset, triggered by the slightest provocation of her classmate’s small expression of concern. I suddenly had the irresistible impulse to leave the room as quickly as possible, but she was blocking the aisle to the door. Luckily, I remembered that there was an emergency exit at the back of the lecture hall that dumped into a little alleyway and I made my escape, instantly hidden by the night. I threw my stuff in my car and made a hasty exit from the parking lot, determined not to run into the dead-grandmother student again.

So, I can be awkward around strong emotions. But over the years, I’ve gotten better at masking my errors. I can cycle through possible emotional choices very quickly and come up with acceptable responses like a computer playing chess. But like chess, there is a practically infinite number of pathways and variations in human social and emotional interactions, and I’ll never be as fast as an empath in intuiting emotions or applying the appropriate (natural) responses.

Being relatively unemotional can be very useful in professional situations, but it’s caused some unfortunate tensions with friends and lovers when things do not upset me that they desperately think I should be upset by, like being worried at the possibility of a breakup. Not long ago when I told my friends that my father had just had a heart attack that day, they were very confused about whether I was being serious and whether it was an appropriate thing to joke about. This confusion occurred only because I did not accompany my statement with the appropriate show of negative emotion. In fact, when I was formally diagnosed, I believe that one attribute—having conversations about very emotionally fraught subjects without appropriate displays of emotion—was one of the most striking indicators of sociopathy that I displayed to my psychologist. It is the one that is often the hardest for me to accurately fake.

A lot of times my lack of emotionality just reads as an increased masculinity. The men I date sometimes lament that they feel like the girl in the relationship. I wonder what my sociopathy would look like if I actually were male—it often seems that male sociopathy exhibits itself as blatantly antisocial in a way that is not always the case in women. Indeed, very little research data exists regarding sociopathy in women, but what has been done reveals that female sociopaths exhibit only two or three main features that are similar to those found in men—usually, a lack of empathy and a pleasure in the manipulation and exploitation of others—but do not often exhibit violently impulsive behavior.

I am rarely tempted to commit violence, but my impulsiveness got me into plenty of trouble in my teens and early twenties, when I would find myself being groped and harassed in seedy concert venues alone and scantily clad, traveling down a heavily trafficked dark hilly road on my back on a skateboard, or caught in a lie (and possession of stolen goods) in a retail store’s security office. On occasion I experience bloodlust, in particular when I think someone is trying to force me to experience guilt or shame. One commenter on my blog remarked about impulse: “Once impulse takes control there is no grasp of reality or balance until it’s over and you’re looking down at what you’ve done wondering what the next move is to get away with it.”

Impulsiveness and fearlessness are defining characteristics of sociopathy. Scientists have explored variations in psychophysiological traits in sociopaths, finding that sociopaths have an abnormally low startle response when confronted with aversive stimuli. It appears that we have a deficit in our ability to feel negative emotion—or fear—in response to threats. I literally do not blink in the face of danger. One time I walked in on two men robbing my apartment. At first I didn’t realize what was happening. They of course did and scurried out the back window where they had come in. I ran after them but then realized that most of my things had not been taken, only piled in the center of the room in preparation. There was no point in chasing after these men, and so I stopped. The police came at my neighbor’s insistence, but I felt acutely aware that I had no idea how to behave before them. I was not naturally afraid or particularly concerned, though I knew this was what was expected of me. I ended up just being friendly, but it came off as flirtatious. Maybe that’s okay. It’s these unusual circumstances that are certain to trip me up in my continuing project to appear mostly normal.

My first year of teaching, I said many borderline-offensive things and then I just started intentionally saying them, as if I was being sickeningly sarcastic or deliberately offbeat, like suggesting that I might dress as Condoleezza Rice for Halloween. It’s not that the mask slips off and reveals my true thoughts. I don’t really have “true thoughts,” just good and bad performances as I attempt to say and do things that normal people say and do.

And really, I can’t help myself. I am continually shaping my self-presentation so that I can control what people think of me. I have been doing it for so long that I cannot even imagine what I would be if I were not performing all the time, blunting my edges and cultivating tricks of invitation. Even the way I speak is manufactured.

I have an ever-so-slight accent, something of a low drawl colored with unusual inflections, that is nothing like my siblings’ or parents’ accents. It has no identifiable origins but developed, I think, from my propensity to indulge in the sound of my own voice. If you listened closely to my speech, you would hear the pleasure I take in the textures of consonants and the phrasing of vowels. I have done everything to maintain and cultivate my accent, as I’ve discovered that it promotes a kind of accessible mystery and captivating vulnerability, an otherness that is attractive and nonthreatening. People often mistake me as foreign, most frequently Eastern European and Mediterranean. One of my paramours actually said that, if anything, I seem like an alien—“decidedly not human.”

I meet a lot of people at work and at conferences, and I work hard at putting on the right act to optimize my standing in the profession. Unfortunately, like many, I’m bad at remembering people’s faces, typically because I did a quick valuation of someone as a person upon meeting him and figured he was not worth the effort. If he remembers me and I don’t remember him, I act like an idiot for the first few sentences. Then I flirt like mad. I touch shoulders. I laugh heartily and repeat his name as often as I can. “Oh, Peter! I like the way you think!” If he compliments me back I accept the compliment with confidence, then quickly turn the conversation to him and keep it on him. I am gracious and generous with compliments and expressions of interest. My accent is more pronounced. I create a rush of attention and flattery, with no apparent origin or goal. I excuse myself abruptly. I always make sure that I leave the conversation. I am careful not to be left.

If I’m stuck where I am, I veer the conversation to an area of personal expertise. I know what you are thinking. This is what douchebags do. But you would be surprised at how delicate I am about the shifting of conversations. You would not notice it unless I told you. I ask at least a few more questions before I confess my own experience, interest, or knowledge of the subject matter. I am razor sharp. I tell witty stories or interesting factoids.

“You lived in Los Angeles for a year? Isn’t it beautiful?”

“After about three months there I got sick of the sun. I felt that every day I had to be out bicycling or hiking or otherwise making the most of such good weather.”

“Ah, see, that’s the special pleasure of living in that climate, being able to waste a beautiful day by drawing the drapes and watching ten episodes of The Sopranos. It’s decadent. Like eating gold flakes.”

People like to hear words like pleasure and decadent. They think of Roman orgies or chocolate. I emphasize my point by tilting my chin down ever so slightly while maintaining eye contact. My hand reaches out to touch theirs just for an instant, a half grab or tug that never really materializes. It’s unmistakably sensual but too fleeting to be forward. They laugh nervously, wondering for just a moment whether I can read their thoughts. Of course I can.

Sociopaths typically don’t make small talk about themselves as much as normal people do. They will direct the conversation back to the new acquaintance as much as they can. When I talk to people, the only thing I really care about is getting what I want. This is true of everybody, but I never am trying to get someone’s approval or admiration, unless it is a means to the end. I have no desire to talk. Instead, what I find most useful is collecting a mental dossier about everyone I know. Knowledge is power and if I know even something like where your grandmother is buried, I might be able to use that in the future. Consequently, it typically only makes sense for me to listen. If I’m not listening, I’m probably telling a joke or shamelessly flattering you. I probably would rather not be talking to you at all, but since I am, I might as well be polishing my charm.

A sociopath will reveal “personal” details about himself strategically, i.e., for the purposes of misdirection or a false sense of intimacy or trust. Revelations of actual truths are very rare and may be perceived as a small slip of the mask. I don’t like people knowing things about me because it just means more things for me to remember that I can’t lie about (or more lies to keep track of if I decide to evade the truth). And if knowledge is power, I want to keep my cards very close to my chest.

Sociopaths are supposed to excel at deceit, and new research might reveal why. The brain is made up of gray matter, which is the groups of brain cells that process information, and white matter, which carries electrical signals from one group of neurons to another, connecting the different parts of the brain. Habitual liars, in a study by Yaling Yang of the University of Southern California, had on average 22 percent to 26 percent more white matter in their prefrontal cortex than both the normal and antisocial controls. The white matter may be a result of liars making connections between things that nonliars would not make, for instance “me” and “fighter pilot.” According to Yang, these connections allow you to “jump from one idea to another,” fabricating stories from otherwise unrelated stories and ideas. What is not clear from the study is whether these connections facilitate lying in the otherwise truthful, or repeated lying creates these extra connections by “exercising” them.

On the blog, I am careful to disguise my identity. The deepest and most invisible lies are the ones that you never have to say out loud—that others tell about you to themselves. I selectively disclose information about myself for strategic reasons. For instance, I never talk about my gender or even strictly about my ethnicity or other demarcating personal characteristics. I hope that by doing so I will be a blank slate and people will be able to project their own ideas onto me. I want to be a figurehead, a receptacle for people’s hopes, dreams, fears. I want people to relate directly to the blog—to think of the sociopaths they love in their lives or the sociopaths they hate. If I got too specific about anything, the illusion would be broken. Instead I stick to generalities and let people fill in the blanks in whatever manner they feel inclined. When people write to me and say that I seem to describe perfectly their own experiences, either as a sociopath or as someone who has known a sociopath, I know I have been successful.

The self-confidence that has helped me become something of a figurehead with the blog also helps in my seduction life. I always do much better than my looks alone would warrant. I don’t just walk, I strut. I make solid eye contact. I act as if one of my main purposes for existence is to be admired, and I give people ample opportunity for it. I always assume that people have crushes on me, a belief that has been validated many times by embarrassed confessions years later when the issue has become less sensitive for the sufferer.

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.

Ruining 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.

She was striking, particularly in her similarity to me, which made me want to ruin her. In my mind I quickly did the calculations—Lucy was smitten with Cass, Cass was smitten with me, which meant I had an unexpected power over Lucy. At my direction, Cass began pursuing Lucy. In the meantime, I found out everything I could about her from her well-meaning friends. These little forays with the friends were not only a means to an end but their own independent sources of pleasure. It turned out Lucy and I were born hours apart on the exact same day. This information fed my obsession in the most delicious way. I began thinking of her as not just a doppelgänger, but as an actual extension of me, like a walking mirror image. We had the same predilections, the same pet peeves, the same style of distracted, quasiformal, slightly awkward communication. In my mind she was my alter ego, which, of course, made her exceedingly interesting to me.

For as long as Lucy dated Cass, I kept him as my side piece. I would induce him to make and then break dates with her in favor of being with me. He was complicit through most of it—he knew that I was using him to mess with her. When he started feeling pangs of conscience, I broke it off with him. I waited until he focused all his attention on Lucy again, waited until she got her hopes up that he had turned over a new leaf, then called him up again. I told him we were meant for each other and I was just testing his resolve. I had no respect for him.

Lucy was just as bad in her own way. She had no sense of keeping personal things private, particularly with people like me who would use that information against her. I felt like she must have been emotionally damaged. It was almost farce, like a campy vampire movie where the love interest/victim is always traipsing along giving herself paper cuts, or tripping and scraping a knee, or cutting her finger while chopping onions, that sort of a thing. And if it wasn’t Lucy telling me things herself, it was her well-intentioned friends. It was such a head trip. Sometimes I wondered if I was being punked, because things could not have gone more perfectly for me.

The thing that kept it all interesting was that I was genuinely fond of Lucy, smitten even. Her Pollyanna attitude was captivating. I almost wanted to be sincere back to her, almost wanted to be a true friend. There were so many interesting psychological angles going on, at least in my own mind, such that even the most mundane of conversations was absolutely thrilling to me. Just thinking about it makes me salivate. In fact, after a while, I began to avoid Lucy. She became a dessert too rich, too painfully pleasurable. Lucy gave me a stomachache, so I made Cass break it off with her for good.

And this is what I mean about ruining people being relatively harmless. What did I actually do to Lucy? Nothing. From Lucy’s perspective, here is what happened: She grabbed a boy and kissed him at a party. She liked this boy and they saw each other a couple times a week after that, sometimes with his creepy friend (me). After a while, it didn’t work out. The end. I didn’t ruin anything about her, really. She’s married now, has a good job. The worst thing I did was propagate a romance that she believed was sincere but was actually staged (as best as I could manage) to break her heart. And that’s the thing. I don’t just manipulate others; I manipulate myself. I mess with my own emotions as much as I try to mess with other people’s. In fact, in enacting the ruination of others, I concoct elaborate psychological fantasies that may or may not be happening. And the thought of the possibilities is often enough to satisfy me.

Someone once suggested that I expand my emotional horizons by taking MDMA, the pure ingredient in the drug ecstasy. I told him that it was an interesting idea, but that I sort of already manipulate myself into feeling other emotions via film, music, and art, and I wasn’t sure if it would be all that different.

I love music. There’s no doubt that music is manipulative, as is film (possibly because of the music in it). The whole purpose of music seems to be to evoke some feeling or sensation in the audience, if you let yourself get caught up in the experience. I have found that it can be a good way to learn about other people, allowing me to experience emotions the way other people experience them or the way the composer or lyricist experienced them. Music is like a drug in some ways because it forces me to feel something different from what I usually feel; it’s an artificial entrée into an alternative sensuality.

When I studied music in school, I even liked being critiqued, to get detailed judges’ sheets back after a competition. I liked that these people were compelled to pay meticulous and thoughtful attention to me and my performance; it hardly mattered whether they liked it or not.

As I have grown older, music has played a different role in my life, offering an avenue of human interaction with other musicians that is devoid of guile or artifice. The connection between performing musicians is mediated by sounds and instruments—musical acts in time—rather than words or facial cues. Playing music provides me with a level of pleasure and enrichment that I rarely feel when interacting with people in any other way. It also offers a means of avoiding casual social interaction with nonmusicians, since I can set up shop at a piano at almost any social function that has one. It is such a relief to see them in the corners of hotel lobbies or old-timey bars.

The truth is that I hate small talk. I care even less than most people about your eight-month-old baby making all of his developmental milestones or your trip last month to Colorado. And it is even worse for me because when I am forced to engage in small talk, I feel compelled to excel at it—smiling, nodding, and coming up with clever and complimentary anecdotes. But with music, I know that the impression I make on others while playing the piano is much more effective than what I could manage on my most impressive day of banter. Receding to the edges of parties becomes introspective rather than antisocial, artistic rather than awkward. It is sometimes easier to beguile without speaking. There is something about music that is so mystifying and alluring, and performing it is one of the very few acts of self-involvement that is universally perceived as generosity.

I often wish I could just passively watch people without being expected to participate myself, like television. I actually do spend a lot of time in front of the television for this reason, and I am pretty undiscriminating in what I will watch. I like the closed universes and conventional plot devices of television series, knowing that there is nothing for me to do but to passively watch what happens, having no stake in the outcome. I find it easier to identify with characters in movies and books than with people in real life. In movies, you can watch and analyze people freely and without detection. In books, you can listen in on their inner thoughts, take the time to contemplate them, and listen in again if you are so compelled. I have learned more about people from books, television, and movies than I ever have in real life. I have enjoyed people more that way, too.

People mistakenly assume that because sociopaths don’t empathize, they don’t have emotions. I’ve never heard of a sociopath not having emotions. I do think that sociopath emotions are frequently shallow and stunted, childlike even, but how many people do you know who are emotionally stunted and are not sociopaths? If I didn’t have emotions, how would I be so good at playing the emotions of others?

And what are emotions anyway? They’re at least partially contextual. They at least partially originate from the stories we tell ourselves. If you have “butterflies in your stomach,” you could be nervous or excited depending on your interpretation of your situation. And there are certain emotions that exist in some cultures that don’t necessarily exist in others, for instance the nostalgic saudades in Brazil or the intense aspects of shame in Japan. Are emotions just an interpretation of the body’s evolutionary fight-or-flight reactions? Are emotions only releases of adrenaline that we interpret as anxiety? Or endorphins that we interpret as satisfaction or pleasure?

One theory of why we dream suggests that dreams are the result of the brain trying to interpret external stimuli during sleep. For instance, if we are cold, we imagine that we are walking through snow. Our subconscious concocts a story to explain things we are sensing during our sleep—trying desperately to make random and incomplete sensory inputs fit into whatever fictional scenario we have literally dreamed up. Are our emotions the same? Are we just interpreting sensory inputs, making up explanations that support the stories we tell ourselves?

But as much as I want to believe that everyone else lives in a collective delusion, I know that love exists.

In his tragic narrative poem “Lara,” Lord Byron wrote a semiautobiographical narrative of a wayward count, describing him thus:

I’ve always known that my heart is a little blacker and colder than most people’s. Maybe that’s why it’s so tempting to try to break other people’s.