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

Chapter 3 WE’RE CREEPY AND WE’RE KOOKY

I grew up in a home with many siblings, but my favorite has always been my older brother Jim. When he was eighteen he snapped and became what he later called “the Lone Wolf.” On a trip with some of his friends he got sick and soiled himself in the parking lot of Walmart. The embarrassment and anxiety from this incident seems to have triggered a fugue state; he didn’t tell his friends or even have the common decency to go inside the store to clean up. Instead he stripped his underwear off and left it on the asphalt of the parking lot, and segregated himself from the rest of the group. After searching they found him wandering around a different section of the lot and with skill convinced him to return to the car. For the rest of the now-awkward trip he wore a single set of dirty clothes and refused to wash himself. For the most part, he couldn’t speak in coherent sentences, or really do anything to function like a human being. After a few days, he became Jim again, but he couldn’t answer questions about the Lone Wolf and still can’t.

For lack of better words, I would describe the adult Jim as fragile. He is very sensitive to stress, easily overwhelmed by the most insignificant things, and almost consistently nervous. He acts like an abused dog that has been kicked one too many times in the stomach to feel at ease around strangers. Despite intensive therapy, he still can’t seem to keep it together and will lash out in passive-aggressive ways or retreat completely, leaving a shell of himself behind. When I look at him I sometimes wonder, is this what empath M.E. would have looked like? I could never imagine myself turning out like Jim, which makes me wonder—how did the same stimulation produce two opposite characters? I often think about Jim—my empathetic counterpart—when questions arise about whether I was born as a sociopath or made into this by the circumstances of my childhood. There is compelling scientific evidence to suggest that sociopathy has a strong genetic component. Studies also show that sociopathic traits are stable and consistent through an individual’s lifetime. Identical twins who share 100 percent of their genes have been found far more likely to both exhibit sociopathic traits than fraternal twins, who share only 50 percent of their genes. The closest thing I have to a twin is my brother Jim. At a little more than a year apart in age, we were often mistaken for fraternal twins. Jim and I did everything together. It’s safe to say that we had nearly identical upbringings and experiences, but we turned into starkly opposite adults.

In a large park in the city where I grew up there was a giant concrete dinosaur, a brontosaurus. Most of him lay beneath the surface of the sandlot, his massive body never to be excavated. Only his long neck and purple tail stuck out into the world—perfect for us kids to climb and swing on. My brother Jim and I spent a lot of time with the brontosaurus in late afternoons and early evenings—sometimes many hours—when my mother was meant to pick us up after school. It was near to the school but remote enough that it was out of sight of the school monitors. No one would suspect we had been forgotten by our parent, and we had prepared stories for ourselves in case anyone approached us: “Our mom is at the principal’s office discussing our progress,” or “Our mom was just called away for an emergency. She is having a neighbor come get us right now.” The truth is we had no idea why our mother never seemed to be able to pick us up on time, but we didn’t want to deal with the hassle of concerned strangers, so we lied. The story always involved a responsible adult just footsteps away, even as the sunlight waned.

One sunny afternoon when I was around ten years old and my brother eleven, my parents took us down to the park. It must have been a primary school holiday, because I remember that our older brother still had high school, but there were no other kids around. They deposited us by the brontosaurus and went off to do their own thing while we played our warrior and submarine games with each other and our old, slightly decrepit dinosaur friend, flipping ourselves onto his neck, reaching our arms into the dark crevasse of his lazily half-open mouth. When we tired of him, we hiked into the bamboo-infested creek and pretended we were Vietcong soldiers padding soundlessly through the jungle.

After an hour or so of this, we headed back to the parked car just in time to see our parents get in. I remember seeing my father open the door for my mother and her taking her seat in the leisurely, elegant way that she often did. Since my parents appeared to be getting ready to leave, my brother and I picked up our speed and walked a little faster toward them. We were looking forward to going home and getting something to eat, as our soldiering play had worked up our appetites. We were about 150 yards away from them when we heard the car start, but we didn’t begin sprinting until we saw the car’s reverse lights flash on, indicating that they had shifted out of park. I am not sure when I realized that our parents were leaving us. Even as the car drove through the narrow park roads, and we ran as fast as we could and screamed at the top of our lungs, I didn’t think that they would leave. I wonder if they saw their kids trailing them in their rearview mirror like a scene from a horror show, monsters from whom they were trying desperately to escape in a low-speed chase—the low rumbling of their car in contrast to our wild gasping and hoarse yelling, our animal footfalls haphazard against the pavement.

We followed my parents’ car for a half mile or more, but we weren’t quite able to keep up with them through the park roads. When they hit the main road, we couldn’t keep up at all, and they were soon gone.

The moment when you stop running after your parents’ car is the moment that you lose hope. The gods are fallen and all safety is gone. It is a physical realization, in which hope drains out of you in direct proportion to the dwindling adrenaline that propels your body forward. Hundreds of pounding heartbeats later, doubled over and gasping for breath in the middle of the road, we might have listened for the sound of brakes and a car turning around. If we did, we didn’t share it with each other. Instead, we made suggestions as to why they would leave us. Maybe they forgot that we had come with them, or there really had been some kind of emergency, perhaps involving dismemberment or maiming. Maybe they had gotten into an argument. We attempted to find patterns in their behavior, any sort of predictability that we could rely on, but their actions were often unexplainable. We sensed, though, that they would not come back for us. Actually, we knew they wouldn’t, and they didn’t.

We could have taken our chances on the winding road up to our house, but we decided instead to strike out on our own. For my brother, it may have been an attempt to shame my parents out of their bad behavior, the way that small children frequently run away, hoping to prompt their parents to cry heavy tears of remorse. For me, I wanted to see if we really did need my mom and dad, or if having to be a part of their family was all a fiction we were taught by church and television to keep us doing Saturday chores.

We didn’t really sit down to make a plan for our survival, but we knew we needed supplies, so we walked over to the nearby high school, where our older brother’s car was parked. Jim forced open a window while I reached my skinny arm in to unlock it. Inside was a treasure trove of ski equipment from a not-too-recent ski trip. We collected all of the knitwear for warmth and protection for the days ahead, and since we didn’t have anything to carry the stuff in, we wore all of the clothes in layers upon layers. Each of us put on several hats, pairs of gloves, and jackets, many of which were grossly oversized. We looked ridiculously overdressed for a Southern California late afternoon, piled up with knit caps and gloves, but our minds were on surviving through the coming months.

We were very hungry. The obvious solution was to beg, and we were conveniently dressed for the occasion. We tried to find a piece of cardboard and a marker to make a sign but we only found some college-ruled lined paper and ballpoint pens. (Now when I see a beggar on the street, I often wonder at his resourcefulness in finding a thick permanent marker, a piece of cardboard, and scissors or a knife to cut it into an adequately sized rectangle.) But the street was in a forested, residential area and there was no traffic to which we could appeal. We just hung out, sweating in our homeless-style knitwear and kicking dirt. I’m not sure how long we stood there before we got bored and hungry and decided to give in.

I never resented my parents for leaving us that day. I don’t know why they left. Maybe they just willed us to disappear from their minds for a little while. If they thought about it at all, I think they believed that the only realistic consequence was that we might have suffered a bit having to make that precarious walk home. If I resented them for anything it was for making us believe that they wouldn’t leave. They bought into the “fiction” that we were a conventional family, the kind that looked out for each other, and that they were conventional parents. It wasn’t that they didn’t love us—I know they did in their own way—but at the same time it’s not like it mattered; their love served no purpose to me. Their good intentions did not make my life any better, rather they seemed only to insulate them from the truth, allowing them to live in a dark world of collusion through which reason and objective facts could not penetrate. Anything that didn’t leave permanent physical scars requiring explanation to their friends and neighbors went unnoticed.

I was raised as the middle child in a Royal Tenenbaums–ish family with a violent and shaming father and an indifferent, sometimes hysterical mother. I had a group of four siblings that banded together as if we were a small but well-trained militia. Growing up we had the distinct impression we were better than everyone else, and that the only people who could understand and appreciate us were the other members of our family.

My parents married young, my mom at twenty and my dad twenty-three. My mother had been coerced by her own dysfunctional family into dropping out of college. Once back home, she dated aggressively, trying out men who could save her. I am not sure why she chose my dad, but she did it quickly, pinning him down and asking if he was going to propose only a few months after meeting him. She gave birth to my oldest brother in the first year of their marriage and continued steadily to have babies after that.

My father was a lawyer. When he and my mother were dating, he worked for a big law firm, but after that job fell apart he began his own small-time legal practice. He liked to think of himself as a modern-day Atticus Finch, sometimes accepting baked goods as payment from his clients. He was phenomenally unreliable as a breadwinner, and we often came home from a day at the amusement park to find that the power had been shut off, because we were months behind in paying for our electricity. He spent thousands of dollars on expensive hobbies, while we were bringing a handful of oranges from our backyard to school for lunch. The year I was twelve he didn’t file a tax return. He owned his business, hadn’t paid or withheld any taxes all year, and then just didn’t feel like paying them when April 15 rolled around. Of course he got audited and whatever remained of our financial security evaporated.

Much more serious than any financial hardships I experienced, however, my father’s emotional and moral hypocrisy taught me not to trust emotions or anything else that couldn’t be backed up with hard, indisputable fact. If my heart turned hard, I believe it was in response to his maudlin displays of feelings and insincere appeals to virtue.

I am not sure how other people perceived my father, but I know that he tried very hard to present himself as a good man and a good parent—to the world, to himself, and to us. He liked to think of himself as an admirable person, and almost everything he did was in service to this desire. He had a habit of listing his achievements, as if he carried his own mental dossier in his head for the purpose of recitation: his bar association, his service to clients, his standing in the church, and most important, his philanthropic ventures. He needed the world to know that he was a giving, generous person.

My parents were involved in some of our school activities, particularly the musical ones. Sometimes my dad ran lights for my high school band performances while my mother accompanied the choir members. I think they must have been pillars of our provincial little society. Once we were running late when, in the car on the way to a concert, I realized I had forgotten to bring my instrument. We did not risk their missing their engagements by turning back; instead, I stood in the wings while my mother sang and my father ran the house lights, finding nothing unusual about my parents participating in my school event while I was excluded.

Whenever my father behaved badly, I think he felt more disappointment in betraying that image of himself than for damaging us. It didn’t matter whether he really was this ideal person; it only mattered that he looked that way, even to himself. I could not respect how easily he could deceive himself. We would watch sad movies together as a family, and he would turn to my mother with tears in his eyes, holding out his forearm and exclaiming: “Look! Goose bumps!” He wanted desperately for us to witness evidence of his ability to feel, to be human, and he needed our affirmation of this fact more than anything else.

One day when I was around eight years old I was watching a news special with my father when I made a callous remark about a disabled child. He asked in horror, “Have you no empathy?” I had to ask him what he meant. I just didn’t know the word, but he acted like I was a monster. The message was clear: His feelings and sense of self-righteousness made him a paradigm of humanity; my lack of feelings made me a blemish on his good name.

It’s hard to overstate how much I loathed him for these very simple things. The very first recurring dream that I can remember was about killing him with my bare hands. There was something thrilling about the violence of it, smashing a door into his head repeatedly, smirking as he fell motionless to the floor, no longer able to parade around the globe in his imagined greatness. It was reassuring to know that I could do it if I needed to, and my dreams were a place where I could practice and plan for it—working out and relishing every detail of quieting him from our lives.

My mother is beautiful. Throughout my childhood, people regularly stopped her in the street and told her so. When she was young, she was very musically talented, or at least we thought so. She taught piano lessons to neighborhood kids, and sometimes it seemed like our family was living off the forty dollars a month she made off each student. For three hours every day after school, kids would rotate through the house, banging on the keys of the family piano, while we would watch television or do our homework. I remember waiting on the staircase for whatever kid to finish, judging his performance and resenting him for making me wait for my mother’s attention. At the end-of-year recitals, I suspected her obvious pleasure had less to do with each child’s individual accomplishments and more to do with her own achievement of coaxing beautiful or semicoherent music out of such unformed things.

My mother loved the spotlight, and it suited her. After my youngest sister was born, my mother got serious about her actress/singer ambitions. She auditioned for and got a supporting role in a professional dinner theater production, and she’d come home glowing from each performance, on a high from the applause and adulation. She appeared in several musicals and concerts after that and became a staple in community productions.

My father especially enjoyed the concerts that involved our church choir, which our friends and neighbors would be guaranteed to attend. However, when my mother’s career took her too far away and therefore had no directly positive impact on his reputation, he would berate her for needing attention and admiration from outside of the family, meaning anyone other than him.

It is true that she did need the attention and admiration from outside of our house. I think it filled in the empty spaces in her, built up a temporary infrastructure to maintain her as a going concern, a functional adult and parent. By the time she pursued her acting dreams, she had already put away her hopes of my father’s becoming a wealthy, successful attorney. Her kids kept multiplying and gaining more volume and mobility, filling her house with chores and responsibilities that further constricted any space available for her own breathing and dreaming. Fictional characters allowed her to take refuge from us and her life, to escape into dialogues and story lines that did not involve scraped knees and stuffy noses. She needed to enjoy the freedom of being a different person for a few nights a week, of being appreciated for aesthetics rather than domestic utility.

Whenever one of us would get sick or hurt, my mother would throw up her arms and cry, “Oh great! Well now what am I supposed to do?” And you could see all the ruined plans and missed opportunities for the day flash across her face like ripples in a pond. Every cup of tea she would prepare for you would be accompanied with sighs. Every “Are you feeling better?” was loaded with accusatory urgency, as if your failure to get better was a direct assault on her ability to live freely and well.

When the seasons or plays inevitably ended, she would become deeply depressed—to the point of becoming physically ill. She totaled several cars. I imagine her mind involuntarily searching out happier memories of being onstage or laughing with friends, undeterred by red lights or road signs. Perhaps they were not memories at all that had distracted her, but fantasies of another life she could have had if she had made only slightly different choices.

Her car accidents were like little earthquakes in our lives, reminders of our mortality, and consequently that we (and she) were alive. I respected her little rebellions, even if they meant that I would go hungry for a few evenings or my brother’s head would get split from the impact of the car windshield. I don’t remember ever being angry with her for these things; she was just trying to live, and it is true that our existences, over which she had little control, had interfered with her happiness in countless ways. My dad, of course, would point with recrimination to my brother’s wounded forehead after the accidents. But no one really cared about my brother’s forehead—least of all my dad—and life went on as it always did.

But she did get us soup when we were sick. She fed us and clothed us, as did my father. She put her hand on our foreheads with looks of concern that made wrinkles in her own forehead. She kissed us at bedtime; he did too. And even though I did not, my mother would cry when my father beat me with his belt, for what I can’t remember. And when I graduated from law school, my father genuinely rejoiced—never had I seen him so happy as that day. I never doubted their love for me, but their love was inconstant. It was sometimes very ugly. It didn’t prevent me from harm; rather, it often caused me harm. The more they felt secure in their love for me, the less they seemed prompted actually to look after my well-being.

I learned a lot from my parents. I learned to limit the emotional effect that other people could have on me. I learned to be self-sufficient. They taught me that love is exceedingly unreliable, and so I have never relied on it.

The question of nature versus nurture for sociopaths is controversial. Arguing “nature” seems to give sociopaths a free pass—being “born with it” somehow makes them more pitiable and acceptable by society. Whereas arguing “nurture” suggests that sociopaths can one day reverse their condition through hard work and therapy, or alternatively recruit more of their kind by abusing children. The answer is more complicated than that, however. Psychologists and scientists believe sociopathy, like almost everything about us, is some combination of genes and environment. While there is a clear heritable link, environment also plays a huge role in triggering those genes and how a particular sociopath develops. According to psychologist and author of Social Intelligence Daniel Goleman, if a gene never gets expressed, “we may as well not possess that gene at all,” which raises an interesting question—are you a sociopath if it is coded in your genes but it’s not expressed in your behavior? Sometimes there is no clear answer to how or why a person’s sociopath genes get triggered. As for myself, I have always felt like I am precariously balanced, neither on the right side nor the wrong side of life but ready at every moment to tip completely to one side or another. I often wonder how different my life would have been if my upbringing were any better or worse than it was.

Some of the most formative environmental factors for sociopaths may have happened before the sociopath’s earliest memory. Although the brain doesn’t reach maturity until twenty, according to Dr. Goleman, the first twenty-four months of a human being’s life are most central to her development, as it is the period of greatest growth. For mice, the corollary period is the first twelve hours after birth. Baby mice who are licked and thus nurtured more by their mothers during these hours thrive better and are more clever and self-assured; those babies that are less licked become slower learners, easily overwhelmed, and anxious. Scientists have hypothesized that for humans the equivalent might be empathy, attunement, and touch. Dr. Goleman’s research accords with the infant attachment theory first developed by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who conducted research on orphans after World War II. He and other scientists found that children who had not been regularly touched in their infancy failed to thrive, did not grow, and even sometimes died. According to attachment theory, infants who receive insufficient or no responses from their parents during distress grow to be rebellious, independent, and detached children, failing to prefer their parents over strangers. As adults they have trouble making lasting, meaningful relationships.

When I was an infant I had a particularly bad case of colic, a poorly understood condition affecting infants whose main symptom is frequent, inconsolable crying. My parents complain about it even now, what a difficult child I was, especially because I came so soon after my brother Jim, who was needy in his way.

My parents have very vivid memories of taking me to functions with my extended family during which I would wail the entire time. Each aunt, uncle, or grandparent would think they had the solution, and each would eventually give up in desperation. When my parents recount the stories now, they express a hint of vindication that no one else could console me. It seems to reflect a happy truth for them—that there was nothing wrong with them as parents, only something wrong with me. My father openly acknowledges that he would frequently just leave me in a room to cry myself to exhaustion. At the age of six weeks I was finally taken to my pediatrician—I had ruptured my navel due to excessive crying. I’m sure my parents did as well as they could, but it no doubt must have been difficult to tolerate such a child, much less nurture it.

Long after my colic days were done, my mother says that I was a remarkably independent child. When I was left in the church’s nursery for the first time, I was the only baby who didn’t cry or ask for my parents, playing quietly and happily with the unfamiliar toys of the schoolroom until I was picked up. It was as if it made no difference to me where I was or who was looking after me. Maybe I missed a window of opportunity, like those less-licked baby mice.

The brain learns different skills at different stages that are tied to neural development and growth. If a child misses the correct developmental window to learn a particular skill or concept, for example empathy, that child’s brain may never be able to catch up or become normal. The most extreme examples are of children who grow up in isolation or in the wild, sometimes known as feral children. The Tampa Bay Times reported the story of Danielle Crockett, who was rescued by police from her mother’s trash- and vermin-filled home in July 2005. Upon discovering Danielle locked in a closet and living in her own filth, one of the officers, a rookie, staggered out the front door to vomit. A veteran investigator of the Florida Department of Children and Families was spotted hunched over the steering wheel of her parked car, sobbing. “Unbelievable,” she described it. “The worst I’ve ever seen.” Danielle was six years old at the time but looked more like a four-year-old. She wore diapers, was nonverbal, and was unable to walk or feed herself. As the police officer flung her over his shoulder, her diaper leaking down his uniform, her mother shrieked at him, “Don’t take my baby!”

Danielle had a “normal” brain, with no sign of genetic mental retardation, but she behaved as if she were severely mentally handicapped. One doctor called it “environmental autism,” although as she put it, “even a child with the most severe autism responds to [hugs and affection].” Danielle did not react to people in any way. “In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed,” she said. “Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world.”

Danielle will never be normal. After several years she was able to be potty trained and taught how to feed herself, though she still does not speak. When she was taken in by an adoptive family, the Miami Herald asked, “Will their love be enough?” The short answer is no. Her brain had missed too many windows of opportunity—too many neural connections were never made.

Sometimes I hear people say that they were “born this way,” whatever way that happens to be. To say you are born a sociopath is like saying you were born smart or born tall. Yes, you may have the genetic predisposition for intelligence or height, or indeed to speak or walk upright, but the existence of feral children is an important reminder that no one is destined for any outcome at birth, that we rely on the most basic daily interactions, nutrition, culture, education, experiences, and myriad other influences in our development to become who we become.

Was I born to charm? Born to harm? If we can’t say for sure, then how did I get here? Given that a propensity for emotional problems runs in my family, I think my genetic predisposition to sociopathy was triggered largely because I never learned how to trust. In particular, my parents’ erratic emotional lives taught me that I couldn’t depend on anyone to protect me. Rather than looking to other people for stability, I learned to depend on myself. Because interaction with other people is inevitable, I inevitability learned manipulation, particularly how to direct and misdirect people’s attention to achieve my desired outcomes. For instance, my experiences taught me that it was useless to appeal to people’s love or sense of duty, so I appealed to other, more salient emotions like fear or people’s own desperate desire to be loved. I viewed everyone as objects, pieces in my chess game. I had no awareness of their own internal worlds and no understanding of their emotional palette because their bright hues were so different from my own drab shades of gray. Perhaps because I never thought of people as being distinct individuals with their own senses of self and manifest destiny, I never learned to think of myself that way either. I had no definite sense of self to adhere to or otherwise be invested in. Largely without structure, my life became an endless series of reactions to contingencies, impulsive decision-making driving me from one day to the next. Unlike people without my genetic predispositions who might have come out of these experiences desperately searching for love to fill the void, I felt largely indifferent.

After my brother Jim and I walked home from the park that day, our parents’ car was parked outside in the driveway, just like it always was. Inside, they didn’t ask us any questions. In general, they didn’t worry about our suffering. I think our suffering did not register with them because they could feel no consequences resulting from it. And because we were the kind of children that accepted silence as explanation, they never experienced recrimination. It was as if it had never happened. They went to bed that night satisfied that their children were safe and warm like anyone else’s.

Now that I am grown and can see my family dynamics with better perspective, I am more convinced than ever that the environment in which I was raised had a significant role to play in my development into a sociopath. Lots of children live in families with unreliable parents, physical discipline, and financial instability—these things aren’t uncommon. But I can see how the antisocial behaviors and mental posturing that now define me were incentivized when I was growing up—how my own emotional world was stifled and how understanding and respect for the emotional world of others died away. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem here: it’s hard to know whether my distrust of my dad’s overt displays of compassion caused me to downplay my own sense of morality, or whether I never really had much of a conscience to begin with, and that is why my dad always seemed so ridiculous to me.

I don’t ever remember thinking differently than I do now, but I do have a sensation or memory of an early cognitive fork where I chose to think more proactively. I must have been somewhere between ages four and six. Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean: Have you ever been a pedestrian at a traffic light? There’s always a moment of hesitation when you arrive at your corner and see the red hand telling you it’s not safe to walk. You could follow what it says and just wait your turn. Or you could make your own assessment of whether it is safe to cross by looking at the cars and studying the traffic light patterns. There are advantages to both approaches. The one is safe and doesn’t require mental effort. The other one is risky and possibly will only shave a few seconds off your commute at best and land you in the hospital at worst. But if you get good at it, those few seconds could multiply by the thousands over years of commuting. And there’s something demoralizing about standing on a corner while a host of braver souls plows into the intersection, eager to get on with their lives.

I could sense this was true about life, even at the age of four or so. I could choose to take charge of my life, to leverage my time, talents, and health, and to potentially profit or die trying. Or I could contentedly get in line and wait my turn. It was not a difficult choice to make, but rather a decision made in direct response to my environment and how I could best survive and even thrive in that environment. My way seemed to offer a competitive advantage. I chose to eschew relying on instinct and instead to rely on rigid mental analysis and hyper-awareness of all of my thoughts, actions, and decisions.

Years later I questioned whether I had made a mistake—and whether it was possible for me somehow to still be normal. Maybe there were legitimate reasons why everyone else thought the way they did about life. Maybe crying really is the best response to being hurt instead of vengeance. Maybe love is more valuable than power in relationships. But by then it was too late. The windows had closed.

Growing up, everyone in the family was inclined to interpret things that I did as normal. There were other words for what I was, words other than “sociopath.” “Tomboy” explained why I was reckless all of the time. Did you know that drowning deaths for boys are four times what they are for girls? No one really has a good explanation other than that boys tend to be more reckless, less judicious, and more impulsive. So when I was a child jumping off ocean jetties into heavy surf, no one thought I was a sociopath—they thought I was a tomboy.

“Precocious” explained my fixation on the power structures of the adult world. Most children are content to live in their own child worlds. I found my peers, particularly my non-siblings, to be unbearably simpleminded. Unlike them, I was obsessed with learning everything there was to learn about how the world worked, on both micro and macro levels. I would hear something in school or in casual adult conversation like Vietnam or atomic bomb and then spend a week or two obsessed with learning everything I could about this new thing, this thing that seemed to matter so much to other people. I remember the first time I heard about AIDS. I must have been seven or eight years old. My aunt was babysitting me. She was a childlike woman and I could tell from her interactions with my parents that she had no power or influence in the outside world (there were plenty of those people, I had already noticed). She doted on us because she had no children of her own (there were many of those people as well, easy marks for a child’s manipulation). We heard AIDS on the news. My aunt got upset and started crying. I didn’t know at the time but found out soon that her uncle, my great-uncle, was sick, and gay, and that was one of the reasons why AIDS seemed so fraught for her and others. I asked her what AIDS was. She gave me a child’s understanding of the disease that should have satisfied me, but it didn’t. My need to know the whys and hows of the world was not easily sated. I continued to ask other adults (the only people who seemed interested in the things I was interested in were adults) and they laughed at my interest, calling me precocious. They didn’t call me a sociopath. They never wondered why I wanted to know. They assumed that I wanted to know for the same reason that they wanted to know—fear. And that was partly true, but I was not afraid of AIDS. I only wanted to understand completely why AIDS made everyone else afraid. So it never mattered much what I did because they would readily excuse my behavior in whatever way was convenient or simply ignore it.

As a child, my outsize inner life seeped out onto the surface in all sorts of messy ways that my family pretended not to see. I talked to myself all the time, repeating everything I said sotto voce as if I were acting in a dress rehearsal. My parents ignored my blatant and awkward attempts to manipulate, deceive, and inveigle adults. They neglected to notice the odd way that I associated with my childhood acquaintances without really forming connections, never seeing them as anything more than moving objects—instruments in my games. I lied all the time. I stole things, but more often than not, I would just trick kids into giving them to me. I snuck into people’s homes and rearranged their belongings. I broke things, burned things, and bruised people.

And I played my part beautifully. I never failed to up the ante in our neighborhood games. If we were jumping off the diving board into the pool, I asked how much more fun it would be to jump off the roof into the pool. If we were dressing up in paramilitary garb, I suggested that we might as well kidnap our neighbor’s lawn ornaments and make elaborate ransom notes for them. We cut out letters from magazines and made a “proof of life” video. Because the neighbors were so good-spirited and we had taken such pains in accomplishing our absurd adventures, we got away with smiles all around.

That was the thing with me. I made people smile so much that it was easy to laugh off anything I did as harmless and silly rather than dangerous or reckless. I was a natural clown, an entertainer. I danced with gusto. I yelled and told stories. If there had been YouTube back then, I would have gone viral. My family could often ignore my other quirks because I was so charming and kooky. They could imagine they were just living inside a Saturday-morning television show involving a high-spirited kid and her colorful high jinks. At the end of each episode, they would smile, shrug their shoulders, and shake their heads.

But my lack of inhibition also meant that it all came out unfiltered, the charm interspersed with the awkward and disturbing. When I was on, I could delight everyone. But sometimes I could be too much. I would demand too much attention, pushing past cuteness to an uncomfortable grotesque. Other times, I would turn off, withdrawing completely into myself as if no one else was around me. I felt like I could turn invisible.

I was a perceptive child, but I couldn’t relate to people beyond amusing them, which was just another way for me to make them do or behave how I wanted them to. I didn’t like to be touched and rejected affection. The only physical contact I wanted entailed violence, and that I craved. The father of one of my best friends in grade school had to pull me aside and sternly ask me to stop beating his daughter. She was this skinny, stringy thing, all bony and with no muscle, with this goofy laugh; it was like she was asking to be slapped. I didn’t know that what I was doing was bad. It didn’t even occur to me that it would hurt her or that she might not like it.

I was not a typical child. That was obvious to everyone. I knew I was different, but there were no real indications to me of how or why I was different. Children are all selfish things, but maybe I was a little more self-interested than most. Or maybe I was simply more adept at accomplishing my self-serving ends than others, unfettered by conscience or guilt as I was. It was not clear. Young and powerless, I developed my own forms of power by convincing people that pleasing me was in their own best interest. Like many children, I objectified everyone around me. I envisioned the people in my life as two-dimensional robots that turned off when I wasn’t directly interacting with them. I loved getting high marks in my classes; it meant I could get away with things other students couldn’t because I was one of the smart kids. I made sure to stay within the realm of socially acceptable childish behavior—or at least to have a sympathetic narrative prepared in case I was caught. Other than being adept at childish manipulation, I never seemed different from my peers, at least not in a way that could not be explained by my exceptional intelligence.

Everything I learned about power—how great it feels to have it and how terrible it feels to be without it—I learned from my dad. Our relationship for the most part constituted a quiet wrestle for power—he demanded dominion over me as part of his home and family, while I enjoyed undermining what I believed to be his undeserved authority. When I misbehaved I would sometimes get beaten black and blue by my father, but I never reacted. If anything, what bothered me about the beatings was that he thought he was winning our power struggle, but I knew it wouldn’t last. If someone who loves you is hitting you that hard, you have more power than he does. You’ve provoked a reaction in him that he cannot control, and if you are like me, you will use this incident however it suits you for as long as you are associated with him. For my image-obsessed father, the threat of my disclosing these beatings was enough to torture him. Perhaps at a church social gathering I might wince as I lowered myself gingerly into a chair, making meaningful eye contact with my father when well-meaning third parties asked if I was okay, a look of terror flashing over his features as he anticipated my response. Strategically speaking, the beatings were the best thing to happen to me. His guilt and self-hatred were more potent than any other weapon in my little child arsenal and more enduring than any bruises that I may have suffered.

My father often made ridiculous demands of his children. He would tape lists of demands like “build a fence” and “fix the sink” to the doors of our bedrooms so we would see them when we woke up. I had gotten used to attempting the impossible when my father requested it. The way he asked me always made it seem like a dare, questioning whether I had the smarts or the courage to make things happen. Because that’s what I prided myself on, getting stuff done. Unlike my father, whom I considered to be largely inefficient, I was great at taking care of business. That was my role in the family.

His narcissism made him love me for my accomplishments because they reflected well on him, but it also made him hate me because I never bought into his self-image, which was all he ever really cared about. His dossier of civic duty and success meant nothing to me, because I knew better, and mine was and would be far greater than his. I think I did a lot of the same things he did—played baseball, joined a band, attended law school—so that he would know that I was better. I lived my life so that I had no reason to respect him.

One night in my early teens, driving home from the movies with my parents, I got into an argument with my father about the movie’s ending, which he thought was about overcoming obstacles and, of course, I thought was about meaninglessness, as I did about most everything those days. I was full of a teenager’s petulance and contrariness mixed with a little more intelligence and cruelty than the average kid.

I didn’t mind arguing with him. I in fact made it a point not to back down from any of our arguments, particularly if they presented an opportunity to challenge some part of his provincial worldview, which I had already concluded was distorted in self-serving ways. We were still arguing by the time we pulled into the driveway of our house, and I could tell that he wasn’t going to let it go. I told him, “You believe what you want,” and went into the house. My impassivity often provoked his worst behavior.

I should have known that he wasn’t going to let me get away that easily, or maybe I knew but didn’t care. He followed me up the stairs, because it bothered him that his daughter—who was just a child—refused to agree with him, didn’t care if he disagreed with her, and thought nothing of casually dismissing him.

At the time, my parents were going through one of their rough patches. My father would bully my mother and she would have momentary breakdowns in which she would lie on the bathroom floor and respond to us by rhyming whatever it was we said to her:

“Mom, are you okay?”

“What did you say?”

“Do you need help? Are you well?”

“No, I’m feeling swell.”

Sometimes when my parents fought, she would try to assert herself using whatever she had learned from the self-help books that lined the headboard of their bed. One of her favorite lines was “I’m rolling up my window on you.” It meant that she was refusing to let him affect how she felt, which drove him mad. In retrospect I wonder who it was that wrote that self-help book and how many of its readers ended up with swollen lips and bruised eyes. The idea that my father couldn’t make an impact on a person was enraging to him. Had my mother actually rolled up a car window on him he would have smashed the glass.

That night as my father became increasingly hostile about our argument over the movie, I told him, “I’m rolling up my window on you,” and then I slipped into the bathroom at the top of the stairs, shutting and locking the door.

I knew there would be consequences. I knew he hated that phrase, and that my repetition of it presented the specter of another generation of women in his house who refused to respect or appreciate him, and instead despised him. I also knew that he hated locked doors. I knew these things would damage him, which is what I wanted. And in any case, I needed to pee.

It was only a moment before he was pounding on the door. I imagined his face on the other side, getting redder and redder, contorted in an ugly display of anger. I remember wondering detachedly how long I would have to wait for him to go away. He began to shout.

“Open up!”

“Open up!”

“Open up!”

Each time he said it was louder than the last, swelling with impending violence. There was a pregnant pause, then the first big punch into the door, and then a crack. I wondered, curiously, about the door’s sturdiness, about whether its designer contemplated this kind of domestic disturbance to its integrity. I thought about how many blows it would take for my father to get through the door, and I wondered, curiously, how much danger I was really in. What did he imagine he would do when he got through the door? Would he drag me out of the bathroom by my hair, kicking me in the soft of my stomach, screaming at me to agree with him about the ending of the movie? It seemed absurd.

I sat down on the tub to wait it out. The loud noises triggered a rush of adrenaline in the form of increased heart rate, heightened sensitivity to sounds, decreased peripheral vision; I observed these facts to myself calmly. I passively ignored their invitation to feel a sense of urgency as being counterproductive. Despite my body’s involuntary physical reactions, there was no emotional panic. I don’t know what it feels like to panic in a situation like this. What would a panicked person even do? There are so few options in such tight quarters. If anything, I was intrigued, curious to see how events would unravel.

By now the punches had knocked a hole in the door, and I could see through the hole that his hand was bloody and swollen. I wasn’t concerned about his hand, although it occurs to me that another daughter might have been. I wasn’t glad that he was hurt either, because I knew that it gave him satisfaction to be stricken by such passion that he could disregard his own pain and suffering. The bathroom door was not the only door that would be damaged by my father’s fists. The bedroom door at the end of the hall accumulated several indentations throughout my childhood (it opened to my oldest brother’s bedroom), as did the door to the master bedroom (resulting from fights with Mom). Walls were occasionally dented from having been punched near the heads of his family members.

He kept working at the jagged, splintered hole until it was big enough for him to stick his face through it, which meant that it was of considerable size. I remember achieving confirmation of his ugliness, seeing his face glisten with sweat under the harsh bathroom light. But he wasn’t grimacing in anger as I had imagined; instead, he was smiling widely so that his teeth showed. He asked me with a wild gleefulness, “You are going to roll up your window on me?”

By then I must have seemed startled enough to satisfy him.

He withdrew his face, and through the hole in the door, I could see that he had lost his propelling anger. Any power I had gained by walking away from him and locking that door was stolen back from me the moment he saw the distress in my eyes, even if it was only slight.

He walked over to the closet to take out some gauze and other medical supplies to tend to his hand. In his youth he had worked as an EMT and was very proud of his first aid skills, so I knew that he would be meticulous with his self-ministering, as a point of pride. When I was certain that he was fully engrossed in his task, I slipped out of the bathroom, down the stairs, and outside, where I hid in the dark.

I stayed out there for a while, breathing deeply and contemplating my next move. I was not scared per se, but more aware of the way my world had changed in the past fifteen minutes. I was suddenly less concerned about my math homework and more concerned about preparing for a physical assault. Before hiding in the trees, I grabbed a hammer from the shed and held it up with the claw end out. For a few seconds, I would have killed anyone who came near me.

A little while later I heard my oldest brother yelling my name. I didn’t answer, waiting. I heard him go back inside. A few more minutes, and then he came back out.

“It’s okay. People are here.”

“Good,” I thought. “Witnesses.” But I knew that my dad was over it already. He had gotten the satisfaction of inflicting injury on himself, fear on me, and physical destruction where his loved ones could see it. He had everything he wanted, and was therefore done for the night.

My mother had called a church official to help calm my father, in front of whom we all knew he wouldn’t lay a hand on me. For the remainder of the night, he wouldn’t do anything but express contrition. Even this would be delicious for him, a crucial element of the dramatic narrative that he and I had set into motion. I dropped the hammer and snuck back inside.

That bathroom door didn’t get fixed for months. When he finally got around to replacing it, my dad threw the old one out around the side of the house, as the yard was our family’s repository for broken things. My brother Jim found it there and told me to come down to see it, but when I got out there he was gone.

I stood and stared at it a little before he showed up with a pickax and a sledgehammer in his hands. Jim let me take the first swing, and after that we took turns smashing it to splinters. I felt the breathless exhilaration of destruction, obliterating from existence this object that had contributed to invoking anxiety in me, that had dispelled any false sense of safety I may have felt within my own home. The impact of metal on wood, the aching in my arms—it all felt wonderful, powerful.

I don’t know where Jim was when my dad was punching through that door. If he was around, he certainly didn’t do anything to stop it. I couldn’t count on him to do things like that for me. He just wasn’t strong enough, and I could never really fault him for that. In truth I could take better care of myself that way than he ever could.

I could, however, count on Jim to maintain a deep and abiding hatred of my father on my behalf, which was actually the worst revenge I could get on my dad. Children can be so cruel that way—loving each other so much more than they could love a parent despite the affection that is heaped upon them.

Family folklore holds that I was not the most brilliant of my siblings, but I was decidedly the most accomplished, unhindered as I was by emotional and moral constraints. And with my obsession with power structures and the way things work, I was naturally the heart of the operation, the central command in which all resources were inventoried and tactically dispatched. More than being the typical “peacemaker” middle child, I was a powerbroker, negotiating deals and functioning as a clearinghouse between warring factions. Because I was relatively passionless, I was neutral (and rich) Switzerland.

My siblings and I were extremely insular and tight-knit—not because we are particularly affectionate, but rather from a common desire to optimize our group success. Wordlessly, we all seemed to acknowledge that our collective survival was paramount at the cost of all else, except that to me the whole point of the exercise was to ensure my own survival. Switzerland is a neutral banking powerhouse not to benefit all of Europe, but to benefit itself. I would have sacrificed any of my family members for myself in a heartbeat, if not for the fact that their presence in my life was—to varying degrees—essential to my happiness. This was made clear to me by the time Jim and I took sledgehammers to that bathroom door, if not sooner. We were like sticks: apart we were easily broken, but together we were strong. To say that I love them is insufficient or beside the point. I liked to have them around.

In some ways, my family might have appeared to be an ideal American family, an army of fresh- (but blank-) faced children with very few concerns outside the narrow world in which we lived. We regarded each other and our parents as immutable facts of life. We played games and read books, ran around in the backyard building things and breaking things, made expeditions into the woods and always got out alive.

We trauma bonded. And even though my siblings reacted to those traumas each in his or her own individual way, there is a strand of stupid toughness that runs through all of them, not unlike my great-grandparents who survived the Depression. The toughest of us—besides me—is my sister Kathleen. Her husband thinks that she is more of a sociopath than I am, and I can see what he means. She can be very callous and calculating. Her children have a healthy fear of her, and failure is not really an option for them. Her first child was born a little over a year after she got married. After previously not wanting children at any point in her life, she could think of nothing else but creating the perfect genetic amalgamation of her and her husband in as short a time as possible. When her baby was born, she took to the task of rearing her child with a military efficiency in accordance with the baby guides she had read in advance of his arrival. It was as if she wanted a do-over, replacing the family with which she had grown up with a new one that she could create and shape into something much better.

Kathleen resented our parents, I realized, for all the things that she felt she deserved from them and never got. They never attended her dance recitals, for instance, never volunteered for the school play she was in. It took me a long time to understand that these things constituted a measure of her perceived value in the world, and my parents’ failures were directly correlated in her mind to her diminished worth as a human being. For this measure, and almost everything else in life, she had a fixed standard—an immovable notion of what was good or bad, sufficient or insufficient, moral or immoral. Indeed, Kathleen put the imperative in moral imperative.

And that is where she and I departed. She put all her manipulative energies into what she believed was good and right, as opposed to me, who simply invested in whatever benefited me most at the moment. While I targeted people based solely on who caught my interest, she would target only bad apples in order to see them ruined and the good (embodied by her) prevail. While my self-image was that of a pagan god, hers was of an avenging angel. With her sword unsheathed (a little too eagerly, if you ask me), she was constantly alert to fight for the righteous cause, defying authority whenever it was exercised unjustly. I enjoyed this about her. Sometimes it felt like we were an invincible sibling team, alternately invoking fear and inspiring admiration in the hearts of our peers. She was easy to get riled up and enlisted in any of my “causes,” simply by making them sound like causes, like the time she was scheduled to give the valedictory speech and I convinced her to turn it into an elaborate prank as an act of defiance to a school administration that “mistreated” students. By the time my youngest sister, Susie, got to high school, there were few teachers left unscathed from the devastation left by Kathleen and me—Kathleen because she was compelled to right the wrongs of public school, and I because I had to win at all costs, sometimes allowing the costs to flow unchecked just to see the volume of my power.

But Jim was always my partner in crime. He was older, but growing up it often felt like I was his big sister. He was easy to manipulate, so sweet. I never had to try hard with him. His default was to give me what I wanted, and so we were best friends. Being attached to Jim was a problem, though. I was used to things not lasting. My parents were unpredictable, so I had gotten used to relying on myself. When things got rough at home, I found great comfort in thinking that there was nothing really keeping me there—except Jim.

I used to wonder what life would be like without him. It bothered me to think that what we had would end, and so I used my analytical mind to plan the prevention of this possibility. He and I would spend hours talking about what our lives would look like together into adulthood. We planned where we would live, how we would support ourselves, what activities would fill our days. At some point our dream was to own a model train store together. Together we would build miniature cities around which our engines would run, their chains of red and yellow and blue cars trailing in loops without end. Later it was to play music together. It didn’t matter what kind.

He was the one assurance in my child life. I could always count on him to provide for all my needs as best he could, and so I was extraordinarily selfish with him. I made him pay me money to play the games he wanted to play, which he would sometimes resist, but he always relented in the end. And I knew he would, because he wanted so much to play with me, and he didn’t mind being exploited enough to make a fuss. He never disagreed with me with any conviction. He never defended himself. I demanded things of him all the time with the knowledge that he would inevitably cave.

He was so concerned about upsetting me, and I never thought once about whether what I did would hurt his feelings. I was just happy that I could do what I wanted, and I had this tagalong older brother with me to bail me out when stuff got bad. He wasn’t always particularly useful. He was softhearted, sensitive, mostly passive, but my enemies were his enemies and he would oppose them with whatever tools he had.

Although my oldest brother, Scott, bullied everyone, including his siblings, Jim bore the brunt of it. Scott was a thug. We called him the stupid brother, because all he had was brute strength, which he used to achieve his will. It was instinctual for him to target Jim, whose weakness seeped out from his bones. Scott was the muscle, the soldier—emotionally blind. He brutalized people without noticing the impact on them, and for a long time, he did things to Jim without it ever occurring to him that they might have some negative effect on Jim. In this way Scott and I were very similar.

Even though I didn’t like Scott, he had his value to me. He taught me how physical strength could be used for psychological intimidation and how to channel my love of beating people into games and sports. We would box each other with ski gloves or pretend that we were wrestlers in the WWF. I held my own against him by being shorter and faster, and it was fun for me. I liked that he treated me as his equal and not a weaker, younger thing, that he didn’t even think to do so. We would egg each other on and dream up more violent games to play.

But Jim had no natural inclination to fight either of us, and he ended up absorbing all of the blows. He would just lie on the floor with his arms in front of his face. I couldn’t tell if he just didn’t think he had any other choice, or if he thought he did have a choice and that this was what he was choosing. I knew I didn’t want to live like him, that I couldn’t. To me, Jim’s choices were emotional ones, and they were bad. His actions seemed irrational and therefore beyond my understanding. Watching him, my respect for his emotional world diminished, as did any regard for my own emotions or those of others.

I am not sure when it happened, but eventually my oldest brother and I realized that we shouldn’t hit Jim anymore—that he was too delicate for it. We realized that we had to protect him or he wouldn’t survive life’s blows. We were the strong ones, the ones who could take care of business. At first we started pulling punches against him, and then we stopped throwing them at all. Soon we started blocking other people’s punches. We say now that we have spent our lives coddling him, which means that from his early teens to now we have been putting ourselves out for him, buying him cars and houses, cosigning loans with him on which he will inevitably default. We are worried that if we do not, he’ll snap.

Jim was so different from me. Being so close, it often felt like we were confronted with the same challenges and chose opposite ways of dealing with them. But the antisocial behaviors that now characterize me constituted the best choices for me when I was growing up, and I made them consciously. I followed so closely behind Jim in age that it was easy to see what worked or didn’t work for him and then avoid his same mistakes. I equated his emotional sensitivity with his frailty. Where I forged ahead, he bent. Where I demanded things, he gave. Where I fought with all my might, he elected passive resistance or simply succumbed to whatever fate someone else had chosen for him. Who would want to live that way? I would think to myself. Because he was so concerned about my feelings, or my dad’s, he had to deprioritize his own emotional well-being in favor of ours.

I often think it would be interesting to do a controlled experiment on identical twins with sociopathic genes, putting one of them in a “bad” environment and another in a “good” environment. Then we might get some real answers about what role genetics plays. I once read about a doctor who had a mad-scientist dream of determining what role genetics plays in the development of gender. One day he got his chance. A botched circumcision had left one boy in a pair of identical twins with a horribly mutilated penis. The doctor convinced the parents that it was much better for them to remove the entire penis and raise the boy as a girl. They agreed. S/he struggled with feelings of ambiguous gender until finally s/he confronted the parents, who confessed. After he started living life as a man, how did he feel when he looked at his identical twin? Did he see in his twin “what could have been”? Sometimes I wonder if my brother looks at me and asks himself the same. But because he is an empath, I think it is much more likely that he pities me.

My siblings are brutally honest with each other, because it is our nature to be brutal, but also because we assume that if we don’t tell each other the ugly truths about ourselves, no one else will. We are competitive. If asked for a complete ranking of the family members based on any given trait—attractiveness, intelligence, agility, or depravity, for instance—we could give you a list without having to take a second to think about it. Not everyone in the family is a sociopath; I am the only one who has been diagnosed as one. But we grew up sharing a perspective of blunt practicality and disdain for moral sentiment, having tacitly agreed to a collective rejection of the outside world.

Sometimes there weren’t a lot of incentives to make friends outside of the family. When strangers came to the house—friends or future spouses—we ignored them. Once when my father had invited over a young man for dinner, we ate silently and neglected to address him. After dinner we all went into another room and played computer games. When we failed to invite the young man to join us, my father complained, to which I responded matter-of-factly that we simply wanted him to leave. My father describes us as “vicious,” which to me inaccurately implies that we go out of our way to hurt people. We don’t go to that kind of trouble; it is that we rarely give anyone a second thought. For whatever reason, we do care about each other, however. Perhaps it is an evolutionary imperative to preserve our genes that makes us want to keep each other alive and relatively well. Or perhaps it is an alliance that we long ago worked out among ourselves to ensure each person’s individual survival. I can’t say. Whatever our differences, we stuck together, and for the most part benefited from doing so.

We have grown into adults who are all likely to survive an apocalypse, which, being Mormon, we were taught to take seriously. It doesn’t matter if it comes in a gradually encroaching ice age or a sudden storm of nuclear fire; we’ll band together to survive and we won’t suffer any survivor guilt. We each have our roles in the family based on our perceived usefulness and are expected to dispatch these duties proficiently and efficiently. Collectively, we can remodel houses, build traps, make butter, shoot guns, put out fires, destroy reputations, sew clothes, and navigate bureaucracies. Most of us can defend ourselves relatively proficiently with guns, bows, knives, sticks, spears, or our fists. When one of us fails, we demand that he suffer the consequences. But we’re not savages, either. We love art. There was always music in our house—my brother on the piano or my sister dancing on the stairs. It seemed that whatever ugliness was upon us, some species of happiness was only a few notes away.

And there wasn’t a lack of love in my family. It was an unspoken deal we made to care about each other, if necessary to the exclusion of all others. Though they accept me and never questioned my behavior as a child, I know they’ve been tempted to blame themselves for the way I turned out, wondering about little things that they did or didn’t do that could have pushed me here.

For my parents, their denial that anything might be wrong with me came from a deep insecurity that they had irrevocably damaged me. They had viewed me as troubled from birth, and everything they did after that seemed to make me worse. My tomboyishness made them worried that I would become a lesbian. My proclivity for violence, stealing, and arson made them anxious that I would become a criminal. I imagine that my colic as a baby must have set the tone for my parents in their relationship with me. There was nothing that could be done for me; my high-pitched complaints indicated to my parents that I had already decided they were inadequate. Even as a baby, I didn’t tire; I was relentless, unreasonable, and immoderate. They must have approached me with such consternation, as there were mysteries in me that simply could not be solved.

If I had grown up today, some elementary school teacher would probably have had a serious conversation with my parents and asked them to get me psychological testing. As it was, I wasn’t sent to a therapist until I was sixteen. By that time my mother had emotionally emancipated herself from my father’s dictatorial rule. She was keen to also get us the “emotional help” we needed, but I was the only one she deemed so damaged as to warrant professional help. By then she had noticed that I was not just fiercely independent and reckless, but also emotionally apathetic. And it didn’t seem like I was going to grow out of it. It was too late, though; I was already too smart for the therapist. Or maybe I was never amenable to therapy. Either way, I wasn’t going to change. I had already chosen to view the world as a set of opportunities at winning or losing in a zero-sum game, and I used every encounter to gain information to my advantage.

Everything I learned about people’s motivations, their expectations, desires, and emotional responses, was cataloged in my mind for later use. Therapy was a treasure trove in this respect. It taught me about what was expected of me as a normal person and therefore made me better able to disguise myself, to scheme my manipulations with greater precision. In particular, it crystallized a valuable piece of data that I had already internalized—that frailty could excuse anything. I learned to capitalize on my vulnerabilities, real or imagined. Therapists helped me find them, as their job was to look for them, coming up with reasons for my deficits and digging for trauma wherever they could find it. So many valuable tactics for seduction and exploitation were uncovered in my teenage therapy sessions. And school was the society in which I could exercise those tactics.