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

Chapter 4 LITTLE SOCIOPATH IN THE BIG WORLD

When people on the blog and elsewhere ask me how they can know if they are sociopaths, I often ask them about their childhoods: If you were always on the outside looking in, separated from the other kids and maybe even from your family by a wall of emotions that they seemed to feel effortlessly while you did not; if you could instinctively get a sense of how power flowed between various cliques, between the students and the staff, and within your family; if belonging never meant anything to you yet you found you could easily enter and then manipulate any group at will; then maybe, just maybe, you were a tiny wolf in lamb’s wool, a young sociopath without knowing it.

My childhood was unusual only in that it never had a start and never had an end. From a very young age, I filled my life with minutiae and little conquests. While others were learning to play kickball, I learned to play people. I was not subtle. I used friends as pawns purely for access to their toys or whatever else they could offer me. I generally didn’t need to play out elaborate ruses of the kind I’d spin a few years later; I simply did the minimum necessary to insinuate myself into their good graces so I could get what I needed: food at lunch when my family’s pantry was empty, rides home or to activities when my parents were MIA, invitations to birthday parties at fun venues that I was otherwise priced out of, and the thing that I craved more than anything else—the fear of others that let me know that I was the one in power, I was the one in control. I think it unnerved people how little I cared about things that other people cared about, like the well-being of others or my own physical safety. When one of my classmates cried about having a split lip from my punching him, I just stood there, watching, and left when I got bored with the blood and drama of it. I liked toys and candy like every other kid, but I couldn’t be blackmailed or manipulated with them, refusing to be tricked into sharing or playing nice like the other kids were.

Other children weren’t my only targets. Adults tend to believe children, especially when they make their faces seem so expressively open with emotion, especially when the child seems to be the victim of adult overreaching or abuse. I knew what that looked like in other children, the face of the victimized. They would widen their eyes quizzically, pause, then slowly reflect on the reality of their situation (was that man with the van and free candy really being nice, or was there something more insidious going on?) with the wheels turning in their tiny little heads and their mouths half-open. Looks of consternation would manifest on their chubby, soft faces, and then a sad realization would slowly spread across them, their faces falling—they have been victimized and you, adult, are the only one who can help them. Sometimes I would watch myself in the mirror, seeing if my face could also make those faces.

I was better at manipulating adults than I was at manipulating other children, which is why I often wonder about child sociopaths who can’t manage to remain undetected. Adults do not inspect children’s behavior closely. It’s been so long since they saw the world through child eyes that they don’t really remember what is normal behavior for children. There are times when they do not understand children, but they also have vague memories of being misunderstood as a child. Careful not to make that same mistake, adults tend to have a much greater tolerance or margin of error when it comes to unusual childish behavior. They’re much more willing to write off a child obsessed with collecting worms during recess as being a simple variation of the eccentricities of childhood, whereas the child’s peers would more readily classify that child as an anomalous freak.

Children sociopaths are not obvious to adults, which is perhaps why people debate their very existence. It’s rare to hear stories of child sociopaths that seem ripped from the pages of The Bad Seed. In a New York Times Magazine article titled “Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?” the author told the story of Michael, a boy who had been terrorizing his parents since soon after his baby brother was born. Michael would fly into a rage at the slightest interruption to his life, like being asked to put on his shoes, punching and kicking walls while screaming at his parents. When his mother tried to reason with him with reminders about how they had talked about his behavior and that she had hoped they had gotten past it, he stopped cold in his tantrum and replied, “Well you didn’t think that through very clearly, did you?” Other horror stories included another nine-year-old boy who pushed a toddler into the swimming pool of a motel, then pulled up a chair to watch it drown. When asked why he did those things he replied, curiosity. Unfazed by the threat of punishment, he seemed to welcome being the focus of attention.

This sort of behavior is by far the exception. At least to adult eyes, the behavior of a typical child sociopath is much more subtle. Paul Frick, a child psychologist with the University of New Orleans, explains that more common behavior might be the lack of remorse shown when caught. For instance, normal children tend to feel conflicted about getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar. On the one hand, they wanted that cookie. On the other hand, they feel like there is something morally wrong about stealing. A child sociopath would not show this same type of remorse. The only thing the child sociopath would regret is getting caught. Even the New York Times journalist who interviewed Michael was surprised at how normal he seemed: “When I entered the house, of course, I was thinking of adult psychopaths who have led criminal lives for decades, which is normally how they come to our attention. I was maybe expecting a child version of that, but of course that’s kind of ridiculous. Even among adult psychopaths, that would be a small minority.”

No, fooling adults was never my problem; it was always my peers who were more sensitive and exacting in the homogeneity of “normal” behavior that they required. I’m good, but I’m not flawless, and they required near perfection. Let me give an example of what I mean. If a person were to go to a Mormon church for the first time, there would be many things that might give them away as a non-Mormon—perhaps the newcomer would be wearing jeans, or would be a woman wearing slacks instead of a dress or a skirt, or even a woman wearing a skirt cut above her knees. There is an extremely high degree of homogeneity in Mormon culture, and in ways that may not be immediately obvious to the uninitiated. It is not just a pressure to conform that makes everyone so uniform; it actually reflects a shared underlying belief system and similar experiences. You can try to imitate the physical trappings of Mormonism all you want, but unless you’ve studied and practiced Mormon culture extensively, you will never be confused for a cultural Mormon. Similarly, since I did not share the same worldview and underlying beliefs and experiences as my childhood peers, I could pretend and imitate all I wanted, but there would still be small discrepancies that would give me away, or at the very least make me seem quirky to my peers.

I usually had friends despite my perceived oddness, but I experienced periods in which I was avoided or even ostracized by everyone. I could overwhelm people, put them off. I was too aggressive for them, or they could see how deceptive, untrustworthy, and scheming I was. Sometimes my considerable charisma could outweigh the off-putting aspects of my personality, but sometimes it went the other way. My ability to understand my occasional status as a social pariah was spotty; I was good at observing the way other kids reacted to me, but I didn’t always care enough to do anything about it. I was too impulsive, too willing to sacrifice several months of social capital in exchange for a moment’s indiscretion.

Of course I was never bullied or picked on. If anything, my peers were afraid of me. And I usually had enough sense to be selective about whom I targeted—no one too likable. Kids love vigilantism, so I frequently went after bullies. I remember this one set of white trash twins. One of the kids had something wrong with his legs, so he would show up to school with braces or special shoes. He far exceeded children’s tolerance for diversity. Perhaps because they were identical and to distance himself from the less fortunate twin, the other one became a big bully. He was little but scrappy, and since he couldn’t really pick on the true alphas, he would pick on everyone else, hoping merely to establish his dominance as a beta. Everyone hated him, but no one wanted to provoke his wrath. I didn’t care either way about him. I think maybe I scared him. But one time he was basically forced to confront me during an undersupervised game of capture the flag. I had cheated somehow and his team goaded him into calling me on it. Words turned into shoves and pretty soon I had him pinned to the ground and I beat the crap out of him. Not too long, lest we draw attention. Just enough that he didn’t get up for several minutes. The other kids loved me for that for at least several months. I was happy to do it. To me, stopping a bully was like helping put out a fire. It may not have reached my house yet, but fires are unpredictable and they spook the surrounding wildlife into behaving unpredictably. The probability that it will somehow affect me is high enough that any preventative measures on my part are often warranted. And beating on a bully makes you a hero in people’s eyes. I guess that’s why Batman does it.

I often wonder how my life would be different if I had been educated outside the public school system (or even outside the U.S.). Maybe I would pretend less or be less good at it? As it was, trying to blend in with the other children required me to learn the skills of an anthropologist. As an outsider trying to fit in, I had to learn about people through observation and the recognition of patterns. I became very perceptive. I also became good at acting. I could see that other kids thought and behaved differently from me, often reacting emotionally whereas I stayed calm, and so I began to mimic them. I think my first attempts at imitating normal behavior were honest attempts to actually be normal, in the same way that an infant imitates the speech patterns of its parents not to try to trick, but in an honest attempt to communicate. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I would never be normal. Maybe it was the cognitive fork in the road when I was four years old. Maybe it was the code written in my DNA. Either way, it was too late by that time to turn back—if I ever indeed could have. I was irrevocably different from other people, in ways that I had yet to fully understand. I wasn’t able to articulate that then of course, but I knew it in my bones.

In the years when I played observer, I’d watch with contempt as the kids who weren’t popular fawned all over the kids who were. I’d see them for the weaklings they were and wonder why they thought belonging mattered so much that they were willing to debase themselves. I couldn’t even conceive of the idea that anyone or any group was important enough for me to humiliate myself. After I had observed long enough and learned what I needed to know, I easily became one of the popular kids. But even when I was schmoozing with the jocks and the cheerleaders and the class clowns whom everybody loved, even when kids from lower grades wanted my attention, I knew I was not one of them. I’d known that I would never really belong no matter how many people claimed to love hanging out with me, because the person they thought they knew was not the real me.

I did however enjoy playing my games with them. With my friends, I’d usually find little ways to prey on their insecurities. Have you ever picked a scab? Or poked at a tender tooth? Probed a sore muscle? There’s something exploratory about it, and I was this way with my friends’ insecurities. They fascinated me. I have never had an insecurity. I know it sounds absurd. It’s not like I think that I am the best at everything. I am well aware of my many failings. I guess it’s just that they don’t bother me, and I certainly don’t identify with them in this bizarre, fixated way that I often see people do.

Often my lack of insecurities would trigger them in my own friends. For instance, a girl I was friends with in high school was shy around boys. She worried that she was undesirable. I happened to be surrounded by boys all of the time: I was a drummer, a surfer, and an extreme-sports enthusiast, all male-dominated fields. Almost all of my friends were male and I never once lost any sleep over whether they found me attractive or not, which I think was actually what made me attractive to them. I knew that she wished she could be more like me in this way. I knew that part of her hated me for it. I knew that more than anything, she wanted to prove one day that she was more desirable than I was. So I set up a little game for us to play.

There was a boy who had a crush on me. We’ll call him Dave. I knew he had a crush on me because he was very open about it but was torn because he was very Christian and I was Mormon. This made him the perfect companion for absolutely everything. I loved teasing him with his attraction to me, particularly knowing that he would never act on it because he equated it with rebellion against God (or something). Frequently I would hang out with Dave with my insecure friend—we’ll call her Sarah—because I knew she had a bit of a crush on him and was oblivious enough not to notice that he was interested in me. Or was she? I wasn’t really sure, but I loved the awkward dynamic that it set up in all our interactions.

One Saturday we were out and about and decided to go together to a party later that evening. We stopped by Dave’s house so he could pick up a change of clothes. While we were waiting for him, Sarah and I got to talking, or more accurately, I got her talking. I could tell that she was thinking that tonight was her chance to prove that somebody liked her better than me. Maybe because Dave had been flirting with her all day in an attempt to give me some of my own medicine? In any case, she wore on her face confidence and a premature sense of victory.

“Why are you smiling?” I asked.

“No reason.” She giggled.

“No, seriously, you can tell me. What is it?”

“It’s nothing. It’s stupid.”

“You want to make a bet to see who can kiss Dave first?”

“How’d you know?!”

“Ha, I didn’t until just now. But we can, you know. Do you want to?”

Of course she wanted to. She thought she was going to win. She wanted to see me humiliated for once. We invented elaborate rules and came up with some reward (I knew the more complicated the “rules” seemed, the more it would seem like a legitimate and fair endeavor when really it was just me setting her up for embarrassment and feeding her insecurities). Of course I won, but only after dragging it out as long as possible, and only after she had thrown herself at him and had been soundly rejected. It was doubly delicious knowing that not only had I crushed Sarah’s newfound confidence, but Dave had given up his religious beliefs for me only to be spurned the next day.

Despite my bad intentions, for the most part everything I did was relatively tame, at least when you consider that there are children shooting up schools. I never thought of myself as a predator because I never raped or killed anyone. But looking back, I wonder if my essential understanding of my outsider status, combined with the instinctive sense that I had to carefully observe other people in order to both survive and thrive, is how the human predator thinks.

If I’m a predator, do I prey for sport or to survive? I learned how to be this way to survive, but it’s also true that I do it when it’s not necessary. Many predators engage in similar behavior, so-called “surplus killing,” or attacking prey without an immediate need or use for the animal. Have you seen videos of killer whales batting around their prey only to kill and abandon them? Scientists assure us that they aren’t actually killing for the fun of it (how would they know?), but rather that surplus killing is a survival mechanism—those who engage in surplus killing are the most aggressive, and the most aggressive predators are the ones who survive and procreate.

Predators who engage in surplus killing are constantly at the ready, always willing to make the kill. Similarly, I am always ready to play to win, no matter whom I am playing against or how innocent or nonthreatening they are to me in that moment. It makes sense. If I were only ruthless when I needed to be or only toward particular types of people who “deserved” it, I don’t think I could be as effective. I would be constantly questioning myself—is this person worth it? Do I really need to be going after them in this particular way? Instead, my natural inclination is to be aggressive to everyone. Nowadays I put a lot of effort into suppressing this urge. I’ve allowed myself to be tamed by people in order to have longer-lasting relationships, but the animalistic urge to destroy is always bubbling underneath the surface. For many I’m a beautiful and exotic pet but inherently dangerous—like a white tiger to my family and friends’ Siegfried and Roy.

This natural aggression was always the biggest obstacle preventing me from having a normal social life. All through growing up, I could try everything to hide my true nature, but it would always find ways to seep onto the surface in the form of unveiled aggression. When someone invoked my wrath—a tattling schoolmate or an insipid teacher—my eyes turned into dark simmering pools, the roiling of revenge plots apparent just below the surface. I tilted my head forward, my hands curled into fists and my eyes narrowed, as if to focus all my malignant energy on my antagonist for optimum destruction. I glowered like villains do in the movies, shattering the illusion of normalcy I tried so hard to project. Often it felt as if, at least socially, it was always one step forward, two steps back.

It was in my preteen years that I realized how crucial it was to actively cultivate attractive personality traits. I would study my peers to discover what made them seem likable to each other, and I became all of those things. That’s when I picked up surfing, played in rock bands, and became a social climber. In addition to getting good grades, I started watching indie films and listening to underground music, did alternative sports like BMX biking and street luging and wore thrift-store clothes. I became so uniquely accomplished, talented, and charming that I was naturally included on everyone’s list of people to know and like (or fear). Not only could I wear any number of masks to suit any situation, I had learned how to wear them with consistency.

I didn’t stop behaving outrageously, but I made it a point to perform well in school so that any slipups would be overlooked as quirks. My mother’s love of music—her view of it as her salvation—was passed on to me. I played the drums in the school band and in rock bands with other kids. When I was in junior high and high school, music masked a lot of my antisocial behaviors. Musicians are expected to be narcissistic and outrageous; it would be disappointing if they behaved normally. So the things I did seemed appropriate in the context of my rock star ambitions. When you’re holding a guitar or banging on drums, you’re supposed to scream and dance wildly, to be aggressive, to bully crowds into going crazy in mosh pits, to elicit the love and attention that they are all too willing to give.

I was fortunate that Jim continued to include me in his social life, even though I was his kid sister. In high school, all of his friends were older—not exactly edgy, but energetic and committed to ska music. They dressed in vintage suits and skinny ties. Every weekend they went to clubs and house parties to hear their favorite bands play, and my brother and I would go with them. It was my introduction to mosh pits and crowd surfing, knives, broken bottles, and crowd fights where people got dragged off in stretchers and cop cars. It was thrilling.

In high school I would get into elaborate feuds with people. Once I fought with one of my teachers over who should be in charge of the class—I thought I should be; for some reason he thought he should be. I bought yards of black fabric and cut out armbands, eventually getting half of the school involved in the “protest” against him. (Teenagers are eager to rebel against any sort of authority, which I was only too willing to exploit.) Another time I wanted to start a competitive drum line that would compete in shows around Southern California. We needed instruments, so, figuring it was better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission, I forged the entrance forms and took the school’s gear on the weekends, when I was sure no one would notice. I picked fights with people much bigger and stronger than I was, but mostly they were at rock concerts as part of a mosh pit, where the violence was tolerated. Cunning and calculating even then, I managed to stay out of serious trouble to preserve my freedom.

In order to avoid complaints and simply because I liked to, I mostly played with the boys as a child. They rarely tattled about injuries. I liked running around and jostling with them, coming in with a thin coat of sweat and grime from my time in the yard. When I was very young, I refused to wear a shirt so that I could be just like the boys. I didn’t understand why anyone would choose to hold baby dolls rather than make war with army soldiers.

I loved contact sports, everything about them. Touch football was classic that way. Especially after it rained and the fields were muddy, it was natural for tackling and black eyes to happen. Or playing tag on the playground equipment, we would fling ourselves off platforms and whip around corners, our bodies colliding in clumsy ballets. It was such a rush to smash my body into someone else’s, such satisfaction when one of my playmates got sent off to the nurse’s office with a bloody nose! In high school softball, I wasn’t the best player, but I’m sure I collided with other players more than anyone else. I stole bases with relish. Even if the ball had been thrown to the baseman by the time I got there, my unmitigated determination in running straight for her often freaked her out enough that she would leap to one side. One time as I was stealing home, I spooked the catcher so much that she clotheslined me though she didn’t even have the ball yet. It’s true that sometimes people are alarmed by my enthusiasm, but usually, I consider it their problem.

Risk taking, aggression, and a lack of concern for your own health or that of others are all symptoms of sociopathy, and my childhood is rife with evidence of them. I think that narrow escapes from death are probably better experienced young than old. They imprint in your mind a healthy sense of your mortality for later use. When I was eight, I almost drowned while swimming in the ocean. I can’t recall the experience in great detail but I do remember the force of the ocean overcoming me, water as invisible as air swallowing me alive. My mother tells me that when the lifeguard fished me out of the water and breathed life into me, my first signs of life were gasps of laughter. It was perfect timing. I learned that death could come at any moment but was not so bad, really. I never developed a fear of it. At times I have flirted with it, even longed for it, but never actively sought it.

One Sunday I got very sick. It was a couple months before my sixteenth birthday. I usually kept these things to myself. Even then, I didn’t like involving other people in my personal issues, because it presented an invitation to interfere with the activities of my life. But that day, I relented and told my mother about the sharp pain directly below my sternum. After she expressed her usual exasperation, she gave me some kind of quack herbal medicine and told me to rest. Now I felt pain plus nausea.

The next day I stayed home from school, which did nothing but make me feel behind in all of my activities. It took all my challenging classes, music and sports groups, and other extracurriculars, plus toying with the interior lives of my friends, acquaintances, and authority figures, to keep my mind and body occupied. Boredom was my enemy, and thus, so too was illness. The next day, despite still being sick, I went back to school; that week I played softball and hit a double.

Every day my parents would suggest another new remedy. I carried a little bag of medicine with me wherever I went: Tums, Advil, ibuprofen, and various homeopathic cure-alls. I knew that there was pain, but I could not gauge its severity or analyze its meaning. It was an obstacle, like missing a player on the field or being farsighted. I had to play harder, strain my eyes—to contend with this thing growing in my insides, pulsing for attention, and blanketing my body with a reluctance to function.

All the energy that I usually used in social situations to blend in and charm others was redirected into controlling and ignoring the pain. A few days into it, I began to snarl at people, to glower. I ceased engaging in flattery or even polite pleasantries. I stopped reacting to people with nods or concerned facial expressions; instead, I stared at them with the dead eyes I had previously reserved for when I was alone and unseen. I couldn’t be bothered to smile. There was no filter between my secret thoughts and my mouth, so I ended up telling my friends how ugly they were or why they deserved the bad things that came to them. I didn’t have the intellectual ability to properly regulate my emotions or to turn on the charm. Without the mental stamina to constantly calibrate my effect on people, I embraced the raw flavor of my meanness, the mélange of dull sadism and sharp disregard.

I didn’t even know I was doing it, as I hadn’t realized how much brainpower it had taken me simply to maintain my personal relationships, how much was required of me to restrain my natural impulses. Only later when none of my friends stuck around did I realize what had happened. They can only make exceptions for you for so long. I behaved with sufficient meanness that my vile behavior justified many of my friends’ abandonment of me. It was like I had spent my adolescence wearing medieval chain mail under my clothes only to suddenly lose it unawares. Unrestricted by its weight, my movements were outsize and bizarre.

Mornings, afternoons, and evenings passed this way, in silent, growling submission to pain. My abdominal pains migrated to my back at the level of my kidneys. I grew sweatier, clammier, and greener. My dad suggested I had muscle strain. I went back to school and had to go to a band festival about forty miles away. On the bus I was feverish and lay down on the floor on the ride home. All weekend I stayed in bed. Tuesday, I went back to school but was too sick to stay in class, so I spent the afternoon sleeping in my brother’s car. I don’t remember the season, but the afternoons were sunny, and the warm, undifferentiated sunlight streamed in from the windows, turning the car into a greenhouse, an incubator. Curled up in the backseat, I felt the delicious warmth blocking out the mixture of throbbing, sharp, and dull pains now populating every wide expanse and narrow corner of my body. At home I disappeared into bed. When my mother came to wake me for dinner, she unraveled a shivering, hot, wet child from the covers. When my dad got home he stared at me for a while and contemplated his next move. He looked at my torso, saw that something was very wrong, and relented: “We’ll go to the doctor tomorrow.”

The next day, everyone at the doctor’s office was very solicitous, calm, and soothing. They did some tests, and after the results came back, everything changed into rushing and accusations. The doctor said something in outraged tones about my white cell count. I could sense my mother receding into quiet, semicatatonic disavowal, the state she retreated to when my father punched things or screamed at her. The doctor was all questions—if I had felt pain, what I had been doing for the last ten days, and why I hadn’t spoken up sooner—the kind that suggested I had done something wrong, and I stopped answering them. I was bored and restless. I didn’t want to be there anymore. I wanted to be free to do my own thing instead of being a passive victim at the mercy of the well-intentioned. Someone asked me if I wanted to lie down; I politely declined and then passed out. When I came to, I heard shouting and my father convincing the medical staff not to order an ambulance. Even in my delirium I could sense their mistrust of him.

My dad would have done anything to get away from the reproachful stares. Behind my own fluttering, half-closed eyelids, I could see the wild panic in his eyes. It wasn’t panic about his daughter dying. Or rather, it was. But it was the moral judgment of his friends and neighbors upon my dying rather than the loss of me that terrified him. That he would allow his daughter to die from neglect. That he and my mother had let me suffer in excruciating pain for more than a week without seeking any medical attention, because—as I discovered later—he had allowed our family’s medical insurance to lapse. To think of it now, I am surprised that he didn’t leave my mother and me there to sort it out ourselves. In a way, my mother was luckier than my father. Her oppression allowed her to escape responsibility; her powerlessness absolved her guilt.

When I woke up following surgery, I saw my dad standing over me with tired anger. He gave me the rundown: The appendix had perforated, spewing toxins into my guts. My insides had become septic with infection, and the muscles in my back had become gangrenous. The surgeons had to cut out chunks of rotted flesh, and a plastic tube was inserted in the wound to drain the pus out. There should be no lasting damage.

“You could have died. The doctors are very angry.” At me, his tone implied. It was as if I should have apologized to everyone.

Hospitals are, of course, dehumanizing places. The worst time of day is predawn, when the floors are especially cold and the daylight peeking through the blinds feels like a reckoning. The night nurses get replaced by the day nurses, fresh in their cheerful cartoon scrubs and eager to inflict their cruel practicalities. The gaggles of interns and doctors make their rounds, pulling curtains to examine and catalog flaccid, damaged flesh connected to tubes and machines—cyborgs in clinical phantasmagoria.

Stripped of your armor, you can embrace the savage that the hospital makes of you, or you can grasp desperately for the human. For me, it was an easy choice. I was well acquainted with the savage in me—the animal that knew no other thing than its will to survive and thrive. I had no trouble turning off my sense of dignity or my need for connection, because I knew that to do so was the most efficient means of getting through the days ahead. There was also a sense of relief that I didn’t have to put on a mask for anyone. It saved me a lot of mental energy. Life was whittled down to the essentials—sleeping, eating, and defecating—interrupted by frequent physical violations that could be predicted and planned for. In this, I was a model patient. I did as I was told, dutifully doing my breathing exercises and taking my laps around the floor, hospital gown flapping open behind me. One nurse thought I was “brave.” I think she was talking about my steely-eyed, grin-and-bear-it kind of attitude. There were no tears, no complaints from me—a total lack of affect. In a victim, it is courage and thus admirable; in a predator, it is a lack of humanity and instills fear.

After about a week, I was scheduled to leave, as long as I maintained my upward wellness trajectory. The nurse told me that my final barrier to departure was the morning breakfast. Too nauseated to eat, I tried nibbling the foods with the highest volume-to-density ratio so it would look like I had downed more than I had, but it still appeared as if I hadn’t touched anything. In this instance, my dad saved me. He showed up an hour before he was due at a meeting, cramming pancakes into his mouth with one hand and flushing scrambled eggs down the toilet with the other.

On the way home, and with minutes to spare before my dad’s meeting, we swung by the music store to pick up a compact disc I had wanted. It was closed, but he pounded on the door until he got the attention of an employee, gestured toward me with hurried explanations, and came back to the car with what I had asked for. People can surprise you.

I do not know how the family survived my hospital bills, but I am sure the same skills my dad used to get me my CD helped in getting out from under our enormous debt. When we got home, he walked me up the stairs and helped me into my bed, assuring me that someone would do something about my soaked bandages. He often said things like that, which were incredibly unlikely to actually happen.

My parents generally weren’t much more attentive to personal safety than I was. My family got into a surprising number of car accidents. When we were kids, we had a very serious accident on a dangerous mountain highway while on our way to visit my cousins. We got rear-ended (by someone who later appeared to be intoxicated), and the force propelled our car across several lanes of traffic until we collided with a concrete wall. Partly because us kids were all crammed into the back of the car, we all got pretty banged up, but for some reason, we didn’t turn back home and instead drove the rest of the ten hours that it took for us to get to our relatives’ house. I suspect we lived on the insurance proceeds from that accident for several years. Even now my first instinct upon being involved in an auto accident (usually not my fault; I’m a great driver) is to take a copious number of photos and solicit incriminating statements from the other driver.

I had been climbing on moving vehicles since I was little. I would climb onto moving vehicles, climb around already moving vehicles, and even once tried climbing under a moving vehicle. I loved to ride in the backs of trucks, dangling off.

When I was ten years old, a family friend asked my older brother Jim and me to operate an eight-passenger, gas-powered golf cart to shuttle guests to and from a Halloween party hosted about a half mile away from the parking area. We were polite and safe when taking passengers up to the house but performed increasingly risky acts on the way back down. On one trip, I was attempting to climb along the roof from the back of the golf cart to the front. My brother wasn’t paying attention and when he didn’t see me, he assumed that he had left me back at the house. He made a sharp U-turn and I went flying off the roof, barrel-rolling for several seconds along the pavement. I lost consciousness and woke up on my back, red tail-lights rapidly coming my direction. My brother (still unaware of what had happened) was backing up as part of a three-point turn and I just missed being run over by rolling out of the way.

“Where’d you go?” my brother asked, surprised, when I climbed back into the cart.

“I don’t know. Nowhere,” I replied.

Driving my own motor vehicle wasn’t any less hazardous. One afternoon my mother introduced me to what would become, $1,200 later, my first car. The car was a beautiful disaster—a 1972 Pontiac “Luxury” LeMans, V-8 engine with dual mufflers coming out the back. The car was viscerally appealing, a sister of the GTO with a nearly identical body. It was the last year that the Pontiac maintained its curvy form, mimicking the musculature of the animals that cars of that era were frequently named after (Mustang, Charger, Cougar). The Pontiac’s dual round headlights stared back at you; its grill and bumper sneered. Its fenders were rusted out by the wheel wells and the only thing saving the roof from rust was the white vinyl top. The best feature in my mother’s eyes, though, was the Detroit steel. She believed that in an accident the other person would feel the hurt, not me. I proved this intuition to be accurate many times in my first few years with it.

The engine to my car was so simple that I did my own small repairs and tweaks. I wanted to understand how it worked. I wanted to control it, not the other way around. When the starter went out one year while I was at college, I enlisted my boyfriend to help me replace it where it was stalled in a friend’s apartment complex parking lot. I had no idea how to do it and neither did he, but I was always willing to try new things no matter how ill advised. Everything was going well until we began to disconnect the starter from the car before detaching the battery. Sparks started flying, catching the undercarriage on fire. We both quickly got out from under the car and I had to throw snow on the flames to put them out.

I got a lot of attention in that car, some of it lewd, but I never felt vulnerable in it—I always felt invincible. I learned how to handle its power, how to accelerate into turns, how to launch it off the line while drag-racing it with friends, and how to fishtail it in California rainstorms, which, due to their rarity, made roads especially slick from accumulated gas and oil.

I loved the confidence and power I felt with that car, because it was such a contrast to the dissonance of being female, teenage, and powerless. My brothers were closer to my daredevil personality than my sisters, with their mild games of dolls and house. They would go off to their church Boy Scout groups and shoot arrows and skulk around the woods with knives, and my equivalent Mormon female activities were cross-stitching homilies for pillowcases, baking snickerdoodles, and anything that involved the use of a glue gun. In general, the women in my life seemed like they were never acting, always being acted upon.

When I was in my tween years, men started telling me how much I looked like my mother. I correctly interpreted that to mean that I had started to become an object of sexual desire. By the time I was ten, I had already developed full plump breasts and my hips had the contours of a Greek vase. Men openly leered, their aggression palpable. The adult women in the world treated me like I was a slut, even though I had no idea why. And so my new body was primarily a liability at first. If I wasn’t careful, it functioned like a suicide bomb, with collateral damage in the form of judgment from women and harassment from men.

I understand that all teenage girls experience some variation of this awkward transition between child and sex object. Even so, I think in a lot of ways it’s much worse for someone like me—a budding sociopath. All I wanted was power and control. If I were a boy, I thought, I would be big and muscled. I would cut an imposing presence. I was always athletic, always aggressive for a girl. Even in male-dominated physical activities like mosh pits, I held my own through sheer antagonism. But I was also five foot three and 125 pounds. I wanted fear and respect but what I typically ended up with were unwanted advances from inebriated guys twice my size. I did not look like a predator, I looked like an attractive target for unsolicited and aggressive forms of attention. I was a strong, tough girl, but men were generally stronger and tougher. I was extraordinarily smart and conniving, but it was oftentimes not enough to vanquish the authority of adults half as smart and not nearly as conniving as me. It’s not that I did not feel female so much as I did not feel as weak as I looked.

I have never identified very much with my gender, or at least, I have been extraordinarily ambivalent. But a lot of girls go through similar phases of rejection of and rebellion from gender stereotypes. When you grow up as a girl, it is like there are faint chalk lines traced approximately three inches around your entire body at all times, drawn by society and often religion and family and particularly other women, who somehow feel invested in how you behave, as if your actions reflect directly on all womanhood. These chalk lines circumscribe the manner in which you interact with the world, are the source of the implicit “for a girl” that seems to trail every compliment (“tough, for a girl”). You want to wave your arms around as hard as you can to wipe them away and scatter them to dust, but the chalk lines just follow you around, always keeping you inside that constant three inches of space. I felt that the label of girl was too limiting to contain my own grandiose conception of myself, and so I mostly ignored it.

There were obviously good things about my gender. My mother was largely passive with my father, but if she ever wanted something, all it took was a simple touch, a half promise of physical pleasure, to get him to do almost anything she wanted. In those hundreds of times when men told me my mother was beautiful, I eventually saw not just objectification but the power of dearly hoped-for pleasures. I have sometimes heard men lament that women have all of the power because they are the ones who say yes or no to sex. But I wasn’t yet ready to deploy that kind of power. In my high school years, while other girls were learning about and experimenting with their sexuality, I was largely asexual. I didn’t understand then that sex could be something that could give me pleasure. And I didn’t understand it as a way of connecting to people, and therefore gaining a form of power over them. I didn’t know that sex was a means to love, and that people will do anything for love.

I did, however, use my gender to great effect with many of my disgusting, perverted teachers. One of them I hated in particular. My high school English teacher had given me a failing grade on one of my assignments because my mother had turned it in for me on a day I’d been away at a softball tournament or drum competition. He ridiculed me in front of the class for having my “mommy bring it,” trying to make an example of me. This teacher was old and vindictively petty. I never liked him. I had seen him ruthlessly attack other students in my class, so I never gave him any reason to target me. Still, there was something about my silent defiance that must have gotten under his skin, because he finally made up something plausible to attack me on.

“Thomas! You may have noticed that you received an F. I didn’t even look at your paper, so next time you can save your mommy some time and either come in and turn in your work yourself or don’t bother turning it in at all.” I was instantly angry, but it quickly chilled.

“Screw you, fat man,” I calmly retorted, and minutes later was waiting my turn in the principal’s office.

From that time on we’d engaged in a low-grade power struggle. I wanted to take him down, and since he had such a bad reputation, the easiest way was just to create a paper trail of his inappropriate behavior. I started taking detailed notes of things he said and did in class that were even remotely questionable. I made friends with girls in my class, planting in their heads the total inappropriateness of even some of his more innocuous behavior. He wasn’t that bad a guy, really. He was just old and a bit of a natural chauvinist in the way that men born before 1950 typically are. When we would take quizzes, he would project them up on the board and have everyone move forward, ostensibly so people in the back could see better. He always had the first row move their seats all the way up to touch his desk, and in that row just happened to be a girl who frequently wore the revealing spandex of a dancer. I started a rumor that he had us move like this to get a better view of her ample cleavage. It was a very plausible story, particularly with the way his face frequently contorted into what looked like a leer. It may have actually been true. In any case, it made good gossip and was accepted as truth shortly after it got started.

That rumor itself was not enough. Nor was it enough when I finally goaded him into making a lewd and demeaning comment about my breasts. The class was talking about a recent music department production.

“How did you like my solo?” I sneered after listening to him go on about everyone else in the class.

“Thomas! You have no class! Up there onstage, flopping all around, letting it all hang out. Not like these other girls,” he said, gesturing to the dancer in front of him. I think he was trying to turn the class against me, but unfortunately for him I had gotten to them first. He didn’t hurt my feelings; he had finally, unequivocally, overstepped the student-teacher boundary in front of witnesses.

After class I asked the dancer if she felt uncomfortable about his thinly veiled harassment. I was the picture of worried concern. She was touched by my sincerity. Yes, she had heard the rumor I started about her and this teacher (unaware that I was the one who started it). Yes, it did bother her. I was the sympathetic ear. She confessed all of her discomfort and I not only listened, I validated and fed the flame of her distress.

I used his behavior that day to paint him as out of control. I needed her to be afraid of him. I needed her to be one of the other voices raised in condemnation against him. I told her that we had to stop him before it got any worse. I told her that I was thinking of filing an official complaint against him for sexual harassment and asked if she would be willing to verify my story if necessary. I made it seem as if her participation would probably not be necessary, based on numerous contingencies, so she agreed. She would soon find out that she would be my star witness.

When I got home I told my mother about what had happened in class—strictly the facts, nothing about our power struggle or my preparations to get him fired. I told her about how “violated” I felt and about how I was not the only girl toward whom he had behaved in this way. I knew my mother felt bad about all of the times growing up that she had failed me, so she’d be inclined to help here. I told her I had found out that you make sexual harassment claims against teachers directly with the school district. Would she like to come with me to the district office the next morning to start the paperwork? My father was completely opposed to the idea, which I think made it all the more appealing to my mother.

I gave my statement and enlisted a small cadre of loyalists to paint him in as bad a light as they could. He was supervised for several weeks. There was always someone else with him whenever he was on campus, I noticed with delight. Officially he received a “strike,” an official censure; unofficially I believe he was forced into early retirement and had to give up his position as head of the English department, which to me was success. I was never one to be greedy or get caught up in the “principle of the thing.” I wasn’t trying to get him fired to protect future generations of vulnerable young girls. I was trying to get him fired to show him that he was vulnerable, and to me, a helpless little girl.

Still, it was a good lesson in the limits of the formal justice system, one that I would face again shortly in law school. This was not the only time I tangled with a teacher, but no matter what I did and to whom I reported them, none were ever fired or even removed from their positions. And while I gained the satisfaction of causing them pain, I garnered a reputation for making trouble. Maybe I lied, cheated, and bullied in order to achieve their destruction, but it was nonetheless true that they were bad teachers who should not have been allowed around kids. One teacher was an idiot who favored the popular kids over the unpopular ones, ignoring their talent in order to bask in the social acceptance that he never received when he was a student in high school himself. Another was sexually obsessed with his students and paid special lascivious attention to the ones with large breasts (including me) and low self-esteem (not including me). I wasn’t doing a public service in trying to ruin them. I just couldn’t stand that such unfit people could have authority over me. And that was the double injustice of being a young sociopath and a girl, too.