The Empty Vessel

I’ve been watching Californication. Scanning every internet media streaming provider for a companion through a bout of the flu, or my new series long diversion from doing the dishes. After Younger. After The Legend of Korra. I never intended to keep watching. But there is something incredibly compelling, nay magnetic, about David Duchovny’s all-smoking all-drinking sex-addicted husk of a man, Hank Moody. He stumbles through his life like a drunk through a plate glass window, grasping and cynical, blunt and lackadaisical, and always with a witty comeback. Desperately drowning in a life of leisure that would make other men replete with glee, yet it somehow makes him feel even emptier inside, and further from his muse. Maybe the show is a hollow parade of tits and arse and a glorification of the softcore drug addict – maybe that’s the point. But I saw myself in Hank, my failings and my aspirations. The irreverent, tortured, luxuriant piece of shit who needs to exercise (sic) their demons. Californication reminded me that I am a writer. And that if I don’t write about this I’m probably going to let it kill me.

I went to see a psychiatrist recently. He came highly recommended by friends and friends of friends. I’d been intending to see him for more than a year, but his appointment process is so badly handled I’m surprised it isn’t creating more disorders than it treats. I thought he was going to prescribe me the medication I wanted. He was my next-to-last resort.

The friend of mine who recommended the psychiatrist to me said that he was very blunt and bold. She had initially railed against what he had told her about herself, until upon reflection and discussion with people close to her, she had realised that he was right. I had planned to go into the session spouting every symptom and concern that would make me a favoured candidate for Moclobemide. I knew from my consultation with my doctor that being upfront and letting the practitioner know about all the research you had done just seemed to make them feel threatened and put them on guard. So I’d planned to hide my intelligence, my recurrent struggle.

Unfortunately when I got into the session, this all went out the window. I’d been asked to do a 100 question personality assessment while I was in the waiting room. I could tell that in order to test sane 90% of the questions were meant to be answered with “No.” But I answered honestly, which meant quite a few yeses. There was a typo on the test that displayed such striking irony I still don’t know if it was deliberate.

70. I am critical or others.

I underlined the mistake before I answered the question. Which meant answering “Yes” was inescapable.

The psychiatrist took my test as I came in and said he would assess it at the end. He started immediately by asking me the story of my life, David Copperfield style. He didn’t think I was born in Australia because of my accent, and was yet another person to pass up the suggestion of British and nod vigorously at the idea of Canadian. I’ll never understand. Canadian is very specific, and most people can’t distinguish it from an American accent unless it’s a cliché adorned with “aboots” and “eys.” I think it’s something in the tone rather than the pronunciation. Or maybe it’s just that the Cultivated Australian accent has actually died out. I’m sure the fact that I chose to sound like a weird hybrid of Berkshire, Toronto and Cate Blanchett, instead of anyone around me wasn’t lost on him.

I was more than happy to regale him with tales of anything and everything, where I grew up, my absent father, my alcoholic mother, my castigating grandmother, my failed university career, my long history of having no friends and being depressed. And also my history of therapists, the school counsellor who told me that I was “too eloquent to be depressed” and the more recent psychologist who was perfectly agreeable but completely ineffectual. I would go into the sessions with her and I would talk about my week, what I had achieved and what I still hoped to achieve, and she would sit there enjoying the stories, always impressed with my skills and encouraging of my pursuits. It was a pleasant sanctioned reflective time where she passively stroked my ego. Nice, but utterly unchallenging. Not like therapy, and more like something I could have had with any one of my friends. And certainly not worth the price tag. I always left the sessions feeling slightly content with myself, but very quickly the melancholy would descend again. I explained this to the psychiatrist, saying that I didn’t want a repeat of this; he had to understand that when I sit down with a therapist I’m very “on” – I’m delighted to talk about myself and I like to think I give an engaging delivery and have an interesting life. I want to get all the peaks and valleys nicely delineated in the time we have. But that’s not who I am, when I live my life minute-to-minute, or when I’m at home or alone.

I run overtime with the psychiatrist, who is already behind by at least an hour. I don’t know how long the appointment was meant to be. Only near the end do I manage to cram in the problems I’m having and what I hope to change. I am beset by nihilism, I have no sex drive, I’m worried I will never know happiness. He “grades” my test, tallying the results of my psychological evaluation. He’s listened patiently for nearly an hour to my long and dense life story. Now he drops bombs. He writes me a list of personality disorders and tells me to look them up. He tells me I’m too self-occupied and I have no purpose. He says I’m incredibly intelligent and what works for other people will not work for me. He says the only way I’m going to get anything out of therapy is if I can somehow leave my intelligence at the door. I am not like everyone else and I have no hope of being normal. He says my best hope of achieving happiness is by finding a career where I am esteemed, where I feel competent and respected and can express my creative side, but that it would be a diversion from my depression not a cure. He tells me that I don’t want to know what is at the root of my depression. I am taken aback because I desperately want to know why I am depressed, more than anything. I feel that he has misjudged me if he thinks I am somehow in bed with my depression or scared of it. The fact that he could have any kind of answer is thrilling and unexpected. I ask him what it is. Again he tells me that I don’t want to know, that it could be dangerous to explore it without a therapist to guide me through the whole process, to “put [me] back together again.” I lean forward in my chair with suffocating earnestness and express my sincere and honest wish to know why I am depressed. He insists that I “don’t want to go digging there.”

“Why?!” I beg, flabbergasted by his reluctance to give up this supremely juicy morsel of psychoanalysis. “Why don’t I want to go digging into the reasons for my depression? Because I might uncover some sort of emotional trauma?”

“No,” he says, “because there’s nothing there.”

I sit back in my chair, maybe my eyes even roll back into my head with the boredom imparted by that cliché. “Yes,” I say, “I had this discussion with my doctor, intelligent questioning people always look for an answer to their depression, to find a cause, and sometimes there isn’t one, you’re just depressed, and that can be hard to accept.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean there’s no specific emotional trauma, nothing to be uncovered because there is no emotion. When most people look deep inside themselves for meaning they find an emotional centre and connections of feeling. You don’t have an emotional world. You never developed one.” He blunders his way into a saying he half remembers, eventually conveying “the empty vessel makes the most noise.” Attributed to Plato and Shakespeare, and definitely in the vein of “full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” It conveys both a frustration towards inadequacy or loss, and an overcompensation. This is me in a nutshell. And it’s not even my fault – every part of my upbringing conspired to make me this way. I don’t know if I feel better or worse knowing it was destined.

He goes on to say that I could have long-term, invasive and thoroughly unenjoyable therapy to basically “rebuild my personality from scratch,” but at 25 I’m essentially too old to start again with any hope of positive results. He reiterates his advice that I find a meaningful career where I am appreciated. I try to tell him about singing and “these things that I’m great at which I’ve never enjoyed, and these things that I love which will never see me employed” – but we’ve run out of time. I know that it will just be my same protestations as always. Asserting that I am uniquely disadvantaged with regard to the intersection of competence, monetary compensation and enthusiasm. Whining about my lack of musical ability and/or success. And he’d probably tell me not to invest my happiness and self-worth in an area where my ego is so fragile.

I take the notes he has given me and I stand in the car park next to my bike, and I message my partners. I tell Dorian and Magnus that it was very revealing and affirming, and that I have too much to talk about for a typed messaging service. I am beside myself with the desire to discuss and dissect the session. Magnus and I find time to talk on the phone an hour or so later. I walk the footpath next to the closed pharmacy, stunned and relieved. We make comparisons with Sherlock and Doctor Who and each other. He’s surprised, but only with the incisiveness and severity of the disorders, not the overall content. I walk through the supermarket after our conversation. “3 AM” by Matchbox Twenty is playing on the radio, and I am smiling. I am smiling to myself like someone with a wonderful self-satisfying secret. Someone has told me I have no emotional world and it’s one of the best things I’ve heard. I’m not exactly sure why. But I think it has something to do with the unspoken permission it gives me to be myself. To no longer feel like I have “misread the user manual” for my life, but rather that I have a different model of machine altogether. And that’s OK I guess. I can’t really do anything but accept it.

I negotiate talking with Dorian. I don’t want to have the conversation because I know he won’t want to have had it. I know where the conversation is going, it’s been heading there for a while. We were both hoping that things would change, that this therapy would catalyse something where I was more able to meet his needs. But instead it’s reaffirmed that this is who I am, and I’m probably never going to change. I want to keep being that person, but I know it’s slowly tearing us apart. I’ve been chafing in this relationship. Dorian hasn’t loved me the same since we broke up the first time. He’s been growing ever closer to Kara. They’re moving in together. They have everything I could never give him, and everything he never gave me. I see him leaving behind so many of the hard lessons we went through together, and regaining the comfort of who he was. We’re both just being who we truly are, I guess. We are so different and we changed so much in order to be with each other. It’s amazing we lasted seven years.

We talk about it, everything the psychiatrist said, and how we’re not going to be saved. Dorian always said he couldn’t stay with me if it was like this. It seems like a forgone conclusion that our relationship has failed, but he wants me to say it anyway, that I want to leave him. I think it’s better for both of us. We both just want it to be like it was, but it never will be. If I stay with him I’ll keep trying to be someone I’m not, and torturing myself with the futility of it. If he stays with me he’ll keep waiting around for me to return to my old self, heartbroken and without closure.

And so we end things. More plainly than I ever thought us capable. I think we’ve both seen it coming. We still want to be friends, and to not cut off all intimacy. I still love him, an emotion I shouldn’t be very proficient in. He doubts what I mean and I try to describe my love for him. He sheds a tear at the beauty of my words but adds that love should mean wanting to be with someone as much as you can, to have them close to you always. That’s the difference between me and him I guess. I don’t want to hang up the phone. But I do anyway.

I talk to Magnus about it. Dropping the news about Dorian at his feet like the corpse of an endangered animal. He offers me his support. I think I’m going to be happier. I eat dinner. I go to bed. The next day I wake up with the flu. I feel like someone has beaten me with a baseball bat. It seems apt. I still hold out hope that after the flu I will feel reborn.

In the following days I look up the list of personality disorders the psychiatrist gave me. It is not made clear to me whether or not I have been officially diagnosed with these disorders. All I know is that the test I took and the interview I gave have very strongly implicated them in my personality.

The list written by my psychiatrist.

• Borderline/Narcissistic

• Obsessive-compulsive

• Schizoid/Avoidant

In the following content I want to share the research that I did. I will cover both the clinical and the personal aspects of the disorders, and explore each disorder as a lens through which my personality can be viewed. It is a long discussion, but a worthwhile one.

The psychiatrist has presented two of the disorders as pairs, Borderline/Narcissistic and Schizoid/Avoidant. My research indicates some psychological approaches view these disorders as integrated or existing on a continuum. There is certainly a lot of evidence pointing to co-occurrence within these pairs. As far as I can tell though, both halves are relevant to me and I shall address them separately as each one has unique symptoms. A very basic summary of each disorder is as follows:

Borderline: interpersonal and intrapersonal mood swings

Narcissistic: grandiosity of ego

Obsessive-compulsive: pervasive perfectionism

Schizoid: hermit tendencies

Avoidant: no self-esteem

The first thing I noticed was that I had something from every cluster (see left^[1]). I have more wrong with me (so to speak) than people I know who have lauded themselves psychopaths. Odd, dramatic, anxious and depressed are very good descriptors for me at my worst.

Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline personality disorder is basically characterised by instability, in everything: moods, self-image, relationships, emotions, behaviour, and functioning. These swings can last hours or days. The full symptom list is as follows: 

• Fear surrounding real or imagined abandonment, and preparatory actions to avoid it
• A pattern of unstable relationships with a “love/hate” dynamic
• Distorted self-image and disturbed sense of identity with shifting ideals
• Impulsive high-risk behaviours, unsafe sex, drug abuse, binge eating, spending sprees, gambling, thrill-seeking and self-sabotage
• Promised or real suicidal and self-injuring behaviour
• Black-and-white thinking
• Intense, disproportionate and varied mood swings lasting from a few hours to a few days
• Inappropriate, intense or uncontrolled anger, verbal or physical
• Periods of stress-related paranoid thoughts
• Feeling out of contact with reality, one’s self or body
• Continual feelings of emptiness^[2][3][4]

When I look at this list I think of two things. The first is my mother. I think about how every relationship she has ever had has started with adulation, and ended with scorn. Everything from boyfriends to gardeners to bosses, doctors and friends. In the beginning they’re the best thing that has ever happened to her, the answer to all her prayers and exemplary among their kind. Within a week the cracks start to show, and after a month she wishes she’d never met them. They’ve failed her and “shown their true colours” as she puts it, they’re mercurial, tyrannical, stupid, stubborn, malicious, or just downright arseholes. Just about everyone in and out of my mother’s life suffers this trajectory. She makes such a business out of hating people. She’s also irascible and abusive, paranoid about snakes and ‘big pharma’ (among other things), has conditioned every dog she has ever had into separation anxiety, cannot stand to be apart from her animals, hates herself, and regularly comes up with a new goal in life to get-rich-quick and find untold fulfilment.

The second thing I think of is me; standing in the kitchen holding a knife screaming about how I hate myself, Dorian looking on terrified. The very personification of distorted self-image, self-injury threats, unstable disproportionate temper, and emptiness. I think about the ever-shifting parade of preoccupations I have had, and fashions I have feverishly followed. All the sex and materialism and compulsive shopping. The nights I spend awake worrying that I have gastro or cancer or my teeth are going to fall out. The times where I stand in front of the mirror before a night out, so frustrated that I can’t feel beautiful. The inexplicable moods that hound me. The crushing existential futility. These overblown mood-swings with no substance.

In the psychiatry session the therapist kept asking me about delinquent, dangerous and addictive behaviours. I swear it must have been about 3 times. But it was more in what he didn’t say, a “conspicuous by its absence” kind of thing. It seems like these disorders have a real aptness for escapism, that it’s quite a rarity that I don’t engage in these behaviours. All I could tell him was that I wished I was wilder. A bit of shoplifting as a kid, a bit of public sex, a bit of accidental passive drug consumption. I can stop at a single square of chocolate and half a glass of wine. But it made me wonder, since I’ve always wanted so badly to do wild things, and it kept being brought up — would I be somehow predisposed to enjoy them if I could possibly let myself go? I often make glib remarks about how I’m one short of the fame trifecta: creativity, check; abusive parents, check; so… drug addiction? There might be some sort of succour there, but I know it’s not the path to true happiness.

Thankfully I don’t really have the fear of abandonment, extreme risk-taking or interpersonal problems inherent in borderline, but the other points have weight. I used to be a lot worse with the borderline traits, and I think it’s what I have managed best in recent years. I didn’t know it then, I thought it was all part of my depression, but I wrote about it here on the blog, about my big wake-up call and how I felt like my mood swings were turning me into a petulant child. I’m very proud of how I managed to rein my emotions in, it’s pretty astounding.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

I wasn’t in the least bit surprised to be labelled with narcissism. Hello there, you’re reading my blog, a ten year love affair with self-aggrandisement. Narcissistic personality disorder is typified by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, arrogance, an excessive need for admiration, sensitivity to criticism and a lack of empathy. Clinically it requires the presence of most if not all of the following symptoms:^[5] 

• Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from others
• Fixated on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc.
• Self-perception of being unique, superior and associated with high-status people and institutions
• Needing constant admiration from others
• Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others
• Exploitative of others to achieve personal gain
• Unwilling to empathize with others’ feelings, wishes, or needs
• Intensely envious of others and the belief that others are equally envious of them
• Pompous and arrogant demeanour

 Save for the exploitativeness and intense envy, I identify with everything on this list. Though I would add that I’m not very severe in any of these traits – which actually only serves to prove that I am narcissistic. “When you have narcissistic personality disorder, you may not want to think that anything could be wrong — doing so wouldn’t fit with your self-image of power and perfection.”^[6] Narcissism is one of the traits that I am most comfortable with having, probably for that reason – and it’s good that I’m comfortable with it, because it’s the first “incurable” disorder on this list.

I don’t really have much insight to lay down on the topic of narcissism. It is who I am, it’s pretty well explained. I really only feel it fuck with me when I come into contact with famous people. Amanda Palmer is a prime example, and you can see this in the letter I wrote to her. My belief that we should be friends is narcissism at its finest. I think that I’m so special and amazing that if she just got to know me she would like me and want to be friends with me. But I am also acutely aware that I am not the first fan to feel this way. The Amanda Palmer Facebook groups make this painfully clear. On the day I delivered the letter I made the mistake of reading some of the comments on Amanda’s posts. There I found every single fan opining that they had an unequalled claim to a connection with Amanda. I knew in an abstract sense that Amanda had heard every variation of praise from fans, but what I did not expect to find were lines from my own letter parroted back to me. The same words that I thought were so singular and powerful were blithely trotted out by random people on the internet. And it was awful for me, so belittling and disappointing. My pride in my eloquence and my uniqueness were both stung. And worse than that, after the show, having absorbed so much of the art and culture of Amanda, I realised that she was everything I want to be. Her musical sound, her rapport with her bandmate, the extent of her fame, the way people respond to her, her charming English writer husband. The songs might have different lyrics in them, and I don’t want children, but that’s the only difference between our ambitions. And she’s gone and done it all already. The world already has one Amanda Palmer. Even if I did manage to make my songs a reality and fight my way into the public eye, I would just be a poor imitation of her. The media would probably enjoy rubbing that in too. Not only are my thoughts unoriginal, but my personhood is too. I was crushed. I descended into full-blown old-fashioned depression and slept for the better part of three days. I only managed to cope with it all by ignoring it. The fact that the shows wrapped up helped too.

It’s not the only time celebrity has rankled my narcissism in this way either. I met up with a performer recently and we ended up discussing our sexual experiences, both in terms of number and prowess. And I learned that this person, whom I’d assumed had endured a mired adolescence much like my own, had instead been sexually desirable from the outset. I think the words “lining up around the block” were used. The list of desirous and satisfied sexual partners stretched on and on, and I found myself quite disconcerted. You see, I fancied this person a little, but I’d assumed that was uncommon. It’s like finding out Zach Galifianakis is actually Brad Pitt. I felt predictable, I hadn’t found myself attracted to someone off-beat but instead some sort of closet heart-throb. Not only that, but the breadth of this person’s sexual experience so far outstripped my own that the chances of making any kind of intimate impression seemed slim. They weren’t bragging or being dismissive, it was just how things read. And the idea of being just another girl, just another unremarkable lay, another chick who offered themselves up – was dispiriting and reductive.

They say everyone is the hero of their own life story, so here’s where I’m really going to lay on the hubris thick: everyone I’ve ever flirted with has been flattered, everyone I’ve ever wanted to have sex with has seen it as a privilege, and everyone I’ve ever slept with has said I was some of the best they’d ever had. I’m not used to somebody else being the “prize.” But I had met my match. Here was someone with a prideful sexual narrative as strong as my own. Who was the main character here? It probably wasn’t me.

I realised something about myself that night – part of the reason I have sex is about ego. Nothing delights me more than someone completely at my whim having the time of their lives. Sometimes I get more satisfaction from someone else’s satisfaction than my own; which oddly enough makes me sound like quite a giving and altruistic lover, which may or may not be true. But I can’t shake the feeling that I see something ugly in myself, in that interplay of sex and self-centredness. It’s distasteful to see the fragility of your own ego, the feeling of being unwilling to take a chance or enjoy a moment because you’re too attached to the comfort of glory. It’s classic narcissism.

The most interesting thing to me about narcissism isn’t the symptoms or prognosis though, it’s the causes.^[7][8] 

• An oversensitive temperament (personality traits) at birth.
• Excessive admiration that is never balanced with realistic feedback.
• Excessive praise for good behaviours or excessive criticism for bad behaviours in childhood.
• Overindulgence and overvaluation by parents, other family members, or peers.
• Being praised for perceived exceptional looks or abilities by adults.
• Severe emotional abuse in childhood.
• Unpredictable or unreliable caregiving from parents.
• Learning manipulative behaviours from parents or peers.
• Valued by parents as a means to regulate their own self-esteem.

Every single one of these things is bitterly true of my upbringing, everywhere it says “or” you can instead place “and.” I don’t know if I was born oversensitive, but there is a history of bipolar disorder on my father’s side, which is probably also linked to my borderline tendencies. I definitely garnered a lot of admiration with little to no feedback. My year 11 English teacher gave me 100% on everything, and when pressed for tips so I could do better in my final year, she folded her arms across the back of my desk and confessed with longing and defeat, “I wish I could write as well as you do.” I was in two “gifted” school programs, and skipped a year in high school. I was defined and crushed by my intelligence. It was seen as single-handedly responsible for everything good and bad in my life; it was the reason adults and teachers liked me and indulged me, but also the reason all my peers hated me. The psychiatrist kept pressing me about why I had no friends growing up. Why did I think that was? My mother had always told me that it was because the kids were jealous of my intelligence. These days I feel like maybe that was uncharitable, and also an elitist cliché. It was probably just because I was different. Because the way my mother raised me meant I was marked as an outsider from the beginning. I always spoke my mind, I didn’t live in town, my mother was an overprotective hermit and there was no-one around with well-developed social skills to learn from.

During my childhood my mother had literally three friends, which would soon become two, and a string of abusive boyfriends. She tried to force me to be her friend too. I was a captive audience, bound by blood and living arrangements. She told me all about her problems, drinking and wailing and making me tell her that she was a good mother, over and over. The line “valued by parents as a means to regulate their own self-esteem” really hits me in the feels, nothing so accurately describes how my mother treated me. You know how sometimes you listen to the lyrics of a song and the artist so perfectly encapsulates your experiences that you explode with kinship? That’s how I feel about this. She pumped me up when she felt good, and then tore me down when she felt miserable. My grandmother never let my mother develop any self-esteem, so my mother really wanted me to have a healthy sense of self. But when her lathers of praise made me narcissistic, she was revolted and set about destroying my entire ego. This isn’t even figurative. I remember this one horrendous conversation late one night when she was drunk (again). I don’t remember how it started. What I do remember is her telling me that I was the most disgustingly selfish human being she’d ever met. She was really in the mood to lay into me about it. I tried being rational and telling her that I found nothing wrong with the way I lived my life, and that I had a right to live it in any manner I pleased. But every time I tried to defend myself against her attacks she would sneer that I must be “so proud” of my vile personality. I tried agreeing with her that I was despicable and dishonourable and needed to change. None of it worked. I tried crying piteously. Maybe she just wanted to hurt me and once she saw that I was distraught she would have her fill? But she kept going. She told me she was appalled that she had given birth to something that had turned out like this; that her sweet, innocent baby could turn into such an inconsiderate bitch. She tore into every shred of self-regard I possessed with all the vigour of her own self-loathing. I started crying for real. I don’t think she let up for hours. I felt sick and began to freak out. She had so comprehensively undermined my entire personality I didn’t know who I was any more. Something inside me broke. I didn’t sleep that night. I stayed up in bed writing eight pages of barely cohesive ramblings about how my entire existence was founded on lies. It was my first mental breakdown. I was eleven.

Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder

Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is distinct from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Loosely OCPD is a lifestyle perspective whereas OCD is a series of habits. OCPD is a preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism and details, manifest in mental, interpersonal and environmental control, at the expense of flexibility, openness to experience, and efficiency.^[9] Repetitive routines may take precedence over social and leisure activities. People affected with this disorder may find it hard to relax, think that time is running out for their activities, or feel that more effort is needed to achieve their goals.^[10] OCPD is defined by four or more of the following: ^[11] 

• Preoccupation with details, rules, lists, order, organization, or schedules to the extent that the major point of the activity is lost
• Perfectionism that interferes with task completion (e.g., inability to complete projects because one’s overly strict standards are not met)
• Excessive devotion to work and productivity to the exclusion of leisure activities and friendships
• Extreme conscientiousness, scrupulousness, and inflexibility concerning morality, ethics, or values
• Inability to discard worn-out or worthless objects even when they have no sentimental value
• Reluctance to delegate tasks or to work with others unless they follow one’s own way of doing things
• Miserly spending style toward both self and others; money viewed as something to be hoarded for future catastrophes
• Overall rigidity and stubbornness

Here I am reminded of my grandmother. Especially the miserliness, hoarding, inability to relax and the need to perform pointless repetitive routines. She fits every single criteria for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder as well as having some OCD traits as well. My mother meets all the criteria for OCPD too. I feel like there’s just been a trickle-down effect throughout my family tree. For me, the perfectionism getting in the way of getting things done is a big one, as is the adage “if you want a thing done properly, do it yourself.” I suffer a little miserliness and hoarding, but I’m certainly not rigid and inflexible in my beliefs, nor am I a workaholic.

Interestingly, though it is clinically unconfirmed, I feel my OCPD tendencies share a lot of causes with my narcissism. I saw something on the internet recently that said if you praise kids for their intelligence then they believe it is a finite resource and become anxious, risk-averse and ill-equipped to deal with failure.^[12] Whereas if you praise them for their effort, they believe it is something they can always build upon and are more motivated to keep learning.

Source

In so many ways this is the story of my life. I am so used to being revered for my talents. So unwilling to move out of that comfort zone. So devastated when I’m not good at something. I’m much more inclined to say that I am “naturally talented” rather than a hard worker. I don’t go in for all that Tumblr angst about “how dare you insult me and invalidate all my back-breaking hours of practice by saying that I am ‘talented’ or ‘lucky.’” I am talented and lucky, I took to a ridiculous amount of skills like a duck to water. I only ever worked hard for the things I’m not good at.

I feel like being defined by my exceptional intelligence and praised excessively for some of my actions yet criticised very harshly for others, taught me to define my worth by my accomplishments. It gave me a big head, but also made me highly self-policing. I once wrote “I feel like no-one ever tells me that what I’ve done is good enough, that I’ve done well, that I can stop. I could always have done more or done better. There is never any endpoint. There is no fulfilment. Far from being instilled with a sense of ambition and striving, I have been driven to the point where I will never feel any satisfaction and my quest for it will remain endless. I am like one of those vampire myths about unslakable thirst.” It’s somehow the worst of both worlds. I was conditioned into thinking my intelligence was this fixed thing on which all my achievements were founded, but also that I needed to work ever harder – possibly to compensate for my seemingly fading intelligence. I was a gifted child, but it got harder to be exceptional as I got older and my sphere of reference expanded.

One of the hardest things about having obsessive-compulsive personality disorder tendencies is that I am always on the lookout for the metrics of success. School made that very easy, university only slightly harder. Get good grades and earn the commendation of your teachers. But when I finished uni, no-one wanted to employ me. In my few short stints as an employee, I was a typical obsessive-compulsive: moral, rule-oriented, stoic and a total perfectionist. I thought these were the metrics of success. Do your job well, do it to the letter, and keep everyone informed. Turns out these traits are actually supremely annoying, and likely to make people think you are a stuck up, corporate ladder-climbing, fault-finding blabbermouth. I was insulted. I just wanted a job I didn’t have to stress about, where I was valued for the quality of my work within my existing duties and nothing more. I just wanted to be told that I was enough. But people wanted to suspect me of rabid ambition I didn’t even have. At least that’s what the people I discussed it with supposed. None of my employers actually had the guts to tell me why they never called me in for more work. Just like no-one ever told me why they didn’t want to be friends with me.

I’ve tried to find perfection in my relationships too. Dorian gave me a lot of readily accessible metrics for success. His tastes, his hobbies, his ideals. I pursued each one in a desperate doe-eyed fugue, but I couldn’t keep it up. It was disastrous for us. I learnt the hard way about being who you are in a relationship from the beginning, warts and all; instead of trying to be perfect and then collapsing in exhaustion, shattering everyone’s dreams.

I don’t know what success is now. I am so haunted by the words “my failed marriage.” I’m 25. Marrying Dorian was one of the few things in my life that I was proud of, one of the only things that made me feel like an adult or even a real person. I don’t drive a car, have a career or career prospects, I don’t pay taxes, or even wear adult’s clothes a lot of the time. But I have health insurance. And I was married once.

Schizoid Personality Disorder

Schizoid personality disorder is often confused with similar sounding disorders such as schizotypal personality disorder and schizophrenia. All share the prefix “schizo” from the Ancient Greek which means “to split.” They mean “spilt form,” “split type” and “split mind” respectively. All are concerned with disconnection from normal life or disengagement from reality. The symptoms also intensify as one moves from schizoid to schizotypal to schizophrenia, though there is little causal link between the three.^[13][14]

Schizoid personality disorder is marked by persistent detachment from social relationships and a limited range of emotional expression. It is diagnosed by four or more of the following: ^{[15][16][17][18][19][20]}

• Lack of desire for, or enjoyment of close relationships, including family 
• Lack of close friends or confidants other than immediate relatives
• Abiding preference for solitary/introverted activities 
• Emotional coldness, detachment, or flattened emotional response
• Indifference to praise or criticism from others
• Absent or reduced interest in having sexual experiences with others 
• Pleasure derived from a rare few, if any, activities
• Other associated tendencies are daydreaming, a lack of motivation, and “vagueness” of goals.

Schizoid personality disorder was something I went into the psychiatry session knowing nothing about, but it’s been one of the most informative. Its marks are all over my past, present and future.

In high school I was very aware that I was no fun. People criticised me for being stuck up, nerdy and boring. Also someone had gotten a hold of the word “frigid” and it was flying around in all directions indiscriminately. When I discovered the archetype of the “Ice Queen” in a quiz in Girlfriend magazine it had a big impact on me. It showed me that I didn’t have to be a frumpy geek in order to be such a reserved outsider, but could instead be this captivatingly aloof, secretly sexy woman who commanded respect. I was instantly enamoured. I still have the artwork of the Ice Queen from the quiz, lovingly preserved on the back of my lyrics folder from high school.

The “Ice Queen” from Girlfriend Magazine.

Though I continued to wish that I could be more fun and likeable, the Ice Queen gave me a way of framing my dour disposition as a rakish affectation. I was already innately the Ice Queen, but I also fostered that image. Now, for better or worse, it is who I am. Dorian thought I hated being hugged by him at first, even though I was very grateful someone finally wanted to. People tell me I’m hard to get close to, that I don’t let people in, that I am inscrutable and formidable. I try as always to break out of that shell, and I never really manage it. It’s not that this is some sort of wall that I have put up, and now I am scared to let it down. This is all I’ve got. Any attempts to be “bubbly and outgoing” feel false, like carnival masks I put on for other people’s benefit.

I very much identified with Daria when I was growing up. I often floated down the halls of my high school placid in my emotional detachment, watching people riddled with irrational anxieties and hormonal fevers doing stupid things. Very few people appreciated my droll quips though. I felt so separate from the teenage experience. One night Dorian and I were watching Buffy and I was calling Buffy out on hysterical teenage relationship bullshit, with the comment being tacitly aimed at the script being overwrought and unrealistic. Dorian was slightly taken aback, this was what high school was really like for him, he explained. Everything was life and death, it was an emotional rollercoaster of unbridled hope and crushing heartbreak. I was amazed. Criticising Buffy’s choices wasn’t just something I had come into as an adult, but something I would have felt as a teenager watching it, or even if I found myself in Buffy’s shoes. I tend to cheer on the characters that make the logical unfeeling decisions like Sherlock or soulless Sam Winchester. These are extreme examples that stray into sociopathy, but they rather illustrate my shift in perspective from the norm.

I was telling someone at a party how despite my melancholy disposition, I present as quite charismatic in my therapy sessions. She also had experience with therapy, and she responded enthusiastically, reaching for the perceived common ground, “oh yes, I know what you mean, because you want them [the therapist] to like you!” And I recoiled from the idea then, as I did in the session with the psychiatrist. How superficial, how naïve, how nauseating. I’m not someone who thinks they can please everyone all of the time, or who wants everyone to like them. I gave up on the idea of “being popular” a long time ago. I really don’t care what anyone thinks of me, good or bad. I threw that out there like a badge of honour and realism in the psychiatry session. I didn’t know it then, but I was actually displaying textbook schizoid and narcissistic tendencies. And the more I thought about it, after the discussion at the party – I realised it’s not some sort of badge of resilience or independence, like a celebrity who isn’t brought down by internet trolls. It’s very isolating. The idea that what everyone around you thinks of you is fundamentally baseless, that none of it matters – it really casts you adrift. Maybe I don’t feel chastised by each disapproving glare, but I also don’t feel uplifted by the heartfelt compliments. Lately I’ve just felt such horrible ennui about the idea of friends. Like I’ve already met every kind of person I’m going to meet, and had every kind of conversation I’m ever going to have; like nothing anyone says truly makes a difference to my existence. I’m probably going to piss off everyone I’ve ever met by saying that, but it bears saying, because it has nothing to do with them, they’ve been faultless and engaging. It’s 100% about my perspective, the fact that I’m self-centred and precocious and withdrawn. I’m sometimes swayed hither and thither, but only when it already resonates with my own opinion of myself.

I guess I wasn’t always like that though, because I cared when I was bullied at school. I would come home crying about people being awful and getting my feelings hurt and having no friends. But it’s true that I cared less and less as the years wore on. That I wish I could go back now and be bolder in my giving of even less shits. The question of whether it was all just a coping mechanism is one that still haunts me though. I blame my mother for a lot, but I can’t blame her for everything. She may have sent me off to school with a faulty set of life skills, but my peers – not my caregivers – put the nails in the coffin. If the children I grew up with hadn’t been so cruel and intolerant, maybe I wouldn’t be so socially withdrawn. Because of my intelligence I think I was easily conditioned into narcissism, and when I got bullied it didn’t make sense to me, “why should no-one like me if I’m so awesome?” “Ah yes, it must be that I don’t need them anyway.” Do we all just meekly conform or coldly rebel in the face of continual derision? Can self-direction and empathy really co-exist, or is there only conformity of a different kind? Why did I rebel instead of conform? Did I make the right choice? Did I even have a choice? Am I “just scared of letting people in because [I’m] afraid [I’ll] get hurt?” – as one friend who was trying to bed me put it with such disgusting triteness.

I was telling Dorian how I admired his ability to be so gregarious and personable and how he can’t move for making new friends. I told him I still couldn’t get over the idea that all our friends were fundamentally his friends and not mine, that they were only friends with me because I was an accessory to him. I just didn’t feel like people actually liked me. We had this conversation where he posited that this is because I don’t participate in the emotional rapport of friendship. And I tried to wrap my sterile mind around the idea of this emotional currency inherent in friendship and I just couldn’t. Dorian said that when I tell stories to our friends I don’t really experience them. That is, I don’t relive the raw emotions of the story and then pass these emotions on to the listener. Apparently some (most?) people experience emotions in this way. To me the telling of the story is what’s important. No matter how brief or inconsequential, there is art and performance in communication. That is not to say that it is insincere in any way, but just that I am always aware of how the story is being told. The focus lies not with eliciting some sort of visceral sympathy, but with making the narrative as engaging and entertaining as possible. I love to choose my words, and somewhere in that pause an artful distance is created, and for some people that means something is lost. It seems like there is an emotional rawness out there that I just can’t touch. If I’m telling a story chances are I’ve dealt with any issues surrounding it, or I’ve dealt with them enough, and seeing people react well to the art of my storytelling only further helps me process. Hello again, you’re reading my blog, a ten year exercise in narrative therapy. Nothing is so painful that it won’t one day make a good anecdote. Which rather reminds me of some of the things I’ve heard about the mind-sets of professional comedians. My favourite comics tend to be disarmingly irreverent in the face of pain and taboo. I like to think that I am the same, that maybe something I do, how I conduct myself or write has the ability to deprive a hurt of its power, to entertain people and let them know they’re not alone.

I very much want to relate to people, but from a distance, and by being unequivocally myself. I’ve heard creativity is like breathing in and out, and my very nascent theory is that communication is kind of like that too. All communication needs both orator and listener. Some people are more receptive, privately listening to people, sympathising, and helping people unburden themselves. Some people are more transmissive, publicly revealing thoughts and feelings others daren’t admit to, being an example of candour and self-acceptance. Dorian was certainly the former, and I am almost exclusively the latter. Maybe I’m superficial. The notes my psychiatrist sent to my doctor said as much. I was outraged for a while, until my love of words took over. What does it actually mean to be superficial? We can all picture the cliché, the airhead who uses “like” for every second word and is more concerned with keeping up with the Kardashians than anything else. Someone who can only talk about television and celebrity and gossip or sports, someone to whom anything other than small talk is foreign territory. Superficial is that which is on the surface, something which is obvious and external. Deep things are occluded, they are hidden and internal. The metaphor is very basic: superficial thoughts are conspicuous and frivolous, they are public domain and unimportant. Deep thoughts are concealed and consequential, their insights are penetrating, private or sensitising. There is a lot to be said here for the adage “the sweetest fruit is at the top of the tree.” We place greater value on things that are rare and which we have to work for, and so we confer value upon ideas by making them secret. Deep thoughts have to be uncovered with careful questioning, and are not readily shared, but superficial things are given away for nothing. So what happens when everything is made apparent and given out for free? When you’ll talk about your morals or your most gnarly sexual fantasy as easily as you’ll talk about the weather? My theory is that these usually weighty thoughts become somehow devalued. Perhaps the fact that nothing is sacred to me means that I can’t give anyone anything of value. I have no secrets to entrust. I am an open book.

Magnus’ theory about this goes a little deeper and expounds that because I’m so comfortable and blasé about sharing all these sensitive thoughts I’m not displaying the usual vulnerability. Most people would feel vulnerable sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings, worried that someone might pronounce harsh judgement upon the core of their being and wound them. I make it clear that no such judgement would faze me. My underbelly is no softer than the rest of me. So it becomes one person in a position of strength and one person in a position of weakness, and that does not invite people to open up to me. I’m not meeting people half way and sharing in the vulnerability of trading concealed thoughts. Dorian feels like the problem isn’t necessarily just about vulnerability, but also about specialness. Since I don’t value my own secrets, maybe I don’t value anyone else’s either. And so people feel like they can’t give me anything of value. And awfully enough I think that might be true. I think it’s part of the reason I’ve felt such ennui about interaction. By devaluing my own secrets, I devalue the secrets of others. It robs the whole interaction of its uniqueness. All my conversations are on the same level. I’m oddly like a celebrity in that my whole being belongs to the public, all my dirty laundry has been aired, and I’ve let people appraise my every inch. Why share a secret with me when I don’t seem to care about secrets, and I can’t return the favour? In a lot of ways secrets are about honouring people with trust. Maybe that’s the emotional currency that I don’t possess. It’s not that I’m untrusting, it’s just that I don’t have any secrets to repay people with. All I’ve got to give is right here on the surface. Superficial. It never occurred to me that by being so open and honest with the world, I might be making it hard for people to invest in me. The very thing that makes me such a good blogger might be the reason that I am an unfulfilling friend. And I don’t think I can change it.

It’s a double-edged sword, what the girl at the party said, wanting people to like you. It showed me how much I have reacted against that, how much I don’t care, to the point of total insulation. But she was so much like me, so much of the same personality, and she wants to be liked. Somewhere, deep down, do I still just want people to like me? Do I need to cultivate some sort of mystique? Is some manner of vulnerability the answer? Or is placing your self-worth in the hands of others fundamentally ill-advised? Does it make it better or worse if I qualify it by saying that I think the person I most want to impress and be loved by, is myself? I guess it gives a more self-affirming foundation, unless of course one hates oneself. Why is it such a quest for me to be accepted by myself? Surely it shouldn’t be that hard. Have I just internalised all the bullying I received into a demeaning inner monologue? But why? And why did it take so many years to catch up with me? Do I think I deserve it? What did I even do? I’m all I’ve ever had, so why did I choose to hate myself? You could probably say that my mother taught me to hate myself, but I’ve resisted so many of her teachings, why did I choose to take on board the most damaging one? But is it even possible to create self-esteem out of a self-esteem free environment? Spanning back to her mother, and her mother’s mother, etc. Always just a victim of heredity and environment. Damned from the beginning, clawing my way out of the pit.

It’s no secret that I don’t like my family. A friend of mine was telling me how wonderful it is that her children will always be bound by family, they will always have each other and a legacy. She was enraptured with the idea that family was this safe space of people who were inextricably linked and could never abandon each other. The only true love that could be relied upon. This is very much touted by our society, in many a Disney movie and political campaign. I have never felt this way, and I never will. I could barely conceive of the idealised picture she tried to paint. The very thing she finds so sovereign about family, is the thing I detest most. “Bound” is a good word, because it is both about being “bonded” and about being “shackled.” She is in the former category, I am in the latter. Everyone in my family seems to detest each other, but they stick around pretending to care out of some sickening sense of moral duty. There is no love, only obligation. I am frankly revolted by the idea that sharing genetic material means you are indebted to someone. I have tried very hard to avoid suffering simply because society believes I have an obligation to. I try to practice kindness in order to enrich myself, not to placate others. It must be so different to have a family that shares genuine unconditional love. When people try to talk to me about their families, all I can see are the niggling injustices. I will always be a self-preservationist, and staunchly anti-family.

Though I may do so quite a bit, I don’t actually like talking about my family. I don’t like relating the scars of the past, or the stresses of the present. It is so howlingly tedious. I try my very best to live by The Satanic Rules of the Earth. So much so that I’ve framed them on my wall.

The Satanic Rules of the Earth (click to enlarge)

“Do not tell your troubles to others unless you are sure they want to hear them” and “Do not complain about anything to which you need not subject yourself” are relevant and challenging concepts when it comes to my family. First of all, neither of them are capable of either. All my life I have listened to my mother and grandmother complain, heedlessly, and mostly about things that could be fixed. They are beacons of unremitting negativity. I swore to myself that I would never let myself become like my mother, who would come home from work some evenings and spend every breath until bedtime sounding off about her job and the people she worked with. Then at the annual Christmas party my mother and her workmates would all get hideously drunk and form little cabals to complain about each other in a kind of round-robin arrangement. Oddly enough a lot of people seem to enjoy this kind of thing. I’m happy to talk about injustices and how one might retaliate or find peace, but this is all just petty gossip and ill-will with no desire for betterment. It makes me want to claw my own eyes out. I don’t think there are many things in this world I detest more.

I noticed a very distressing pattern a while back. Whenever something bad would happen to someone in my family they would complain to me, or otherwise inconvenience me with it, and I would get upset and tell Dorian about it. Dorian would end up having to listen to me rage about my family and often felt quite concerned or weighed down as a result. I realised that the anguish was just getting passed around. Often from my grandmother to my mother to me to Dorian. Everyone was just burdening each other with their complaints. And I was part of that chain. I was horrified. I decided that the buck had to stop with me. I wasn’t going to complain about the complaints, and perpetuate this utterly pointless cycle. I didn’t need to talk about this shit every time it came up. It was just the same things with different flavours of circumstance. I had made my choice to endure it and I didn’t need to inconvenience anyone with that. It didn’t do anyone any good. Many think pieces and research articles back this up. I decided to stand by my convictions, I didn’t need to engage this visceral need to vent. I would be a sin-eater.

It’s hard to describe how Dorian felt about my new approach to (not) discussing my family bullshit. In one way it had been unenjoyable for him and only brought forth negativity. There were many useless conversations which had dissolved into hopeless nihilism that he wished he’d never had with me, so in many ways I felt like I was taking his advice. But in another he viewed it as a natural part of being with someone and felt kind of shut out. Magnus has been the same. He wondered why I never wanted to see him after I had seen my family. I explained that after the immediacy of the unpleasantness, all I would want to do was talk about it because it was fresh in my mind; and I knew that if I just stepped back and didn’t have anyone to talk to, the feeling would pass. I didn’t need to tell anyone if there was no-one there. If something really notable happened, then sure that was worth sharing, but if it was the same complaints as always – I had to break that cycle. I didn’t want to be “that guy” with all the hard-luck stories.

“Hard Luck Stories” by The Bushwackers Band (click to enlarge)

Poetically a song I grew up with from my mother’s vinyl collection.

► Listen

I’ve always been pretty introverted. There’s nothing I hate more than group work, and I don’t do well at large parties where I know few people. I was supplied with a very full social calendar when I started my relationship with Dorian, it was very new and exciting. I’d never had many friends and I’d never lived in a city, and I relished all these opportunities. But over time my introversion resurfaced. I had to admit that I didn’t want to go clubbing every weekend, or go to every party. I didn’t see the point after a while. It became tiresome and difficult and stressful. I’ve also always been a night owl, and eventually the pattern of Dorian coming home after work, and cooking dinner and going to bed at a reasonable time got to me too. I wanted time to stay up and work on my projects, on my blog or my crafting or my home improvements. A lot of the time I’d gotten up so late that I’d barely done anything before it was time to get ready to cook dinner. I didn’t want to sit in the house ignoring Dorian while I wrote or sewed or put together furniture. I also didn’t want to ask him to give me some space, because I knew he would feel rejected. Sometimes I would tell him I felt unwell so he didn’t visit and I could indulge my hobbies. I felt terrible about this and eventually confessed the truth. I thought he would be disappointed in me, but he understood and we agreed to give me some time to myself. But once I got a taste for it, one day a week by myself turned into two and three and five. My schizoid tendencies were a big wedge in my marriage. For a long time I hadn’t been dealing well with the responsibilities of being a partner. I would stay up till all hours caught up in what I was working on. I didn’t want to go out. I stopped wanting to cook. I lost my sex drive. I became the very model of a schizoid personality. Did stressors conspire to push me into that space? Or was I always like that, and I just snapped back like a rubber band stretched too far? I think the obsessive compulsive personality traits had a lot to do with it too. I chose perfection instead of myself and then kind of revolted.

My ex Damien had a great passion for Russian literature and loved to tell me things like “Tolstoy didn’t masturbate because he believed that each time he ejaculated the inspiration to write another novel was spent.”  Though this statement is not exactly true, and he conveniently left out the bit about vegetarianism, I feel like he revered Tolstoy’s ascetic practices and felt a great deal of guilt about his own hedonistic conduct. I have never felt guilt about sex. Even though my mother and Girlfriend magazine both warned me extensively that it was so completely normal to feel that way, that guilt was practically inescapable. I was also told that losing my virginity would be awkward and painful and bittersweet. I loved losing my virginity, I loved sex. Sex has always been the easiest thing in the world for me, nothing but a joy. I’ve never identified with the celibate workaholic who puts all their energy into their projects instead of chasing tail or climaxing, and I’ve never thought of myself as sexually timid or insensible. So I was devastated to find that my sexual desire had diminished to a distressing extent, and that instead of enjoying sex I was remodelling the garden. I had a sexual smorgasbord in front of me, I was being granted intimate opportunities I had dreamed of for years, and I couldn’t conjure any desire or feel any fulfilment. I was too absorbed in my hobbies. It should be difficult to feel deprived of something that you don’t actually long for. But I miss the rush of being led by desire, the urgency and the simplicity. There’s no comforting new identity waiting for me among Tolstoy’s ideals. I don’t know why my sex drive has deserted me. I’ve always been a very libidinous person until the last few years. I dearly hope I might be again.

I’ve often blamed my lack of sexual desire on my depression, but it is also a symptom of schizoid personality disorder. Now that I have all this new information, in many areas I honestly can’t tell the difference between the depression and the schizoid “flatness.” Emotional detachment, indifference to praise and criticism, lack of libido, diminished enjoyment, and apathy sound exactly like my depression. But if you go through the list of exclusive depression symptoms, I also have most of those, and I have been officially diagnosed. It mainly goes to show you how integrated these disorders are, how the shape of your personality can really give you a predisposition to feeling depressed. I pity me in some ways. To have been bred and raised as I was, to end up developing a personality that means I have such incredible difficulty feeling happy. It’s almost like instead of sadness being something that I feel, it’s something that I am.

One of the first things that I read about schizoid personality disorder was this wonderfully damning line about how it has “one of the lowest levels of “life success” of all PDs (measured as “status, wealth and successful relationships”).^[21] I also read that sufferers hardly ever seek treatment. And it became apparent to me that my schizoid tendencies would try and push me away from support. That the disorder was kind of self-perpetuating. I realised that maybe being alone isn’t good for me, even if I want to be alone. I saw the Mountain Goats in concert recently and John Darnielle was telling a story about the song “In Memory of Satan” and he said, “an addict alone is in bad company” – and I think it’s something like that.

Avoidant Personality Disorder

Avoidant personality disorder I think is the most contentious and least applicable disorder on this list. A lot of that has to do with calls that it should be integrated with schizoid personality disorder. I feel that between schizoid, borderline, and narcissism (especially if you subscribe to the idea that all narcissists have inordinately sensitive egos), it doesn’t offer many unique symptoms. It is also muddled up in my experience of depression, and which one of them is truly responsible is a “chicken or egg” conundrum (just like with schizoid). This, combined with the fact that its symptoms don’t sit harmoniously with the other listed disorders, makes its appropriateness dubious and difficult to assess. However it does provide some valuable talking points surrounding self-regard.

Avoidant personality disorder is diagnosed by “a pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by four (or more) of the following: 

• Avoids occupational activities that involve significant interpersonal contact, because of fears of criticism, disapproval, or rejection.
• Is unwilling to get involved with people unless certain of being liked.
• Shows restraint initiating intimate relationships because of the fear of being ashamed, ridiculed, or rejected due to severe low self-worth.
• Is preoccupied with being criticized or rejected in social situations.
• Is inhibited in new interpersonal situations because of feelings of inadequacy.
• Views self as socially inept, personally unappealing, or inferior to others
• Is unusually reluctant to take personal risks or to engage in any new activities because they may prove embarrassing.”^[22] 

There’s a tinge of all this in my life, but it is slight and fleeting. Overall I do not meet the criteria for a diagnosis of avoidant personality disorder. I much more fit the pattern of schizoid behaviours, because my social disengagement is informed by disinterest not fear. Maybe I do just want people to like me, maybe I also don’t care. However, Wikipedia supplies a more fleshed out list of associated tendencies: 

• Self-imposed social isolation
• Extreme shyness or anxiety in social situations, though the person feels a strong desire for close relationships
• Avoids physical contact because it has been associated with an unpleasant or painful stimulus
• Mistrust of others or oneself; exhibits heightened self-doubt
• In some extreme cases, agoraphobia
• Uses fantasy as a form of escapism to interrupt painful thoughts
• Drastically-reduced or absent self-esteem
• Self-loathing, autophobia or self-harm
• Highly self-conscious
• Self-critical about their problems relating to others
• Lonely self-perception, although others may find the relationship with them meaningful 

The last five points here are quite relevant. The last two have already been evidenced in this very post, and all the rest are in “I’m Not Saying Sorry Anymore.” However I will again stress how much crossover there is into my depression. Some of the more visceral self-regard problems are also covered by borderline personality disorder. I can very much see where the psychiatrist is coming from with the suggestion of avoidant, but I think it merely highlights a lack of self-esteem. It seems my mother succeeded in destroying my self-image, or maybe just fracturing it into a polarity of narcissism and self-loathing with nothing in-between. Which might be our first clue to causes and inroads to recovery. I do seem to spend some days feeling a little too chuffed with myself, and others feeling like a piece of crap that no-one will ever like. Cultivating a self-perception that doesn’t vacillate between adoration and hatred might be nice.

Intersections

I guess deep down that my life really is just the metaphor, “the empty vessel makes the most noise.” The schizoid and avoidant tendencies have at their root the idea that I have nothing valuable to give people, that I am empty. And the borderline and narcissism are the big showy noise that I make on the outside to cover it up, with OCPD sitting somewhere in the middle projecting my intelligence and telling me I need to try harder.

It is interesting the contrast, or indeed the conflict that there is between many of the disorders. It is as if they shouldn’t coexist. The volatility of the borderline and the stolidness of the schizoid, the self-worship of the narcissism and the self-effacement of the avoidant. But we contain multitudes and I am nothing if not the queen of cognitive dissonance. The disorders are a scary matched set, sharing more similarities than differences. Intersected together they provide an eerily accurate portrait of my personality.

Table of Intersections (click to enlarge)

Further reading

It really shows you how fluid and imprecise the study of personality disorders is, but also how applicable and pertinent it can be. No one thing is discrete, it is both validated and subsumed. The disorders magnify each other, but they also balance each other out in a kind of horrific equilibrium. Sometimes the balance fails and I completely withdraw into solitude and independence, sometimes I burst forth in charismatic selflessness. I pivot from crippling self-doubt and loathing to manic narcissism and hubris. It reminds me of an image I saw about the nature of art.

Between absolute narcissism and crippling self-doubt lies art.

I don’t think that all art is formed by these influences, but I can relate to the idea that great art can only be created when there is a balance between these two forces.

In a way, the only things saving me from addiction, monstrous depression and suicide attempts – are my narcissistic and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. All my life I have wished I was more wild and adventurous, that I lived a teenage life of rebellion and perilousness. But every time an opportunity arose I balked, too intimidated by the risks, too scared of falling from grace. It is the struggle between the ego-syntonic and the ego-dystonic, traits which are acceptable to the aims of the ego and consistent with positive self-perception, and those which are in conflict with it. A lot of where I found my strength in overcoming my depression, my great reserve of potential, came from my narcissism and OCPD. My knowledge that I was superior and masterful, and if I just tried hard enough I could achieve the impossible. Any time I feel too debased by the abjection, unworthiness or misery inherent in my other predispositions, I can rely on my self-love to comfort me. I am reminded of a quote from Blackadder Goes Forth which appears at the opening of Russell Brand’s My Booky Wook:

Mary: Tell me, Edmund: Do you have someone special in your life?

Edmund: Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do.

Mary: Who?

Edmund: Me.

Mary: No, I mean someone you love, cherish and want to keep safe from all the horror and the hurt.

Edmund: Erm… Still me, really.

I can understand what the psychiatrist was saying about having a therapist guide me through the process of recovery. The disordered characteristics are like a house of cards. Each one props the others up and if one of them should fall then the whole thing might come tumbling down. Everything is so integrated that tackling the wrong thing at the wrong time might crush me.

Conclusion

If you’ve gotten this far through the post chances are you probably think you have at least two personality disorders, or you’ve diagnosed at least one of your friends. So by way of disclaimer I’m going to set your mind at ease. I am not a medical professional of any kind, I’m simply someone who has done a bit of reading on the internet, and so are you. Only a medical professional can make a diagnosis, and even I have not been officially diagnosed. My personality has been assessed to “strongly identify” with the discussed disorders. If you feel like the symptoms you have read here resonate with you, you should feel free to explore this with a qualified professional. But before you do, I want to clarify what a personality disorder is. Between the two main diagnostic handbooks we find the following criteria:^{[23][24][25][26][27]}

A personality disorder constitutes inner experience and behaviour which is:

Disharmonious and maladaptive and causes personal distress or impairment

Within the domain of self-identity or self-direction and interpersonal functioning

Involving several trait domains or facets such as:

Thought patterns

Emotions or emotional response

Perception of self and others

Interpersonal relationships

Impulse control

Pervasive and inflexible

Enduring and consistent over time

Occurring in a broad range of personal and social situations

Potentially causing significant problems in occupational and social performance

Manifesting in adolescence or early adulthood and persisting into adulthood

Atypical for the individual’s developmental stage or socio-cultural environment

Not due to substance influence or a general medical condition

Which is all to say that unless the way you think, feel and act is reducing your quality of life – you don’t have a personality disorder. If you feel relatively happy and people like you and you’re achieving your goals with no more than the usual difficulty – then you’re fine. If however you have a long history of melancholy and discontent, few successful relationships of any kind, and have been unable to sustain a normal life – then you might want to seek help. I’ve never been able feel content with myself or accepted by others. In addition to everything else I’ve discussed, sometimes I think there is poison in my mind. Often when I share my way of seeing the world with others it taints them. Every now and then I listen to myself a little too closely in a darkened room and I don’t like what I hear. Sometimes I feel like there are ants crawling around the inside of my skull, all disorder and compulsion. I feel like the madness is unstoppably erosive and every bout of sleep deprivation, anxiety or drug abuse further degrades my mind. Or maybe the horror of my internal world is merely being revealed to me like some sort of bad acid trip. And it never heals or goes away.

I felt very relieved and validated by what the psychiatrist told me, about my emotional world and my personality. But as I did some digging into the outcomes for sufferers of personality disorders, I also felt quite condemned. There were a lot of statistics that showed personality disorders basically correlate with a short and unhappy life. Full rehabilitation is also incredibly difficult and rare.

It’s one thing to suspect something of yourself and another to have it served up on a diagnostic platter in 45 minutes. The whole premise is unnerving. The idea that so much of my personality operates from abnormal fundaments. It's the shift from “I feel this way because of my perspective” to “I feel this way because I might have a slew of personality disorders.” One is very amorphous and open-ended and the other is listed in textbooks with treatment outcomes. It must also be considered that all of this was revealed in an effort to investigate and treat my depression. So we’ve also gone from “I am depressed because I am depressed” to potentially “I am depressed because my worldview is distorted.” And let’s not forget that this distortion was unavoidable and deeply rooted in my upbringing. It really does rob you of your agency. I’ve essentially been told that my dysphoria is due to who I am. And that the best I can hope for is an engrossing distraction.

Many friends have cautioned me about getting too caught up in what the psychiatrist told me, that instead of these disorders being merely descriptive of my personality, I might let them define me. That I would cease to feel like myself and instead feel like nothing more than a victim. I know that the accuracy of the diagnosis isn’t indisputable, that it’s just one test and the opinions of just one man. It’s a bit absurd really. I’m going to get second and third opinions. I know that who I am hasn’t been functionally changed by having these things recognised in me. I had these tendencies before I stepped into that office, and I still have them now. My outcomes were just as poor or just as good before I had a name to put to things. Maybe it would have been better if I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I wanted answers. I guess it’s a case of “be careful what you wish for.” I know that these disorder paradigms are intended to be tools, not curses. Ideally they’re supposed to aid recovery by identifying patterns. The labels will only change me if I let them change me. I can see all this with an unyielding rationality, but it doesn’t help.

The fundamental assumption in all of this is that deviance equals distress and normalcy equals contentment. It is something that you necessarily have to assume in medicine. Healthy people have normal organs, etc. And the assumptions run in both directions too. I was already depressed, so it was unsurprising to find that my personality is abnormal. My personality is abnormal so it makes sense that I am depressed. It follows that recovery would be a reversal of these things: becoming normal would mean I wasn’t depressed, no longer being depressed would mean I was normal.

I have always hoped to recover from my depression. To feel better and to get better. I can’t imagine what it is like to be someone who has never suffered from depression; to respond to things typically, to look on the bright side, to not feel oppressed, or empty. The idea of having hope, to have some sort of blithe optimism carrying you onwards, instead of being defeated at every turn by the pointlessness of your existence – sounds like a fairy-tale. What quaint lives these people must lead. It’s the same thing that I have often said about my intelligence. Obliviousness seems so relaxing. My intellect and my depression are so closely linked. I am so filled with awe and disdain for the condition of being average. But what if my demonstrated inability to conform means I will never get better? What if being normal is the only way I can be happy? What if recovery means losing my uniqueness?

My friends are waiting for me to use my practicality to move past this, or for my narcissism to comfort me, and I guess I am too. But dear Lord Satan, do even I have the level of narcissism necessary to deny the impact of all this? It would take an incredibly thick skin to not be affected. But I guess in a lot of ways it’s my only recourse. The resolution of cognitive dissonance. To say, “What is normal? What should I change into? For what? For whom? Change into someone else’s idea of “right” to achieve someone else’s idea of “happiness?” Fuck that.” And once again I see conformity and I choose to rebel. But none of it brings me any closer to my happiness, and that’s all that matters.

My fears seem so silly. I know that normalcy doesn’t equal happiness, and happiness doesn’t equal conformity, but all I’ve ever been is an unhappy outsider who has watched other people dance in the sun. I’m tired. I’m scared. I’m so filled with impotence. It feels like nothing ever changes. That’s what’s depressing. I only ever have things confirmed. I already knew I was fucked up and unhappy. Is normalcy the path to happiness? Is continuing to be a freak the answer? I don’t know. It’s all a big mystery.

I just got handed a whole bunch of confusing tools that I don’t know how to use yet. My next steps are to begin therapy with a new psychologist or psychiatrist. I am interested to see if I fit a clinical diagnosis for any of the aforementioned personality disorders, as well as explore how these relate to my depression and how I might better cope with living, achieve happiness, and find true inner peace and that's it.

Afterword

My desk during the writing process

I started this blog on the 7^th of April. It is now the 14^th of May. I have been writing this blog for more than 5 weeks. At 15 500 words it is the longest single piece that I have ever written, and as such I am floored I have brought it to completion. It was a serious undertaking. I have taken to lighting a candle in the oil burner on my desk as I sit down each evening. It is odd to have worked on something so long that you have developed habits surrounding it. Writing has felt like both a ritual and a job. Sometimes I would write for many consecutive days, six to ten hours each day. Sometimes I would go three or four days without writing a word. Often thousands of words poured onto the page in perfect harmony, other times I wrestled with one particular passage until my eyes gave out, barely having committed 500 words. I have watched more than one nine hour tea light evaporate before my eyes, and countless sunrises and even mid-mornings. I am so pleased to be here, at the closing.

I had my consult with the psychiatrist on the 17^th of March. I knew that I would write about the experience, but I dreaded the labour of context telling the story would involve. I tried to avoid writing about it, and I talked to a lot of different people during this time. But it was when I started watching Californication that I realised I had to write, and I started immediately with that very thought. I am now a third of the way through the last season, and I have kept my promise to myself that I would finish the blog before the show. In this post more than any other I have found myself sharing media: television shows and movies and music and books and magazines. It really illuminates how much of my personality is built around the narratives that I have invested in, the characters and archetypes. It is strange how naturally those things found their way into the blog, and how much they say about me.

After my psychiatry session, I went back to my regular doctor to follow up on it. I had spent the intervening four and a half weeks mulling over what it meant to be diagnosed with five different personality disorders, only to be told that it was no diagnosis at all. The psychiatrist had simply handed me a list with an air of finality and told me to look up the disorders. But his letter to my doctor said that though I had “strongly identified with… [the] personality styles” he had not made a diagnosis of personality disorder. I was half way through writing the blog. I had to go back and remove all the language which said I had been given a clinical diagnosis. I also had to go back to my friends a little abashed, and tell them that I wasn’t actually diagnosed. I had just started to make peace with the idea that I had all these disorders, and now I had to reconsider my position.

When I started writing this post I felt like a great weight was lifting off my shoulders. I was unpacking all of the symptoms and relating them to my experience. I felt validated. It felt good to put all the research that I had done onto the page, so I had something tangible to show for my journey. So people could understand if they wanted to. So my torment could become art. Writing about the disorders changed them from a slight against my personality to a celebration of it. It felt like the blog was healing me, and for that reason I think it is the single best and most important thing that I have ever written. But as I came to the last half of the conclusion I realised that I wasn’t going to finish on the upbeat note that I’d pictured in my head. The “Conclusion” chapter draws heavily from a conversation I had with Magnus about treatment, conformity and hopelessness. Revisiting that conversation was hard. I opened up to him about the depth of my despair and watched him good-naturedly respond: but you’re still essentially fine, right? But I’m not fine. It means a lot to me that my friends see me as someone who has struggled with incredible adversity and managed to rise to the occasion, maybe even excel. But that doesn’t mean I am coping. My high functioning depression belies a lot of inner turmoil. I realise that I still don’t have a lot of answers about all this, and I wish I did. It’s incredibly frustrating to me that one can write over 15 000 words and be no closer to closure. I know it’s all a process. I’m trying to have patience and cultivate understanding.

I am also processing the end of my seven year relationship and marriage to Dorian. This is not the blog that I wanted to write to bear the news, but it’s the blog the world got anyway. Dorian has surprised me with the deference that he has shown my writing. It’s very honest, it’s very public. Having our story sandwiched in-between a discussion of personality disorders doesn’t feel like I’m doing our relationship justice. He’ll always be a part of me, and I mean that truly. He’s my oldest, dearest friend. I’ve known him more than a quarter of my life. If tragedy should strike, there’s no-one’s arms I’d rather be in, not even my own mother’s. He knows me better than I know myself, my whole ugly soul. He’s always been interested in every little whim of my day. He knows my every quirk and can anticipate my reactions, and make me laugh even harder as a result. I just hope I knew him well enough, and made him laugh often enough. I love him. I miss him always.

After reading a draft of this blog Dorian told me that what I had written about us made him feel like it had all worked out for the better. Transitioning from husband and wife to where we are now has given me the freedom I needed and alleviated a lot of stress in my life. He said that strangely, he feels freer to love me now than he has in a long time. I stood staring at the message where he said this for a long time. My phone was on the counter next to the coffee machine and I just looked at it, dumbstruck. The idea that after all we’ve been through, after all the hurt and the loss, that he doesn’t feel crushed, but instead feels lighter. I was absolutely astonished. I never thought he would see it this way, and I am so comforted that he does. I am so grateful that we have found this place of acceptance and positivity. I feel freer to love him too. It feels great to have a relationship where we’re not trying to be something to each other or fulfil some sort of role. There’s no pressure. We just get to focus on bringing joy into each other’s lives in the moments we share, and celebrating the best of each other and our love.

This is a new chapter in my life. I have been broken apart and put together in new and interesting ways. I am very intrigued to see what my future holds.

This blog is the first of what I hope to be many podcasts. Back when I was doing The Harrington Files I used to read the posts as a kind of audiobook. I really enjoyed the process. During the writing of this piece I read a lot of it out loud to get the flow right. You get blind to so much in a post of this magnitude. Listening to myself recite the words has been an unexpected pleasure. I have rediscovered my love of narration. I love the sound of words and the act of orating. And there are no more pleasant words to speak than these ones which mean so much and have been so carefully chosen. I have enjoyed it so much that I’m seriously considering that I might love reading my blog just as much as singing. Though it may not provide the same glee, it makes up for it with the satisfaction I feel for having the capability to do it in full measure. I love hearing myself speak. I think that’s actually the centre of my love, not singing per se, but hearing my voice intone my carefully selected words. I see it in the way I write, it's not just written to be read, it’s written to be spoken. I do wonder who will be prepared to listen to approximately two hours of me prattling on. I probably like the sound of my own voice better than anyone else does... But thank you, thank you so much if you have listened to or read this post. It is my magnum opus, and it means the world to me that anyone would want to hear it.