Psychopathy And Poor Personal Decisions

It will make sense by the end... I think...

Photo by GRAHAM MANSFIELD on Unsplash

When listening to the show that I did with Chion, I found something that Fallon said interesting. It was when he was speaking about how exhausting it is to be considerate of others for him, and how his sleep requirements exponentially increased when he started making this a focus of his life. I know that this is true in my own life as well. The more I have to meet the needs of others, the more mentally tired I am. However, this isn’t the only place that this happens for me.

I have mentioned in the past that I hate exercising. I really do not care for it at all. There is no sense of accomplishment for me, there is no dopamine hit, it is nothing more than pure, unadulterated work that I do not want to have anything to do with. This has always been the case, but there are certainly times in my life when physical activity is a requirement in my life, so I find ways to deal with the exercise component in a manner that I can deal with.

Now, a long time ago, I did ballet. It is a highly demanding form of dance, and it requires regular physical work, not only at the barre but in the gym as well. It requires a ton of practice, and a ton of rehearsal. I was able to get through that because the dancing part of it was what I wanted to do. It was hard, and I like challenges, so it was a means to an end when I did the rest of the physical work. The stronger my legs, for instance, the harder I could push myself, so I trained my muscles diligently to achieve that end. I never enjoyed it, but viewed it as necessary.

After I quit dancing, I took up yoga. Being flexible has always been a natural thing for me, but I recognized that there was certainly less flexibility in my body than when I was working my limbs constantly in ballet. I had to leave ballet due to the damage that I had done to my body, so returning to it wasn’t really an option for a couple of reasons. One being the damage that I had already done to myself, and the other will be explained in a moment.

So… yoga. It’s another form of exercise. There is no sense of well-being, or of calm that I am seeking when I do it, there is no oneness with my breath, or any of the other “spiritual” aspects of it. It is physical movement, no more, no less, and just like all other forms of exercise, I don’t want to do it. Remember when I mentioned that I would explain the other option in a moment? This is that moment. As I mentioned, I have to find a way to make the exercise something that I will tolerate as a part of my routine. Usually, this comes in the form of challenging myself, much like I did with ballet. I need to be able to achieve something, the process is not going to be enough.

With yoga, this was, get as flexible as possible. It gave me a reason to do what I was doing that could distract me from having to do what I was doing. After all, this was a self-inflicted hell, so I wanted to negate as much of the dislike of it as possible. I didn’t do hatha yoga… or rather I didn’t for very long. I did it long enough to learn what the movements were, and then decided very quickly it was too slow, too easy, and not distracting enough. I also didn’t go to a class, because seriously, who has time for that? There are plenty of things that I could use to teach myself at home, which is what I did.

Hatha yoga is now boring and not attractive to me. I quickly was able to do all the things that I could find, and the movements were too focused on the whole “oneness spirituality” blah blah blah, so what else was there? I found something called vinyasa flow yoga. This is when you flow from one pose to another without breaks. It pushes your muscles a lot more. It’s more of a challenge, which I liked, but it also goes far deeper into the flexibility poses.

For instance, take this:

Now, continue to lower your body until your shoulder is basically tucked up underneath, or at least lodged right next to your knee with that arm extended out toward the other leg making contact with the inner thigh and your head is either resting on the floor, or butted up against your lower leg. Then take that hand that is up over your head and grab the outer side of your foot. Now, hold that until the instructor moves off onto something else.

It was intense, and it was hard, and it was a challenge. I had found a way to make yoga something difficult enough that I would keep to the schedule of doing it every day. Success, right? Well… I do like a challenge, and hard is never hard enough, and pushing myself is second nature. There is no internal stop mechanism in my mind that tells me, you are damaging yourself. It takes my body to tell me to knock it off.

In terms of the yoga, that came about by my joints slipping out of their sockets while I was literally doing nothing. I could be sitting on the sofa and my hip would try to slip out. I would have to stand up immediately and realign the leg to prevent this from happening. My shoulders would slip out when I was sleeping. You might think, all right, it should be obvious that it’s the yoga. You’d think that, but you would also be wrong because I was being a clueless idiot. You see, as I mentioned, being flexible has always come naturally to me. Meaning that I have naturally much more open joints than most people. To give you an idea of what I mean:

That’s called the butterfly stretch. You are supposed to press your elbows into your knees to get them closer to the floor. Apparently, it’s painful for a lot of people. My knees just rest on the floor. This doesn’t take any effort from me, and it never has. That is just where my body is at naturally. You also might think, “All right Athena, why in the ever-loving hell would you want to be more flexible than that? That should be enough, and most people will never be that flexible. You’re there naturally, so what’s the deal?”

There isn’t one other than, “To see if I can”. That’s it.

So, here we are, hips and shoulders slipping out all willy-nilly, and me being clueless that I could be doing this to myself and it not being what I was warned about my entire life from doctors that the natural flexibility that I have, coupled with the dancing that I did, might result in me needing surgeries on my joints pretty early on in my life. I just assumed that was what was causing it.

Then the pain started. Mostly deep in my hip and what did my genius ass do to help with that? More deep stretching. See, told you that I was a clueless idiot. Well, go figure, that made everything worse. The pain would go away for a little bit, and by that, I mean hours, not days, but would always return with a vengeance. More pain, more stretching, more pain, you get it…

It was finally at that moment that I thought, “Huh, maybe this is the yoga that’s causing this problem. Maybe I should knock it off for a while and see what happens.” Go figure, the problem resolved itself. I had pushed my muscle and tendon flexibility so much that the muscles and tendons could not hold my joints together anymore. Once I stopped, they tightened back up, and there was no more need to consider surgery. However, now I’m not allowed to do yoga anymore.

Are you thinking, “Why though? You figured out the problem. Just don’t do that again and it should be fine, right?”

Oh, you logical sweet summer child. That only works when you aren’t wired like I am and you have an internal self-preservation switch that tells you not to do things because bad things will happen to you. This is the same reason that I can’t go back to ballet. I don’t mean I am physically unable. I mean that my Significant Other has forbidden it because he knows me. He knows that as much as I understand cognitively that if I did it I would need to limit myself to it being like a few hour-long classes a week just to enjoy it, that is not what will happen.

Do you know what will? Within that first week, I will be wondering how long it would take me to go back on Pointe even though I know that Pointe work was a huge part of the physical damage that made me have to quit in the first place. I started training on Pointe way earlier than I should have. My ballet Mistress certainly wouldn’t teach me, so I enlisted the top dancer in the company to teach me clandestinely.

For a psychopath, there is no voice inside that will say, “Don’t do this, it will hurt you”. Instead, there is a person that would look at you while driving you in a car and say in all seriousness, “I saw this in a cartoon once and I think I can do it”. It’s not a great steward of my long-term health and survival. Yes, I know I shouldn’t, but I just want to see if I can, even if I have already done it before. That was a while ago, so maybe things have changed. Not to mention, I could see if I can do it faster than I did last time. It should be fine… right?

Nope, which is why I have a Significant Other that will tell me no when I need it. Not, “No I don’t think you should do that. Remember what happened last time.” That wouldn’t work with me. The only thing that works with me is:

NOT HAPPENING.

And leaves no room for disagreement.

Fortunately for me I have someone in my life that is more invested in my survival and health than apparently I am, so that is why I am still around and physically functional enough to write for you guys. Otherwise, I would probably have had some sort of unfortunate outcome already.

Psychopaths can struggle with not placing ourselves in bad situations because there is no fear about anything. Even when there is an understanding that the risk isn’t worth the reward, curiosity can still be a nasty driving force, because really… what’s the worst that can happen. Not being afraid of death there really isn’t an answer that is strong enough to counter the internal narrative that we live with. It is important to find things that aren’t inherently dangerous to occupy our time with, but even things like exercise can be a force for evil in our lives if we aren’t careful.

Lift weights? How much more can I lift or press?

Do stationary cycling? How much further, faster, harder can I push this, and for how long?

Running? I have no idea. I very much dislike running, but I am sure a psychopath that does like it can find the most unhealthy way to engage with it possible. Maybe, running a marathon every day for a month or something would qualify.

It doesn’t matter what the challenge is, if I get my sights set on something, whatever that goal post was set for, it will move, and move very quickly far away from where it started. Not having the same rewards system as neurotypicals, accomplishment isn’t the same for us. It is simply a mile marker that will be one of many on the ever-moving landscape of challenges. I also am not inclined to compete with other people as I would first have to consider them to be relevant to me, and I don’t. Competition is with me, and me alone, and I am never satisfied with getting to where I wanted to be last week. That was last week, this is this week, and whatever I wanted to achieve is now easy for me. I need hard because hard is entertaining.

I can turn anything that I don’t want to do into something that I will do to my detriment if I find something about it that challenges and entertains me. No matter how far I get, I can always find a way to go further, and sometimes I require someone else stepping in and saying, “That’s enough of that now. Time to do something else. This isn’t a suggestion.”

It seems to me that neurotypicals do have a different response to getting to the place that they wanted to. It seems that they celebrate the achievement and often seem to consider that achievement to be a good stopping point. Let me know if that is an accurate assessment of your experience of challenging yourself and accomplishing that challenge.