Your Preferences Should Not Dictate The World
Entitlement is evil...
I never wanted children. I have been very upfront about that for my entire time writing about psychopathy. It isn’t something that has ever waivered for me, and has yet to do so to this day. All of my life I have had people inform me that this would change, that I would want children, and once that biological clock started ticking I would understand their urging that I reconsider my position.
My opinion on this never did change, and I am as averse to having children as I have been in the past. However, some things from the past to now have shifted and my perspective on my perspective has as well. That is what I want to talk to you about.
When I was younger, people would tell me about me quite often. Frankly, they still do this in regard to psychopathy and how I think, but we have talked about that in the past, so that isn’t what this post is about. One of the things that I was continually cajoled about was having children. The notion of the motherly instinct kicking in was rather laughable to me, as I knew that it wouldn’t, but had no idea why. At the time, when I was a teenager and early twenties, I had no idea that I was psychopathic. However, I did know me, and I knew that children were not something that I had a modicum of patience for.
When people would tell me that I would change my mind it annoyed me. It wasn’t the only thing that I was informed that I didn’t know… about me… that strangers apparently knew more, so it stands to reason that these proclamations about me would be less than well received. My response to these declarations began to have an effect on how I viewed the world, and my lack of empathy made it so I would see things through my own eyes, not understanding the limit of their sight.
My lack of empathy made me assume that the world should understand things from my perspective. After all, they were certainly wrong about me, so they must simply be wrong. I lacked whatever this instinct was to have children, so it stood to reason to me anyway, that it didn’t actually exist. I heard from one side that having children is something that all women want, and from another that once they had children that they were miserable. This fostered the idea that it was more or less a cult-like way of thinking. You are encouraged to participate, but your happiness or lack thereof has no bearing on the outcome. It is about procreation, not personal satisfaction. Humans have to breed to exist, so do your part… That’s how it sounded to me.
I would guess that there is some aspect of you that has received similar criticism. You receive pressure to conform to a group way of functioning that doesn’t apply to how you are oriented in the world. This can be very off-putting, and I have seen that it can produce more than annoyance in neurotypicals, it can induce rage. From what I can understand this translates to a lack of being seen or appreciated for who you are, and what you feel about the world.
I don’t have that sort of response. Annoyance is the most arousal such things get out of me, but that didn’t change how I viewed the world because of what I considered a rather conformist mentality that I already knew I functioned well outside of in general. Certainly, if the notions of emotional experience and emotional empathy never applied to me, why on earth would I assume any of the rest of it would either?
As I have grown and aged, my brain has continued to mature, as all human brains do. Just because I am a psychopath and certain aspects of my brain will never fire, that doesn’t change my ability to learn to see things in the world that perhaps I was too arrogant to notice when I was younger.
I consider it particularly arrogant of me to assume that anyone should agree with me on the child question. As I mentioned, I was already well aware of my difference from the normative neurotype, so the application of how I experienced the world to those different than me was very self-centered. This more or less comes with the territory of being psychopathic, but that doesn’t mean that being psychopathic is an excuse for arrogance, though it can certainly make a person think that it is.
Something that I have stressed throughout my writing about psychopathy is that it is a difference. It is not something that makes me superior, and it is not something that makes me inferior. I think that there are valuable things to learn from it, but it is still a difference, not a superpower, despite what many apparently would like to claim about my thinking regarding the subject.
In recent days I have been listening to various different lectures as I am apt to do, and something that has come up is the notion of child-bearing. In my own life I have seen many women who said the same thing that I did, that they didn’t want children, but when they reached a certain turning point in their lives, oftentimes an age that triggers the desire, not only have children, but those children morphed them into a totally different person. I have also, unfortunately, known women that were so certain that they would never want children and go through sterilization, only to find that they are devastated by their decision later on.
My stance never changed, but I ended up being the exception, not the rule. It took me years of watching those around me to understand this, and the development of cognitive empathy, as well as self-reflection, to see that as the exception I had to learn the value of the norm. This is something that I think is lost on people, and the more that people seem to think that the world revolves around them, that everyone around them thinks and feels as they do, they dismiss the value of what has brought humans as far as they have come.
A large number of people are utterly lost in their journey to find an identity, and these people will latch onto many different ideas that can either be very good for them, or toxic down to their very core. Humans have to embark on a journey of self-discovery, and often this happens when they are young. Many find things that are fulfilling, and many find things that will eat them alive leaving mere bones for the buzzards to pick over as they bleach in the sun. What they are not being taught is to honor what came before and how to see the value in it.
I understand what it is to be different than those around me. I have known this since I was very young, so I am very familiar with it. I lack the ability to have this emotionally bother me, and will admit a complete lack of understanding of how alienating that might be to someone that is just trying to find their place in the world. However, it is necessary to understand that there are things that the group, the human tribe, has identified as valuable because they are hardwired to gravitate toward it. Something not having value to you as an individual should not remove your ability to see it’s value in the world as a whole.
No, I don’t want to have children. If someone asked me that is the answer that I would give them without hesitation. It has never changed, and I don’t imagine that it will. However, I needed to understand that there is a reason that all those others told me that I would regret it and that I would change my mind about it. It wasn’t that they wanted to rope me into something that they knew would make me miserable. it was because they knew something that I didn’t. Granted, in my situation I will never have that knowledge, but most humans will, and that is the point of this post.
This post isn’t about encouraging you to not have children or to have children. That was just a singular example that I am using as a larger illustration that there is value to what the norm is, and the exception should not dictate the rule. Not having people support you in your decisions that violate the standard can be trying, but your exception should not nurture resentment toward the consensus.
In my experience, I was simply too limited in how I could understand neurotypicals. Having children wasn’t important to me, so it really couldn’t be important to anyone, right? Wrong, and of course it was wrong. Cognitive empathy and understanding of those around you, require you to put yourself in a box and without it coloring your thoughts, actually observe the world around you. Without doing so, you are applying things that have no bearing on the world, and likely are more harmful than helpful.
You have to be able to see beyond yourself and to the species that has lived and thrived despite terrible hardships for millions of years. What you “know” of the world and of yourself is trivial compared to what your brain is hardwired to “know” without you being involved. There is a reason that people and the group think as they do. It would be silly to dismiss that, and to assume that a singular brain that has a life expectancy of less than eighty years understands the human race better than the genetic memory that has been passed down through every single generation that came before you.
Understand who you are and cultivate yourself without tuning out the valuable lessons of humanity. People that have come before might very well know more than you do, and what you think you know may in fact be limited to your inability to see beyond the bridge of your nose. Understand that who you are should not, and will not dictate the whole of a species, and to think otherwise is an exercise in hubris.
If you can see yourself and embrace where you come from, you will have the best of both worlds. If you reject one or the other as a whole, you will never find yourself again in the din that will engulf you.
Interesting. I was one if the women who was not looking to marry or have children. But I did marry for the adventure of it. The 3rd time I was about 32 and at at 35 the bell went off. I had never even noticed pregnant women on the street. I did not like babies. I liked puppies. I knew I was not particularly maternal and not at all domestically inclined.
What changed?
I had a big insight in which I could see two things at once: my nice relatively predictable life of study, work, friends, a mate and great vacations vs a deeper level of life where I have children and all the things that means. It was like comparing 2D to 3D. I chose the later and 45 years later am still there with my husband, 2 adult daughters, and a grandchild.
I've never liked babies. As a child, I couldn't fathom why adult women were so gaga about them. I didn't like baby dolls, either. But, I learned to dislike them even more when I started babysitting at age 12. I was popular for some reason, so I was always booked, but I only rarely liked children, and always once they were older. I ended up raising several children to school age during college working as a private nanny. All of these experiences convinced me without any doubt that I would never want to be a mother.
One of the weirdest remarks I received after saying that I would never have children, was to be asked who would take care of me in my old age. I was dumbfounded. Do people actually have children for this purpose? I would hate to tell this person, but there is no guarantee that a child will take care of you. In fact, they might end up on drugs, or in bad relationships, or in poverty, and so many possibilities that would make caregiving highly unlikely. As a matter of fact, I have seen elderly parents still taking care of wayward, or ill adult children.
However, fate intervened, and my significant other's ex-wife died, leaving their two small children motherless. I was well acquainted with these kids, and fond of them. I knew that I would take over where their mother left off, and they've always called me "mom". They never considered me to be their stepmother. They've been a lot of fun, and a lot of trouble, but both have great careers, are successfully married, and the grandchildren are adorable. I find being a grandmother more suitable to my naturebecause I don't want to discipline, or worry about instilling values, or teaching anything. Their parents have to do all of that worrying and work, while I just spoil them, which is loads of fun.
However, like Karol, if I'm going to have a planned child it will always be a cat. I knew this as a small child, and felt profoundly related to them, often understanding them far more than I do humans.