To help explain the title of my blog it was inevitable that I would need to address “schizoid-ism” at some point. While I wish I had the time and energy to write an intelligent and concise introduction to the topic, I don’t, and I haven’t the slightest idea when I will. So instead, I am going to use a creative non-fiction piece I wrote for a writing class earlier this year. I’m not proud of the aimless hasty writing, but I don’t have the time to rewrite it, and besides, its unpolishedness gives it a raw human quality (remember, its okay to get naked emotionally).
I made a goal of posting here everyday, understandably there will be some posts that are good, as for the rest, lets just call them grey. Grey is undefined, neither good nor bad, nor trying to be either. It is as it is. (I have much more to say about grey, it will have to wait for a future post though as I need to stop working on this and study for a test I have to take in two hours).
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The Crisis of Identity: A Brief and Incomplete History of How I Learned I was Schizoid.
There was a very large period of time in my life’s relative small timeline when I did not know who or what I was.
I understand how cliché this conundrum can sound. It is a problem that is normally sounded, as if a trumpet, during the war of personal crisis. When one slows down long enough to let the world continue to spin while their head gradually comes to a complete stop, and like stepping out of an airport into a foreign country, there is that moment of alien clarity. Surroundings suddenly look different. Everything takes on a new, slightly distorted meaning, and the senses tingle and dance as they play ping-pong with the queer stimuli.
It is in these moments people shrink back in a terror of self-conscious introspection. They look at themselves in a mirror and do not recognize the imposter staring back. In this delicate moment of panicked anguish, they sound the trumpet of identity crisis.
Identity crisis is one of the classic and chronic banes of humanity. It is no water off our back. In fact, it is a King Kong of emotion that hangs from humanity’s neck like an overgrown baby monkey from hell. It alights on the unsuspecting, lights a fuse, and explodes in epiphany. This epiphany comes in infinite forms depending on age, gender, and all of those other stereotypical yet necessary human distinctions. This epiphany of identity crisis festers, demands its limelight, and spawns statements like mine above: “who am I?” “Who have I become?” “What am I doing with my life?” “I’m not like I used to be.” “I feel like I’m losing myself.”
I have great reverence for this great identity crisis. However, mine is of a different breed. It has a name, unlike those of mid-life crisis, fallen through friendship, or broken heart, my crisis is chronic and lasting.
I remember the moment when I realized that my identity was in crisis. It was when I was nineteen-years-old. I was a drifting vagrant for a couple months staying with different relatives in California and Utah. At this point in my life I had been out of high school for an entire year: away from friends, my immediate family, and my room (an incubator filled with books, video games, and television; warmed by their lifeless technological light I rarely ventured outside). Away from these things, I began to lose what I thought was myself. I remember the exact moment it happened, that moment of clarity when I looked at the world around me with foreign eyes, a world that suddenly seemed so different from the one “I used to know.”
I was sitting in the passenger seat of my grandpa’s Forerunner, he had just picked me up from the airport and we were heading back to his house in Sebastopol, California. I sat there in an awkward silence, speechless; I had nothing to say. Was there nothing to say? There had to be something to say. I used to be so good at talking to people, telling stories, making eye contact. Now I couldn’t even look over at my grandpa; eye contact had become uncomfortable.
I looked out the window at the passing cards in the oncoming lane of traffic. The people in those cars were all talking, laughing, enjoying one another’s company. How is it that I can sit here with my grandpa, my own flesh and blood, and have nothing to say?
Looking straight ahead I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He was concentrating on the road, he had a toothpick in his mouth which was typical. Every memory I have of him is not without that toothpick. I liked the way he used it. It was familiar to me. Comfortable. The way he would maneuver it around with his lips and tongue and it would make quiet mouth sounds. I watched him do this out of the corner of my eye, if I turned my head too far to the left he would think I was initiating conversation, and I didn’t want that…and I didn’t know why.
I loved the silence of that drive, but I hated it. It was more comfortable than speaking would have been, but it was suffocating. Like I was trapped, out of air, and I looked forward to getting home, as if I would open the car door and heave the outside air into my lungs, the calming cool air that makes up the center of a safety bubble I never knew I had.
This realization came almost five years before I would finally learn what it was that caused my identity pains. When the answers did come, they came as a result of two years of counseling at my University. I worked my way through doctors, watched them sit in their chairs and muse over the potential problems, heard them throw out terms like bipolar, social anxiety, manic depressive, obsessive compulsive, and even sociopathic. I watched them scribble prescriptions to counteract these problems and I swallowed every one of the prescribed pills. Nothing worked. What was my problem? I didn’t know, and neither did they.
It got to the point when I had had enough not knowing. After refusing to take any more bipolar medicine, because a) it wasn’t working, and b) for fear of getting priapism (when you get an erection that doesn’t go away and they have to physically drain your penis of the blood…*shudder*), I decided it was time to try and see a new councilor and see if he or she would have any new insights. Thankfully, I was referred to the “best psychologist we have,” named Lars.
The first time I sat down with Lars I remember immediately being set at ease. Lars is a small man who wears large glasses and a bowtie, as non-threatening as they come. “So what would you like to talk about?” he asks as he smiles and offers me a Diet Coke which I politely refuse and then reply, “ I don’t really know, I’ve seen everybody else here and they referred me to you because you are the best.” “Well, what seems to be the problem?”
I went into my normal spiel about how I hate being around people; how I have a very specific way I like to handle social situations. I feel like I notice too much and my mind reels. I worry too much about what I say and do when I’m in public, but then there are times I could care less. I can’t stand small talk. I have no set personality; it changes with my surroundings, mood, friends, or even the TV series I’m currently watching. I don’t like long-term relationships, or any relationships at all for that matter. I am good at intimacy, but only in spurts, and on my terms, I actively avoid it otherwise. During rare and exhausting moments I can soak up attention and bask in its warm center, but mostly I loathe it and want to remain unnoticed in the corner. I wish I could be invisible, so that I could be around people without being with people. I feel nothing towards other people, no feelings of love, loyalty, compassion, but also no feelings of hate, envy, or dislike. I feel indifferent. Apathetic. Unconcerned with the world around me, and content alone in my room away from it all. All these things and more. Lars listened patiently, offering insights as I went a long, but offering no real solutions.
After a couple weeks of meeting with Lars, he mentioned that he was fascinated with my dislike for intimacy, and he probed further, speculating on my anti-social and apathetic behavior and feelings. There was a passing moment when he threw out a term I had never heard before: schizoid. I asked him what it meant, and he replied something about not being able to have close relationships with others. I told him that couldn’t be me because I was able to have close intimate relationships with others, and in many instances I preferred them over shallow surface relationships with acquaintances or friends, but that yes, in general I would rather be alone. Not thinking anything more about this, we moved on and it wasn’t until two weeks later when I was listening to the recording of that session that I took the time to look the term “Schizoid” up online.
According to Wikipedia, Schizoid personality disorder (SPD) is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of interest in social relationships, a tendency towards a solitary lifestyle, secretiveness, and emotional coldness. SPD is not the same as schizophrenia, although they share some similar characteristics such as detachment or blunted effect.
Immediately I was captivated, and spent the next few hours researching all I could about SPD. This was my crisis! This was its name! This is what I am, a schizoid, but what does that mean?
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That is all I will include from the creative non-fiction piece. Here is a brief afterwards though:
I learned that it took so long to diagnose me because I am a rare form schizoid, a secret schizoid. Which is defined on wikipedia as:
Schizoid individuals who present with an engaging, interactive personality style which contradicts the timidity, reluctance, or avoidance of the external world and interpersonal relationships as emphasized by conventional definitions of the schizoid personality.
Secret schizoids present themselves as socially available, interested, engaged, and involved in interacting in the eyes of the observer, while at the same time, he or she is apart, emotionally withdrawn, and sequestered in a safe place in his or her own internal world.
This may all be a little confusing, but then again some of it may also hit home. We all experience crises of identity at one point or another. It would be impossible not to; especially in this crazy day-and-age of technology, where the “real” self is at constant odds with the self we project on the internet and other forms of social media. Schizoid doesn’t only refer to a personality disorder, it refers to anything that has inconsistent or contradictory elements. Don’t we all fit that definition at times? Aren’t we all a little schizoid? I would hope so. There is always more than meets the eye, and that’s a good thing. In a world where we all try so hard to be something, anything, everything, it’s good to remind ourselves that we are more than the sum of all of our technologically divided parts. I am more than what people think of me, and if that’s the case, people are more than what I think of them. Weird.
To end, I will quote the erudite Kanye West who in his song Power samples a line from the King Crimson song about the double nature of society. He ends his chorus and the song with the line:
21st century schizoid man.
The whole chorus is as follows:
No one man should have all that power
The clock’s tickin’, I just count the hours
Stop trippin’, I’m trippin’ off the power
(21st century schizoid man)
Kanye, thank you for reminding us you are more than just the douche bag who interrupted Taylor Swift at the VMAs, and that we should be more than just the shallow critics who all echo the same baa of condemnation in eerie unison. You’re right, why should we give you all that power?
