I don’t know who I am anymore. It’s an extreme statement to make, but it is true.
I’ve walked this Earth for 18 years, and I’ve changed so much that it’s hard to keep track. But it’s natural for people to change, everyone does eventually, but is it natural to be multiple people at once?
My life is a mix of multiple faces, multiple personalities, multiple extremes. How I can go from kind and friendly, to nasty and vindictive in a matter of minutes depending on the slightest thing, is something that’s practically worthy of study.
It is an incredibly disorienting cycle of being told how kind and caring I am, before going off and saying/doing things that someone who’s so kind would never do, just for another day to come and the cycle repeats.
As someone who’s both taken and passed AP Psychology, you’d figure that I might have some kind of reasoning behind this, but I don’t. I’m not sure if it’s due to my history with Asperger’s, or if it’s something much deeper. Either way, it’s a problem unlike any other I’ve ever faced.
It comes in many forms, some of which have impacted me since the days I was just a toddler.
The biggest and longest lasting is my extreme over-competitiveness, a drive that has pushed me to points unmatched in order to gain what is sometimes only a slight advantage. If I feel that someone has wronged me in the course of some kind of competitive situation, I will make it my duty to personally single them out and annihilate them.
It could be the smallest thing that sets me off, but once I’m going, I don’t stop until I’ve hit them with 10 times what they hit me with. It’s usually not even to send a message, I generally just enjoy it.
Of course, though, that’s only if I win, losing opens a whole other can of worms. One of my oldest stories was from when I was much younger, and I jabbed a kid in the leg with a pencil over a lost game of Monopoly.
Unfortunately, there’s a part of that which still lingers on within me. Now I’ve grown significantly since then, and I’m not injuring folks over lost games, but I can still get really nasty about them.
Only a few months ago I was playing an FPS with a small group of folks I knew on the internet. It was a rather easy affair, for the opposition that is. They dominated us the whole game, and we were left to hold off one final assault on our little base of operations.
We held them off for long enough that the blast doors behind us opened up, allowing us to make a clean getaway, but I was so engrossed in the moment that I didn’t even notice. I would eventually spin around and notice the open doors, victory so close I could stick my tongue out and taste it.
All I had to do was vault over a wall directly in front of me and make a gallant rush towards freedom. I never got the chance to though, as by the time I noticed, one of my friends had impaled me with their spear.
To have victory snatched from my grasp as it had just happened had me absolutely fuming. I was mere seconds away from verbally unloading into them with everything I had. I didn’t care if my friendship with them hung perilously in the balance, they may have won, but there was no chance I was letting them enjoy it.
Thankfully, self-control won out in the end, and I was able to put a lid on all that and dip out of the call with them before I exploded. Even to this day however, I refuse to play that game out of fear that it would rekindle those feelings of hatred, and we’d be right back where we started.
I am well aware of the fact that people generally conform to the environment and whomever is around them. But when you can go from calm and understanding to argumentative and unwilling to give an inch, or kind and generous to rude and crass in a matter of minutes or maybe less, one begins to wonder how normal this all really is.
I can transfer between extremes multiple times within a single hour, and it is terrible not just for myself but for those around me as well. Am I really a nice guy who has bad moments, or am I a bad guy who hides behind a façade of niceness?
Maybe one day I’ll find out.
