(1) Jennifer Armstrong's answer to What's it like having schizoid personality disorder? - Quora
I don’t have the disorder, but I have some features of it. I began to try to conquer these features, actually, around my mid-twenties, because the severe emotional repression I was experiencing was distressing in the sense that I had generated an auto-immune disorder, directing all my anger, and deep sadness against myself, so that whenever I felt rage at somebody’s injustice, I would succumb to a virus and stay sick for a long time. It was absolutely imperative for me to reverse this structural misdirected flow of unconscious energy as I was quite handicapped by it. That was the pathological side of things for me. And I have been working on them, concertedly, especially using the principle of transgression, to awaken my emotional self, at the cost of breaking down my schizoid defenses.
On the positive side, I have tended to feel buoyant in many situations that are defined by gender, as I do not require myself to conform to gender roles. I find a lot of freedom in not following their prescriptions. I do dream very, very vividly, and in a complex manner, and find my dreams are very informative, involved and self-healing.
I believe I am very fair and just to most people I meet. In fact I have a very deep rooted system of ethics that compels me to be so. I do get extremely irritated though, when my path in life or values are simply presumed to be the same as everyone else’s because I feel cheapened by that experience, and I think that a society that makes these sorts of assumptions lacks self-scrutiny and sufficient attention to detail or complexity. I make this known.
I continue my project of trying to integrate emotion into my experience, and I have sometimes overwhelming emotions, coming from the buried rage at how my father, in particular, treated me. I have to try to integrate that into my full being, without allowing myself to self-destruct because of the power of this negative emotion, which is absolutely volcanic and incendiary.
People who take lightly the fact that I have had to handle internal explosives are likely to earn my extreme hostility. What do they expect me to do? If I abandon the project of working with the materials I have, or don’t do they job well, I will blow both myself and them up. Is that what they want me to do? It’s okay of they don’t understand this, and stay well out of my way, but if they interfere with this delicate project of me redeeming myself , I will use some of the force of this dynamite against them. That is for my self protection AND because it is the just thing to do.
I have made some gains over the years, with my project of handling what is inside of me, but it is usually futile to try to share the seriousness of what I am doing, because most people do not have the same internal structure, and cannot relate to what I am saying. It must sound melodramatic to them rather than real, and I don’t want to cheapen myself by making myself sound like the opposite. There is the trap of being labeled as a female stereotype, a most alien and incomprehensible one from my viewpoint. I owe it to myself, and to justice, not to allow that to happen again. I need to keep my real views under greater guard, at least so that I do not feel devalued and cheapened.
I think I have now mapped the external landscape sufficiently enough to know where I do or do not fit in, ideologically, and even though I am very left-wing or libertarian in my outlook, I fit in better with rural, conservative folk. My original culture was of this stock, and I can wear a similar mask without much effort because there is a lot in me that is the same. Western liberals, on the other hand, generally get around to trying to rip off my mask, as if I were deliberately deceiving them in some way. That forces me to go to great lengths to redress the injustice, by showing them where they made their errors due to a lack of seriousness and respect in their thinking. I don’t like to have to point this out to everyone who makes a mistake of such a severe nature, but I owe that to myself. Ultimately, though, it is better for me to avoid putting myself in a position where a mistake like that would be even possible. I am retreated to a rural setting now. This works for me.
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